The one song guarenteed to make people cry, accoring to science
Research on music is always ten times more fascinating when scientists converge on specific artists, albums and songs to illustrate their findings.
Learning about music through studies and observations of the world as we know it is a profound experience, as it provides insight into the human condition that may not be immediately apparent, and while how we react to certain sounds and voices does differ from person to person, there are a handful that bring us all together, because the few things that we can all agree on are what take mankind forward.
Music has the power to break down walls and transcend the classifications we impose on one another, because every individual is equally susceptible to being moved by art. Our differences aside, certain works evoke emotions within us that go to show just how similar we are despite the optics that may suggest otherwise.
Across decades and generations, music has covered the full spectrum of human emotions, but there’s one song that scientists say has an unusually high success rate of moving people to tears. In 2016, Metro reported on a study involving 102 people between the ages of 18 and 67 to find the song that is most likely to make people cry, and it led them to the ‘Discovery of the Camp’ score from the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, an 11-minute instrumental track performed by the London Metropolitan Orchestra, which is quite the tearjerker for multiple reasons.
First of all, the music itself has an intense lightness to it that is guaranteed to clog listeners up, almost like an overwhelming encounter with a divine entity, and while the piece isn’t even all that complex in its arrangement, there is a precision to it that feels specifically designed to make us drop our guards and submit to the pent-up emotions we harbour within.
Then, of course, there’s the context in which the song was used on the show, which makes its poignancy a lot easier to make sense of, for, as a whole, Band of Brothers is quite a heavy watch considering it depicts the turmoil of the Second World War in great detail.
Sure enough, the narrative leads to American troops coming upon the concentration camps set up by Germany and all the suffering contained inside that had been obscured from the world until it wasn’t. The score in question plays over the scene, wherein soldiers walk through the abandoned enclosure to witness for the first time the horrors Jewish people had been subjected to at the hands of the Nazis.
The music doesn’t stand out due to the intensity of the plot, although it is one of those pieces that gets ingrained in your memory subconsciously and goes on to elicit a similar reaction as it did the first time whenever you hear it later in life. That isn’t to say that the subjects of the study had all watched the show, but it is possible that some had already experienced the song for its intended purpose and had been conditioned to an emotional reaction.
The research concluded that people who cry because of music tend to be more empathetic, meaning that they are more “in tune with the feelings of others”, and whether the participants were stirred by the ‘Discovery of the Camp’ score itself or by the Holocaust memories it conjured, the piece ultimately underscores the profound emotional power of music.
