Sadness Along Music And Its Impact In Mental Balance (Name)

‘What makes a grown man wanna cry? What makes him wanna take his life?’ (Tesfaye,
2018, 0m30s). With these two questions Abel Tesfaye aka ‘The Weeknd’ opens his song ‘I
Was Never There’ in which he exposes how self-intoxicating can be feelings (can feelings
be) such as loneliness and melancholy if we do not deal correctly with our problems and
emotional responsibilities. These type of topics and narratives are often found in many
songs from the majority of the most (from most well-known singers) well-known singers
and rappers nowadays, such as Lana del Rey, Post Malone, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish
(Eillish), Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd himself, among others.

But why is that these kinds of topics are so frequent in mainstream music? It is not
supposed to music to be happy and mood-lifting? Well, the reason of why sad music is so
popular among all the people of all the ages is a phenomenon that has been object of
interest and research since many years ago. In this regard, Sachs, Damasio, & Habibi,
(2015) state that this is probably because certain forms of art that are carry (carried) out
through self-expression, social connectedness and existential meaning are often found more
beautiful than joyful or happy forms of art.

Additionally, it has been proved that it helps people to carry out steam-draining situations
as long as it thematic is related at a certain degree to the situation that the person is
experiencing. This is the main reason of why most of people decides to listen this kind of
music, whether if they are currently going through a difficult situation, or if they had done
before and now, they find a secure place in that specific song, EP, or album that once help
him/her. In other words, music develops a sense of empathy and it makes negative feelings
more lightweight to carry out, which relieves the charge of our inner-emotional dynamics.

Nevertheless, it has been also found that if people keep on a regular basis an active
listening of this kind of music whether if they are in a propitious mood or not, they could be
influenced by low audio frequencies rates and be more able to adopt certain types of
moods. This is ironic in a certain way, since sad music has been conceived as a possible
feature to mental disorders treatments. This as a result of recent neuroimaging discoveries
which suggest that listening to it brings a coordinated effort between various regions of the
brain known to be involved in emotional recognition, conscious feeling, aesthetic judgment,
and reward processing (Sachs, Damasio, & Habibi, 2015).

For instance, it has been noticed certain personality traits which make people more likeable
to appreciate sad music (Taruffi & Koelsch, 2014). Consequently, taking into account the
possibility of presenting certain contextual features, a person can be more or less prone to
be positively impacted by sad music, and vice versa. In particular, being young is one of the
biggest traits related to the amount of sad music a person usually listens on his/her daily
basis, hence to the amount of hormonal and psychological processes and changes that they
experience during their youth.

References:

Sachs, M. E., Damasio, A., & Habibi, A. (2015). The pleasures of sad music: a systematic
review. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 404.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00404

Taruffi, L., & Koelsch, S. (2014). The paradox of music-evoked sadness: an online
survey. PloS One, 9(10), e110490. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0110490

ter Bogt, T., Canale, N., Lenzi, M., Vieno, A., & van den Eijnden, R. (2021). Sad music
depresses sad adolescents: A listener’s profile. Psychology of Music, 49(2), 257–
272. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735619849622