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I've posted this before numerous times, but here's a quick rundown of how the cognitive process works and how it relates to music: The first thing to notice and acknowledge is the overlapping between the language and the music areas of the brain, as music uses many of the same mechanisms we use when we hear people talk. In essence, our ability to draw out emotion out of a piece has a two facets. 1) We are wired to extrapolate emotional content out of arbitrary patterns, like we do in speech. For example, an angry person shouting in a language you don't understand can (imagine this over the phone) intimidate you or provoke various emotions. It's not because of the content of the speech but by the way it's presented. In this fashion we can identify 3 basic emotions no matter what kind of music we hear: Happiness, Anger and Sadness. Example A: A person who is depressed will often speak slowly and with a lower tone. These are some of the characteristics we often extrapolate in music as "sadness," regardless of what we're hearing. Example B: Aggressiveness in music tends to communicate anger just like shouting at someone will, again elements overlap here and it's easy to see the connection. 2) There is a mechanism by which we are chemically rewarded when we are surprised by syntax change within an establish context. This means, that a diminished chord by Bach in a rather standard T-D-T cadence is meant to achieve exactly a kind of balance between being harsh and being still predictable enough. This leads to a kind of "aesthetic curve" where this middle ground is at the center of a lot of music changes. For example an interrupted cadence in C major often is A minor due to similarity in the notes, despite it being an entirely different key. It's "far enough" that you notice, but not too far that it bothers. This phenomenon exists, of course, in speech as well. It happens when you read a sentence like for example: "I'll install some Betty duck airplane." Spoken out loud anyone's reaction will be along the same lines of what happens when there is an allowed break in harmony. This is also the basis of a lot of literary principles in forming sentences and etc etc. Because this works on the basis of established syntax, it needs context for it to work and hence this is where culture comes into play greatly. This break in syntax can only happen if you're able to predict what -should- come, and instead what you get is something else. In a language/music where you can't do it, it's impossible to get this payoff to work. This is also, I suspect, the reason modern music hard to get into, as it takes a while to assimilate many new elements until they begin working this way (hear enough atonality and you'll find "breaks" from it, just like in any kind of syntax within a certain context.) Example A: the Neapolitan cadence is a good old example of (Cadence) harmony that is extremely powerful (you couldn't GET more dissonant back then than this,) and it works precisely because what you expect is similar to what you get, but different enough that it makes you react. Example B: Augmented chords took a long while to become single-use chords within a harmonic context. Liszt was one of the first to attempt to use them on their own entirely without resorting to passing notes as a way to "legitimize them." The reason is that the sound created by an augmented chord on it's own is "too far" from other sounds within a context therefore not a good stand-alone chord. Within a created context however, it's used extensively as the effect is diminished through the use of passing notes, Eg T -> S by means of a progressively raised 5th to the 3rd of the S. This is typical by Schubert, for example. It effectively creates an augmented chord, but only in passing and with pedal tones that ease off the dissonance. Compare with Mozart's rather pioneering minuet (Minuet in D KV 355-576b) where the chord is used by itself (but resolved chromatically.) --- Further reading: Towards a neural basis of music-evoked emotions (Trends Cog Sci, 2010) Processing Expectancy Violations during Music Performance and Perception: An ERP Study (J Cog Neurosci, in press) Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music (Current Biology, 2009) :>

Well, from a purely abstract sense... music doesn't inherently contain emotion. When we listen and perceive music, however, we tend to associate emotion with it. The exact reason WHY we associate music with emotion - as far as I know hasn't been figured out. I think we associate emotion to it because we tend to associate emotion to everything we hear - we react to it in different ways. Whether emotional responses are the same across cultures is a different matter. I've listened to a lot of different music from different cultures. Some of it, I can get an emotional response from. Others I can't. And others still, I'm barely able to interpret anything at all! I think a lot of that is just cultural conditioning.

the thing is MUSIC DOES NOT HAVE EMOTIONS. people have, dogs, dolphins and things like that. music doesn't. so, the analysis should shift other way - is music pointless when it does not serves to arouse emotion? i can only say that very seldomly this can be the case. because emotion is a loving vast thing enveloping so much! now if you want specific emotions like sadness, i will tell what i told my sister: stop listening to this emo music, it makes you emo, your life starts sucking and you become feminine in the worst sense. arousing emotions, simulating them can be pointless in much worse way than pure enjoyment of musical thought.

What the hell?? 6/8 against 2/4 is not the same as having 6/8 on both and just removing the dot from the dotted 4th note! It looks wrong and it plays back wrong. The only thing that tokke explained there that is useful is the replacing the visual time signature with text objects. That's what you should be doing, yes. But it simply makes no sense to have 2/4 if it'll just be 6/8 anyway, it's very misleading since a 4th is STILL 2 8ths, regardless of what your time signature is saying unless you simply are making up new rules as you go along. (EVEN IF the 6/8 counts as triplets, but why the hell would you do that?!) And even then, if your quarter is now 3 8ths, why the hell would you even write 2/4??! Likewise, why even bother with different key signatures?? I mean I understand it if it's polytonal, but even then it seems redundant. Jeesh.

Just trying to help you avoid mockery if you were to write something like what tokke did in his example, that's all. I don't really care what you're writing and I never really said anything about aesthetics, just strictly practical things.

This was some really pure bullshit, stuff that i can make just by placing random notes in the musicprogram....Some really ugly scraggy you made here. Really dont know why you are choosen as one of the recommended pieces to listen to....