How Do We Recognize Emotions In Music?

We recognize emotion in music much as we recognize it in speech, using acoustic cues such as tempo, pitch, and sound level. Slow, minor-key music reads as sad, while fast, major-key music reads as happy. The brain then completes the response: happy music engages reward regions, while sad music activates the amygdala.

Music elicits strong emotions, so much so that it is called “the language of emotions”.  You might have seen the age-old viral video showing a baby crying in response to a “sad” song, before it even learns to talk!

Clearly, these emotions are not conveyed through lyrics, since we recognize them in background scores too! Even people without any musical training can recognize emotions in music, showing that we’re born with this ability.

Furthermore, we all experience similar feelings in response to certain musical pieces. We would all agree that listening to “The Imperial March” from Star Wars sends chills down our spine, while “Yoda’s Theme” instills a sense of hope.

Ever wonder how we’re able to accomplish this feat of recognizing emotions in music?

Investigating Emotions In Music

Scientists studying the psychology of music investigate emotions evoked by it using self-reports from listeners. There are two levels in which emotions operate through music. The first one is the emotion that the music is designed to convey to the listener, otherwise known as the “perceived emotion”. The other is the emotion that a listener feels by listening to the music, called the “felt emotion”.

Sad And Happy Music – What’s The Difference?

Music has been known to induce a variety of emotions. However, the most common classification of emotions in music is dichotomous, either happy or sad.

Studies have attempted to elaborate on what differentiates sad music from happy music. Scientists do this by comparing the acoustic properties of musical pieces that are consistently reported by listeners as being either sad or happy. 

The results of such analyses provided some interesting insights. Music that is slow in rhythm and uses minor chords was seen to arouse sadness in listeners. On the other hand, faster songs using major scales made listeners feel happy. Several other factors in music were also found to arouse feelings of sadness, such as low pitch and narrow pitch range, low sound level, and low energy execution.

You may notice that a song like “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, which makes us feel upbeat, has a faster tempo and uses major tones, as compared to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”, which makes the listeners weepy!

These results suggested that our ears differentiate emotions in musical pieces using certain fixed acoustic properties. This is perhaps because the same acoustic features in language evoke happy or sad emotions in us! Therefore, we sense emotions in music similar to how we sense them while listening to speech.

Brain Responses To Happy And Sad Music

Musical pieces are distinguished as happy or sad at the auditory level in our ear, but does the brain respond to these two types of music differently?

A functional MRI study looking at brain activity during music listening showed that sad and happy music elicit different responses in the brain. The participants of this study had their brains scanned while listening to “sad” and “happy” music. Findings showed that happy music gave rise to activity in the brain's reward regions, which are linked to ‘dopamine’, a neurotransmitter (a brain chemical) released in response to pleasurable stimuli.

Dopamine, when released in the brain, makes us feel happy or euphoric, thus improving our mood. Dopamine not only makes eating your favorite candy pleasurable, but also listening to your favorite song!

On the other hand, sad music increased activity in brain regions linked to processing emotions, such as the amygdala. This is an almond-shaped structure in the brain that helps us feel a wide range of emotions, including sadness and fear. It is the amygdala that signals you to run away from a snake, and it can also make you cry when you hear a sad song.

Thus, the brain provides “pleasure” in response to happy music, and makes us “emotional” while listening to sad music. Therefore, while our ears may perform a primary classification of emotions in music, the final answer and emotional response comes from the brain.

Why Does Music Give You Chills?

Have you ever had a song hit a certain note and felt a wave of tingles spread across your skin, raising the hairs on your arms? That shiver-and-goosebumps reaction has a name: scientists call it frisson, and it is sometimes described, only half-jokingly, as a “skin orgasm.” It is the same sensation people are reaching for when they search for an “eargasm,” or when they say a song gave them “chills.” Roughly half of listeners report experiencing it at least sometimes.

Frisson tends to be triggered by moments of musical surprise: an unexpected change in harmony, a sudden swell from soft to loud, or the entry of a voice where you did not expect one. The goosebumps themselves come from piloerection, in which tiny muscles at the base of each body hair contract and stand the hair up. That same chill is part of why a “sad” song can make you cry rather than simply sound mournful, and it is one of the clearest signs that music is doing more than just informing you of an emotion. It is producing a genuine bodily response. If you would like the full story of the goosebumps reflex, we have a dedicated piece on why beautiful music gives you goosebumps.

What makes frisson especially interesting is what happens in the brain. A brain-imaging study found that these peak emotional moments are accompanied by a release of dopamine, the same reward chemical we met earlier, in a deep brain region called the striatum. The release was not uniform: dopamine appeared in the caudate during the build-up, while you anticipate the thrilling moment, and in the nucleus accumbens at the peak itself, when the chill actually arrives. In other words, your brain rewards you both for expecting the goosebumps and for getting them.

Is Music Only “Happy” Or “Sad”?

So far we have leaned on the happy-versus-sad split, because it is the simplest and most studied contrast. But if you think about the music you actually love, you will notice it rarely fits neatly into one of two boxes. A film score can feel awe-inspiring, a folk tune can ache with nostalgia, and a calm piano piece can leave you feeling peaceful rather than “happy.” Everyday emotion words borrowed from psychology, such as anger, fear, or disgust, turn out to be a clumsy fit for what music actually makes us feel.

To capture this richer palette, researchers built a music-specific tool called the Geneva Emotional Music Scale. Working from the responses of hundreds of listeners, they found that the emotions music evokes sort into nine families: wonder, transcendence, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, power, joyful activation, tension, and sadness. These nine, in turn, gather into three broad groupings the researchers labeled sublimity, vitality, and unease. Crucially, this music-tailored model captured what people felt better than the standard “basic emotion” lists did, which tells us that music speaks in a wider emotional vocabulary than a simple happy/sad dial would suggest.

This is why two listeners can sincerely disagree about a song. The same piece might evoke nostalgia in one person and a sense of power in another, depending on memories, mood, and culture. The happy/sad split is a useful starting point, but it is the floor of music's emotional range, not the ceiling.

A Final Word

Music is often classified as “happy” or “sad” by listeners, but it has seldom been questioned as to how we recognize these emotions in the absence of cues, such as lyrics. Findings from studies on the psychology of music suggest that our ability to recognize emotions in music is an extension of our ability to sense emotions in speech.

The acoustic features of human speech that we find “sad” or “happy” are also found in “sad” and “happy” music. This has led scientists to believe that the uniquely human ability to enjoy music and “feel” emotions from it originated as a result of our ability to sense intonations in speech, a skill known as “prosody”. Thus, music is in some ways “a happy accident” that occurred on the evolutionary journey of humans in their development of language.