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It is the culmination of the film. The protagonist’s love interest is mortally wounded, their dog has run away, and for some reason it is now raining. To drive home the fact that it’s a touching moment, the music is now playing in a dark minor tone.
New research suggests there could be some in the audience who don’t find the score so emotionally effective.
Experiments conducted by a team of scientists from West Sydney University suggest that we might just experience music as joyful or depressing thanks to a history of global influences from dominant music cultures.
From pop music to Hollywood soundtracks, harmonies and melodies usually resonate with a more cheerful, uplifting mood if its notes or chords progress in a way described as important.
A melody that progresses a little more languidly between decisive notes is described as minor. It’s the sound of shattering songs, thoughtful moments during soaps, and tearful scenes in the movies.
The relationship between major progress and positive feelings (and sad emotions with minor ones) is so ubiquitous throughout the western world, it’s easy to assume that something essentially biological is happening.
The origins of this connection, however, are a complete mystery. Some speculate that it might have something to do with a certain dissonance in a minor tonality, like a ladder with the occasional half-step thrown in just to make us stumble.
Alternatively, it might have something to do with averaging the pitches in a piece triggering a more primitive response, where the overall impression resembles vocalizations imitating a friend or foe.
If each of these hypotheses were true, the emotions of music would be universal experiences. However, several studies involving remote communities that have not been exposed to much western music have yielded mixed results.
In an attempt to produce more definitive evidence of whether melodies are plucked at our strings in the same way regardless of musical exposure, the researchers behind this latest study took to remote regions of Papua New Guinea with music recordings consisting of cadences in main and minor keys. .
A total of 170 adults from the Uruwa River Valley were paid to participate in the survey, listening to recorded snippets of music that varied in average pitch, cadence, mode and pitch. All participants had to do was listen to two of the samples and tell the researchers if one made them feel happy.
Hidden in the folds of a mountainous landscape, the villages in the region just don’t have easy access to Spotify.
What little influence of Western music they had is mostly woven into hymns by Lutheran missionaries, with the resulting songs known as “stringben” in the Pidgin language.
With changing access to churches, virtually no direct exposure to Western music traditions, and different customs when engaging in music of various kinds, the population provides a unique opportunity to test whether a difference in tonality induces a shared emotional experience.
As a countermeasure, the researchers also conducted the same study in a soundproof room in Sydney, Australia. Virtually all of the 79 volunteers were regular listeners of Western music (except for one who was more of a fan of Arabic music).
Based on what are known as Bayesian statistical inferences, the results strongly indicate that the self-reported emotional responses to the average pitch of a piece of music have more to do with previous exposure to Westernized music than something more universal.
It is possible that the emotions imposed by the last chords of a piece of music could still have an uncultured origin, based on limitations in the evidence among the villagers of Uruwa Valley.
Together, however, the results of the study show no indication that our common response of happiness to important strings is buried in our biology.
How particular musical traditions became associated with emotional language is a question still to be solved.
People and some of our closest relatives have been playing music for tens of thousands of years, if not much longer. We play it at funerals, at weddings, during our storytelling, or when we are alone with our thoughts, making its practice difficult to provoke except for its cultural background.
As our cultures evolve, so does our music.
This research was published in PLOS One.
