One might alternatively ask: “What makes a song a ‘banger’?”. Certain repetitions or chord progressions often can spark profound emotions. Listening to music can bring people to tears or lead them to dance with reckless abandon. In Virginia Hughes’s article, Why Does Music Feel So Good, she explores how music affects our brains.
I first became interested in this topic after listening to Antonin Dvorak’s piece, American, for string quartet. Like Hughes describes in her article, when I first heard American, I felt an unfamiliar and unexplainable rush of emotion.I didn’t understand how any music, especially classical music, could bring about this sentiment. Dvorak’s music felt powerful and uplifting in a way I had never thought music could.
According to Hughes’s article, these emotions can be explained by the parts of the brain that are active when one listens to music. She cites “…the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotion,[and] the hippocampus, which is important for learning and memory” as the main contributors to music-derived pleasure.
Although I couldn’t find an article regarding the subject, I next wondered what parts of the brain are involved when one receives pleasure from music she is playing herself. Though I have never played Dvorak’s American, I often have unexplainable affinities for certain pieces we play in Philharmonic. In this, I feel whatever emotions are are sparked by music are twice as powerful when that music is being produced by the individual experiencing the emotions. Have you ever felt embarrassingly moved by a sappy song? Or liked a band or orchestra song a little too much?
Thinking in Writing 