Listening to Sad Music Makes People Feel Good

According to a new study, listening to sad music doesn't make people miserable, rather makes them feel better about themselves.

The melancholy song "Yesterday" by Beatles has over 2,000 cover versions and remains as one of the most covered songs in recorded music history. But why does sad music has much mass appeal when it can trigger an unpleasant emotion.

According to this site, we are culturally conditioned to associate a certain sound to sadness. Especially, those who listen to western music associate notes played in minor keys with sadness.

In the present study, a team of researchers led by led by Ai Kawakami, asked 44 volunteers to listen to sad or happy music and then rate the music and their own emotional state.

Researchers found that listening to sad music made people feel better. Study participants reported that they felt the song was much more tragic than their own emotional state.

Seeing an artwork based on tragedy makes humans feel good. According to Kawakami et al., the same thing happens when people listen to sad music. Their brains doesn't perceive sad songs as an immediate threat and so people feel a 'vicarious emotion', that feels pleasant.

Even when people say that they feel the "pain in the sad music", they really aren't affected by it directly, which is why people tend to feel pleasant after listening to sad music.

"The results revealed that although sad music was perceived to be more tragic, listening to sad music actually induced participants to feel more romantic, blither, and less tragic. Thus, the participants seemed to experience ambivalent emotions when listening to sad music. This is possibly because the emotion induced by music is indirect, that is, not induced by personal events, which somehow induces participants to feel pleasure as well," researchers wrote in the journal.

The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.