Sad music might actually evoke positive emotions according to a new study by Japanese researchers published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.
The study looked at the reasons people enjoy listening to sad music and the research was carried out by Ai Kawakami and colleagues from Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan.
Kawakami and colleagues asked 44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-specialists, to listen to two pieces of sad music and one piece of happy music.
Each participant was required to use a set of keywords to rate both their perception of the music and their own emotional state.
The researchers explained that sad music evoked contradictory emotions because the participants of the study tended to feel sad music to be more tragic and less romantic than they felt themselves while listening to it.
The findings of the report stated: “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.
"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."
The results also outlined that unlike sadness in daily life, sadness experienced through art actually feels pleasant, possibly because emotion in music has no direct danger or harm unlike emotion experienced in everyday life.
