According to Medical Express, the study provided the first experimental evidence that sadness can directly positively affect the enjoyment of music.
Research experiments were conducted at the Experimental Musicology Laboratory at the University of New South Wales with the participation of 50 people, most of whom were undergraduate music students.
Participants were asked to choose a piece of sad music they had previously loved, and choices included classics from Ludwig van Beethoven to modern songs by Taylor Swift. They were obviously not instructed to choose sad music.
Participants were asked to imagine if they could 'take away' their sadness by listening to music, and the majority reported that they could.
After removing the sadness in imagination, participants were asked if they liked the piece of music differently; 82% of them said it reduced their taste in music by eliminating sadness.
The experiment was supervised by Dr. Emre Schubert commented: “The results indicate that the sadness we feel when listening to music may actually be desirable and can increase the pleasure of listening to it.”
It was previously thought that when people feel sad in response to music they enjoy, they are actually suffering. But the findings suggest that emotion and sadness have overlapping meanings.
In other words, “Affection begets sadness, sadness begets emotion.”
