Why does music move us?

JOE NUNWEEK
Last updated 05:00 30/03/2014
Back in 1933, Hungarian jazz pianist Rezso Seress composed a melancholic piece of music called Gloomy Sunday, allegedly while feeling blue after splitting with a lover.

Originally an instrumental, it became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and, with the addition of English lyrics, Billie Holiday turned it into a hit during the World War II.

Almost immediately, the BBC banned her version in a forcible attempt to keep soldiers and civvies chipper. American 
radio stations quickly followed suit.

It wasn't just jingoism that drove the censors - Gloomy Sunday was also cheerily nicknamed the Hungarian Suicide Song, with alarmist press reports linking it to a couple of dozen deaths in both Hungary and North America.

Nowadays, Gloomy Sunday is passed off as an urban legend-turned-media panic, but we've always been awed and fascinated by music, and by its ability to alter moods and cast emotional hues. Faced with the popularity of matching music to prayer, early Christian theologian St Augustine warned that "music has a secret and incredible power to move our hearts.

When evil words are accompanied by music, they penetrate more deeply and the poison enters as wine through a funnel into a vat". Bearing in mind that in the year 398 AD, St Augustine would have been unaware of American hip-hop collective Odd Future - banned from entering New Zealand recently lest they incite riots - this is positively prescient.

In 1921, businessman and inventor Thomas Edison called his latest record player "the phonograph with a soul", marketing it like medicine: "Gradually the music soothes you. You forget fatigue and your nerves disappear. You feel refreshed and lighthearted."

Determined to prove the benefit of music to family and home, he offered people free Mood Change Charts in-store, and willing participants were invited to Mood Change Parties to fill their charts in as a group (and hopefully, buy something).

It might sound like a frivolous sales pitch, but the notion of a mood-change party isn't all that far off some of the contemporary research into music and emotion.

Researchers at Tokyo University recently put forth a simple but paradoxical conclusion from a 44-person study: sad music actually induces pleasant emotion. The participants sat alone in a room, one after another.

They were played excerpts of three major and minor-key pieces, then asked to rate 62 descriptive words or phrases related to the emotion they felt at that time. Interestingly, while the subjects could recognise the music that felt tragic, they didn't necessarily feel misery - instead, words recurred like fascinated, merry, feel like dancing, in love.
Read more: http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/9874282/Why-does-music-move-us