May 3, 2021 • 23 mins
Listening to sad songs is a weird, counterintuitive thing to do. Why listen to something that moves you to tears?
As someone who’s sensitivity to sad songs sometimes means pulling over until the tears clear, Dessa mulls major versus minor, explores what melody has in common with the sound of human crying, and quizzes a fellow songwriter about the power of screaming. Do sad songs reveal some secrets about empathy?
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American Public Media coproduction with iHeartMedia.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So could you show me like a chord that's major
and then a chord that's minor, just so we can
hear the difference. Yep, So here's a C major chord
C minor to meet. Anyone who prefers C major is
(00:22):
out of their mind, Like I wish them well, but
we can't ever fully understand one another or be close
friends because C minor is true and C major that's
for selling soap. Wow, I never knew. I mean, I
know you felt strong. I didn't know you felt this strongly.
(00:42):
That's me and Andy Thompson talking shop. He's a composer
and a producer who works out of a basement studio
called Instrument Landing. And I'm Dessa, host of the show
Deeply Human. I'm wearing my podcast had today. But I
make my living as a hip hop artist, and Andy
and I are frequent collaborators. Most of the music that
I write is pretty dark, so much so that my
(01:03):
bandmates tease me about it. Even my fans tease me
about it. Years ago, when I sent an early mix
of an album to my mom, she said she liked it,
but then asked, why do you always make music to
bleed out? To I've loved sad songs since I was
a teenager. My favorite genre was arguably total devastation. Tracy
(01:24):
Chapman's Fast Car That was a big one, some of
my mom's Bonnie ray Its slow Jams messed me up
pretty good, and of course Jeff Buckley's rendition of Hallelujah.
I played them over and over again because they reliably
made me feel exquisitely awful. Listening to sad songs is
(01:49):
a weird, counterintuitive thing to do. Why would anyone willfully
gravitate towards something that hurts to hear? To find out,
I'm asking a music critic, a philosopher, an experimental researcher,
and a songwriter, why do we listen to sad music? First,
let's holler at our critic, someone who listens to music professionally.
(02:11):
Stephen Thompson is a writer, an editor, and a broadcast
guy with National public radio in the US, and he's
a serious sad song enthusiast. I know that you made
a playlist called Weeping at the Wheels right, right right,
and the cover image was just a box of tissues
on a dashboard, and man, the car is definitely one
(02:33):
of the best spots to be totally disemboweled by a song.
There's a couple of songs that that I'm not allowed
to drive to because because I become an irresponsible pilot
of a motor vehicle in the throes of that much emotion,
you know, you know, when you cry, it can sometimes
like help you, like irrigate your emotions a little bit.
(02:56):
And I think, I think sad songs kind of have
that same that same function. I have a depressive streak,
and I have an anxious streak. And when I was
in high school, I remember my anxiety had gotten to
the point where I wasn't able to sleep at night,
and I started making lists of all the things that
I had to do. And then when I was done
writing down everything I had to do, and I was
(03:17):
able to process and handle it. And I think in
a way, sad songs for me are like those lists,
those anxiety lists, you know, so I can my brain
can just be this haunted circus of terrible emotions, and
a song that has a way of processing those emotions
(03:38):
can sometimes like serve as like almost like a sorting
mechanism for that web of feelings in my head. And
so I think sad music is really therapeutic for me
in that way, clarifying a painful feeling, pinning it to
a board, the clean, neat description provides some degree of relief,
even if the feeling itself persists. I know that in
(03:58):
my life being able to call demons by their proper
names just helps somehow. It's a relief to know exactly
what I'm up against, you know how, like your kid
and you come crying to your parents you've had a nightmare,
and your parents explain, like, nightmares are your brain's way
of taking out the garbage. And I always thought that
was a great way of thinking about nightmares. It's your
your brain's way of processing difficult and dark things and
(04:21):
so that you can handle them going forward. I think
in a way, sad songs ping a little bit of
that same thing. I wonder though, if there's like an
undercurrent of intimacy that runs through sad music that isn't
necessarily there and like dance music and that it's okay
to tell anyone, hey, I want to dance, but the
idea that like, hey, I think I'm getting a divorce,
