Can someone explain to me *why* we can perceive emotion in music? It's all kind of magical to me how music really is a universal language. (Erm, it is, right?) We can all recognise a happy tune, a tense tune, an aggressive one, and perhaps a contemplative or serene tune.
Why is that?
@JordiGH That's a really interesting question. Music is so much a part of culture that you'd think it would be less universal. You'd think that a happy song coming out of, say, the Chinese tradition wouldn't be obviously happy to someone immersed in German culture. And yet, most of the time, it translates fine.
@JordiGH One thing that can make it a bit confusing when crossing cultural lines is that, in European music, minor keys usually connote sadness or some other "negative" emotion. That's less likely to be true in Asian music, from what I understand.
@JordiGH @ink_slinger yeah, highly formalized forms can be harder to process cross-culturally
@DialMforMara @JordiGH That makes sense since something like opera is transmitting a lot of cultural and even political information, not just basic human emotion.
@ink_slinger @DialMforMara Yeah, but.. have you *heard* the music? Chinese opera sounds really different!
@JordiGH @DialMforMara I've heard a bit, but I fully admit to not being very familiar with Chinese opera.
@JordiGH What makes this even more interesting is something I heard on a podcast several months ago, suggesting that some cultures have emotions that don't exist in other cultures, for a whole complicated list of reasons. If they expressed those emotions in song, would people from other cultures understand, despite not having a word for the emotion they're feeling?
If you can find that podcast, I'd really like to listen it!
@ink_slinger Although Chinese opera is kind of hard for me to understand... But I've head other kinds of Chinese music I think I can understand.