It’s no mystery that major and minor chords in western music makes us feel good. But could this be because of an evolutionary trait?
Recent research led by Eline Adrianne Smit and colleagues from the MARCS Institute for Brain suggests this could be the case.
Turn to any major pop radio station in the Western world and you’ll likely recognize some familiar features in the songs including:
- A formulaic structure
- Themes of romance
- A catchy melody in a major scale
- A song less than three and a half minutes
These unique features of modern music are designed to make the audience feel good, so we listen on repeat. But why do these songs make us feel good?
For the last few decades, psychologists have wondered if there are features to music that elicit universal emotional responses in humans.
Could certain elements of music be hard-wired into the human central nervous system?
A Musical Study
A recent study tested how different communities with varying levels of exposure to Western music would respond emotionally to major melodies and minor melodies.
According to Discover Magazine, “At least in Western cultures, major and minor melodies and harmony heavily influence emotional responses to music. Major chords and progressions are associated with positive emotions, and minor chords and progressions are associated with negative emotions.”
Smit and colleagues asked musicians and non-musicians in Sydney, Australia as well as different communities from Papua New Guinea with varying degrees of exposure to Western music, to associate major and minor melodies with either happiness or sadness.
The Results
The researchers found that the degree of familiarity with Western music corresponded with the association between major melodies with happiness, and minor melodies with sadness.
While this association was present for some groups in Papua New Guinea, researchers did not find evidence for this association in the community that was the most remote.
This study suggests that familiarity through cultural exposure plays and important factor when associating major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness respectively.
Interestingly, major chords tend to appear more frequently than minor chords in popular music and research shows that humans are likely to attribute positive emotions to things that we are familiar with.
Universality in Music?
Lead researcher Smit also thinks there could be some associative conditioning at play. She makes the important point that people typically don’t listen to music in isolation. Instead we listen to music that fits the context of our situation.
For example, we would usually hear major music at an event like a wedding, whereas we might hear minor music at a funeral.
If specific features of music are combined with emotionally laden events often enough, then we will likely associate that musical feature with that specific emotion.
Some psychologists have suggested that music was a sort of social glue in our evolutionary history, helping to facilitate the development of humans as a deeply social species.
While this study does support that culture reinforces the association between major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness, Smit does note that, “there is still absolutely the possibility that particular aspects of music might be universal.”
Universal Emotions in Music
In similar research conducted in 2016, Psychologist Heike Argstatter sought to determine whether universal basic emotions are recognizable in music across cultures.
This study built on her previous research which found that, within one Western culture, both trained musicians and laypeople consistently categorized the same musical sequences into categories based on the same basic emotions.
Dr. Argstatter then sought to extend these findings to audiences in disparate cultural settings.
The results? Dr. Argstatter found evidence that all participants, regardless of culture, would identify the same emotions in the same pieces of music. This was especially true for happiness and sadness.