(04:43):
that's a secret, that's an intimacy, and that like there
are fewer people in places that you can share that information,
and so maybe, like we understand ourselves to be in
a more intimate and trusting relationship with a musician who's
telling us a sad story than one who's telling us
is celebrating the song, can feel like you're communing with
an artist who understands and has been through what you've
(05:05):
gone through. And so it's not necessarily hopeless because here's
somebody who clearly went through some of the same things
that I did and came out on the other side
and wrote a song about it. I mean, I think
empathy is just one of the most powerful and important
experiences we can have as human beings. This is the
whole misery loves Company thing, but the way that Steven
(05:28):
tells it, maybe it's also like proof of life, evidence
that a fellow sufferer with a misery much like yours
was able to get back on our feet and get
stable enough to hire a band and a publicist and
release some music into the world. All right, for Steven's
walk off music, let's tee up a cut from his
(05:48):
Weeping at the Wheel playlist, and now back to Andy's
(06:12):
basement studio for a second to talk fundamentals. What is
sad music exactly? My lad jewel vary and there are
exceptions to every rule, but Andy ticked off a few
of the features that makes sad songs sound sad. A
lot of times when you feel sad, you kind of
pull inward and you're quiet, and you don't necessarily want
to speak to other people. And so I think one
thing a composer can do is to bring the dynamic down.
(06:42):
Another thing a composer can do is use just sparseness
and not have a lot going on, have the notes
to be very alone with themselves. But there are other things,
like major and minor keys that are a little bit
(07:03):
more of a mystery. Keep in mind, this conversation is
being had by two Western musicians, and the world is
a very wide musical place, but in very broad strokes.
Major chords are usually considered happy and minor chords sad.
So let's break down the chords to see what they're
made of. C major chord has a C in the
(07:24):
major third and five. To make it a minor chord,
you take that second note and you move it down
a half step, which is the shortest distance you can
move an interval in music. Usually they're C minor. Dissecting
(07:50):
a chord doesn't explain the feeling it foakes much better
than cutting open a candle explains romance. You're basically talking
about two frequencies interacting, and when they interact one way,
it generally makes people feel happy, and when they interact
a different way, it makes him feel sad. And that
to me is it's kind of like a black hole.
I don't know. It goes like this, the F five,
(08:13):
the minor fall and the major lived, the baffle king composing.
Have we just learned that some chords are associated with sadness?
Or is there a mathematical relationship between the notes that
makes us feel that way? People who have spent a
(08:35):
lifetime trying to master the how of music still don't
know the why. Myself very much included segue to our philosopher.
Andrew Huddleston, teaches at Birkbeck College in London. Is an undergrad.
He wrote a thesis on why we're drawn to sad music,
and I asked him how sad music evolks emotion. One
theory is that the musical expressions resemble the expressions of
(08:59):
sad people think of the face of a Saint Bernard dog,
we say that the face is sad, even though we
think the dog is not sad. Now why do we
think that, Well, it resembles in a certain way the
expression of sad people, maybe in a kind of caricatured way,
the kind of drooping quality of the Saint Bernard dog's face.
And you think something similar might be the case in
(09:21):
the contours of music, that they might have these kinds
of qualities that put us in mind of sadness. Some
sad music might actually resemble the sounds that come out
of sad humans, that sound like wailing or like laments.
And I think that that's a very common thing in
vocal music and in some purely instrumental music too, where
(09:43):
that quality is mirrored. And I think that that really
puts us in mind of expressions of sadness, that kind
of rising and falling suddenly falling vocal line, or the
sense of a sigh in the music. My mom used
to sing a lullaby to me and my kid brother
(10:03):
Maxie called No Nando, and I think it has the
kind of melody lines that Andrew's talking about. It has
these like super epic swells and cascades My mom is
Puerto Rican and most of the words are in Spanish,
but I've always suspected that maybe, like the trills in
the vocal line were forged by Sephardic Jewish singers with
roots in Spain. It's one of those songs where a
(10:26):
mom like puts her kid's name into it, and I
do not have kids, so I'm gonna use Max's name.
