Consider the situation in which I am listening to an extremely bouncy and upbeat piece of music at the time my hamster dies.
Whenever I hear that piece of music again it “provokes deep, negative reflection on the event or action.” Does that make it a sad piece of music? I would argue that it does not because most people listening to it will say that it is not a sad piece of music.
Obviously, you are correct to think this way. Note the word ‘COULD’ in my previous post. You don’t have a hamster anyway.
this is a pretty irrelevent point, actually, but i felt i had to make it simply because music is my ‘thing’ if u know what i mean
the point about Barber’s Adagio for Strings being a sad piece… im afraid to say is wrong… it was written about falling in love and the intense emotions one feels (the climax is supposedly his first orgasm… nice thought huh?) and so instead of being sad it is the oppositive… it is so amasingly happy
and is written with such an intense feeling to it because Barber was trying to express the broad range of amasing feelings one experiences when in love.
it didnt post my response so im posting it in shortened form.
in response to idea of barber’s adagio for strings…
the piece is actually far from sad. it is written about falling in love, and the intense emotions one experiences when in love.
oh rats it did post it. im so confused
that my dear (ben) is what is known as association. this can be done on purpose and is called ‘‘conditioning’’. case study: little hans and the fallen horse he associated with a giant penis and was therefore frightened of. admittedly this wasn’t due to conditioning, i just think its really funny. and very freudian. 
so basically, its not a sad piece of music. it just has sad associations for you. which would probably stay with you for life. but it doesn’t make it a sad song.
ahhhhhhh what they were actually testing was your ‘toff-o-meter’ rating. i had a similar question asked (not at a university interview, but at a rather ‘posh’ institute where i stuck out hiddeously wearing a punk-rock t-shirt, MeccaDNM jeans and an Ezekiel hoodie (everyone else was in school blazers (the damn invitation said casual so i went casual)), anyway that, almost exact, question was asked, i replied that a sad piece of music was a piece of music that I didn’t like, they said “would it be different from what you normally listen too”, i said “possibly or i just don’t like the band/musicain/etc”, i lasted about another 3 questions then was dropped from the programm, but hey at least i got a laugh out of watching them gasp at my non-school blazer clothes.
PS i had no intention of joining the scheme, or answering how they wanted me to answer. and it was for a grant to attend a fee paying school.
PPS how dull am i that i scarificed a saturday afternoon to go to it, or even worse i am now wasting time typing it out.
“Consider the situation in which I am listening to an extremely bouncy and upbeat piece of music at the time my hamster dies.
Whenever I hear that piece of music again it “provokes deep, negative reflection on the event or action.” Does that make it a sad piece of music? I would argue that it does not because most people listening to it will say that it is not a sad piece of music.”
cue dependent memory … can’t be arsed with explaining it - look in a psych textbook
thats the fella
fantastic!! philosophy of music - my favourite subject and what a wonderful question!!
music is, for many people, inextricably linked to emotion. what is so amazing is that different people will listen to the same combinations of pitches and rhythm and will all identify this piece of music with the same emotion.
however, when we say a piece of music is sad, do we mean that it makes us feel sad when we listen to it?
i think not. it makes us feel something, but not necessarily the emotion it describes. i take the famous example of faure’s “elegie”: the music in my opinion describes incredibly well the feelings of someone bereaved - from the anger at the start, to muted sadness and even bitter-sweet memories. however, the listener is not made to feel as if someone close to them had died (and whoever would want to listen to the piece if it did?!!) - rather i think we feel a certain satisfaction when listening to sad music - i might even say pleasure.
so the “sadness” of a piece of music does not depend on the way the listener feels when listening to the music. so we are stuck again with the original question.
this is where my ideas run out and i start to get confused. help me someone!!!
well let me see the question is
“what is a sad piece of music?”
break it down and it looks at two key words, sad and music. by it’s dictionary definition sad means ‘unhappy; feeling sorrow or regret; causing or suggesting sorrow; regretable; shameful; deplorable; dull…’
now looking at all of this we notice that these are all words, they are congured up by us humans, to understand an emotion which we feel but not really understand it a matter of expression and as a human being we want to and try to express ourselves.
well music that also is a manner to express yourself, it is a way of laying out a problem or a thought or some sort. pain, anger, love etc. any emotion we can think of is found in music.
so put the two together sad piece of music is a manner of which we can express our feelings to the world or to ourselves if you like.
and ben claire is right in saying that it is association, since it’s not the musics fault you feel sad if it’s up lifting, but the memory that goes along with it.
Btw ben sorry i did quote the dictionary straight out, but what could i do?
I wish people would read my posts! When I mentioned my hamster dying I did not say that made the music i was listening to “sad”. I fully acknowledge that it is just memory association and nowhere in my post did I say otherwise.
What you’re saying (erkyle and A Muslim) is that if the intent of the writer is a sad piece of music then that is what makes it a sad piece of music. It just comes back to the same thing if someone writes what they think is a sad piece of music but out in the world it makes everyone feel happy. Does that mean it’s still a sad piece of music?
NB: We are talking music here and so lyrics should not apply.
Ben will know who this message is from.
It wasnt in fact a piece of music but a meal that was associated.It was said at the time that this meal would no longer be enjoyed as it would bring back memories.If this is true does this make this a bad meal for everyone who tries it or just the person who has the bad experience linked to it.
p.s. it was a bad meal in the first place so nothing really lost there.
