How can music be sad if it has no words?

On resemblance theories, music's rising and falling contours and pacing resemble the gestures and voice of human emotion, so we hear an emotional character in the sound itself; other theories add that music can also arouse real feelings in listeners.

Does music actually make us feel emotions or just represent them?

Both views have defenders. Arousal theorists hold that music induces genuine felt emotion, while expression theorists hold that we primarily recognize an emotional quality in the music without necessarily feeling it.

Musical Expression and Emotion

How music can be expressive of emotion and how it moves listeners.

Definition

The study of how music can be expressive of emotion and can arouse emotional responses in listeners, and of what philosophical account best explains this.

Scope

Covers the central problem of music aesthetics: how purely instrumental music can be expressive of or arouse emotion despite having no words or obvious referents. Surveys the main philosophical positions — arousal, resemblance (contour), and expression theories — and notes the empirical psychology of music and emotion. Excludes broader ontological questions, treated under philosophy of music.

Core questions

Does music express emotion, arouse it, or both?
How can wordless music be 'sad' or 'joyful'?
What is the contour or resemblance theory of musical expression?
How does the play of expectation generate emotional meaning?
What does empirical psychology contribute to these questions?

Key theories

Expectation theory of musical emotion: Meyer argued that musical meaning and emotion arise from the way music sets up, delays, and fulfills or violates a listener's stylistically conditioned expectations, locating affect in the dynamic unfolding of the music rather than in external reference.
Contour (resemblance) theory of expression: Kivy proposed that music is expressive of emotions largely because its dynamic shape resembles the behavioral and vocal contours of human emotional expression, so that we hear sadness in music as we see it in a basset hound's face, without the music itself feeling sad.

History

Nineteenth-century expressivism was challenged by Hanslick's formalism; in the twentieth century Meyer grounded musical emotion in expectation, Kivy developed the contour theory, and from the 1990s empirical music psychology brought experimental evidence to bear on these long-standing philosophical claims.

Debates

Arousal versus expression: Theorists dispute whether music literally arouses emotions in listeners or merely is expressive of emotions that we recognize without feeling, with resemblance, arousal, and persona accounts each explaining different aspects of the phenomenon.

Key figures

Leonard B. Meyer
Peter Kivy
Patrik Juslin

Seminal works

meyer1956
kivy1989
juslin2010

Frequently asked questions

How can music be sad if it has no words?: On resemblance theories, music's rising and falling contours and pacing resemble the gestures and voice of human emotion, so we hear an emotional character in the sound itself; other theories add that music can also arouse real feelings in listeners.
Does music actually make us feel emotions or just represent them?: Both views have defenders. Arousal theorists hold that music induces genuine felt emotion, while expression theorists hold that we primarily recognize an emotional quality in the music without necessarily feeling it.