But it goes like this an no na do no
no go me baby Maxie it done, and no na
(10:51):
gole no na go ani no na and the nina no.
It is an insanely dramatic way to put a kid
to bed. I used to hate it when you go high,
because I knew and he was almost done and I
(11:13):
had to go to sleep. I still sing on nonando
sometimes around my apartment, and my voice right now sounds
a lot like my mom's did then. But why I
am a grown adult who could listen to dance music
or just eat Peanut M and M's or right a
Shetland pony through a field of daisies. I asked Andrew
for the philosopher's take on why we listen to sad
(11:35):
music at all. We're interested in knowing about what the
world is like, even about extreme kinds of suffering and horror,
even if that's not particularly pleasant. You know, why are
people drawn to tragedy? Why are people drawn to films
that are about really horrible things? Why do they read
novels that are about really horrible things? And I think
(11:55):
one of the explanations is we care about knowledge. We
care about knowing what the world is, even if what
we find out is something that's depressing. There might also
be something important about packaging sadness in music. So I
think the beauty plays a really considerable role here. One
thing that it can provide is in itself a certain
kind of consolation. Perhaps the presence of the beauty in
(12:18):
this expression of something that's sad or depressing, it might
also intimate a certain kind of hope as well. Maybe
the music here becomes the mixer and a stiff drink,
or the sticker the doctor gives to a little kid
after her shot. It's still going to burn, but the
beauty of the music gives you something for the pain.
(12:39):
Andrew himself is a Wagner guy, So DJ drop something
from the ring cycle. Yeah, my name is Boskowski. I
(13:03):
work at the University of Oslo as an Associate professor
in music cognition. Yana was part of a team that
conducted an experiment to study fans of sad music. They
wanted to find out what kinds of personality traits are
related to people's enjoyment of sad music. Jana's team recruits
a bunch of research participants, put some in fancy headphones
(13:26):
and presses play on eight minutes of sad instrumental music. Next,
you wanna hit some with a questionnaire to record their feelings.
It's got different emotional adjectives like moved, melancholic, sad, peaceful,
and intensity scales from one to seven. Also, they filled
in a whole battery of different kinds of personality tests
(13:50):
and questions about their current mood and also their experienced
quality of life and kind of general health related questions.
Some of the participants were hooked up with electrodes to
measure bodily responses to evidence of intense emotional reactions. With
all the data collected, Yonah and her team crunch the
numbers looking for patterns, and they find one one thing
(14:14):
that really consistently seemed to predict people's enjoyment of sad music.
Was empathy. Those who score the highest in empathic concern
or sympathy for others, they seem to be enjoying sad
music the most. So perhaps they are connecting to something
human in the music. They're reacting to sad music, gus
(14:36):
they would to a sad person. Got admit as emo.
Kids are coming off pretty good right now, kind compassionate.
Sure you could date somebody from the varsity team will
only listens to metal, but they might let your cat
on fire something. And if they do, we will have
a hot cup of tea ready if you want to
talk about it all right. For Yonah's walk off music,
(14:58):
I persuaded her to say the melancholic finish lullaby that
her mother used to sing, You want me to sing? Okay,
here goes bier Nicki, Sulin boy Gan and Holy yon
None ohmak Covery, be a nil, Lucky Soli, loly Bion,
(15:21):
Bion and Bienny. And we listened to sad music for clarity,
for comfort. But what about the people who write the songs?
Why do we wallow and suffering? I invited a fellow songwriter,
Mayotta to talk it out. She's found herself in tears
(15:42):
over her keyboard while crafting a particularly sad joint. Why
do you do that? Why do we do that? That
doesn't make any sense that um my general thought that
why we do that? I think it's for catharsis, and
for me specifically, it's definitely for catharsis without sweating the
dictionary different and like, what does that mean when you
use that word says release? I think, like that's the
(16:05):
main thing I'm thinking of, is release. I really see
trauma as like stagnant energy that got stuck and wasn't
allowed to like move through you. Like I literally just
heard this from my therapist a couple of days ago,
and she dragged me and was like, well, you have
to feel to heal. If you don't let yourself feel
(16:25):
your lows, you don't get to feel the highs either,
Like everything numbs out. I know from personal experience that
it can be a serious challenge to perform while your
body isn't the throes of a big feeling. Your hands,
shake your voice titans, your diaphragm might want to do
(16:45):
that spasm thing. Sadness affects all the muscles that are
supposed to be playing the damn song. But Mayada built
room for these feelings into the architecture of her arrangements.
