Music surrounds us in a cashmere blanket of sound.
Sound and Feeling
After the performance in Philadelphia that night, Yumi emailed me a story of musical awe she experienced while playing Mozart’s Requiem the week that her grandfather died:
This was Grandfather’s piece. Mozart’s Requiem, which we coincidentally played the week he died, January 2011. . . . When we started playing Confutatis, all the tears I never shed when he died came out . . . the angry, aggressive 32nd notes, from all the 40 of us strings in unison playing with sharp accents . . . each one like punches. And suddenly, the heavens opened up with Voca me, and all the light shone through, bright white almost blinding light. Like sun rays beaming through in sound. Angels singing. Grandfather, and Grammy, were there with me . . . shining on us. And then the memory floodgates opened to when we sang this in high school chorus, with Mr. Gibson and my friends, in the music room . . . back in time. And then suddenly back to now, the re-entrance of the fortissimo accents and missed opportunities and grief and anger. I could feel tears streaming down my face because my eyes couldn’t contain them anymore. Became momentarily aware that I was in performance . . . and let it go, it’s a safe place on stage. I felt the surge of anger subside, and, by the time we finished the Requiem and ended the concert with Ave Verum . . . even with my tears, I felt glowing, calm, deep sadness, and peacefulness. I felt like Grandfather heard me.
Yumi’s story follows awe’s familiar unfolding. It begins with encounters with the vastness of her grandfather’s death. Mystery strikes her in sensing her deceased grandparents’ presence. Yumi’s self transforms, moving through webs of associations—memories of singing in high school, a blending of sensory experiences known as synesthesia. She feels touched by bright light—an epiphany—bursting through sound. Her body gets into the act, glowing, overtaken with tears in recognition of the vastness of it all. Through the experience, she feels she is speaking with her grandfather.
Yumi’s observations about the meaning of music find a home in an influential philosophical study of the arts, that of Susanne Langer. In her books Feeling and Form and Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Langer advances her central thesis, that the arts’ purpose is to objectify feeling. Each art, Langer details, is a unique kind of representation of emotion. In making music or visual art within a culture and moment of history, we archive our beliefs about what Langer called “the pattern of life,” or what I will call life patterns. Life patterns are the great themes of social living and are central to our experience of emotion, such as what it means to suffer. To experience loss. To love. To protest unfairness. To be subordinated by forces more powerful than the self. To be in relation to the Divine. To encounter mystery. To live and die.
The arts, Langer continues, represent our experience of life patterns in a realm of symbolic meaning that differs from that of our spoken language. Our spoken word is typically held to standards of truth, or veracity. The syntax of language and its arrangement of subjects, objects, and verbs seeks to represent events in the three-dimensional space of our usual, waking experience. Events unfold forward in a linear sense of time. Cause-and-effect relations are unidirectional.
Music, Langer posits, is freed of the constraints of veridicality that structure so much of our spoken language. As a result, our experience of aesthetic emotion—through music or visual art, for example—follows different laws of space, time, and causality. In this realm of experience, fast, holistic intuitions arise about life patterns, or possible truths about our lives. The realm of meaning in the arts, Langer concludes, has “no counterpart in any vocabulary.” Music “is a tonal analogue of emotive life.”
Yumi’s account of musical awe aligns with this thinking. For Yumi, 32nd notes are “angry” and “aggressive.” Fortissimo accents express grief. Sounds “punch,” tears “stream,” anger “surges,” like metaphorical descriptions in poems. She hurtles backward in time and is transported to a space where she is together with her deceased grandparents. Yumi’s experience of awe in playing Mozart’s Requiem allowed her to understand life’s most reliable pattern—that it ends, even for those we love most, in death.
How does music relate life patterns to us? How does it allow our minds to grapple, in the case of awe, with how we relate to the vast mysteries of life? The easy answer is through lyrics. And indeed, in our twenty-six-culture study, people around the world wrote about how specific lyrics transformed their minds. You probably could quote right now lyrics from songs that brought you awe and an understanding of life patterns.
The more complex possibility is that the sounds of music, independent of the words that make up the lyrics, stir specific emotions. It has taken Swiss emotion scientist Klaus Scherer forty years to figure out how.
Scherer’s theorizing goes as follows. When we are in an emotional state, like anger, compassion, terror, or awe, our neurophysiology changes: our breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, vagus nerve activation, and movements of muscles throughout the body all shift to support adaptive behaviors like fleeing, recoiling, soothing, embracing, exulting, or exploring. These bodily changes alter the mechanics of the vocal apparatus and, by implication, the acoustics of our voice. For example, when in an anxious state, the muscles around the lungs are tense, our tightened vocal cords produce less variability in pitch, and with less saliva in our mouths our lips tighten, resulting in high-pitched, unvarying, up-tempo sounds that convey anxiety.
Musicians express emotions, Scherer continues, by producing sounds that resemble the acoustics of our vocal expression of emotion. In empirical tests of this idea, musicians are asked to use their voices, or an instrument, or even just a drum, to communicate different emotions. They do so, research finds, by producing music whose sounds resemble emotion-specific profiles of pitch, rhythm, contour, loudness, and timbre. Anger, for example, is conveyed in slow sounds with lower pitches and rising contours, like a roar of protest. The musical expression of joy is done with higher-pitched, quickly shifting sounds with rising contours, like the sounds of good friends tittering or a stream flowing during spring. When these samples of music are played to ordinary listeners, we have no trouble discerning ten different emotions, even from the beat of a drum.
To document how music expresses awe, Alan Cowen and I had participants from China and the United States first provide minute-long nonlyrical music samples that they personally felt expressed various emotions, including awe. We also had Chinese participants do the same with traditional Chinese music, which our U.S. participants had never heard. When we played these brief musical selections to new participants in the two countries, these new listeners could reliably detect thirteen emotions in the musical selections, including those provided by people from the other culture, and including our U.S. participants when listening to selections of traditional Chinese music. The feelings we perceive in music include the following: amusing, energizing, calm, erotic, triumphant, angry or defiant, fearful, tense, annoying, dreamy, sad, serene, and awe-inspiring. Aligning with Scherer’s theorizing, the music that expressed awe had acoustics resembling the whoas and wows and aahs we vocalize when feeling awe.