Music is one of the many things that are always present in our everyday lives.
Being a baby and listening to lullabies, learning the alphabet song, turning on the radio in the car, and even doing your groceries to the sound of “elevator music” in the background.
It is found that music influences our lives – it has the power to impact people with illness, depression, motivation, and productivity. Human aggression and thoughts of evil can also be encouraged by a music genre. Music can make people feel a lot of emotions and bring people together while creating social bonds.
Laurel Trainor, professor of psychology, neuroscience, behaviour, and director of the McMaster Institute of music and the mind, states that music was used in times of war to create social bonds between soldiers. The variety of genres in music influences the mind and emotions of people.
That said, here are some different types of music and how they can influence us emotionally.
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Love Is In The Air
Many things make your heart beat faster and your stomach fill with a horde of butterflies, but nothing sets the tone like a good old-fashioned love song. Have you ever listened to a love song that made you feel in love, but you don’t even have a significant other? Love songs have the power to make you feel like you’re missing someone you don’t even know or haven’t met as of yet. Or, have you ever heard a love song that made you feel more in love with your significant other? I don’t think this feeling can be described in simple words, but it can be felt.
Music can set the mood for love. When walking into a romantic restaurant, the tone of music creates a romantic aura. The aura subconsciously makes your emotions and feelings vulnerable to embrace, receive, and give actions of love. Music’s influence in terms of love songs can be seen when one person makes a tape or a CD with their favorite love songs on it.
This act is a form of intimacy where one expresses their feelings by creating a playlist of love songs. The purpose of a love song is to indicate feelings of romance, intimacy, and in some instances, heartbreak. It is part of human nature to experience these feelings, so why not do it through music?
A Teardrop Away
When looking out the car window and staring into nothingness, what plays on the radio? It is usually a typical sad song that forces feelings of regret, heartbreak, loss, and grief to the surface.
It is scientifically proven that sad music causes sudden sadness. Adolescents and adults both use music to manage their feelings. Listening to sad music can help the listener reflect on situations, provide comfort, and reappraise an adverse event. A recent study proved that people with mental health issues, such as depression, prefer listening to melancholic music.
It is a strange fact, but when asking depressed people why they listen to sad music, they experience it as soothing and uplifting – it all has to do with connectedness. When you are experiencing the loss of a loved one, what do you listen to during the day? Lyrics about walking on sunshine or lyrics about missing someone? People prefer songs that speak to them and connect to their inner emotions, as well as relate to the words that they struggle to find.
A Berlin-based research team found that positive feelings such as happiness and peace were correlated with listening to sad music. So a piece of advice, if you wanted any, is that you are normal when listening to sad songs when in an unhappy environment. It can help you to find peace within the situation. So, don’t ever worry about feeling like a total outsider, because everyone does it!
Get Those Moves On
Before hosting a party with loads of fun activities, you always create the perfect playlist to set the mood for the evening. When selecting the right tone for your party, you need to decide which activities are planned for the night.
If you want to encourage dancing, choose music that will increase your guests’ energy levels, such as alternative rock or deep house. When planning on playing some board games, choose background pop songs to sing along to now and then. For example, if you host a Bingo game night, you can select The Most Popular Songs to set the ‘game on’ tone. If you are hosting a fancy-dress party with cocktails, you can decide on classic or jazz songs.
It is essential to create the perfect playlist when hosting a social event because it can affect the outcomes. On another note, energised music is vital in the development of young children. When music creates a rhythm that encourages dancing, it develops motor movement skills. So, whether you are in love or sad, remember to play and listen to laid-back, fun, and energetic music to relax and dance the night away.
Have you ever thought about what the world would be like if we had no music to listen to? Music is powerful, and its impact on a person’s life sometimes goes unnoticed.
A specific song that is playing on the radio or in the shopping mall can immediately alter your mood, and that can be because of the feeling you get from that particular song. Often, the feeling you get from a specific piece or the emotion you feel while listening to the song is because you have a memory connected to the music.
It means that whenever you hear that song, you will be transported to the memory the song reminds you of, and it’s as if you are right there in that place feeling the same emotions that you felt at that specific point in time.
These are just a few influences that different types of music can have on people – but there is a lot more to discover and do research on. The genres of music covered in this article are love songs, sad songs, and party songs, but there is also educational music, political music, music that encourages violence, culture music, spiritual music, ritual music, and sounds of nature (also called ambience).
All these different types of music bring out aspects of a variety of emotions and thoughts, but the point is still clear – without music, we’d pretty much be lost.