Oh man, oh wow, Wolf, I'm just like I'm like
viscerally coming back to a couple of times. I wrote
(17:06):
a lot of like really belty swelling, like kind of
squalling type of moments into these songs, and so it
was like a yell just dropped jaw on an awe,
but like really loud, and I think that was the
release instead of like straight up crying like something needs
(17:28):
to get out of me. But I'm gonna do it
in a kind of pretty way because my choir teacher
taught me, like in high school, when you have to scream,
do it musically right, like breathe like you would be singing.
And while my body was like on some very like
shaky type of thing, I knew that if I just
made it to the chorus, I could basically scream, And
(17:51):
I think that was kind of what shorted up. Does
it feel like you're sometimes writing sad songs for political,
you know, reasons, like specifically absolutely? Actually, I would venture
to say that those are the ones that are the hardest,
like ones that came out of some very specifically rough
stuff about just like my my black experience. For example,
(18:14):
it's like, in the most technical of senses, I am
literally performing my pain right now. But like, I'm doing
this thing and I know that I'm incurring damage from it,
and I know that it's like stress. It's like stressing
my body to have to explain this over and over again.
But also like, I still believe in the power of
sharing my experience, but I need you to hear me.
(18:38):
Some sad music might be used as a call to action,
a request, or a challenge for listeners to come to
one another's aid. I think that a lot of Western
experience of music, particularly of art, is for entertainment, and
I don't really see my job as one as as
an entertainer. If you had a business card, like would
(19:00):
it say, Wow, what was the first thing that came
to my musical healer? Yeah? I think musical healer. That
song with the belty yell instead of cry chorus that
Mayatta was talking about is called Cracked Chest. She hasn't
recorded a studio version yet, but we're lucky enough to
premiere the Devil here. It's oh mind, oh my, oh mind,
(19:24):
oh my, oh my, oh my. Was somebody my hen
(19:49):
for a while? My dad made his living as a
loot player. If you can't picture it, a loot is
a precursor of the guitar, the kind of instrument you
might see on a tapestry. It's not the line of
work you pursue hoping to get rich. And by the
nineteen eighties my dad had missed the loot craze by
like so years. Still he sat alone for many hours
(20:09):
playing these delicate, melancholy songs written by other sensitive men.
Now long did When I asked what drove his musical obsession,
I met the hard limit of his sentimentalism. He said
he was deeply moved by the music. He found great
beauty in it, but he just didn't see any evidence
that it had some higher meaning. He used the phrase
(20:29):
mental masturbation, like that might be what all this loop
playing amounted to. And some people have suggested that our
affinity to music is just a byproduct of evolution, that
our pattern sensitive brains built for language might just geek
out our music like a house cat does on a
laser pointer. Stephen Pinker, a famous cognitive psychologist, characterized music
(20:51):
as auditory cheesecake. H I don't understand music in theory,
but I understand it in practice, and I see how
the faces in the crowd change when the big ballad
(21:12):
begins and the strings lift like a tidal wave, and
we are all briefly relieved of the obligation to be
our professional, presentable selves, and instead the full truth of
our lives is welcomed into the room, the fears and
the fractures, and until the final notes ring, we are
suspended in communion with one another, like rafts and rough water,
somehow fortified by the storm. The music sensitizes us to
(21:38):
the world and to the other people in it. There's
this line often attributed to the Persian poet Roomy, that
about sums it up for me. You have to keep
breaking your heart until it opens as I let myself out.
Here's a clip of a song I sometimes play on tour.
It's called good Grief. How can it's head bad? Maybe
(22:13):
good grieves one's good? How can it at our next meeting?
