Sad music holds an interesting paradox: we usually dislike feeling sad in real life, yet we enjoy art that evokes sadness. Many scientists and philosophers, starting with Aristotle, have tried to explain this.
It’s possible that through sad songs, we experience catharsis, providing relief from negative emotions. Perhaps there’s some evolutionary advantage to this. Maybe society teaches us to appreciate suffering, or our bodies respond to melancholy music by producing hormones that create a comforting effect. While scientists have not reached a definitive conclusion, they lean toward two main theories.
Sad Music Helps Us Process Emotions
Experimental philosopher and psychologist Joshua Knobe from Yale University is married to an indie rock singer who performs sad songs. Recently, he and his colleagues sought to explain the paradox of sad music and uncover its essence.
Earlier, Knobe found that people often understand the same thing in two ways: concretely and abstractly. On the one hand, we might consider someone an artist if they possess a specific set of skills—like being a master with a paintbrush. On the other hand, if they lack abstract traits—such as curiosity and passion, merely copying classical masterpieces for profit—we might not regard them as artists. Knobe and his student, Tara Venkatesan, a cognitive scientist and opera singer, speculated that sad songs might have a similar dual nature.
Scientists already know that our emotional response to music is multifaceted: we don’t simply feel happy when we hear a beautiful song or sad when we hear a melancholic one. A survey of 363 participants revealed that sad songs evoke a wide range of emotions, which can be divided into three broad categories:
Many participants described their state as a combination of all three categories.
In his research, musicologist Tuomas Eerola found that unfamiliar sad songs often move particularly sensitive individuals. According to him, such people are more willing to immerse themselves in the fictional sadness that music brings. These individuals also show more significant hormonal changes in response to sad melodies.
Given how layered our emotions are and how hard they are to express in words, it’s no surprise that sad music turns out to be a paradox. Yet, this still doesn’t explain why we derive pleasure from it and consider it meaningful.
Sad Music Lets Us Connect with Others
Some psychologists have studied how certain aspects of music—key, tempo, rhythm, and timbre—are linked to listeners’ emotions. It turns out that certain types of songs serve nearly universal functions. For example, lullabies across different cultures share similar acoustic features that give both children and adults a sense of security.
According to Tuomas Eerola, throughout life, we learn to identify the connection between our emotions and how we “sound.” We recognize emotional expressions in speech, and many of the same signals are used similarly in music.
However, other scientists believe such correlations do little to explain the value of sad music. Music psychologist Patrick Juslin argues that these explanations shift the discussion from “Why does Beethoven’s Third Symphony evoke sadness?” to “Why does a slow tempo evoke sadness?”
This is why Juslin and his colleagues suggested that cognitive mechanisms allow listeners to feel sadness. These include unconscious brainstem reflexes, synchronization of musical rhythm with an internal rhythm (such as the heartbeat), conditioned responses to certain sounds, triggered memories, emotional contagion, and understanding of the music—all of which may play some role.
“Possibly,” because sadness is a powerful emotion capable of provoking a positive empathetic reaction: someone else’s sadness can move us. Joshua Knobe explains it this way: we feel lonely, then listen to music or pick up a book, and we no longer feel so alone.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers conducted a two-part experiment. In the first part, more than 400 participants were given descriptions of four songs—from one that was technically imperfect but emotionally deep to one that was technically flawless but emotionally flat. Participants rated how much each song reflected the true essence of music on a 7-point scale. The goal was to determine how important emotional expression—whether joy, sadness, hatred, or something else—was to music on an intuitive level. Overall, deeply emotional but technically imperfect songs received the highest scores, meaning emotional expressiveness was more important than technical skill.
In the second part of the study, 450 new participants were presented with 72 descriptions of emotionally rich songs expressing various feelings, including contempt, narcissism, inspiration, or lust. For comparison, they were also given prompts describing conversations that conveyed similar emotions. For example: “An acquaintance tells you about their week and mentions feeling gloomy.” The emotions that participants felt captured the essence of music overlapped with those that made people feel more connected during communication. These included love, joy, loneliness, sadness, ecstasy, calmness, and sorrow.
Philosopher Mario Attie-Picker, who helped lead the experiment, finds the results quite convincing. He proposed a simple hypothesis: perhaps we don’t listen to music for an emotional reaction but for the sense of connection with others. After all, many participants admitted that despite its emotional richness, sad music didn’t particularly bring them pleasure. Viewing the paradox of sad music through this lens, our love for melancholy melodies is not an acknowledgment of the value of sadness but an appreciation of the value of connection and shared emotional experiences. Other scientists quickly agreed with this view.
However, sad music is multilayered, like an onion. This explanation raises more questions. Who are we trying to connect with? The performer? Our past selves? Someone imaginary? How can sad music be entirely about one thing? Isn’t the power of art partly derived from its ability to transcend generalization and broaden our experience?
Researchers acknowledge the complexity of the subject and the limitations of their studies. And philosopher Attie-Picker offers a less scientific argument: sometimes, sad songs just feel like exactly what we need at a particular moment.
