The main abstract question about music and emotions is how music communicates feelings. This question is extended to how and why emotions are experienced in reaction to music, the worth of those experiences, and why we seek out music that makes us feel negative emotions like despair. According to Hesmondhalgh (2013), music, like any other art, can touch our hearts and change our lives. The right song can lift our spirits and focus our minds, take us back to a particular place we visited, or help us relive a pivotal event. This paper analyzes the effects of music on listeners.
From my experience, music can affect my emotions since it is my right to decide on the kind of songs I will listen to, depending on my immediate experience. The philosophical question of how music may convey these feelings depends on the listener’s current mood. Since musical compositions and performances can affect a listener’s psyche, the idea that they can determine their emotions is right (Drew, 2020). When listening to a given song, some people become happy because the melody may please them. In contrast, other people may be sad when they listen to melodies played when someone dies.
The link between music and listeners’ emotions is proper because composers express their emotions through music. It is right to conclude that composers may write music to communicate an emotion they had felt before. From my experience, music has been created to make me happy or sad because music provides workarounds for several issues in our daily lives. Hence, this makes the argument that music affects our emotions realistic.
Many educated listeners indeed lack the emotional capacity to respond to music. Since educated listeners know the message that may be right and wrong, they tend to ignore the music, and this prevents the music from changing their feelings about life. They can protect their state of mind during any mental problems. For example, during stressful moments, they may consider performing tasks that relieve someone from the stress but not listening to music that may have stressful messages. Therefore, they educate people that music does not affect their emotions.
A listener needs to be able to read the music’s emotional undercurrent to give it the proper reaction. Thus, this is most glaring when a sympathetic rather than an empathetic response is given. Since the intensity of the music is not dependent on how the listener feels, the listener’s reaction to the music is not a criterion for how expressive it is (Drew, 2020). The emotional expressiveness I assign to music must depend on our lesser perceptions. That function is more likely to be causative than an element of examining what it means for music to be emotionally sensitive.
People can find a sense of belonging in a musical group. The emotions and thoughts of others can often be deduced from their musical choices. Someone who is in love will listen to music that has love messages to improve his or her knowledge in the field of love, while someone who has divorced in marriage or has been heartbroken by the lover will listen to a sad song because of the experience he or she has gained from the relationship.
Listening to music does not mean hearing but understanding its message. It is acceptable that loud music can scare a dog, but it does not mean that the dog understands what the theme is all about. Words, tunes, melodies, beats, and parts of the piece are all audible to me when I am listening. Such musical comprehension varies over a variety of scales. Your knowledge of a particular work or genre is more extensive than mine, and vice versa for another. I may pick up on more in a piece than you do, but what I hear could be entirely off.
My musical knowledge may be limited compared to others since I can only appreciate one genre. The lack of harmony and melody in some musical compositions may also necessitate the development of other skill sets when performing those works. It has been argued that it is not enough only to be able to identify musical elements in a piece; one must also be able to identify the feelings that the work evokes. According to Small (1998), the fact that we accept painful reactions to some music because we want to understand it raises the question of why we should be interested in studying something that hurts us.
It is suitable to check that the music someone may listen to is meeting their current situation. The order of music ensures that the musical work’s flexibility is proportional to the number of characteristics of authentic performance. Therefore, the instrumentation for some pieces can be very flexible, while for other works, such as romantic songs, a particular instrumentation is required for accurate performances.
Individuals do many things in human existence voluntarily, despite or perhaps partly because of the challenges they present. There are known challenges, such as negative emotional responses, in many activities, such as watching the news, climbing mountains, and raising children. However, we do these things with great zeal because that is the sort of creature we are, but it should not be the reason that should make us sad.
When music is playing, people of all ages tend to move about more. The therapeutic effects of physical activity, such as dancing, are widely known to be the effects of music on our physical health. Moreover, the intensity and rhythm of the music you listen to affect your heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure, as I have learned from personal experience. Great musical pieces are so intricate that they force me to understand the message conveyed, which is gratifying in and of itself, but not because we are trying to do anything concrete. There are, however, connections between music and emotions in my analysis of music’s worth, especially if that resolution is tinged with negative affect, as such an experience is uncommon in ordinary life. Furthermore, we feel a special bond with their thoughts because we share an affair with the composer and other listeners.
The idea that I can use my reactions to these feelings to appreciate them, learn about them, and reassure myself that I can feel them is less therapeutic, but it does make sense, given that these emotions have no life implications. As we have already established, I am not sad about tragic events. According to McClary (2002), any proponent of this attitude needs to address why people keep seeking music that makes them feel bad and why they seem to take pleasure in these bad feelings rather than just enduring them because of the benefits they bring.
Similarly, I cannot change the melancholy of a musical composition by not listening to it. Therefore, I accept my feelings of melancholy as valid. However, hearing the appropriate emotional expressiveness in music cannot be invoked in this context, as doing so would make any account personality. The ability to recognize and respond to expressions is a skill that, like any other, can be honed through practice and exposure. On the other hand, many claim to comprehend but insist that music cannot convey feelings.
Daily music listening has many potential benefits, one of which is enhancing one’s memory capacity. An individual’s capacity to learn new information and remember it is improved by exposure to music (Drew, 2020). Memory is retained better when one studies with music playing in the background instead of studying in complete silence. When I listen to my favorite music, I can comprehend more ideas, which positively impacts my memory because it allows me to comprehend the ideas more rapidly and accurately.
In conclusion, it is accurate to assert that music has a variety of effects on the feelings that we experience. The genres of music that we listen to are reflective of the emotions that we are now feeling. Someone who is feeling stressed might experience relief via the power of music. It is well-known that if one listens to music simultaneously while engaging in specific tasks, like preparing for tests, their comprehension of the ideas that need to be learned may increase. Since of this, individuals have to exercise caution when it comes to music because it has the power to alter their feelings.
References
Drew, E. (2020). More Than a Party. Never Apart.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013). Why music matters. John Wiley & Sons.
McClary, S. (2002). Living to Tell. Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshly in Feminine Endings.
Small, C. (1998). The drama of Relationship. The Meanings of Performing and Listening.