I had a lot of songs that can make me happy or sad.
But behind the all of that, I learned that music gives a direct effect on the brain that make us feel sad or happy.
A study from the University of Missouri has confirmed that listening to an upbeat song can lift your mood.
But this only works if you're consciously aware you're trying to make yourself happier by listening to the songs.
Researchers conclude that actively seeking out happiness through music, and other techniques, can then improve your health and relationship satisfaction.
If the upbeat music is on in the background, or you're not consciously aware that you're listening to it to boost your mood, the songs have no affect on how you feel.
Lead author Yuna Ferguson wanted to study how people can improve their moods by listening to upbeat music.
She said: 'Our work provides support for what many people already do – listen to music to improve their moods.'
However, her study found that when people think to themselves that listening to upbeat music will make them happy before listening to the songs, the songs boost their mood.
But if people just listen to upbeat songs, without consciously aware that they are listening to them in a bid to get happier, the songs themselves have no affect.
Listening to sad music could actually make you feel happier, according to researchers from Tokyo University. This is because music considered to be sombre can also provoke romantic feelings which cheers people up.
“If music be the food of love, play on,” Duke Orsino famously remarks in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Music has always been the language of intense emotion: we use it to mark great victories, mourn the passing of monarchs and loved ones alike, and soundtrack our relationships. Life without it is, for most of us, almost unthinkable. But why does it touch us so deeply?
“Hearing a piece of music stimulates primitive, evolutionarily ancient and deep brain structures,” says music psychologist and performer Dr Ruth Herbert, research fellow at the Faculty of Music at Oxford University and author of Everyday Music Listening. Music affects us on an unconscious level, before we have time to think about it
Scholars have always been fascinated by the link between sound and emotion. And although modern science hasn’t fully solved the riddle of why particular pieces of music make us feel certain things, we know far more about it now than we did 20 years ago.
One of the fascinating things that has become clear is that people from very different cultures and backgrounds will often agree on whether a piece of music sounds happy or sad – making it a truly universal form of communication.
“Emotional reactions to music involve the brain’s limbic lobe, which incorporates structures such as the amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamus and cingulate gyrus that process emotional reactions sub-cortically,” Dr Herbert explains.
“That means music affects us on an unconscious level, before we have time to think about it.”
“We also know that listening to a piece of music can stimulate production of endorphins – the feel-good hormones,” she continues. This reaction helps us to do everything from balancing our moods and emotions to bonding with each other.
And emotions generated by music, it turns out, can be contagious. “When you’re in a choir you literally ‘catch’ certain feelings from one another.”
Of course, if you find you’re experiencing hearing loss, the pleasures of music and all its associated benefits may start slipping away from you. You may not even realise that something is missing until hearing is restored through hearing aids or some form of treatment, and life regains its full joy and richness.
MaxToddler
