Why do we love sad songs so much? There’s something magnetic and appealing about songs like Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven or Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
It is a musical emotion that, far from depressing or causing us discomfort, awakens our deepest feelings by making the world stop, navigating an introspection of our own being.
- We are not mistaken in saying that in the most successful song lists there is always one with melancholy tones.
One example is the British singer Adele, whose musical career is based on this quintessence, a sadness, a permanent fragrance in which acceptance, separations, anguish and loneliness permeate lyrics such as those contained in the famous Hello.
Why are we so happy to hear REM Everybody Hurts and all those other tracks we hear in infinite loop even though we’re going through a bad time?
Aristotle himself had already said that music has the gift of “purifying”. In this first idea, it was growing what we now call “emotional catharsis”, a mechanism by which we allowed ourselves to release complex feelings, sensations and emotions.
No one is immune to the effects of music. Music is fascinating to the brain, and studies such as that conducted at McGill University in Quebec and directed by neuropsychologist Valorie Sampoor, explain that neural activity in areas such as the accumbens nucleus (linked to rewards) would show that music is. important for humans in terms of food or social relationships.
Sad music experts say one of the most impactable songs in history was Nothing Compares 2 U, performed by Sinead O’Connor and written by Prince in 1985.
Music, lyrics and a female face crying in the foreground have an almost immediate impact on the depths of our emotional brain.
It is almost impossible not to be shocked by countless sensations, feelings that carry memories of the past, sequences with which one feels identified.
It is almost contradictory that we can feel sad emotions, this premise or doubt led a team of psychologists, musicians, philosophers and neurologists from the University of Tokyo to conduct a series of studies. The data were published in Frontiers in Psychology and may not be more interesting Let’s see below.
Most people like sad songs, we know that, but there’s one thing we can all check: after listening to them we don’t feel bad, quite the opposite.
That is, we are not infected with discomfort, loss, the pain of an ending or disappointment, curiously what we feel after listening to songs like this is well-being, relief, tranquility.
For example, one of the researchers in this work, Dr. Ai Kawakami, a specialist in music and emotions, says that it is necessary to differentiate the feeling emotion from the perceived or indirect.
Music has the quality of making us perceive indirect emotions: we connect with them, but we do not suffer them. “I mean, we don’t feel the music as intensely as when life surprises us, with something unexpected and dark.
Sad songs have the curious quality of connecting with the deepest emotions and leaving them un hurtless, not only that, they emerge with a sense of well-being.
Leonard Cohen said that every time He played Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah he felt something special: it was like finding a balance in a world of chaos, like seeking reconciliation in every conflict.
So one of the reasons we like sad songs is that they give us a little peace, introspection and also emotional catharsis.
This type of music is a vaccine against life’s difficulties, in fact we use it as we do with books that tell dramatic stories, or when we choose to watch sad movies because they always teach us something.
The magic of these indirect emotions generated by this kind of thing has authentic and incredibly useful dimensions.
These kinds of artistic experiences free us from real, raw and painful emotions that often paralyze us in unpleasant states. We like sad songs because they allow us to have contact with our emotional ‘self’ in a safer and, of course, beautiful way.
We can travel through letters at times of our own past; we can cry, evacuate and return untouched.
You can even get carried away by the beauty of music and lyrics to show empathy with the artist, to enjoy a moment of intimacy in which you can traverse this extraterrestrial universe full of deep sadness.
In any case, we always leave comforted, ready to face our trips with more temperance.