Search results for "sad music"

Emotions experienced in relation to nominally sad music

2016

The pleasure evoked by sad music is mediated by feelings of being moved

2017

Why do we enjoy listening to music that makes us sad? This question has puzzled music psychologists for decades, but the paradox of “pleasurable sadness” remains to be solved. Recent findings from a study investigating the enjoyment of sad films suggest that the positive relationship between felt sadness and enjoyment might be explained by feelings of being moved (Hanich et al., 2014). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether feelings of being moved also mediated the enjoyment of sad music. In Experiment 1, 308 participants listened to five sad music excerpts and rated their liking and felt emotions. A multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the initial positive relations…

Fifty shades of blue : Classification of music-evoked sadness

2016

It has been repeatedly shown that sad music induces mainly pleasant or mixed emotions, and is particularly relevant for self-regulation goals. However, this is not entirely compatible with the view that sadness is one of the basic emotions experienced in the face of an unpleasant event or a loss. Also, a distinction between grief and sadness is often drawn, which seemingly does not have relevance in relation to musical experiences. The discrepancy between the positive accounts of emotions associated with sad music and those present in ordinary sadness may be related to the previously unacknowledged spectrum of affects associated with music-related sadness. The present study aims to expose t…

Ambivalent Emotions in Music : We Like Sad Music When It Makes Us Happy

2013

We often react ambivalently to a piece of music, simultaneously experiencing both sadness and happiness, and attributing both emotions to the musical content. Two experiments were conducted (1) to empirically test for ambivalent emotions and (2) to investigate the amount of musical information necessary to elicit such emotions. In experiment 1, synthesized musical excerpts were manipulated in tempo (fast/slow) and mode (major/minor). By using unipolar scales, listeners could independently rate how (1) happy and (2) sad the music made them feel, as well as the (3) happiness and (4) sadness perceived in the music. Regarding perceived emotion, happiness was higher in major-fast excerpts, sadne…

The Pleasant Emotion of Sad Music

2013

In general, sad music is thought to cause us to experience sadness, which is considered an unpleasant emotion. As a result, the question arises as to why we listen to sad music if it evokes sadness. We hypothesized that felt and perceived emotion may not actually coincide in this respect: sad music would be perceived as sad, but the experience of listening to sad music would evoke positive emotions. A total of 44 participants listened to mu-sical excerpts and provided data on perceived and felt emotions by rating 62 descriptive words or phrases re-lated to emotions on a scale that ranged from 0 (not at all) to 4 (very much). The results revealed that the sad music was perceived to be more t…