Perhaps I should clarify that last post because it confused me and I was there when it happened!
I used the example of my hamster dying as an arbitary example but as it turns out on that day my mother prepared a meal of beef stroganof with rice (we think it was that anyway). And i said that I would forever dislike it because it reminded me of my hamster dying. Glad we got that sorted out.
The meal was rank anyway, I just needed an excuse not to eat it.
Hamster stroganof aside, we go back to the original point.
Consider listening to a “sad piece of music” whilst sad. This state of mind “provokes deep, negative reflection”, spiralling the same ideas around your head. Isn’t any music with a repetitive beat or tune going to influence this reflective repetitive thinking? More melodic, slower pace music without the hard, pounding beats is likely to be a longer, classical piece. We are less likely to associate a cheesey chune, an upbeat piece of music, with sadness as it will quickly be over… the next piece will change your chain of thought in some way - breaking you out of your repetitive reflection. I suggest that if you listen to any piece of music repeatedly whilst sad, you will classify it as sad.
But how would you classify a piece of music as sad if you were happy? The obvious answer is the assocation of a rythmn to a similar one from a previously defined sad piece.
This is a great interviewers question as it goes round and round, but the big question is where does it start? What if you had no such previously defined sad piece?
i’m beginning to think that association really is the clue to the matter:
in everyday life, we very rarely hear music that is not explicitly associated with feelings of some kind. we hear music as a background to films (sad music when the characters are sad etc.) or pop songs whose words tell us exactly what emotions are contained within the song…etc. so as we grow up we learn to associate certain characteristics with those emotions (for sadness a tendency to be based in a minor key, the slow pace mentioned in other posts, a relaxation of tension). the human mind being such a complicated and marvellous thing then recognises those characteristics as “sad” even when no storyline is attached.
do people agree with me??!! the only problems i can see with this are - how do children recognise sad music as sad? how do we see emotions in the music of other cultures? and if the same characteristics indicate a sad piece of music in all cultures, then why are they so universal?
i think this has some thing to do with the heart. it it mimics its pace of beating and the pace of music (not completely but is effected). therefore, fast paced music is related to times of excitment, rush and happyness, its to do with blood pumping and adrelerline(sp?).
im pretty sure theres more to it then that, but thats the basic jist of it…
It seems to me that the basic question here is weither a piece of music is sad because of something innate within the sound or weither if it’s sad simply because the general populace believes it to be sad. For example if an up-beat piece was playing when my hamster died I might associate it with sadness, thus it becomes a sad piece of music for me. However most ppl would agree that the peice is still a happy piece because the general populance believes it to be so. So lets look at another situation, lets say an artist releases a piece of music that is up-beat and is one that even the artist would say is a happy piece, however upon release for whatever reason masses of people just weep at the song (and not because it’s horriably composed) would this still be considered a happy piece of music? There are really only a few answers to this.
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Yes of course it’s still a happy piece of music. This implies that there is some sort of innate and unalterable factor that makes a piece of music happy, no matter what. That even if the world woke up tommrow and it were reversed so that all up-beat music made use cry and all down-beat music made us laugh the up-beat music would still be a “happy piece”
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No of course not, if everyone weeps the music must be considered a “sad piece of music.” This is a scary thought for me personally since it implies that reality ( or at least definitions and concepts placed on reality) are based soley on what the majority of ppl agree to. Thus reality in a very loose sense of the word is subject to change and therefore alterable.
Well now I’m done rambling, and truth be told I’m still not sure which decision is the most correct 
Yep I think so too. Thats why we’re affected by tempo and rhythm I think.
I think that melody and harmony are based around the sounds created by people as communication. There are some universal human sounds that we all identify as meaning the same thing like laughing and crying. A laugh follows a major scale and crying follows a minor scale. And so we identify the major scale with happiness and the minor scale with crying and these scales are used in songs according to what emotion it wants to convey. Happy and sad sighing sounds in music follow the same rule. We identify with the songs accordingly.
Other emotions like fear or angriness can be conveyed by shouting for example, and curiosity by unexpected chord changes not following conventional scales. Frustration can come across with unpredicatble rhythms simulating sounds of someone making frustrated sounds.
And obviously the main mood is communicated by the singer - how they sing as well as what they sing. For example with radiohead, Thom Yorke has a very crying sounding voice, rappers often sound very angry as well as talk about things that anger them and most of the newer metal bands adopt an angry shout to go over their music to create an angry feel to it.
I think anger is very identified with these days in western music because of our societies have unwhittingly imposed upon us certain lifestyles that make us feel angry and frustrated and so we identify with music that conveys similar feelings. Happy pop music is liked because people want to feel happier, and listening to happy music can make you feel happier accordingly, and high tempo, dancey, rhythmical music is popular for clubbing because it simulates the heart beating faster relating to ‘excitement, rush and happiness’ like Laws said.
Oriental and African music is mostly rhythmical because thats how their language is and why we don’t mutually identify with each other’s musical tastes that much.
You can go further back and ask where we got our individual communicational sounds from (from which our musical tastes follow). This is all very ambiguous and may just be chance, but I think they were created from how we feel towards natural sounds like thunder and wind and rain. And the language built from there…