Deeply Human is examining the teenage brain to find out
why there's such an intensity of feeling during adolescents. Why
does the world burn brighter in your teens? Deeply Human
(22:36):
is a co production of the BBC World Service and
American public media with I heart Media and as you
know by now, I'm a musician and a songwriter too,
so if you'd like to share your thoughts on songs,
sad or happy ones, you can find me at Duessa
Darling on Twitter. Thanks for listening.
So could you show me like a chord that's major
and then a chord that's minor, just so we can
hear the difference. Yep, So here's a C major chord
C minor to meet. Anyone who prefers C major is
(00:22):
out of their mind, Like I wish them well, but
we can't ever fully understand one another or be close
friends because C minor is true and C major that's
for selling soap. Wow, I never knew. I mean, I
know you felt strong. I didn't know you felt this strongly.
(00:42):
That's me and Andy Thompson talking shop. He's a composer
and a producer who works out of a basement studio
called Instrument Landing. And I'm Dessa, host of the show
Deeply Human. I'm wearing my podcast had today. But I
make my living as a hip hop artist, and Andy
and I are frequent collaborators. Most of the music that
I write is pretty dark, so much so that my
(01:03):
bandmates tease me about it. Even my fans tease me
about it. Years ago, when I sent an early mix
of an album to my mom, she said she liked it,
but then asked, why do you always make music to
bleed out? To I've loved sad songs since I was
a teenager. My favorite genre was arguably total devastation. Tracy
(01:24):
Chapman's Fast Car That was a big one, some of
my mom's Bonnie ray Its slow Jams messed me up
pretty good, and of course Jeff Buckley's rendition of Hallelujah.
I played them over and over again because they reliably
made me feel exquisitely awful. Listening to sad songs is
(01:49):
a weird, counterintuitive thing to do. Why would anyone willfully
gravitate towards something that hurts to hear? To find out,
I'm asking a music critic, a philosopher, an experimental researcher,
and a songwriter, why do we listen to sad music? First,
let's holler at our critic, someone who listens to music professionally.
(02:11):
Stephen Thompson is a writer, an editor, and a broadcast
guy with National public radio in the US, and he's
a serious sad song enthusiast. I know that you made
a playlist called Weeping at the Wheels right, right right,
and the cover image was just a box of tissues
on a dashboard, and man, the car is definitely one
(02:33):
of the best spots to be totally disemboweled by a song.
There's a couple of songs that that I'm not allowed
to drive to because because I become an irresponsible pilot
of a motor vehicle in the throes of that much emotion,
you know, you know, when you cry, it can sometimes
like help you, like irrigate your emotions a little bit.
(02:56):
And I think, I think sad songs kind of have
that same that same function. I have a depressive streak,
and I have an anxious streak. And when I was
in high school, I remember my anxiety had gotten to
the point where I wasn't able to sleep at night,
and I started making lists of all the things that
I had to do. And then when I was done
writing down everything I had to do, and I was
(03:17):
able to process and handle it. And I think in
a way, sad songs for me are like those lists,
those anxiety lists, you know, so I can my brain
can just be this haunted circus of terrible emotions, and
a song that has a way of processing those emotions
(03:38):
can sometimes like serve as like almost like a sorting
mechanism for that web of feelings in my head. And
so I think sad music is really therapeutic for me
in that way, clarifying a painful feeling, pinning it to
a board, the clean, neat description provides some degree of relief,
even if the feeling itself persists. I know that in
(03:58):
my life being able to call demons by their proper
names just helps somehow. It's a relief to know exactly
what I'm up against, you know how, like your kid
and you come crying to your parents you've had a nightmare,
and your parents explain, like, nightmares are your brain's way
of taking out the garbage. And I always thought that
was a great way of thinking about nightmares. It's your
your brain's way of processing difficult and dark things and
(04:21):
so that you can handle them going forward. I think
in a way, sad songs ping a little bit of
that same thing. I wonder though, if there's like an
undercurrent of intimacy that runs through sad music that isn't
necessarily there and like dance music and that it's okay
to tell anyone, hey, I want to dance, but the
idea that like, hey, I think I'm getting a divorce,
(04:43):
that's a secret, that's an intimacy, and that like there
are fewer people in places that you can share that information,
and so maybe, like we understand ourselves to be in
a more intimate and trusting relationship with a musician who's
telling us a sad story than one who's telling us
is celebrating the song, can feel like you're communing with
an artist who understands and has been through what you've
(05:05):
gone through. And so it's not necessarily hopeless because here's
somebody who clearly went through some of the same things
that I did and came out on the other side
and wrote a song about it. I mean, I think
empathy is just one of the most powerful and important
experiences we can have as human beings. This is the
whole misery loves Company thing, but the way that Steven
(05:28):
tells it, maybe it's also like proof of life, evidence
that a fellow sufferer with a misery much like yours
was able to get back on our feet and get
stable enough to hire a band and a publicist and
release some music into the world. All right, for Steven's
walk off music, let's tee up a cut from his
(05:48):
Weeping at the Wheel playlist, and now back to Andy's
(06:12):
basement studio for a second to talk fundamentals. What is
sad music exactly? My lad jewel vary and there are
exceptions to every rule, but Andy ticked off a few
of the features that makes sad songs sound sad. A
lot of times when you feel sad, you kind of
pull inward and you're quiet, and you don't necessarily want
to speak to other people. And so I think one
thing a composer can do is to bring the dynamic down.
