
Music Generates Feelings That Are Only Weakly Bound to the Music - pjdorrell
https://whatismusic.info/blog/MusicGeneratesFeelingsThatAreOnlyWeaklyBoundToTheMusic.html
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aprao
Tangentially related, but I have stopped taking pictures on hikes nowadays. I
just listen to an instrumental piece of music a couple times and when I play
it back a couple weeks or months later, I am able to vividly recall the
experience which I could never do from photos.

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munk-a
Back in 2005 I was gifted both Guero (by Beck) and Guild Wars on my birthday
and ended up listening to the album on repeat while playing the game and I
really vivid visual flashbacks to that game's art style whenever I hear that
album.

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armenarmen
Jimi Hendrix and Morrowind for me

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VladimirGolovin
For me, it's Morrowind and Morrowind. The in-game music was amazing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULTMMgwLuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xULTMMgwLuo)

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crazygringo
It has been well-known in psychology for many decades (as well as film and TV
production, and certainly advertising) that emotional states become indelibly
associated with other things being experienced at the same time, despite there
being zero "causal" connection.

The same way getting food poisoning after eating a certain dish (and vomiting
it back up) can make you avoid the dish for years, even when cooked at home or
at other restaurants where it's no more likely to make you sick than anything
else.

Our "emotional" brain draws connections completely independently of our
"rational" brain. There is extensive literature on this.

So this is one small example of that broadly established phenomenon.

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plutonorm
He/she is right on that count, but then goes on to say that the emotions are
not transferred to real world happenings, imho that's wrong.

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fenwick67
> Music-generated feelings only transfer easily to imagined perceptions

Not trying to be difficult here but what does this mean? What is an imagined
perception vs a real one?

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zuminator
My take on this is, you're watching a movie that takes place in the winter.
Wintry music is playing. All of a sudden the "cold" music along with the scene
of an icy blizzard gives you a slight chilly sensation.

Afterwards you go outside and it's a blazing hot summer day. You put on the
soundtrack to the movie but in this case, it doesn't make you feel any cooler.
Or conversely it's freezing cold outside, but even so the wintry music doesn't
actually make you feel any colder than you already do.

In the situations described above, the music was able to affect your imagined
perceptions, not your real ones.

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pjdorrell
“Hot” and “cold” are not, as far as I know, feelings that music can express.

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guildan
4 seasons by Vilvaldi might be the first example that came to mind that hot
and cold was express in a piece of music.

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CurtHagenlocher
Whenever I listen to Joy Division I think of Emacs Lisp.

~~~
twic
I assume because of the track "She's Lost Control [because she tried to remap
it to caps lock but screwed up XKBOPTIONS]".

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jimbo1qaz
Reminds me: [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-forgetting-
pill](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-forgetting-pill) apparently
recalling a memory rewrites it in your brain, and taking certain drugs causes
the memory (or emotions) to not be rewritten, or lose emotional intensity.
This may be a PTSD treatment.

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mettamage
I wished there was a study on the emotional perception of music and
mindfulness meditation. Whenever I did mindfulness meditation for an hour, if
I'd listen to music after that I'd be a lot more sensative towards the
feelings experienced by it.

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amilein7minutes
This article makes some excellent hypotheses about music that I think everyone
can anecdotally confirm.

To explain the attributes of the brain some of these hypotheses allude to, in
terms of programming, imagine you have a class. It consists of a list of data
members and some member functions that are called by the user (the brain) in
order to parse given (sensory) inputs.

For each sensory input, a separate object is created, and so the returned
outputs, after some computation, are inherently associated with the object.
So, it happens that when you see a blue circle, the member functions are
crunched using the .shape and .color data members, that are set to circle and
blue respectively, say in the constructor of the ``blue circle`` object.

Suppose this model for processing all kinds of sensory inputs; we might have
to imagine complicated classes, lots of member functions so that all kinds of
sensory inputs can be parsed. The author makes the interesting claim that
there are additional arguments in the member functions that are influenced by
whether there is music at the time of sensory object creation.

These arguments distort the outputs (the parsed sensory inputs). The member
functions are black boxes, but common experience gives us some insight, based
on the observed correlations of inputs and outputs (eg. "sad story" as a
sensory input without music is parsed as "sad story", with Bach's Chaconne, is
parsed as "extremely depressing, weirdly poignant story").

One other claim that is made in the article, that is very interesting, is that
there is a feedback, through evolution. Suppose the brains of human beings
have performed Bayesian updates on the outputs of the black box member
functions. When the Bayesian brain creates music, does it harness its updated
function so as to amplify desired effects?

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millerjt
If I’m following this logic, the article seems to present a false equivalence
between perceptions and feelings.

When we hear music, we perceive things like pitch, timbre, duration. We don’t
perceive sadness in music. Rather, certain types of music tend to cause
certain types of feelings in listeners. The parts of music we do perceive are
strongly bound to the music in the way the author defines. That’s how we can
pick out individual instruments or have a conversation while music is playing.

Feelings are, well, more layered and do combine with those created from other
perceptions. They also can last beyond the immediate perception.

Theres a great radio lab episode [1] about music, language, perceiving sound,
and the connection between music and emotion. It’s such a fascinating topic.

[1]
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91512...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91512-musical-
language)

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loons2
I'm not so sure. An audience feels the music much more intensely if the artist
is feeling it. If the artist merely performs it, the audience doesn't feel it
nearly as much.

Great radio lab episode!

re: hearing something awful becomes pleasant with repetition The first time I
heard this (composed using non-chromatic scale with 16 pitches to the octave)
was somewhat uncomfortable, but after hearing it a few times, it became quite
pleasant.

[https://kylegann.com/FracturedParadise.mp3](https://kylegann.com/FracturedParadise.mp3)

The explanation:
[https://kylegann.com/Fractured.html](https://kylegann.com/Fractured.html)

