Can someone explain to me *why* we can perceive emotion in music? It's all kind of magical to me how music really is a universal language. (Erm, it is, right?) We can all recognise a happy tune, a tense tune, an aggressive one, and perhaps a contemplative or serene tune.
Why is that?
@JordiGH That's a really interesting question. Music is so much a part of culture that you'd think it would be less universal. You'd think that a happy song coming out of, say, the Chinese tradition wouldn't be obviously happy to someone immersed in German culture. And yet, most of the time, it translates fine.
@ink_slinger Although Chinese opera is kind of hard for me to understand... But I've head other kinds of Chinese music I think I can understand.
@JordiGH @ink_slinger yeah, highly formalized forms can be harder to process cross-culturally
@DialMforMara @JordiGH That makes sense since something like opera is transmitting a lot of cultural and even political information, not just basic human emotion.
@ink_slinger @DialMforMara Yeah, but.. have you *heard* the music? Chinese opera sounds really different!
@JordiGH @DialMforMara I've heard a bit, but I fully admit to not being very familiar with Chinese opera.
@JordiGH One thing that can make it a bit confusing when crossing cultural lines is that, in European music, minor keys usually connote sadness or some other "negative" emotion. That's less likely to be true in Asian music, from what I understand.