(06:42):
Another thing a composer can do is use just sparseness
and not have a lot going on, have the notes
to be very alone with themselves. But there are other things,
like major and minor keys that are a little bit
(07:03):
more of a mystery. Keep in mind, this conversation is
being had by two Western musicians, and the world is
a very wide musical place, but in very broad strokes.
Major chords are usually considered happy and minor chords sad.
So let's break down the chords to see what they're
made of. C major chord has a C in the
(07:24):
major third and five. To make it a minor chord,
you take that second note and you move it down
a half step, which is the shortest distance you can
move an interval in music. Usually they're C minor. Dissecting
(07:50):
a chord doesn't explain the feeling it foakes much better
than cutting open a candle explains romance. You're basically talking
about two frequencies interacting, and when they interact one way,
it generally makes people feel happy, and when they interact
a different way, it makes him feel sad. And that
to me is it's kind of like a black hole.
I don't know. It goes like this, the F five,
(08:13):
the minor fall and the major lived, the baffle king composing.
Have we just learned that some chords are associated with sadness?
Or is there a mathematical relationship between the notes that
makes us feel that way? People who have spent a
(08:35):
lifetime trying to master the how of music still don't
know the why. Myself very much included segue to our philosopher.
Andrew Huddleston, teaches at Birkbeck College in London. Is an undergrad.
He wrote a thesis on why we're drawn to sad music,
and I asked him how sad music evolks emotion. One
theory is that the musical expressions resemble the expressions of
(08:59):
sad people think of the face of a Saint Bernard dog,
we say that the face is sad, even though we
think the dog is not sad. Now why do we
think that, Well, it resembles in a certain way the
expression of sad people, maybe in a kind of caricatured way,
the kind of drooping quality of the Saint Bernard dog's face.
And you think something similar might be the case in
(09:21):
the contours of music, that they might have these kinds
of qualities that put us in mind of sadness. Some
sad music might actually resemble the sounds that come out
of sad humans, that sound like wailing or like laments.
And I think that that's a very common thing in
vocal music and in some purely instrumental music too, where
(09:43):
that quality is mirrored. And I think that that really
puts us in mind of expressions of sadness, that kind
of rising and falling suddenly falling vocal line, or the
sense of a sigh in the music. My mom used
to sing a lullaby to me and my kid brother
(10:03):
Maxie called No Nando, and I think it has the
kind of melody lines that Andrew's talking about. It has
these like super epic swells and cascades My mom is
Puerto Rican and most of the words are in Spanish,
but I've always suspected that maybe, like the trills in
the vocal line were forged by Sephardic Jewish singers with
roots in Spain. It's one of those songs where a
(10:26):
mom like puts her kid's name into it, and I
do not have kids, so I'm gonna use Max's name.
But it goes like this an no na do no
no go me baby Maxie it done, and no na
(10:51):
gole no na go ani no na and the nina no.
