Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

I’ve been thinking a bit about the relationships between feelings and songs. 

(Click on the chart for a larger image.)

Everyone knows that a song should make you feel something.  Really good songs make you laugh, or cry, or feel closer to someone you love.  But how many different emotional notes or flavors are there?  And how do they relate?

Eckman describes five facially expressed emotions:

• anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surpise

In addition he later included the following:

• amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrasement, excitement, guilt, pride, relief, satisfaction, pleasure, shame

The Emotional State Machine

Think of these emotions as states in a Markov model - are all transitions between states equally likely, or are there certain directions that emotions progress? 

For example, sometimes and expression of anger could be the catalyst used to get people out of the fear state and into a state of acceptance. 

Similarly, there is a definite progression of feelings in the so-called “seven stages of grief”: shock, denial, guilt, bargaining, anger, sadness, acceptance.

Is it possible to create a set of songs that predictably and reliably moves people along this continuum from negative into positive feelings? Kind of like a train that makes a stop at each emotional way station finally delivering passengers to a happier and more positive place.

Emotions in Music

If you’ve been to the movies or a concert, you might have had several emotions:

• suprise: a sudden shift in tempo or arrangement
• tension: could be created by swirling dissonance or cacophony
• anger: many songs make one want to mosh - just think of the feeling where “rage against the machine” gets its name
• trance: a positive state close to rest, often created by moving textures and prettiness harmonic lines, with a slow tempo
• groove: a happy but not tiring
• pump: by this i mean a more beat-driven disco-like experience where people get pumped up

Last Stop Happiness

So for now I have this version of the emotional state machine chart.  Negative states are on the left and positive on the right.  The basic breakdown of states is by tense: whether a feeling or emotion is an immediate sensory experience, the meta-expectation of a future experience (or memory of a past one), and the overarching mood which might span days or weeks.   The meta-emotions are split into an active/passive axis (fear vs anger, hope vs desire).  I’ve also listed a few special emotional states as “transitional” in that they are temporary and lead to an emotional reset.

Notice that there are two paths out of the negative bubble:

• anger -> effort  -> success/victory (think “Reducation through labor”)
• anger -> effort -> exhaustion/collapse (cant think of a song for this)
• sadness -> grief -> letting go
  (think “Holly Brook/Live Again”, “Journey/Dont Stop Belivin”)

It seems that the best progression is as follows:

• sadness -> grief -> letting go -> open
• fear/tension -> anger/struggle -> victory -> pleasure/pride

Set Design

In a typical movie, we would repeat ascending fear->anger->victory loops and perhaps once have the [sadness->grief->letting go] arc near the end.  This is perhaps because grief is more powerful and it is hard to really have people cry many times in a film.   There might also be a romantic subplot leading to a make-out scene late in the film.

Also most pop films would start with something happy so that the coming conflict would have a baseline to contrast against.  Unlike film, we might want to have a tear-jerker moment, but at a live show it should be early so people can dance more at the end.   We’d really want to trade the fear/tension->struggle->victory loop in film for more time spent in the “groove” or “pump” states at a show.

This might give us a set like this:

• Opening: baseline happy/fun
  • “hello we are here/soundcheck” song
  • happy song 2
• Sad movement: (anger/fear)
  • {loss -> fear -> anger/struggle -> victory} xN
  • loss -> grief -> letting go
  • {fear -> anger/struggle -> victory} xN
• Happy movement: happy/pump (repeat as needed)
  • ballady break/trance
  • groove
  • pump