Did you know that the Queen doesn’t like dissonant music?5 »So what,« you might think. It hardly comes as a surprise that an old (Western) lady doesn’t like dissonant music. Tastes are different, after all. But in an article, The Guardian journalist Martin Kettle suggests that not only does the Queen not like dissonant music, but that she doesn’t like music at all. Although his argument that the Queen is culturally conservative with no interest in music whatsoever seems plausible, there might be another, more revealing angle to this phenomenon. What if the Queen is genuinely unable to enjoy listening to music? What if she recognises that music represents or expresses different kinds of emotion but can’t feel anything herself? If that were true, she might belong to a small percentage of people suffering from »specific musical anhedonia« – a condition that was recently discovered by chance while screening participants for a study on music and emotion.6 For a number of reasons, it is not surprising that the discovery was only made just now and by accident. First, people affected by this condition are perfectly able to navigate their everyday lives. They do not run away from music in panic, nor do they suffer seizures in public places when exposed to music. In fact, they might even choose to go to concerts with friends (if not for the music, then at least for the company), which makes it even harder to identify them. Secondly, and more pertinently to those able to gain pleasure from music, listening to a favourite record or attending a musical performance is presumably the most natural, pleasant thing to do. It’s hard, if not impossible, to imagine what it must feel like to not be able to enjoy any kind of music. Such a disorder simply didn’t cross any researcher’s mind until the chance discovery. The inconceivability of this condition highlights, in turn, the importance of affective engagement with music for us. Listening for pleasure is a vital part of our lives. Provided you are healthy and don’t lack any other basic human needs, losing the ability to gain pleasure from music is probably one of the worst things that could happen to you. No other human activity stimulates our emotions in a similar fashion, and that’s why musical emotions are special. They engage our brains and bodies, they show the most complex and nuanced patterns, and they are multimodal.

I.    

The intensity of affective responses to music encompasses a rather broad spectrum. At one end, you may simply like or dislike particular music; this affective category is commonly known as musical preference or taste. It is stable over a long period of time and usually low in affective intensity. At the other end of the spectrum you find so-called »strong experiences« with music.7 Those are rather infrequent, very intense – positive or negative – emotional responses to music that may or may not be associated with life-changing events, and that leave deep traces in your memory. (You’d certainly remember if you had experienced such a musical episode.) But most affective reactions to music – those that are so important to us in our everyday lives – lie between these two extremes and are much more common than strong experiences with music. They may generally be called »emotional responses to music,« or simply »musical emotions.« To be able to understand why they are special, let’s first look at what an emotion actually is. In psychological terms, an emotion is usually regarded as a short period of affective reactions that involve (more or less synchronised) sub-components such as subjective feeling, physiological arousal, facial or bodily expression and action tendency.8 The following examples illustrate how these generic features of an emotion could apply to various (random) musical contexts. A musical emotion is present if you feel fear, anger, happiness, or any other emotion when listening to a song on the radio; if you experience shivers down the spine or goose bumps during a musical performance; if you change your posture or facial expression as a direct consequence of being exposed to music through your headphones; or if you choose to leave a concert or stop a track on your MP3 player that you find overwhelming (either in a positive or negative sense).

These examples give a glimpse into the different facets of musical emotions. Moreover, they highlight how music engages both our brains and our bodies, with results ranging from subtle (unconscious) physiological changes to overt, deliberate behavioural consequences. Research has shown that music is able to activate emotional hubs of the brain associated with the most basic functions, such as the reward system.20 Neurobiologically speaking, listening to music is like eating chocolate, having sex, or being on drugs. Musical sounds are treated as highly rewarding stimuli by our brains, and since organisms seek to re-instantiate such rewarding states, we never get tired of listening to music and might even develop an addiction to it. On the other hand, studies have shown that music is just as capable of tapping into our neurobiological networks of fear. Listening to scary, fear-inducing music can activate the amygdala,21 a centre for the detection of emotionally significant stimuli and hence an important brain structure for registering potential threats. Even more intriguingly, fear networks are not exclusively active when listening to scary music that is loud, fast, or dissonant and that thus shows similarities with auditory features accompanying dangerous »real-life« situations. Even the deviation from an expected pattern of simple chords within the Western harmonic structure can activate the amygdala and signal to the organism that an emotionally relevant stimulus is present.22 These processes happen in the range of milliseconds, without us even becoming aware of the subtle neurophysiological changes that, by design, serve the purpose of preparing a fight-or-flight response. Importantly, these brain activities are not separated from the rest of the body. They start a cascade of physiological reactions via hormones and neurotransmitters that affect the whole organism.

Some of these physiological changes are directly observable. Music affects our heart23 and breathing rate; it changes the temperature of our skin and modifies the amount of sweat secretion at our hands;24 it modulates the size of our pupils;25 and it creates the aforementioned musical chills, i.e. shivers down the spine, during intensely pleasurable moments of listening.26 Above all, these findings make one main point: musical emotions are deeply rooted in the biology of our bodies; they are intricately linked to our neuro- and psychophysiological processes.

The examples provided so far refer to basic emotions such as fear, anger, happiness, surprise, disgust, or sadness.27 These emotions have clear evolutionary functions and some of their underlying neural substrates had millennia to evolve, resulting in very stable neurophysiological patterns. But you might (rightly) interject that musical emotions are much more complex, much more nuanced than simply »happy« or »sad.« The complexity of musical emotions is the second reason attribute that makes them special.

II.

