Listening to sad music can invoke positive emotions in listeners, a new study has claimed.
According to research published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, 44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-specialists, were asked to listen to a ‘sad’ piece of music and a ‘happy’ piece and rate them both.
In many of the participants, sad music evoked contradictory emotions as they tended to feel sad music to be more tragic, less romantic, and less blithe than they felt themselves while listening to it.
The researchers wrote: ‘Emotion experienced by music has no direct danger or harm unlike the emotion experienced in everyday life. Therefore, we can even enjoy unpleasant emotion such as sadness. If we suffer from unpleasant emotion evoked through daily life, sad music might be helpful to alleviate negative emotion.
‘Music that is perceived as sad actually induces romantic emotion as well as sad emotion. And people, regardless of their musical training, experience this ambivalent emotion to listen to the sad music.’
The sad pieces of music included Glinka's La Séparation in F minor and Blumenfeld's Etude Sur Mer in G minor. The happy music piece was Granados's Allegro de Concierto in G major.
The study was undertaken at Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan.
According to research published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, 44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-specialists, were asked to listen to a ‘sad’ piece of music and a ‘happy’ piece and rate them both.
In many of the participants, sad music evoked contradictory emotions as they tended to feel sad music to be more tragic, less romantic, and less blithe than they felt themselves while listening to it.
The researchers wrote: ‘Emotion experienced by music has no direct danger or harm unlike the emotion experienced in everyday life. Therefore, we can even enjoy unpleasant emotion such as sadness. If we suffer from unpleasant emotion evoked through daily life, sad music might be helpful to alleviate negative emotion.
‘Music that is perceived as sad actually induces romantic emotion as well as sad emotion. And people, regardless of their musical training, experience this ambivalent emotion to listen to the sad music.’
The sad pieces of music included Glinka's La Séparation in F minor and Blumenfeld's Etude Sur Mer in G minor. The happy music piece was Granados's Allegro de Concierto in G major.
The study was undertaken at Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan.
