Music and emotion

Himashree Bora

(Cotton University. himashreebora964@gmail.com)

Music is an important part of our life as it is a way of expressing our feelings as well as emotions. Some people consider music as a way to escape from the pain of life. It gives you relief and allows you to reduces stress. Music plays a more important role in our life than just being a source of entertainment. Music stimulates a range of emotions because musical memories live in the amygdala with our feelings. We are built to experience music as much as we are built to breathe. Anyone can access music. This makes music a powerful tool for connecting with those who have dementia. Music can raise someone's mood, get them excited or make them calm and relaxed. Music exerts a powerful influence on human beings. It can boost memory, build task endurance, lighten your mood, reduce anxiety and depression, stave off fatigue, improve your response to pain, and help you work out more effectively.

Though the link between music and emotion has been empirically established, most findings lack general ability across a multi-cultural representation of music. Consequently, while music and emotion studies have standardized the use of Western Classical music as a staple source of stimuli, only a handful have incorporated genres of music native to other cultures. This not only precludes interpretations of universality in musical emotions from their findings but also overlooks musical stimuli which might have advantages as tools for studying musical emotion. The goal of this review is to make such a case for the unique experimental utility offered by North Indian Music.

In particular, this review will highlight and expand upon the findings of Mathur et al (2015), to demonstrate that NICM comprises stimuli that not only permit the study of music and emotional response but are also uniquely designed stimulus tools to investigate how specific psychophysical features like tonality and rhythm modulate musical emotion as separable factors.

The emotional power of music has been recognised for centuries. In fact, music has always been used primarily as a profound and immediate means to evoke emotions, from the melancholic sadness of an aria to the patriotic pride of a national anthem. Given the significant role that emotions play in psychotherapy in general and in a psychotherapeutic change in particular, it's not surprising that sometimes, for some clients, music becomes a meaningful topic in therapy.

In fact, there are a number of people that, despite not being professional musicians, are extremely moved by music and for whom music plays a paramount role. They are the kind of people whose life seems to have a soundtrack. They can easily remember the music that accompanied their most cherished memories, and listening again to these particular pieces of music can evoke in them profound emotional experiences associated with such memories.