The question of whether musical emotions are rather just a subset of garden-variety emotions has long been debated. Garden-variety emotions are the emotions we experience in everyday life: the surprise of bumping into an old friend, the sadness of losing a loved one, the anger at a pickpocket stealing our wallet, the fear of a snake, or the happiness of being greeted with a big smile by our child. All these emotions helped our ancestors to adapt to the environment and thereby increased the chances of survival or reproduction. But why should music activate these emotions if it is not even clear whether listening to music has any adaptive value? If, in an evolutionary sense, music is just »auditory cheescake« (Pinker), are the neural pathways of musical emotions really the same as those of garden-variety emotions? Just think of people reporting that music makes them feel sad. Is this in fact the same quality of sadness you experience when mourning the loss of a loved one, if to a lesser degree? And is experiencing fear when listening to music really the same type of fear as when being faced with a snake in the forest? After all, we know that we’re »just« listening to music.

An important aspect of musical emotions is that there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between a piece of music and a certain emotional state – not even for one individual in one listening context. Over the course of a musical performance (whether live or recorded), we may experience many different kinds of emotion; we may feel different shades of one emotion or even feel two emotions at the same time.28 Thus the range of basic emotions is far too small to capture the full breadth of musical emotions. If you think about the emotion(s) you experienced the last time you listened to music, you might realise that some (or all) of them are not garden-variety emotions. And you might find it hard to come up with the right words to describe your musical emotions. (If you manage, the verbal descriptions may seem insufficient.) Compiling a list of hundreds of affective terms, researchers have tried to map out the full range of musical emotions and group them into meaningful categories.29 What they finally arrived at were nine affective categories: wonder, transcendence, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, power, joyful activation, tension, and sadness. Intuitively, these categories fit nicely with our experiences of musical emotions, and apart from sadness – which is a complicated case30 – and joyful activation – which resembles happiness – none of these emotional categories would be considered basic emotions. Instead, they are highly complex affective aggregates that are hard to pin down and perhaps gone the moment you start to notice them. And yet these musical emotions are just as real as the basic emotions described above.

The dynamic unfolding of music over time might be one reason for the complexity of musical emotions. States of homoeostasis, although present in musical pieces, are ephemeral and may just give you time to take a breath before the musical journey continues. And a journey of emotions it is as well. Understanding the complex and nuanced time course of musical emotions is one of the biggest challenges researchers face today. While neuroscientific and psychophysiological measures are not advanced enough to capture these variations, introspective methods, i.e. focusing one’s attention on the various shapes of musical emotions, biases the experience at best and makes it disappear at worst. There is a final twist to these complex and nuanced patterns of musical emotions, and that is that they are not simply auditory phenomena. The third reason why musical emotions are special is because they are multimodal.

III.

The results of a neuro-imaging study in which participants were asked to listen to fear- and joy-inducing music seemed puzzling at first. Individuals showed strong activations in the visual cortex when listening to fear-inducing music.35 The »problem« with this finding is that no visual input was presented. People listened to the musical tracks with their eyes closed. But what seems perplexing at first is in fact a pseudo-problem. A short post-experiment interview revealed that people imagined scenes of horror movies when being presented with fear-inducing music. They experienced vivid visual imagery that became an integral part of their musical emotions – to the extent that it was no longer clear what the driving force behind the emotion is: the music or the visual imagery.

What this example shows is that listening to music activates other sensory modalities too. For instance, the kinaesthetic sense is known to be involved in the process of listening to music — we may have the feeling of being moved up and down, or being pulled and pushed by the music.36 Another key to unlocking multimodal experiences of music is the activation of autobiographical memories including visual, tactile or even olfactory senses. Associating music with past events enables us to re-experience emotional episodes of our lives. Strong experiences with music are an extreme example of such multimodal re-enactments. Of all the senses involved, the visual is perhaps the most prominent one, as it is our main source of information in everyday life. Recent evidence shows that a large number of people experience visual imagery in response to music and that interactive auditory and visual modalities equally drive the experienced emotions.37 Visual imagery may range from concrete scenes such as landscapes or musical performances to abstract shapes and patterns; images may be dynamic, stable, clear or fuzzy; there may be fixed correspondences between particular musical pieces and visual images or random connections between sound and image. The power of music to engage so many of our senses has, inevitably, a profound effect on the experienced emotions. Musical emotions can turn an abstract form of art into lived human experience via a multimodal stream of consciousness that is fed by current and recalled sensory input. To think of causes and consequences of musical emotions in purely auditory terms would thus severely underestimate the inherent emotional power of musical sounds.

Coda

Industry has long been aware of the effects of music on our mind, brain, and bodies. New apps that promise to enhance whatever part of your life with specifically designed music surge incessantly onto the market. And some of these applications, especially in clinical settings where they may be used to treat dementia, strokes or Parkinson’s disease, indeed have the potential to transform people’s lives. That’s because at the core of music’s wide-ranging capacities lies its emotional power. Intended or not, music does nothing else better than it expresses and induces emotions. Music opens up a world of unexplored emotional spheres that wait to be discovered and felt. If we take the time to listen to music, we are likely to be rewarded by a plethora of sensual delights. And with a bit of luck (and empathy), listening to music may even enable us to transcend cultural borders and create transcultural (affective) understanding,38 as music allows us to discover and experience novel affective states and learn about ourselves as well as others. The music we listen to and the emotions we experience shape a part of who we are and how we interact with others. To be moved by music, to gain pleasure from it, is a capacity that gives meaning to our lives and our societies.