Does music actually evoke emotion ?

[m1469]

I am somebody who has been very emotionally tied to music all of my life.  It has brought me through my most extreme lows as well as highs and I have always taken this for granted.  I do not know how to think on hardly any sound without an emotion as a matter of fact.

Today, however, one of my students came to me after having read some books about music over the holidays and was talking of an interview with some famous musician (I cannot remember who) who stated that music is ONLY math and does not evoke emotion.  And also stated that it cannot evoke emotion any more than motor oil.

Actually, this made sense to me as music in the common thought is just a sensory experience, just as any experience with motor oil would be.  With this in mind, it would not be the music itself which evokes the emotion, but rather the way one relates to it, it would seem.

So I am curious what people think of this?

Also, if this is true, then how could music emotionally touch a child who would have very little to relate to?

I guess today I am thinking that perhaps music is not about emotion at all... but something much different.


m1469

[willcowskitz]

... who stated that music is ONLY math and does not evoke emotion.  And also stated that it cannot evoke emotion any more than motor oil.

Sounds stupid to me. Of course if you had a teddy bear that had been dipped in a bucket of motor oil when you were a baby, motor oil would probably evoke emotion in you. Other than that, there's not much in common with the two. If we choose the Pythagorean path and say that universe consists of numbers, we can apply it in anything. This kind of objectivity is no longer human, and results in nihilism, determinism and kynicism, besides freeing us of responsibility of the choice. This is why I think we're forced to accept that everything is subjective (one of Nietzsche's fundamental thoughts for his practice of philosophy), and depends on how the individual experiences and interprets what their senses message them, and how to continue completing the picture with the help of their imagination (if they have any). For me, music is first of all a language, already because it is mathematical and actually very strict in it's structure in that sense, there are lots of [breakable] rules and laws, that also to some degree define the content and possibilities of interpretation. When I play, I learn to know myself better, I don't "hit the keys", but I open a channel of seamless communication with my deepest self - the subconscious side of me, the soul, the very essence of me that really makes me different from other people in a far more remarkable sense than any outer appearance or superficial characteristics that people usually judge each other by - and I try to locate my self and define it, getting ever closer but never reaching the destination, which I think will occur as perfection only the moment we die. This is also why I don't like "performing" - the people that listen to my music distract me too much away from myself and the connection becomes broken and music turns out ugly, superficial and vague. Only if I'm able to forget everyone and "box myself" will I be creating music from my heart. Once in a while, people with "radical" ideas will pop out of nowhere and insist believing in their theories just because they create such an enthrilling contrast to common beliefs, and I believe the claim that music doesn't evoke emotion is one of those provocative statements, which in fact could force some of us to think what they actually get from music, which in itself is a positive thing. Other than that, it doesn't differ from numerous other materialistic statements I could create on the fly, that end up proving nothing but the narrow-mindedness and tendancy for foolish thoughts of having understood the world by quantitative, scientific methods that try to achieve an easily comprehensible two-dimensional graph of every possible phenomenon that could be presented in exact values of numbers. There's already something called catastrophy theory that has rendered quantitative methods useless in prediction and bases more of it's development on imagination and visionary broadlines of the whole, rather than trying to measure it step by step with even more errors in between each. Materialism was very exciting in Newtonean era, and useful for reconstructing and organizing people's damaged minds from the suppression of their spirituality and education practiced by the church and hierarchial feudalism, but where we stand now it has no remarkable role in the future - it is simply getting old, though some people would rather not let go of it after having figured out what a great safety net (or a cell cage) it is for their conceptions on reality and their selves.

[jazzyprof]

Anything we perceive with our senses can evoke certain emotions within us.  It can be a whiff of some subtle perfume that reminds us of a loved one and makes us feel happy or sad, depending on the circumstances.  It could be the gentle caress of a mother that soothes a crying baby.  It could be the sound of distant drums that induces fear in the tribe knowing that they are about to be attacked.  Music can evoke emotions and that is something humans have known for thousands of years.  There are lullabys we sing to sooth babies.  There are war chants that are sung to embolden warriors.  Certain scales have a sad quality.  Others are happy and bright.  How can one say that music cannot evoke emotions?

[ted]

m1469:

At the personal level music has to evoke "something" in me otherwise I wouldn't bother with it. However, the word "emotion" is too restricted to cover all the responses my brain is likely to come up with. There is such a thing as an abstract organic power in some mathematical or architectural creations. It is possible for me to be moved by, say, a piece of algorithmic or abstract art, itself created with a process devoid of emotion.

