Her Voice Rising

Music has the ability to uplift our sullen spirits, transcend us to different planes, and reimagine memories with vivid detail. It has long been used as an effective means of storytelling, comradery, and entertainment for as long as history has been recorded.

When it’s used effectively, music can become an invaluable tool to promote emotional wellbeing and healing, and alternatively, it can also promote negative thinking and harmful behaviors alternatively.

So let’s dissect some key aspects of music and how to make your tunes work wonders for you.

The Science

How does music affect your brain?

Music directly affects regions of the brain related to memory, reasoning, speech, and reward. See this link from Harvard Health related to how music can have a positive impact of memory and mood.

Memory can be altered by listening to music, effectively retrieving old memories or creating new ones by association. Reasoning and problem-solving skills can become heightened. Attention, concentration, and communication skills are key factors that might be affected through listening, and our reward center becomes unlocked as our brains use neuroplasticity to create new connections, which adapts our learning capabilities. There’s a reason you choose to listen to music when you study.

Even when working out, music can be beneficial by affecting motor skills like movement and coordination, making some tasks like dancing or tapping easier to do with a steady beat to follow.

What does all of that mean?

Overall, listening to music can boost cognitive thinking, physical function, improve mood, and it even has the ability to reduce pain. And by reducing your body’s cortisol, which is a stress hormone, it actively reduces your stress levels, making it a choice coping mechanism for calming heightened levels of anxiety.

Why Music Triggers Different Emotional Responses

There are different aspects to music, and not every song will trigger the same emotional or physical response as the next. Things like rhythm and melody affect how a song sounds while neurological and personal connections affect your direct association with music. Let’s take a look at where those differences come from.

Melody

Melody is a series of notes that may be sung or played to imagine a tune, the main voice of the song that you would typically hum to in response. Melodies in a major key are associated with provoking positive emotions, namely happiness, whereas melodies played in a minor key can evoke negative emotions, primarily sadness. Our emotional response can also be triggered by the rise and fall of the melody’s notes in expectation, or after a climactic rise of keys, its fall can embody resolution.

Rhythm

Rhythm is the arrangement of notes in a given song that creates a pattern. It defines the music’s timing and structure, through an organized series of sounds and silence. Giving the music its sense of movement and defining its flow, this encompasses its beat and tempo. A fast tempo induces feelings of excitement and alertness, like how dancing or running to an upbeat song drives your exhilaration forward. A slow tempo induces feelings of calm and relaxation, like how listening to smooth jazz might help you wind down at the end of a long and stressful day. We can get a deeper sense of pleasure from the music we’re listening to as the rhythm interacts with our body’s internal rhythm, being our heartbeat and breathing, which further reinforces the emotional response that the song is meant to evoke.

Lyrics

Lyrics, in particular, can greatly shape the way that music is perceived because we are likely to grasp onto the words and interpret their meaning just as quickly as we experience the music’s melody and rhythm. Lyrics add a layer of narrative storytelling or emotional context that can either reinforce or alter the impact of the music itself. Being either harmonious or contrasting with the music, lyrics add an additional emotional element that can ignite emotional response. It can trigger memories and even promote feelings of catharsis, which is a purging of negative emotions. Lyrics can also act as a distraction to music, inhibiting other cognitive tasks like memorization or reading, so consider listening to instrumental soundtracks when you need to focus.

Neurological Connections

Neurological connections can be affected through music with the release of dopamine. This is a neurotransmitter associated with our brain’s pleasure and reward center, often engaged during pleasurable activities like eating or laughing. That makes listening to good music the equivalent of giving your brain a cookie. Music can also affect your limbic system, which is responsible for processing your emotions and responding to different musical elements, reinforcing certain moods. So while slow tempos produce those feelings of melancholy or calm, fast tempos produce excitement or joy.

Personal Connections and Social Factors

In addition to the way music can interact with our brain chemistry, our memories and associations with certain music also plays a huge role in how various genres or sounds may affect us. To put this into perspective, if a specific song or artist was performing during a memorable night that you spent with family or friends, you’ll be likely to feel joy when you experience the song or artist’s music again. With that same consideration, however, music that was experienced during negative events may have an adverse reaction on the listener, regardless of the lyrics, beat, or tempo because it is linked to trauma or distress.

Our interpretation of music and how it makes us react emotionally can also be affected by social contexts surrounding that type of music. Considerably, sometimes popular music remains popular because society has deemed it popular. If a culture of people dictates something to evoke a certain feeling, then you are likely to perceive that song with that feeling in mind.

Making Music Work for You

In summary, music can promote mood elevation with upbeat tempos boosting our energy and positive thinking. It can provoke feelings of nostalgia or become linked with both painful or happy memories. Serving either as a method of concentration or standing in the way of focus, music greatly affects cognitive and motor skills in unexpected ways. Music even has the power to evoke sadness or unlock forgotten traumas.

I personally used to listen to a lot of irrefutably sad music then wonder why I felt so depressed all the time. If you’re listening to music that reminds you of sorrow times, or music where the lyrics are storytelling someone else’s sorrow times, you’re going to feel inclined to revert to feelings of sorrow. Music is far more than mere entertainment. It shapes the way you feel and perform throughout your day. Keep all of this in mind as you search for your next mind-altering playlist. In the meantime, if you’re looking for music that can simply elevate your mood and put you in a state of good feeling, check out the list of song recommendations below.

Music Recommendations to Elevate Your Mood

“Weightless” by Marconi Union – proven to reduce anxiety

“Clair de Lune” – Claude Debussy – calming and meditative

“Don’t Stop Me Now” – Queen – high-energy and uplifting

“Here Comes the Sun” – The Beatles – bright and hopeful

“Someone Like You” – Adele – cathartic emotional release

“Happy” – Pharrell Williams – promotes joy and positivity

“Don’t Stop Me Now” – Queen – high-energy and empowering

“(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher” – Jackie Wilson – feel-good anthem

“Shake It Off” – Taylor Swift – encourages letting go of negativity

“I Gotta Feeling” – Black Eyed Peas – boosting excitement and motivation

“Good Day” – Nappy Roots – embracing positivity despite challenges

“Walking on Sunshine” – Katrina and the Waves – uplifting

“Here Comes the Sun” – The Beatles – optimistic

“Uptown Funk” – Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars – funky and energetic

“Can’t Stop the Feeling!” – Justin Timberlake – danceable, happy tune