The Relationship Between Music and Emotion
A common observation about music is:
Our subjective experience of music is very consistent with this observation – when we listen to music, music gives us certain feelings, and those feelings have an emotional quality.
Sometimes we feel we can identify which particular emotion is being expressed by music, such as sadness, or happiness.
To say that music "expresses" emotion is to state that music is a form of communication, and that the performance of a specific musical item results in the communication of some specific type of emotion from the performer (or performers) to the audience.
In effect this is a claim that the meaning of a musical item is the particular emotion that is "expressed" by that musical item.
One problem with this idea is that specific emotions, by themselves, do not constitute meaningful statements that can be communicated.
In other words, the following are not statements:
- "Sad!"
- "Happy!"
They cannot be considered meaningful statements, because emotions do not simply exist by themselves.
An emotion only exists when some particular person feels that emotion.
So at the very least, any meaningful statement referring to an emotion has to say something about who is feeling that emotion, or, who we might expect to feel that emotion, depending on the specifics of the situation.
So it could be any of the following:
- I feel sad.
- We all feel sad.
- You feel sad.
- You should feel sad.
- We should all feel sad.
These are full sentences, that can reasonably considered to have a possible truth value, ie they can be true or false.
But the information contained in these sentences is of somewhat limited value.
Knowing that someone feels a certain emotion doesn't tell us much if we don't know what the emotion is about.
In general, an emotion that someone feels has to be about something.
For example, if I'm feeling sad, there must be some particular thing that I'm feeling sad about.
Also, the emotion that a person feels has to be the result of the person knowing about the something.
For example, I cannot feel sad about some event happening, unless I know that the event has happened.
To give a very specific example, I can feel sad if my friend has died, but only if I know that my friend has died.
Indeed the emotional feeling of sadness will occur, not necessarily at the moment when my friend dies, but rather at the moment when I find out that my friend has died.
In practice there are various means by which I might find out that my friend has died:
- I actually watch as my friend dies.
- Someone tells me that my friend has died.
- I already know some facts which imply that my friend has died, but it is only after a certain amount of thinking that I realise that my friend has died.
In all these cases, the emotion of sadness starts at the time when I transition from a state of believing that my friend is alive to a state of knowing that my friend is now dead.
(Here and elsewhere I use the term revelation to describe the general concept of transitioning from not knowing to knowing something that is of emotional significance.)
The conclusion of this analysis is that information about an emotion is more useful if we know the following -
- Who is feeling the emotion
- What the emotion is about
- When that individual started feeling the emotion as the result of learning about the thing that invoked the emotion.
Proto-music
My hypothesis about music is that music is descended from an original form of communication – "proto-music" – where an individual would communicate that they had started feeling an emotion about something as a result of learning about that something.
One observation about music is that music itself might somehow express emotion, but "pure" music never tells us anything at all about the subject of the emotion.
This suggests that proto-music also did not contain any information about the specific subject of the emotion.
So out of the list of three items above, item 2 was not included, but items 1 and 3 were, ie:
- who is feeling the emotion is determined by who is uttering the proto-musical item, and,
- when that individual started feeling the emotion is determined by when they made the utterance.
Anyone listening to the proto-musical utterance would not know what the speaker's emotion was about, but, they would be interested to find out.
In some cases the speaker's emotion would have resulted directly from the perception of something in the current environment, and nearby listeners would be primed to attempt to perceive the same thing for themselves (or, in some cases, re-interpret something that they had already perceived, but they had not considered it to be of any emotional significance).
Even though this form of communication was very abstract, in effect only allowing speakers to say something equivalent to "I just realised or observed something that is emotionally significant to me, and might be emotionally significant to all of you listening to me", it still communicated something, and it may have played a useful role in coordinating action in a social group of individuals belonging to an ancestral hominid species that lived a very co-operative lifestyle.
This theory about proto-music can be summarised in the following hypothesis, which I call the Revelation Hypothesis, which is that music is not a direct expression of emotion, but rather that:
So the primary meaning is not the emotion itself, even though the musical quality of a musical item may tell us something about the quality of that emotion.
Rather, the primary meaning is the revelation – that information has been revealed, and it is important information, as measured by the degree of emotional significance attached to that information.