The only consistent way around this conundrum for me, in the personal sense, is to assert the equivalence of music and its effect in my brain. In other words, the experience is wholly created in my mind, not by the syntax of the music, not by traditional association, not by a programme, not by anything. The experience itself cannot be anywhere near adequately described by the word "emotion.

How can I put this simply ? Let me see ... Suppose I am improvising and, at the intellectual, conscious level, play, "try out" as it were, a certain figure. The sound of this figure will trigger an unconscious reaction in my brain. The nature of this reaction can be an emotion or anything from absolutely nothing to (unfortunately rarely, but getting much more frequent as I age) a sensation of complete oneness with the universe.

So it has to mean something aside from its mathematical or structural form - of course it does ! However, I think the word "emotion" is too restricted. Awareness in music is too big for English semantics - but we all know this.

[Floristan]

Today, however, one of my students came to me after having read some books about music over the holidays and was talking of an interview with some famous musician (I cannot remember who) who stated that music is ONLY math and does not evoke emotion.  And also stated that it cannot evoke emotion any more than motor oil.
m1469

No doubt some experience music as math, not emotion, and I've known many musicians who insist that music is just organized sound and that the emotions people have about music are extra-musical and extraneous.  They believe all interpretation begins and ends with the score, that the performer can only correctly play the score and must never bring anything of him or herself to the performance other than an intellectual understanding of the score.

When I was in graduate school studying literature, deconstructionism was all the rage.  That school of thought would have us believe that texts exist only to be explicated, that they have no other existence, or rather they do but it is inconsequential.  Deconstructionists would also have us believe that understanding literature is not about understanding the author, or the historical context, or the psychology of the characters, or what the author is trying to convey in terms of a philosophy.  No, texts are just organized collections of words, and that organization is the proper study of literature.

Everyone is entitled to their point of view.  I think these purely intellectual approaches to the arts are impoverished and just wrong-headed.  The arts, all of them, encompass and express the human experience, and all of them, all of them, are emotionally evocative.  Why equivocate over whether emotion is the primary objective of music (or art or literature or dance)?  Sometimes it is more obviously the objective (Puccini) that at other times (Bach), but it is always a potential and valid part of the experience.

When it comes to performance, pianists who play from intellect sound like that is how they are playing.  Those who play from the heart or soul sound a different way.  No one need take sides: there's something for everyone, and a philosophy to go with it, if one so chooses!

[galonia]

It seems that all these replies make the assumption that if music is mathematical, then it is not emotional.  Why can something not be mathematical and emotional at the same time?

I studied pure mathematics and statistics, and I can say that in our first year of university, it was drilled into us that producing a proof that works logically is not good enough, a proof needs to be elegant and beautiful.  Producing the correct answer does not guarantee full marks, how you get there is just as important.

Now that I do a lot of statistical work, it's just the same - human experiences come into play a lot, and it is a very subjective field.  When training up a new statistician, I often have to remind them not to get too hung up about the tiniest details, and tell them, "It's an art, not a science"

Music and maths are intricately linked - music is the aural incarnation of mathematics.  Why can that not be emotional?  I think it is.

[m1469]

Okay... this is really a great discussion in my opinion and I really appreciate the replies here. 

Here is the problem I am having though...

I definitely agree with what has already been said by all of you... this is what I just don't understand ...

If you take a sensory experience devoid of any kind of preconceived notion about it, how does this actually bring emotion?  For example, I am very uncomfortable with spiders and I do not like to deal with them in any way.  But, if I were sleeping and one walked across me, or even slept on top of me for that matter, I wouldn't know it mentally so I would not experience any emotion with it.  So this leads me to believe that it is neither the spider nor my senses that trigger "emotion" but only my mentality.

Why would a sound devoid of preconceived notions, trigger "emotion" ?  I don't think it does.  It is only a wave.  It has to be only what one thinks of it... it seems to me.  How one perceives it.  The power of it all is not actually in the sound itself.  What I have read in almost everybody's replies is that there is perhaps something else taking place that is more intricate and much deeper than mere "emotional" reaction.  This is what I want to understand.

The other thing that bothers me then is that "music" then seems to fall into the lap only of the performers and listeners.  I just don't think that's all there is to it.


(okay, I am way too tired to keep writing... catch up later)

m1469

[willcowskitz]

There indeed is more to "music" (if that's what you call sound) than the emotional or any intellectual aspect for that matter. Everything in the universe vibrates more or less; ice becomes water, water becomes steam. Water molecules "trill" to rise higher.    Music is just another form of vibrations that has direct effect on us. My dad often talks about controlling people with music - how he has done it, and how I could do it. When you play the instrument, you're affecting people, whether they realize it or not. Humans are not the only species reactive to changes in pitch coming in regular rhythmic patterns, animals also react to music and it affects them and their behaviour. Are they conscious of this or not is irrelevant, but the music makes them "vibrate" (again, my dad often talks about how to "play" people, as in having them become music). We're the only species that can go into analyzing the process, theorize on it, try to figure out what its all about, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have any control over the stimulus-response that music creates in us. What is emotional in music, in my opinion, is the directness of it's influence on us; there are no equations, just understanding and instant stimulus for imagination. Music is said to be the purest form of art, and I have to agree to that. As I said before, "universe is numbers", but as galonia pointed out this doesn't necessarily automatically exclude the possibility of emotions being involved - and I thought I'd comment on this too because it reminded me of some lecture material I read through once on the Internet. The hypothesis was that physical determinism is not a threat to free will. To make a long story short, the argument for that basically was that mathematics and natural sciences are not prescriptive, but descriptive laws of the universe and it's behaviour. They don't tell us what we're going to do, but what we could do. We create numerous "laws" everyday with our every started motion and thought, because we choose to. The problem for some people is the over-dualistic world view of "soul" and "body", that need to unite in the individual's *mind* to attain spiritual serenity. These words might sound vague, but they're not coming out of nowhere.

For those interested in sound and it's possible aspects - vibrations of air molecules can, besides creation, be used for destruction: https://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/project458.html

[nanoc]

weel, I, for one, don't see the correlation between mathematics and music.

I mean: sure, you can put music into numbers.... but that is just the transcription of something that has been done without using the maths.... I mean,  it's like statistics. They tell you what's been happening, not what is going to happen in the future. So, if we have statistics to predict the general human behaviour, we should suppose that humans act following some kind of algorism???

Music is order, but it is chaos too. It is not mathematics... mathematics don't express anything, they are just a language created to explain and predict some things... You can't predict music, not in the way we see music today (I mean, if anyone has ever heard a decent piece of music composed by a machine, using pure mathematics....). So music must be neccesary linked to the emotional background of the composer, and it must express emotions....

For example, take Scriabin's sonatas: As the composer grew more and more ecletic (not to say insane) his sonatas became more complex and strange....

Schumann's works betray the composer's excesive sensibility, and Mozart's are as playful and unconventional as the composer was.....

[xvimbi]

Interesting discussion...

Music is not math! But there is a huge correlation between the two, just like there is a correlation between math and pretty much anything else. Math is a language that describes phenomena. It is a human-made language and as such reflects the human experience. Math, most often, does not even explain things, it just describes them. Therefore, I don't see why so many people react hostile to the notion that math and music are "related". They almost think that as soon as one evokes math, all the human elements are being taken away. Childish.

Anyway, if math can be used to describe something, it can usually also be used to predict something. And thus it is not surprising that computer programs exist that create pieces that sound so much like Bach that it is not possible to distinguish between "real" and "synthesized" Bach.

Now, with respect to emotions: it is undeniably true that music has as much to do with emotions as motor oil. Emotions are reactions that relate to past experiences. If certain music is associated with certain experiences, then hearing this music again later will trigger emotions related to that experience. If there are no associations between emotions and a certain type of music, this music would be emotionally meaningless. For example, if somebody was brought up with hearing funeral music during carnival, then this person would always feel happy when hearing funeral music. The reason most people start to feel sad when hearing funeral music is because it is usually associated with funerals, which is a sad occasion. Not many Europeans would feel sad when hearing music during a funeral procession in Louisiana where happy Dixieland Jazz is being played by a marching band. On the other hand, if Cajuns hear this music in the streets of New Orleans, they know someone died.

Music is a language. As such, one can express ideas, but the idea that a performer attaches to a certain passage does not have to be the same as what a listener attaches to it. Therefore, there may be a huge discrepancy between what the perfomer intends and what the listener experiences. Only if everybody associates the same feelings and emotions with the same type of music is it possible to use it constructively as a language. This is the problem that many musicians have when they play music from different cultures. One often hears that Asians are not capable of playing Western music (don't start a flame war now, I am generalizing), because they don't associate the same emotional ideas as Westerners do. And the other way around. Likewise, one often hears that young musicans are not able to adequately display the emotional content of a piece, because they have not yet had certain life experiences that would allow them to attach certain emotions to certain music. And one can easily "hear" this.

So, in a nutshell: music is able to evoke emotions provided the listener has been conditioned to associate emotion with the music in the first hand. The same is true for visual, olfactory or any other kind of sensation.

My 2 Cents.

[willcowskitz]

Good text xvimbi, except that I'd change "Childish" to "Thoughtless".

