Think about a song you love: Why do you love it? Is it because it reminds you of someone – maybe Grandma? Perhaps it calls to mind certain events. More on that later.īut what does any of this have to do with musical meaning? Some even go so far as to instruct leaders not to sing songs that elicit strong emotions (this was one of the tactics used during the “Worship Wars” against “praise songs”) because it was believed that emotions could lead a person astray.Īnd maybe they can. Be sure the words mean the right things.”
In other words, “don’t just sing something because it makes you feel good. This division of meaning and feeling has been nowhere more pronounced than in musical scholarship (except perhaps childhood) – especially in churches.Ĭountless books and pamphlets have been written encouraging singers and leaders to avoid performing music in worship primarily for emotional reasons. The main metaphor involved comparing the rocking back and forth of a canoe with the rocking back and forth of my emotions, which I was supposed to be controlling. (I even wrote a song called “Emotion Sickness” after spending a week in a canoe. It extended well into my young adulthood. While we would now say that this is about “impulse control,” when I was a kid it was about controlling your emotions not letting them get the better of you. Without going into another long history lesson (please, hold your applause), we imagine this to be so because we’ve been taught to control our emotions with our mind remember when you were a kid and your parents taught you about self-control? I’ve written a bit about this here and here, and some really smart people have written even more about entrainment and emotional responses here, here, here and here.īut how is it that music means according to how it feels? Don’t we have conventions like “reason” as opposed to “emotion”? Doesn’t meaning belong to the rational realm while feeling resides in the irrational? Don’t we have two sides of our brain, or something like that? When we move together in unison for a prolonged period of time (about 13 minutes), something happens to us that triggers powerful emotional responses. People move to music, and quite often move rhythmically together. While this originally was understood to apply to nonhuman objects (like pendulum clocks), it has since been observed in human beings as well.
An upbeat tempo can mirror an exuberant or purposeful strut.Īnother way of understanding music’s emotional power is by considering the effects of something called “entrainment.”Įntrainment is a law of physics that states two objects moving rhythmically (that is, back and forth) in proximity to each other will synchronize automatically. On the one hand, several scholars have suggested that music’s emotional efficacy can be attributed to something called “contour theory.”Ĭontour theory argues that music’s emotional power lies in the ways that music’s elements mirror human emotions.įor instance, a descending melody or minor key can be understood to mimic sad emotions. So how exactly does music invoke or evoke (or just voke) emotion? There are several ways of explaining this.
#EMOTION MUSIC SERIES#
I closed the last iteration of this series by pointing out that musical meaning is often constructed around – and uses the material of – its emotional content or ability to invoke or evoke emotion.
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