It is an insanely dramatic way to put a kid
to bed. I used to hate it when you go high,
because I knew and he was almost done and I
(11:13):
had to go to sleep. I still sing on nonando
sometimes around my apartment, and my voice right now sounds
a lot like my mom's did then. But why I
am a grown adult who could listen to dance music
or just eat Peanut M and M's or right a
Shetland pony through a field of daisies. I asked Andrew
for the philosopher's take on why we listen to sad
(11:35):
music at all. We're interested in knowing about what the
world is like, even about extreme kinds of suffering and horror,
even if that's not particularly pleasant. You know, why are
people drawn to tragedy? Why are people drawn to films
that are about really horrible things? Why do they read
novels that are about really horrible things? And I think
(11:55):
one of the explanations is we care about knowledge. We
care about knowing what the world is, even if what
we find out is something that's depressing. There might also
be something important about packaging sadness in music. So I
think the beauty plays a really considerable role here. One
thing that it can provide is in itself a certain
kind of consolation. Perhaps the presence of the beauty in
(12:18):
this expression of something that's sad or depressing, it might
also intimate a certain kind of hope as well. Maybe
the music here becomes the mixer and a stiff drink,
or the sticker the doctor gives to a little kid
after her shot. It's still going to burn, but the
beauty of the music gives you something for the pain.
(12:39):
Andrew himself is a Wagner guy, So DJ drop something
from the ring cycle. Yeah, my name is Boskowski. I
(13:03):
work at the University of Oslo as an Associate professor
in music cognition. Yana was part of a team that
conducted an experiment to study fans of sad music. They
wanted to find out what kinds of personality traits are
related to people's enjoyment of sad music. Jana's team recruits
a bunch of research participants, put some in fancy headphones
(13:26):
and presses play on eight minutes of sad instrumental music. Next,
you wanna hit some with a questionnaire to record their feelings.
It's got different emotional adjectives like moved, melancholic, sad, peaceful,
and intensity scales from one to seven. Also, they filled
in a whole battery of different kinds of personality tests
(13:50):
and questions about their current mood and also their experienced
quality of life and kind of general health related questions.
Some of the participants were hooked up with electrodes to
measure bodily responses to evidence of intense emotional reactions. With
all the data collected, Yonah and her team crunch the
numbers looking for patterns, and they find one one thing
(14:14):
that really consistently seemed to predict people's enjoyment of sad music.
Was empathy. Those who score the highest in empathic concern
or sympathy for others, they seem to be enjoying sad
music the most. So perhaps they are connecting to something
human in the music. They're reacting to sad music, gus
(14:36):
they would to a sad person. Got admit as emo.
Kids are coming off pretty good right now, kind compassionate.
Sure you could date somebody from the varsity team will
only listens to metal, but they might let your cat
on fire something. And if they do, we will have
a hot cup of tea ready if you want to
talk about it all right. For Yonah's walk off music,
(14:58):
I persuaded her to say the melancholic finish lullaby that
her mother used to sing, You want me to sing? Okay,
here goes bier Nicki, Sulin boy Gan and Holy yon
None ohmak Covery, be a nil, Lucky Soli, loly Bion,
(15:21):
Bion and Bienny. And we listened to sad music for clarity,
for comfort. But what about the people who write the songs?
Why do we wallow and suffering? I invited a fellow songwriter,
Mayotta to talk it out. She's found herself in tears
(15:42):
over her keyboard while crafting a particularly sad joint. Why
do you do that? Why do we do that? That
doesn't make any sense that um my general thought that
why we do that? I think it's for catharsis, and
for me specifically, it's definitely for catharsis without sweating the
dictionary different and like, what does that mean when you
use that word says release? I think, like that's the
(16:05):
main thing I'm thinking of, is release. I really see
trauma as like stagnant energy that got stuck and wasn't
allowed to like move through you. Like I literally just
heard this from my therapist a couple of days ago,
and she dragged me and was like, well, you have
to feel to heal. If you don't let yourself feel
(16:25):
your lows, you don't get to feel the highs either,
Like everything numbs out. I know from personal experience that
it can be a serious challenge to perform while your
body isn't the throes of a big feeling. Your hands,
shake your voice titans, your diaphragm might want to do
(16:45):
that spasm thing. Sadness affects all the muscles that are
supposed to be playing the damn song. But Mayada built
room for these feelings into the architecture of her arrangements.
