The perfect sad pop song to make you cry, according to science
Back in 2007, Canadian singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan agreed to work with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) on a television advertisement that would prominently feature her 1997 piano ballad ‘Angel’.
Almost overnight, the commercial became an early social media sensation, with many proclaiming they’d been randomly blindsided in the middle of a The Price Is Right episode by the single saddest thing they’d ever witnessed.
A lot of the success of the McLachlan-ASPCA advert, which has raised many millions of dollars for the charity over almost two decades of regular airings, can be attributed to the heartbreaking footage of miserable, suffering dogs and cats in need of help. The combination of those images with McLachlan’s all-time tearjerker of a song, however, is what sent viewers into fits of guilt and anguish, so what was it about that certain arrangement of music that made it so ideally suited to communicating sadness and pain?
Long before every American came to associate ‘Angel’ with injured puppies, McLachlan had been performing it for years as a tribute to former Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, who’d died of a drug overdose in 1996. It was very much written, not unlike Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’ or Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’, with the idea of communicating a sense of loss as much through the form of the song’s sound as well as its lyrics.
A seasoned musician like McLachlan didn’t require a scientific equation to sit down at the piano and create the kind of feeling she was looking for. The right notes tend to announce themselves, literally ‘striking the right chord’ in line with the emotion the songwriter wants to convey. If we do look under the hood of a song like ‘Angel’, though, we can find many of the familiar components present in hundreds of other songs known for eliciting tears or strong emotional responses.
Professor David Huron of the Ohio State University recently talked about some of these musical sadness ingredients in a story published on the website of the Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC. In his scientific research on how music affects the brain and body, he found that the majority of people in the Western world tend to have fairly similar views on what separates a sad song from a happy or reasonably unbothered song.
Playing the same melody in a minor key rather than a major, for example, almost always changes how the listener perceives the mood of a piece, as an otherwise peppy pop number can instantly feel like an extra weight or sense of insecurity has been attached to it. The use of lower, deeper tones, a slower tempo, emotive phrasing, and stark contrasts also, unsurprisingly, can also be found in most classic sad songs.
Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Angel’ became a popular, meme-ified representative for this kind of miseraballad not just because of its association with pitiful puppies, but because it ticked every box historically used by Western musicians to tap into the tear ducts of their audience.
According to Professor Huron, this cause-and-effect can be tracked chemically in the human body via the release of a hormone called prolactin, which can be found in human tears when we cry over grief, or when listening to sad music, but which won’t be present in the tears we might shed from chopping onions or stubbing our toe. Prolactin’s purpose, besides also stimulating milk production after childbirth, seems to be to create a defence against extreme negative emotions, allowing the body to function properly until the mind recalibrates. “It’s like Mother Nature’s way of wrapping her arms around you and saying, ‘There, there. Everything is OK’,” Huron says.
Interestingly, while just about everyone can agree that a song like ‘Angel’ definitely ‘sounds sad’ and creates a corresponding feeling of sadness when heard, not everyone feels the same way about going through that experience. Only about half of the people in Professor Huron’s studies actually enjoy or appreciate the way sad music affects them, while the other half tend to view sad songs as “boring” or “just depressing”, and an even smaller number of people, just one in ten, said they actually preferred the experience of listening to sad or moody music over happier or neutral tunes.
If you are a part of the apparent minority of folks who’d rather listen to ‘Angel’ than ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine’, try not to be swayed by the puppies and kittens.
