What is happy or sad music is not universal

As a Western DJ, you can be sure you’ll get dancers on the floor with a solid “major” song. And during the funeral, we play the music in “minor”.

“Major” and “minor” refer to the key signature difference. In major, there are four semitones between the first and third note of the scale. In a minor key, this distance is much smaller, with three semitones between the first and third notes. The minor generally seems sad, the major is happy.

When we enjoy concerts, we invariably feel that it is “the universal power of music” that similarly drives everyone in the audience to a lump in the throat or a dance move.

But scientists are now discovering that the impact of music is not so universal. In a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE a team of australian and german researchers shows how people who live cut off from the western world find music in major not necessarily cheerful and in minor not necessarily sad.

Positive emotions

Some 170 people from isolated cultures in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea learned scales and melodies in minor and major. They then had to indicate which one they thought sounded “happy.” The researchers repeated the same experiment with sixty Australians and nineteen Australian musicians.

As a result, Australian citizens and musicians associate major scales with cheerfulness much more clearly than minor scales. But that turned out not to be the case in the group of people who had minimal exposure to Western music in their lifetime. Those who have hardly ever had contact with Western music before will not be happier with major music and melancholic with minor songs.

One possible explanation is that major major music is clearly more common in our culture. We may experience this music as more positive simply because we hear it more often.

According to the researchers, what is also possible is to link the context to the music. Music in major often resonates in the West in the context of playful events. It’s possible that the positive emotions we attribute to music in a major major are related to these happy circumstances. If you experience this coupling often enough, chances are that you will also feel these positive emotions in places and times that are not specifically festive. Then it sounds like pure music that lifts your spirits, but maybe it’s not.