Sad Music Evokes Positive Emotions, Study Finds

A new study conducted by a group of Japanese researcher found that people enjoy listening to sad music because it evokes positive emotions.

Have you ever found yourself preferring listening to sad music even on happy days and wondered why? Well! A group of scientists from Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute may have found the reason why.

In a recently conducted study, 44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-specialists were asked to listen to two pieces of sad music and one happy music piece. The sad pieces of music included Glinka's "La Séparation" in F minor and Blumenfeld's Etude "Sur Mer" in G minor. The happy music piece was Granados's Allegro de Concierto in G major.

The volunteers were then asked to write down words that best described their perception of each music piece and their own emotional state.

Researcher found that the sad music pieces evoked more positive emotions as the participants felt that the music pieces were more tragic and less romantic than what they were actually feeling.

"In general, sad music induces sadness in listeners, and sadness is regarded as an unpleasant emotion. If sad music actually evokes only unpleasant emotion, we would not listen to it," the researchers wrote in a press release. "Music that is perceived as sad actually induces romantic emotion as well as sad emotion. And people, regardless of their musical training, experience this ambivalent emotion to listen to the sad music."

Researcher also noted that sadness felt in our daily lives is different from the sadness felt through any form of art like music, movies or even a painting. One possible explanation for this, authors of the study note, is that fact that sadness felt through art doesn't pose as an actual threat to a person's safety.

The study was published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal