So could you show me like a chord that's major and then a chord that's minor, just so we can hear the difference. Yep, So here's a C major chord C minor to meet. Anyone who prefers C major is out of their mind, Like I wish them well, but we can't ever fully understand one another or be close friends because C minor is true and C major that's for selling soap. Wow, I never knew. I mean, I know you felt strong. I didn't know you felt this strongly.
That's me and Andy Thompson talking shop. He's a composer and a producer who works out of a basement studio called Instrument Landing. And I'm Dessa, host of the show Deeply Human. I'm wearing my podcast had today. But I make my living as a hip hop artist, and Andy and I are frequent collaborators. Most of the music that I write is pretty dark, so much so that my bandmates tease me about it. Even my fans tease me
about it. Years ago, when I sent an early mix of an album to my mom, she said she liked it, but then asked, why do you always make music to bleed out? To I've loved sad songs since I was a teenager. My favorite genre was arguably total devastation. Tracy Chapman's Fast Car That was a big one, some of my mom's Bonnie ray Its slow Jams messed me up pretty good, and of course Jeff Buckley's rendition of Hallelujah. I played them over and over again because they reliably
made me feel exquisitely awful. Listening to sad songs is a weird, counterintuitive thing to do. Why would anyone willfully gravitate towards something that hurts to hear? To find out, I'm asking a music critic, a philosopher, an experimental researcher, and a songwriter, why do we listen to sad music? First, let's holler at our critic, someone who listens to music professionally. Stephen Thompson is a writer, an editor, and a broadcast guy with National public radio in the US, and he's
a serious sad song enthusiast. I know that you made a playlist called Weeping at the Wheels right, right right, and the cover image was just a box of tissues on a dashboard, and man, the car is definitely one of the best spots to be totally disemboweled by a song.
There's a couple of songs that that I'm not allowed to drive to because because I become an irresponsible pilot of a motor vehicle in the throes of that much emotion, you know, you know, when you cry, it can sometimes like help you, like irrigate your emotions a little bit. And I think, I think sad songs kind of have that same that same function. I have a depressive streak,
and I have an anxious streak. And when I was in high school, I remember my anxiety had gotten to the point where I wasn't able to sleep at night, and I started making lists of all the things that I had to do. And then when I was done writing down everything I had to do, and I was
able to process and handle it. And I think in a way, sad songs for me are like those lists, those anxiety lists, you know, so I can my brain can just be this haunted circus of terrible emotions, and a song that has a way of processing those emotions can sometimes like serve as like almost like a sorting
mechanism for that web of feelings in my head. And so I think sad music is really therapeutic for me in that way, clarifying a painful feeling, pinning it to a board, the clean, neat description provides some degree of relief, even if the feeling itself persists. I know that in my life being able to call demons by their proper
names just helps somehow. It's a relief to know exactly what I'm up against, you know how, like your kid and you come crying to your parents you've had a nightmare, and your parents explain, like, nightmares are your brain's way of taking out the garbage. And I always thought that was a great way of thinking about nightmares. It's your your brain's way of processing difficult and dark things and so that you can handle them going forward. I think in a way, sad songs ping a little bit of
that same thing. I wonder though, if there's like an undercurrent of intimacy that runs through sad music that isn't necessarily there and like dance music and that it's okay to tell anyone, hey, I want to dance, but the idea that like, hey, I think I'm getting a divorce, that's a secret, that's an intimacy, and that like there are fewer people in places that you can share that information, and so maybe, like we understand ourselves to be in
a more intimate and trusting relationship with a musician who's telling us a sad story than one who's telling us is celebrating the song, can feel like you're communing with an artist who understands and has been through what you've gone through. And so it's not necessarily hopeless because here's somebody who clearly went through some of the same things that I did and came out on the other side and wrote a song about it. I mean, I think empathy is just one of the most powerful and important
experiences we can have as human beings. This is the whole misery loves Company thing, but the way that Steven tells it, maybe it's also like proof of life, evidence that a fellow sufferer with a misery much like yours was able to get back on our feet and get stable enough to hire a band and a publicist and release some music into the world. All right, for Steven's walk off music, let's tee up a cut from his Weeping at the Wheel playlist, and now back to Andy's
basement studio for a second to talk fundamentals. What is sad music exactly? My lad jewel vary and there are exceptions to every rule, but Andy ticked off a few of the features that makes sad songs sound sad. A lot of times when you feel sad, you kind of pull inward and you're quiet, and you don't necessarily want to speak to other people. And so I think one thing a composer can do is to bring the dynamic down.
Another thing a composer can do is use just sparseness and not have a lot going on, have the notes to be very alone with themselves. But there are other things, like major and minor keys that are a little bit more of a mystery. Keep in mind, this conversation is being had by two Western musicians, and the world is a very wide musical place, but in very broad strokes. Major chords are usually considered happy and minor chords sad. So let's break down the chords to see what they're
made of. C major chord has a C in the major third and five. To make it a minor chord, you take that second note and you move it down a half step, which is the shortest distance you can move an interval in music. Usually they're C minor. Dissecting a chord doesn't explain the feeling it foakes much better
than cutting open a candle explains romance. You're basically talking about two frequencies interacting, and when they interact one way, it generally makes people feel happy, and when they interact a different way, it makes him feel sad. And that to me is it's kind of like a black hole. I don't know. It goes like this, the F five, the minor fall and the major lived, the baffle king composing. Have we just learned that some chords are associated with sadness?
Or is there a mathematical relationship between the notes that makes us feel that way? People who have spent a lifetime trying to master the how of music still don't know the why. Myself very much included segue to our philosopher. Andrew Huddleston, teaches at Birkbeck College in London. Is an undergrad. He wrote a thesis on why we're drawn to sad music,
and I asked him how sad music evolks emotion. One theory is that the musical expressions resemble the expressions of sad people think of the face of a Saint Bernard dog, we say that the face is sad, even though we think the dog is not sad. Now why do we think that, Well, it resembles in a certain way the expression of sad people, maybe in a kind of caricatured way, the kind of drooping quality of the Saint Bernard dog's face.
And you think something similar might be the case in the contours of music, that they might have these kinds of qualities that put us in mind of sadness. Some sad music might actually resemble the sounds that come out of sad humans, that sound like wailing or like laments. And I think that that's a very common thing in vocal music and in some purely instrumental music too, where
that quality is mirrored. And I think that that really puts us in mind of expressions of sadness, that kind of rising and falling suddenly falling vocal line, or the sense of a sigh in the music. My mom used to sing a lullaby to me and my kid brother Maxie called No Nando, and I think it has the
kind of melody lines that Andrew's talking about. It has these like super epic swells and cascades My mom is Puerto Rican and most of the words are in Spanish, but I've always suspected that maybe, like the trills in the vocal line were forged by Sephardic Jewish singers with roots in Spain. It's one of those songs where a mom like puts her kid's name into it, and I do not have kids, so I'm gonna use Max's name.
But it goes like this an no na do no no go me baby Maxie it done, and no na gole no na go ani no na and the nina no. It is an insanely dramatic way to put a kid to bed. I used to hate it when you go high, because I knew and he was almost done and I had to go to sleep. I still sing on nonando sometimes around my apartment, and my voice right now sounds a lot like my mom's did then. But why I am a grown adult who could listen to dance music or just eat Peanut M and M's or right a
Shetland pony through a field of daisies. I asked Andrew for the philosopher's take on why we listen to sad music at all. We're interested in knowing about what the world is like, even about extreme kinds of suffering and horror, even if that's not particularly pleasant. You know, why are people drawn to tragedy? Why are people drawn to films that are about really horrible things? Why do they read novels that are about really horrible things? And I think
one of the explanations is we care about knowledge. We care about knowing what the world is, even if what we find out is something that's depressing. There might also be something important about packaging sadness in music. So I think the beauty plays a really considerable role here. One thing that it can provide is in itself a certain kind of consolation. Perhaps the presence of the beauty in this expression of something that's sad or depressing, it might
also intimate a certain kind of hope as well. Maybe the music here becomes the mixer and a stiff drink, or the sticker the doctor gives to a little kid after her shot. It's still going to burn, but the beauty of the music gives you something for the pain. Andrew himself is a Wagner guy, So DJ drop something from the ring cycle. Yeah, my name is Boskowski. I work at the University of Oslo as an Associate professor in music cognition. Yana was part of a team that
conducted an experiment to study fans of sad music. They wanted to find out what kinds of personality traits are related to people's enjoyment of sad music. Jana's team recruits a bunch of research participants, put some in fancy headphones and presses play on eight minutes of sad instrumental music. Next, you wanna hit some with a questionnaire to record their feelings. It's got different emotional adjectives like moved, melancholic, sad, peaceful,
and intensity scales from one to seven. Also, they filled in a whole battery of different kinds of personality tests and questions about their current mood and also their experienced quality of life and kind of general health related questions. Some of the participants were hooked up with electrodes to
measure bodily responses to evidence of intense emotional reactions. With all the data collected, Yonah and her team crunch the numbers looking for patterns, and they find one one thing that really consistently seemed to predict people's enjoyment of sad music. Was empathy. Those who score the highest in empathic concern or sympathy for others, they seem to be enjoying sad music the most. So perhaps they are connecting to something human in the music. They're reacting to sad music, gus