Oh man, oh wow, Wolf, I'm just like I'm like
viscerally coming back to a couple of times. I wrote
(17:06):
a lot of like really belty swelling, like kind of
squalling type of moments into these songs, and so it
was like a yell just dropped jaw on an awe,
but like really loud, and I think that was the
release instead of like straight up crying like something needs
(17:28):
to get out of me. But I'm gonna do it
in a kind of pretty way because my choir teacher
taught me, like in high school, when you have to scream,
do it musically right, like breathe like you would be singing.
And while my body was like on some very like
shaky type of thing, I knew that if I just
made it to the chorus, I could basically scream, And
(17:51):
I think that was kind of what shorted up. Does
it feel like you're sometimes writing sad songs for political,
you know, reasons, like specifically absolutely? Actually, I would venture
to say that those are the ones that are the hardest,
like ones that came out of some very specifically rough
stuff about just like my my black experience. For example,
(18:14):
it's like, in the most technical of senses, I am
literally performing my pain right now. But like, I'm doing
this thing and I know that I'm incurring damage from it,
and I know that it's like stress. It's like stressing
my body to have to explain this over and over again.
But also like, I still believe in the power of
sharing my experience, but I need you to hear me.
(18:38):
Some sad music might be used as a call to action,
a request, or a challenge for listeners to come to
one another's aid. I think that a lot of Western
experience of music, particularly of art, is for entertainment, and
I don't really see my job as one as as
an entertainer. If you had a business card, like would
(19:00):
it say, Wow, what was the first thing that came
to my musical healer? Yeah? I think musical healer. That
song with the belty yell instead of cry chorus that
Mayatta was talking about is called Cracked Chest. She hasn't
recorded a studio version yet, but we're lucky enough to
premiere the Devil here. It's oh mind, oh my, oh mind,
(19:24):
oh my, oh my, oh my. Was somebody my hen
(19:49):
for a while? My dad made his living as a
loot player. If you can't picture it, a loot is
a precursor of the guitar, the kind of instrument you
might see on a tapestry. It's not the line of
work you pursue hoping to get rich. And by the
nineteen eighties my dad had missed the loot craze by
like so years. Still he sat alone for many hours
(20:09):
playing these delicate, melancholy songs written by other sensitive men.
Now long did When I asked what drove his musical obsession,
I met the hard limit of his sentimentalism. He said
he was deeply moved by the music. He found great
beauty in it, but he just didn't see any evidence
that it had some higher meaning. He used the phrase
(20:29):
mental masturbation, like that might be what all this loop
playing amounted to. And some people have suggested that our
affinity to music is just a byproduct of evolution, that
our pattern sensitive brains built for language might just geek
out our music like a house cat does on a
laser pointer. Stephen Pinker, a famous cognitive psychologist, characterized music
(20:51):
as auditory cheesecake. H I don't understand music in theory,
but I understand it in practice, and I see how
the faces in the crowd change when the big ballad
(21:12):
begins and the strings lift like a tidal wave, and
we are all briefly relieved of the obligation to be
our professional, presentable selves, and instead the full truth of
our lives is welcomed into the room, the fears and
the fractures, and until the final notes ring, we are
suspended in communion with one another, like rafts and rough water,
somehow fortified by the storm. The music sensitizes us to
(21:38):
the world and to the other people in it. There's
this line often attributed to the Persian poet Roomy, that
about sums it up for me. You have to keep
breaking your heart until it opens as I let myself out.
Here's a clip of a song I sometimes play on tour.
It's called good Grief. How can it's head bad? Maybe
(22:13):
good grieves one's good? How can it at our next meeting?
Deeply Human is examining the teenage brain to find out
why there's such an intensity of feeling during adolescents. Why
does the world burn brighter in your teens? Deeply Human
(22:36):
is a co production of the BBC World Service and
American public media with I heart Media and as you
know by now, I'm a musician and a songwriter too,
so if you'd like to share your thoughts on songs,
sad or happy ones, you can find me at Duessa
Darling on Twitter. Thanks for listening.
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