I have, on numerous occasions. I’ve had more “positive” emotions from music than “negative”: joy, release, freedom, amusement, inspiration, community, the insistence I dance. Sometimes sadness, sometimes a moment of touching the mysteries of the universe. It’s always a blend of sound and context, and the contexts vary widely. Once it’s happened to you, it’s easier to experience it again; but the same piece of music wont always trigger the same response: contexts.
It’s just the same as when you hear a police siren in the night, a thunderclap, a baby cry, your parent’s voice… just another sound that triggers some kind of response.
Thank you Octagonist. I understand you. I feel the same way. But I’m talking about very serious experience that is caused by the sound of a certain musical instrument. I have no such experience, but I have heard and read descriptions of people crying. It is interesting to hear the opinion of those who can cry after hearing the performance of a certain instrument. What causes these deep feelings. If context is the reason, this is one story. If the reason lies behind such hills as the physics of sound and the effect on receptors, this is a completely different matter.
I thought before that both factors play the same role. But is it? I have no answer.
Interesting to have caught this part of your conversation. I don’t know really the full context of what your getting at and will read previous comments. But I get specific emotional responses from certain songs and the crescendos are what hit me but they are also in context to a scene in a movie that touches me emotionally with it.
Specifically a scene in the film, the fifth element. An opera singer/alien is singing, they do what to me in my understanding of sound design took the opera singer’s voice and re-synthesized it to do extremely high frequencies and such and the fight scene going on with it, and the emotional context behind it, was really prefect in my eyes and ears. So it sweeps me every time. Saw the film 5 times in the theater I loved it so much.
I agree, the fifth element is truly a masterpiece. How do you feel when you watch this scene? Do you have the same feeling when you listen to only the audio track?
I’ve heard or read that most humans are “hard wired” to respond with a feeling of alert-ness, even anxiety, to sounds around 3KHz. This is the average root frequency babies cry at. It’s beneficial to the survival of the species for adult humans to react to sounds at that frequency because some of them might be a baby human in trouble (or it’s beneficial to the genes of the adult listener because the 3Khz might come from their baby).
So, any instrument hitting 3Khz powerfully (at fundamental or a strong harmonic) will trigger most humans into a heightened level of awareness. Whether that becomes sadness, joy, fear, excitement will depend on the context (both external situation and prior experience of the given human).
I’ve not researched it but I suspect most pop records run hot at 3Khz.
I don’t know if there are other biologically or physically pre-determined frequencies. Most people find quiet wide-band (white/brown noise) soothing. There’s a lot of talk about sonic weapons. There’s a lot of urban myth about “the brown note”. Some people feel very uncomfortable around the kidneys with high levels of sub-bass. To quote Dillinja, “I like to feel it in mah chest.”
Thanks for referring and linking to this, ordered one! Always found the physics behind sound and our interaction with it very interesting.
I remember when I was producing D&B the “Tramen” break (Trace’s edited version) was a thing. Tons of amazing artists had already rinsed different versions of Amen to death by that time, never used it since I didn’t see the point.
But now I love when it turns up in more recent productions, like the end of Bjork’s “Crystalline”… absolutely brilliant:
Your opinion and information about sound are very interesting. I primitively understand how sound can affect physically. How it affects our thoughts, dreams, pity…?
What make different people cry when they hear a violin? Information about 3 kHz is very important, but this frequency is present and dominates in other instruments, and of course in the case when the violin does not evoke these feelings.
Obviously, there is something more important than frequency, the sequence of musical intervals and our associations. But what could it be?
Our interpretation of asian or egiptian music is different. But it seems like the sound of instruments we are reacting the same way.
Human hearing capability varies with frequency and intensity of sound, with roll-off at lower and higher frequencies, so on average at moderate levels the most sensitive region will be in the range from about 1 kHz to 4 kHz. So sounds of the same level at those frequencies are perceived as being louder than sounds of the same level at other frequencies. But that doesn’t mean that there is some magic frequency that triggers an emotional response.
As other posters have hinted, any physical structure has resonant frequencies that are determined simply by their physical dimensions and other properties.
Any psychological response to a sound beyond its physical properties is mostly down to evolved or learned associations and little to do beyond actual acoustics.
I don’t recall. it might have been talked about by my sound engineering tutor at IMW (10 yrs ago - I won’t have notes). It might be in this book, my copy of which is currently in storage. The book is amazing, btw. I can’t recommended it enough for its mixing tips.
I agree with this, and I was trying to encourage @yescomp to pay the most attention to that “context” in my earlier posts. I went down the “babies crying” route because they were looking for some physiology, and I’d come across that nugget during my sound engineering (mostly-)self-education some time ago and liked it.
I think that’s what @Octagonist was getting at, being “hard-wired” by evolution to be more receptive to a specific frequency i.e. the sound of human babies crying… I don’t know if that’s been actually proven but standard Darwinian theory would support that.
Thanks for posting references. I can’t read the article in The Guardian right now, but the more detailed of these references are generally quite good.
It’s a shame that you previously chose to highlight the least accurate statement in the second article:
a baby’s cry occurs predictably at the frequency we are most sensitive to, around 3KHz
when the other articles you listed show what an oversimplification that statement is.
That the more sensitive ranges of human hearing and the spectrum for consonants in speech are similar is undoubtedly consistent with theories of evolutionary biology, but oversimplifications presented as factoids or “nuggets” are not really useful.
What I am pushing back on is that this is nothing to do with “a specific frequency”.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it. But when I do, or did I could feel the same with just the music as I owned the soundtrack as well, but the scene and the music together really set me off. I guess I would say of course just seeing Lee Loo getting pissed while the song starts to rev up and connecting with that while she was kicking the crap out of the alien pirates in sync to the music when the beat sets off.
I just watched it now to see and I’m already a bit emotional from something to do with my first love, but when I was watching it as a kid it was just such a killer twist how the music went from opera to the electronic (which by that age I had gotten totally into electronic music) and though seeing it now with ‘just’ that scene I’d say the movie like a dj set done right is like a peak in that part of the film and it would bring me to tears every time. Like it was perfect, I’d feel elated I guess you could
The physical aspect of the impact on our perception exists. The higher the quality of the sound recording and playback, the deeper the perception I have. Sound synthesis allows me to find the right “colors”. Can we control the physical parameters of sound and achieve the desired effect of perception or not? The evolution of musical instruments and sound is not complete. I sure everyone can share their ideas and findings. Guys, tell us about the sound. We will definitely learn something new and from these fragments of information, personal experience, we will find patterns.
I understand that the sound of any musical instrument is a complex sound, harmonics, vibrations, etc. Probably just a saw with a frequency of 3 or 4.24 kHz will not be the correct or complete answer.
Ya, nothing beats learning a piece of gear to the point you don’t even read the words and know all the key combos, because at that point it’s pure creativity.
Disclaimer: I am not a professional or an amateur, I am a human who drinks water to stay hydrated and eats food to stay nourished.
