Here's an idea, sad music isn't inherently sad.
So here you are, you're listening
to Elliott Smith or Ryan Adams and you are just
bawling your eyes out.
Or you're listening to Scorpion or Queen
and you are throwing your arms triumphantly in the air
because yeah, life, rock and roll.
Music is incredibly effective.
Aldous Huxley said that "after silence,
that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible
is music."
We use music to make emotion manifest,
to convey, communicate, and reinforce.
Music supplements, complements, and conjures emotion
in real life, movies, video games, performance,
advertisements.
But what if I were to tell you that all of those emotions,
elation, triumph, anxiety, misery, hopefulness, doom
and gloom, music doesn't contain any of those emotions.
The lyrics might, but the music doesn't.
Major chords aren't happy.
Minor chords aren't sad.
You have just been trained to hear them that way.
Now there are many theories about how music and emotion
relate to one another as there are Johnny Cash studio records.
So we're only going to talk about a couple.
But if you want to know more, we'll
put a small reading list in the description.
Imitation theory, which goes back to Plato,
says that music imitates the movement or characteristics
of an emotion's physical expression or general feeling.
Wide open intervals sound expansive and accepting.
Upward harmonic motions sounds uplifting.
Jaunty rhythms are jaunty.
But stop the jaunt for just a second,
because if this were true, wouldn't everything
that exhibits these characteristics affect us
in the same way that music does?
Does a dog walking quickly make you feel anxious?
Does a slinky slinking down the stairs make you feel morose.
Of course not, so there must, must
be something else about music or the ways we listen to
and make it.
There's a related claim that says
there's something biological or neurological about humans that
makes us find certain sounds and certain tonalities evocative.
In other words, it's not the music which imitates, its us
that responds.
Some studies have shown this to be true,
that very young children from many different cultures
respond positively to the same intervals and rhythms.
But what does this mean for people who make or listen
to Georgian folk music, or Bulgarian folk music,
or noise rock for that matter?
Are we saying that the biology or neurology
of people who find these things pleasing and meaningful
is somehow different from people who
find Katy Perry or Scriabin pleasing and meaningful?
That sounds wrong and maybe even a little unethical.
What's more though is that amongst any group like Katy
Cats or Bulgarians, there might not even
be a consistent consensus about what emotions
the music contains.
For example, there's a community in Transylvania--
and no, they are not vampires-- where the same music is played
at weddings and funerals.
The emotional content of the music
changes based upon its social context.
Another study shows that Western classical music doesn't induce
the same emotions across every listener, sources
for these things in the description line.
Furthermore, while people might be able to recognize emotion
in music, even music from other cultures,
it doesn't mean that they actually feel that emotion.
Or even if it does effect them, it
might not affect them in the same way over
or the same degree with every listen.
This challenges the idea that we are hard-wired to respond
to music in some way.
In order for music to communicate something,
we have to assume that it is attempting to
and we have to be receptive to that communication.
You can't have your emotional away message
sad to unavailable.
I know that might seem really obvious or even natural.
It's really a deeply ingrained part of your cultural training.
This is why break squeals and explosions don't affect us,
because we don't think of them as containing meaning even
though on some level they might closely
assemble rather musical sounds.
We are not emotionally receptive to them.
The list of things which can cause
us to be receptive it's bigger than Elvis' vocal range, which
incidentally was quite big.
Huge!
Luckily, two researchers Patrick Juslin
and Daniel-- whose last name I'm about to butcher-- Vastfjall,
boiled all of those things down into six categories
which can contribute to quote "emotional induction by music."
They say that brain stem reflexes,
evaluated conditioning, emotional contagion,
visual imagery, episodic memory and musical expectancy
all contribute to the ways we feel stuff
while hearing things.
In other words, sad music isn't simply sad.
There are a whole bunch of factors
which can determine how we respond to a piece of music.
For example, that one Bruno Mars song
might make you upset because it reminds
you of your ex-girlfriend and that time you guys went
to the movies together.
But your mom's evaluative conditioning
and musical training makes her think that it
is boring, predictable dross.
But there are still a lot of unanswered questions
like are musically induced emotions
different from other emotions?
Is music even capable of expressing emotions
beyond the most simplistic ones?
And before we even get to those six factors
of emotional induction, how important is
our preternatural sense of tone and rhythm?
Joe Hanson over at It's OK to Be Smart talks more
about the connections between emotion and music
and about some cool research being done
in a remote Cambodian village.
So go check that out.
And then let us know what you think.
Where does musical emotion come from?
Music?
Our biology?
Our culture?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you don't subscribe, I will play the saddest music
in the world.
I am absolutely prepared to accept that some
laws it might be weapons.
Let's see what you guys had to say about denial
of service attacks as weapons.
So first and foremost, the conversation
inspired by meroxyersox rocks observation
that this channel is a lot of arguing semantics
was awesome, so you should definitely
go back and read all of it.
We'll put some of it right here right now.
DeltaDaedalus points out that MTGox is mining
Team Gix to not Mount Gox.
Thank you for correcting me.
ChildrenofGaelenor points out a really great connection
between denial of service attacks and virtual economies
with online games, which is yeah,
this is really interesting.
To DoggySpew and everyone else comparing
denial of service attacks to vandalism,
I can see this connection, but I think
we need to be open to the fact that vandalism
can be a violent act that is perpetrated by a weapon.
Archelyn513 said that a DOS attack should be considered
a weapon because it can take down
key pieces of infrastructure and draws a connection
to wartime tactics, which is, yeah oh.
To KestrelTown and everyone comparing a DOS attack
to a protest, this is another one
where I can see the connection.
But you have to remember that a protest is subject to the laws
and regulations of the real world,
and that if you actually transgress
some kind of restriction or law, then
you will be held accountable, where that line is not
so clear online and especially with denial of service attacks.
To theMrTatum, that is impossible.
RumrockH points out that extending Ann Bogart's
definition of violence beyond art can be really problematic
and I totally agree.
Sometimes I wish that these episodes
could be 45 minutes long, but that
would be a hard thing to do.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these perspicacious individuals.
And the Tweet of the Week comes from Delirium0 who points us
towards the Wikipedia list a lost films, which is
very interesting, it turns out.
It's pretty nice.