What Features of Music Make You Feel Emotional?
Why do some songs sound sad and others happy? What makes Queen’s “We Will Rock You” convey a different mood than Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”? One study by Annaliese Grimaud and Tuomas Eerola attempts to break down how characteristics of music can change how we perceive the mood of different pieces of music.¹
In order to get into how these musical features can be used to convey emotion, we must first explore what these features are. There are a number of different characteristics of music that can shape the way a song sounds. While not an exhaustive list by any means, the musical features that this study looked at include dynamics, tempo, pitch, articulation, brightness, and mode.
Starting with the more intuitive features, dynamics are the loudness or softness of a piece of music. This can change throughout a song or stay the same, but for the purposes of the study, this refers to the overall loudness and softness of the piece. Next is tempo, which is simply how fast or slow the beat of a song is, as well as pitch, which is how high or low a song or portions of a song sound.² ³
The next few features are a little more complex. Articulation involves how connected or disconnected notes are. The study uses three types of articulation that each have different amounts of space between the notes in a melody. First, legato articulation is smooth and connected with no space between one note and the next. Next, detaché articulation is detached, with some space between each note. Finally, staccato articulation has the shorter, more separated notes, with more space between the notes than detaché articulation.⁴
Another tricky feature is brightness, which is a characteristic of the timbre of the sound, which is what differentiates one sound from another. Timbre is what makes instruments sound different from each other, and it’s also what makes the sound of one person’s voice sound different from another’s. Brightness is one portion of that overall timbre. The technical definition of brightness relates to the amount of harmonics that sound with the pitch, but that can be difficult to interpret or hear when listening to music. An easier way to grasp it has to do with whether the sound sounds sharper and brighter or whether it sounds more mellow and dark. Certain instruments have tendencies to sound lighter or darker than others. For example, here is a darker-sounding violin compared to a brighter-sounding trumpet.⁵ That said, you can also hear variations in brightness, within the same instrument, as is done in the study.
Finally, mode refers to the set of notes a song centers around. A song in a major key generally centers around the notes in the major scale, which sounds like this, while a song in a minor key generally centers around the notes in the minor scale, which sounds like this.⁶ ⁷ While by no means universal or deterministic, many find that the major scale sounds happy and the minor scale sounds sad.
Many studies in music psychology use existing music, which can make it hard to exclude other potential influences on what researchers are measuring when attempting to draw conclusions. However, this study used a more novel approach, where in order to match these features to different moods, the study authors gave participants a song and an emotion and asked them to use a software to change the musical features of the song to match the emotion given. Note that this is not necessarily about what the music made participants feel, but instead what emotion the music seemed to convey. The songs used here were completely original songs that the study authors asked participants to match with a conveyed emotion in a prior experiment. The emotions that the study asked about included sadness, joy, calmness, anger, fear, power, and surprise.¹
The experiment found that the musical features all seemed to have a significant effect on the conveyed emotions. More specifically, this means that each of the musical features seemed to play a part in the mood that participants tried to convey. Different levels of different features were linked to different emotions. In a surprising turn of events, surprise and joy were the only emotions characterized by loud dynamics, with other emotions, particularly anger and sadness, characterized by soft dynamics. Perhaps less surprisingly, faster tempos were characteristic of joy, anger, and surprise, and slower tempos were characteristic of calmness and sadness. Similarly, songs that portrayed power and anger had higher pitches and those that portrayed calmness and sadness had lower pitches. Sad and calm songs were more legato and angry, joyous, and surprised songs were staccato. Songs portraying surprise and joy were the brightest and those portraying sadness were darker in timbre. Unsurprisingly, major was associated with more positive emotions, such as calmness, joy, surprise, and power, while minor was associated with more negative emotions, such as sadness, fear, and anger.¹
Both experiments found that some emotions were easier to identify than others, with surprise being the hardest to identify over the two experiments. However, the second study found that calmness, sadness, joy, and anger, could all be identified using the musical features at accuracies ranging from 91% to around 60%. For example, calmness could be predicted at a 91% rate with the combination of slow tempo, low pitch, legato articulation, dark timbre, and major mode. The researchers also conducted a third experiment where they asked participants to match both original songs and the songs as they were changed by the participants in the last study and identify what mood the song conveyed, with the songs where the musical features had high predictive power for that emotion being the most accurately identified.¹
Overall, this study showcased how different musical features can affect the way music can convey emotions. For example, the Queen’s “We Will Rock You”’s musical features seem to lend to a combination of anger and power, often featuring staccato or detached articulation, a minor mode, higher pitch, and moderately fast tempo, while Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has a slow tempo, legato articulation, lower pitch, and a minor mode, all indicators of a sadness. While I’ll bet you might have known the moods associated with these songs before, hopefully, next time you hear a song that sounds calm, sad, angry, or any number of other emotions, you’ll know more about why it sounds the way it does!
¹ Micallef Grimaud, A., & Eerola, T. (2022). An Interactive Approach to Emotional Expression Through Musical Cues. Music & Science, 5, 20592043211061745.
² https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/how-to-read-sheet-music/tempo/
³ https://ssec.si.edu/match-pitch
⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulation_(music)
⁵ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGEDgkZlC8
⁶ https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/understanding-music/the-major-scale/
⁷ https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/understanding-music/the-minor-scales/
