Music Generates Feelings That Are Only Weakly Bound to the Music

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.

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 &quot;causal&quot; connection.<p>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&#x27;s no more likely to make you sick than anything else.<p>Our &quot;emotional&quot; brain draws connections completely independently of our &quot;rational&quot; brain. There is extensive literature on this.<p>So this is one small example of that broadly established phenomenon.

&gt; Music-generated feelings only transfer easily to imagined perceptions<p>Not trying to be difficult here but what does this mean? What is an imagined perception vs a real one?

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

Reminds me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-forgetting-pill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.co.uk&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-forgetting-pill</a> 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.

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&#x27;d listen to music after that I&#x27;d be a lot more sensative towards the feelings experienced by it.

This article makes some excellent hypotheses about music that I think everyone can anecdotally confirm.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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. &quot;sad story&quot; as a sensory input without music is parsed as &quot;sad story&quot;, with Bach&#x27;s Chaconne, is parsed as &quot;extremely depressing, weirdly poignant story&quot;).<p>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?

If I’m following this logic, the article seems to present a false equivalence between perceptions and feelings.<p>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.<p>Feelings are, well, more layered and do combine with those created from other perceptions. They also can last beyond the immediate perception.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wnycstudios.org&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;radiolab&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;91512-musical-language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wnycstudios.org&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;radiolab&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;91512...</a>

IMO song lyrics are using music as a carrier wave, and we may associate the music with the feelings expressed in the lyrics. That&#x27;s a bit <i>tainted</i> ...<p>When it comes to purely instrumental music I won&#x27;t usually attach emotions to it ... unless it was designed to be &#x27;programmatic&#x27; or &#x27;paint a picture&#x27; by the composer. Even then, there&#x27;s no need to play along. I don&#x27;t buy the &quot;major = happy, minor = sad&#x27;, that can be more than a little naive.<p>Instrumental music is a rich, rich language, and - for me at least - it often arouses emotions <i>I&#x27;ve never felt before</i>. I&#x27;m not so sure that it &#x27;generates&#x27; those feelings; I suspect that it CONVEYS them. Which is why the greatest music (in any culture) endures for centuries.

&gt; 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.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s obsolete at all - it&#x27;s intonation. Music is just hacking intonation perception.<p>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.<p>I often think about this with voice recognition and claims of 99% accuracy. Yeah but it didn&#x27;t get ANY of the intonation, and that&#x27;s where most of the information was.

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.<p>I think it&#x27;s also definitely true that a good musical soundtrack enhances any movie&#x2F;tv show&#x2F;game&#x2F;etc. even if you&#x27;re encountering both for the first time. Without the music, it just isn&#x27;t nearly as frightening&#x2F;exciting&#x2F;romantic&#x2F;funny&#x2F; triumphant&#x2F;etc..

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

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

That&#x27;s why very &quot;literal&quot; lyrics can ruin a song.

This is why film music is a thing!

This must vary from person to person.