~~~
meowface
And "feeling" it usually just means intuitively adding satisfying and
interesting expression to the performance while in a flow state, which at the
end of the day is just slight changes in the tempo, rhythm, dynamics,
durations, etc.

We're not feeling the "feeling it". We're just enjoying the new and
potentially song-improving alterations that often come from a performer
getting deep into a performance. If you were to take a pre-recorded piece with
those exact same alterations, with no live performer (but could hypothetically
make the audio quality the same as a live performance), I bet the audience
would feel it just the same when you play the recording. All that matters is
what the music sounds like.

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loons2
You're not a singer. ;-)

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meowface
True, but I do play piano a bit.

Conveying emotion probably has many extra factors when it comes to vocalizing,
so I'd agree on that point.

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8bitsrule
IMO song lyrics are using music as a carrier wave, and we may associate the
music with the feelings expressed in the lyrics. That's a bit _tainted_ ...

When it comes to purely instrumental music I won't usually attach emotions to
it ... unless it was designed to be 'programmatic' or 'paint a picture' by the
composer. Even then, there's no need to play along. I don't buy the "major =
happy, minor = sad', that can be more than a little naive.

Instrumental music is a rich, rich language, and - for me at least - it often
arouses emotions _I 've never felt before_. I'm not so sure that it
'generates' those feelings; I suspect that it CONVEYS them. Which is why the
greatest music (in any culture) endures for centuries.

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jonplackett
> It is quite possible that music has evolved as a mechanism of generating
> feelings that can be transferred to other things... and that original
> purpose has become obsolete.

I don't think it's obsolete at all - it's intonation. Music is just hacking
intonation perception.

How you say something completely affects its meaning. You use a different
voice for happy news or sad news or serious things or loving things or
sarcasm. A good actor could make the same phrase mean 100 different things.

I often think about this with voice recognition and claims of 99% accuracy.
Yeah but it didn't get ANY of the intonation, and that's where most of the
information was.

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musicale
I just went to a concert and heard a number of deeply moving pieces that I had
never heard before in my life and were very different from what I normally
listen to.

I think it's also definitely true that a good musical soundtrack enhances any
movie/tv show/game/etc. even if you're encountering both for the first time.
Without the music, it just isn't nearly as
frightening/exciting/romantic/funny/ triumphant/etc..

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r34
Basic concepts like "sense percept" (eg. color, shape) and emotion (sadness)
are mixed here. Emotions affect perception in general.

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tchaffee
Seems flawed and easy to debunk. What you see can also deeply affect emotions.
Sunny day versus cold cloudy day.

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magwa101
That's why very "literal" lyrics can ruin a song.

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jordan314
This is why film music is a thing!

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StuffedParrot
This must vary from person to person.