they would to a sad person. Got admit as emo. Kids are coming off pretty good right now, kind compassionate. Sure you could date somebody from the varsity team will only listens to metal, but they might let your cat on fire something. And if they do, we will have a hot cup of tea ready if you want to talk about it all right. For Yonah's walk off music, I persuaded her to say the melancholic finish lullaby that
her mother used to sing, You want me to sing? Okay, here goes bier Nicki, Sulin boy Gan and Holy yon None ohmak Covery, be a nil, Lucky Soli, loly Bion, Bion and Bienny. And we listened to sad music for clarity, for comfort. But what about the people who write the songs? Why do we wallow and suffering? I invited a fellow songwriter, Mayotta to talk it out. She's found herself in tears over her keyboard while crafting a particularly sad joint. Why
do you do that? Why do we do that? That doesn't make any sense that um my general thought that why we do that? I think it's for catharsis, and for me specifically, it's definitely for catharsis without sweating the dictionary different and like, what does that mean when you use that word says release? I think, like that's the main thing I'm thinking of, is release. I really see trauma as like stagnant energy that got stuck and wasn't
allowed to like move through you. Like I literally just heard this from my therapist a couple of days ago, and she dragged me and was like, well, you have to feel to heal. If you don't let yourself feel your lows, you don't get to feel the highs either, Like everything numbs out. I know from personal experience that it can be a serious challenge to perform while your body isn't the throes of a big feeling. Your hands, shake your voice titans, your diaphragm might want to do
that spasm thing. Sadness affects all the muscles that are supposed to be playing the damn song. But Mayada built room for these feelings into the architecture of her arrangements. Oh man, oh wow, Wolf, I'm just like I'm like
viscerally coming back to a couple of times. I wrote a lot of like really belty swelling, like kind of squalling type of moments into these songs, and so it was like a yell just dropped jaw on an awe, but like really loud, and I think that was the release instead of like straight up crying like something needs
to get out of me. But I'm gonna do it in a kind of pretty way because my choir teacher taught me, like in high school, when you have to scream, do it musically right, like breathe like you would be singing. And while my body was like on some very like shaky type of thing, I knew that if I just made it to the chorus, I could basically scream, And I think that was kind of what shorted up. Does it feel like you're sometimes writing sad songs for political,
you know, reasons, like specifically absolutely? Actually, I would venture to say that those are the ones that are the hardest, like ones that came out of some very specifically rough stuff about just like my my black experience. For example, it's like, in the most technical of senses, I am literally performing my pain right now. But like, I'm doing this thing and I know that I'm incurring damage from it,
and I know that it's like stress. It's like stressing my body to have to explain this over and over again. But also like, I still believe in the power of sharing my experience, but I need you to hear me. Some sad music might be used as a call to action, a request, or a challenge for listeners to come to one another's aid. I think that a lot of Western experience of music, particularly of art, is for entertainment, and I don't really see my job as one as as
an entertainer. If you had a business card, like would it say, Wow, what was the first thing that came to my musical healer? Yeah? I think musical healer. That song with the belty yell instead of cry chorus that Mayatta was talking about is called Cracked Chest. She hasn't recorded a studio version yet, but we're lucky enough to premiere the Devil here. It's oh mind, oh my, oh mind, oh my, oh my, oh my. Was somebody my hen for a while? My dad made his living as a
loot player. If you can't picture it, a loot is a precursor of the guitar, the kind of instrument you might see on a tapestry. It's not the line of work you pursue hoping to get rich. And by the nineteen eighties my dad had missed the loot craze by like so years. Still he sat alone for many hours playing these delicate, melancholy songs written by other sensitive men. Now long did When I asked what drove his musical obsession, I met the hard limit of his sentimentalism. He said
he was deeply moved by the music. He found great beauty in it, but he just didn't see any evidence that it had some higher meaning. He used the phrase mental masturbation, like that might be what all this loop playing amounted to. And some people have suggested that our affinity to music is just a byproduct of evolution, that our pattern sensitive brains built for language might just geek out our music like a house cat does on a
laser pointer. Stephen Pinker, a famous cognitive psychologist, characterized music
as auditory cheesecake. H I don't understand music in theory, but I understand it in practice, and I see how the faces in the crowd change when the big ballad begins and the strings lift like a tidal wave, and we are all briefly relieved of the obligation to be our professional, presentable selves, and instead the full truth of our lives is welcomed into the room, the fears and the fractures, and until the final notes ring, we are
suspended in communion with one another, like rafts and rough water, somehow fortified by the storm. The music sensitizes us to the world and to the other people in it. There's this line often attributed to the Persian poet Roomy, that about sums it up for me. You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens as I let myself out. Here's a clip of a song I sometimes play on tour. It's called good Grief. How can it's head bad? Maybe good grieves one's good? How can it at our next meeting?
Deeply Human is examining the teenage brain to find out why there's such an intensity of feeling during adolescents. Why does the world burn brighter in your teens? Deeply Human is a co production of the BBC World Service and American public media with I heart Media and as you know by now, I'm a musician and a songwriter too, so if you'd like to share your thoughts on songs, sad or happy ones, you can find me at Duessa Darling on Twitter. Thanks for listening.