Science reveals song emotion can be detected from first few notes
Science confirms the detection of song emotion from hearing the first few notes.
It may be something we intrinsically know, but now a scientific study confirms it.
You hear a song and can immediately tell whether it is going to be happy or sad- this isn’t rocket science, though it is the science of sound and how chordal composition correlates to its lyrical content.
The paper was published in Royal Society Open Science by researchers from Indiana University.
For their study, they downloaded 90 000 songs from Ultimate Guitar, which is a type of ‘tab streaming’ service of popular songs for musicians to reference. This gave them the chord composition of songs.
They then pulled data from labMT, which crowd-sources positive and negative connotations (emotional valence) of words.
They also consulted with musical database Gracenote to find out where and when the songs were recorded.
Minor fall, major lift
This is not just a reference to Leonard Cohen, but the actual name of the study, which aptly describes what they find.
Minor chords correlate to sadness, and major chords with happy ideas.
“We find that major chords are associated with higher valence lyrics than minor chords,” the study states, “consistent with the previous music perception studies that showed that major chords evoke more positive emotional responses than minor chords.”
The study also found that seventh chords- think jazz, act as an emotional wild card when it comes to deliberating a song’s psychological mood.
The combination of music and lyric packs a powerful emotional punch, either way you look at it.
I guess in some forms of electronic music that doesn’t have lyrics, the mood is solely reliant on chord progression, which sometimes even evokes stronger emotions.
Our intrinsic deliberation of song emotion is now backed by science!
