It seems to me that the basic question here is weither a piece of music is sad because of something innate within the sound or weither if it’s sad simply because the general populace believes it to be sad. For example if an up-beat piece was playing when my hamster died I might associate it with sadness, thus it becomes a sad piece of music for me. However most ppl would agree that the peice is still a happy piece because the general populance believes it to be so. So lets look at another situation, lets say an artist releases a piece of music that is up-beat and is one that even the artist would say is a happy piece, however upon release for whatever reason masses of people just weep at the song (and not because it’s horriably composed) would this still be considered a happy piece of music? There are really only a few answers to this.
Yes of course it’s still a happy piece of music. This implies that there is some sort of innate and unalterable factor that makes a piece of music happy, no matter what. That even if the world woke up tommrow and it were reversed so that all up-beat music made use cry and all down-beat music made us laugh the up-beat music would still be a “happy piece”
No of course not, if everyone weeps the music must be considered a “sad piece of music.” This is a scary thought for me personally since it implies that reality ( or at least definitions and concepts placed on reality) are based soley on what the majority of ppl agree to. Thus reality in a very loose sense of the word is subject to change and therefore alterable.
Well now I’m done rambling, and truth be told I’m still not sure which decision is the most correct
Yep I think so too. Thats why we’re affected by tempo and rhythm I think.
I think that melody and harmony are based around the sounds created by people as communication. There are some universal human sounds that we all identify as meaning the same thing like laughing and crying. A laugh follows a major scale and crying follows a minor scale. And so we identify the major scale with happiness and the minor scale with crying and these scales are used in songs according to what emotion it wants to convey. Happy and sad sighing sounds in music follow the same rule. We identify with the songs accordingly.
Other emotions like fear or angriness can be conveyed by shouting for example, and curiosity by unexpected chord changes not following conventional scales. Frustration can come across with unpredicatble rhythms simulating sounds of someone making frustrated sounds.
And obviously the main mood is communicated by the singer - how they sing as well as what they sing. For example with radiohead, Thom Yorke has a very crying sounding voice, rappers often sound very angry as well as talk about things that anger them and most of the newer metal bands adopt an angry shout to go over their music to create an angry feel to it.
I think anger is very identified with these days in western music because of our societies have unwhittingly imposed upon us certain lifestyles that make us feel angry and frustrated and so we identify with music that conveys similar feelings. Happy pop music is liked because people want to feel happier, and listening to happy music can make you feel happier accordingly, and high tempo, dancey, rhythmical music is popular for clubbing because it simulates the heart beating faster relating to ‘excitement, rush and happiness’ like Laws said.
Oriental and African music is mostly rhythmical because thats how their language is and why we don’t mutually identify with each other’s musical tastes that much.
You can go further back and ask where we got our individual communicational sounds from (from which our musical tastes follow). This is all very ambiguous and may just be chance, but I think they were created from how we feel towards natural sounds like thunder and wind and rain. And the language built from there…