However I'd like to add, that what really separates music from other arts and moreso from motor oil, is the profoundness and high potential of it's nature. Music, and any other art, refines thought by digging into our minds and bringing out the numerous sensory and conceptional associations and emotional prints, flooding our brains with so much energy from them for our imagination to put blending together as another "creation". That is interpretation. And seriously; when we have postmodern pseudo-art and people who see something in it, I see no reason to deny motor oil the membership in this group of emotion-evokants - it is subjective, as is the level of understanding of art that we can possess.

[quasimodo]

Before posting my own views about this question (I don't have time to think seriously about it, right now), I post some excerpts of a text written by Brad Mehldau, "Music and Language".

The complete text is there : https://www.bradmehldau.com/mehldau/words/liner_progression.html

Music and Language
The truism that “The essence of music is unexplainable in words” is self -contradictory. The speaker who utters those words is, after all, giving a kind of explanation. The statement seems to acknowledge the unresolvable aspect that’s always inherent in an understanding of music, but simultaneously forces a resolution. The task of this truism is often to blow the whistle on a discussion that has grown futile, or to call one off ahead of time, admonishing us that it is pointless.
 
(…)

Music is cherished in part because it supersedes the need for discourse ahead of time. The consensus that people often reach is that they can’t reach a consensus — in words at least — on what they just experienced. Our very muteness towards music, though, is often the precondition of a deep solidarity that its listeners experience amongst each other. It involves a preternatural kind of group knowledge, a resounding “I know that you know.” I don’t know what you know, but that’s not important. I’m satisfied by the mere knowledge that music pushes your buttons like it does mine. There is something in the world out there that correlates with both of us immediately, albeit in different ways. That solidarity suggests that music gains a communicative advantage over words precisely because of its non-linguistic character. Speech -language, by comparison, is crippled from the outset, a waterlogged form of communication. If we spend a lot of time on back and forth discourse that never reaches its goal anyway, music seems to already be there, wordlessly beckoning us. The implication is that there is indeed an ‘exit from language’. Discourse reaches the finish line, and music waits on the other side. In one sense we have a symbol of freedom. Music could be viewed as a model of complete self-sufficiency, generating itself out of itself, with no outside (linguistic) authority hovering around. The underlying desire for self-sufficiency, like so many forms of desire, has an anti-social aspect. It would be nice if I had no one to answer to, but then I couldn’t really include myself in society. Like democratic discourse, a shared musical experience denotes a paradox, but one with radically different implications: the solidarity that listeners experience together is a strangely anti-social form of sociality.

(…)

(…)

Music is an ideological w hore. She will play for any team, as Burgess/Kubrick showed so well in A Clockwork Orange: The famous ‘Ode to Joy’ theme from the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — that paragon of Enlightenment ideals, with text from Schiller — is the soundtrack that accompanies the sociopathic protagonist of the story, Alex, as he rapes and murders. When Pavlovian therapy is administered in the second part of the film, he cannot listen to the Beethoven without becoming violently ill. Disturbingly, I always feel pity for Alex at this point. However evil his actions, we share one thing in common — the simple, unfettered joy that comes from listening to that Beethoven. Despite my own horror of this character, I enter into complicity with him.
Alex, played by Malcolm MacDowell in the film, is the dictator. His mates are his army, mindlessly following him and assisting him on his rampages. Kubrick’s vision grimly parodies the characteristic pageantry of fascism — the campish sadomasochism of their repressive military outfits, the brutal pornographic images, the strange matriarchal symbolism. So there I am, staring at the fascist in the mirror. The mirror is Beethoven’s music. Such a beautiful piece of music, one that celebrates so much that is good for me, can be used to celebrate death and destruction for someone else, instantaneously. But we both celebrate, regardless. I must concede that Beethoven’s music has no fixed moral stance in and of itself, and ‘art for art’s sake’ becomes appropriate again: Art seems to win a victory here, reclaiming its autonomy.

(…)

An idealistic form of communication, then, involves isolating possibility from the specificity of its outcome. Then I am allowed to look at something more directly for a moment. In this case, I look at Alex directly through the music. We are communicating with each other, he and I. If there is this solidarity in the music, there is the possibility of some other form of solidarity. The Beethoven will point to infinite possibilities between us: maybe we’ll just sit and listen, maybe we’ll go beat someone to a pulp, maybe we’ll fight for democracy together. But in and of itself, that opening that is the music carries no force, no gravitational pull. The force, if there is one, will come from us. We will decide where we go together, what we do, if we do anything.

[m1469]

Woah... Brad Mehldau is really intense!  This is good.  Thanks for this text, quasimodo  .  I think I will need to read it several times over.

I think I have no more words for now...