Is music pointless without emotion?

i agree with the komposeress, in that i doubt that music can be created by human beings without emotion of some sort. in my oppinion, the seperation of "intellectual" from "emotional" music isn't quite justified, as being intellectually-oriented IS an emotion. but "emotion" isn't quite an adequate term to describe what music conveys. "mood" or "state of consciousness" are better, methinks, but still perhaps inadequate.

maybe "emotion"can be seperated from "mood" in music, if emotion is seen as more brief & passing, for example a burst of joy or anger, perhaps lasting only a few bars, whereas a mood or state of consciousness is more long-term, covering for example a whole piece or series of pieces as an atmosphere is built. (maybe these are just different aspects of emotion,but that's just a question of which words to label these things with). would anyone share their thoghts on this?

Music without emotion has no POINT.

Emotion without music has no OUTLET. (Some may disagree, but I've found if I go for a week or so without listening to music I like, I get emotionally overwrought and frustrated, and can't figure out what's wrong with me.)

Writing music specifically to avoid arousing any sort of emotion in the listener (including disgust) would, I believe, be an exercise in futility.

P.S. - Mike, how does Classical music not have emotion?

Why were my comments removed? I didn't say anything offensive or too irrelevent, did I? Was I being too philosophical? Well it is a philosophical sort of question. Am I too new to this club? Why am I being excluded? I'm heatbroken! Surely the thoughts I expressed at least modestly contributed in a positive way to the conversation, and had enough merit & validity to be left with the others. It would have done no harm; at worst I'd have been criticised or ignored, which I'd much prefer. I do expect this message to be removed, but I'm really offended that my other sincere thoughts were discarded.

Why were my comments removed? I didn't say anything offensive or too irrelevent, did I? Was I being too philosophical? Well it is a philosophical sort of question. Am I too new to this club? Why am I being excluded? I'm heatbroken! Surely the thoughts I expressed at least modestly contributed in a positive way to the conversation, and had enough merit & validity to be left with the others.

Why were my comments removed? I didn't say anything offensive or too irrelevent, did I? Was I being too philosophical? Well it is a philosophical sort of question. Am I too new to this club? Why am I being excluded? I'm heatbroken! Surely the thoughts I expressed at least modestly contributed in a positive way to the conversation, and had enough merit & validity to be left with the others.

I've been playing without emotion since I concentrate too much on accuracy and not playing the wrong notes and it never sound as good as when I concentrate on articulating the message of the music or playing with emotions, rather, plus the wrong notes.

xx

It seems to me that intellectual and emotional response to something, since they coexist within the human mind, are inseperable. It doesn't have to be an intense emotion, but that sensation of satisfaction one gets from listening to a Bach fugue or that someone who listened to enough of it might get from hearing a tone row played in every way shape and form is emotional to some degree.

So it really depends on the individual, I think. If "emotion" means only loud dynamic swelling and soaring violins with Romantic melodies, then no I definiltely don't think music suffers without these. In fact, I find such music usually overbearing, though on some days its all I can listen to.

I belive that there has to be emotion in music, to "feal" the music when playing also improves the song a lot (I think). Have you never fetl that what you compose, arrange and play mirrors how you feel? That happens to me all the time, good mood, nice chearful music, bad mood, flat tunes, sad melody, well evrything is mirrored back in the music

I'm just wondering how you can do anything with some sort of emotion? Even if you aren't conciously aiming for emotion, you are always feeling some sort of emotion.

I'm just wondering how you can do anything with some sort of emotion? Even if you aren't conciously aiming for emotion, you are always feeling some sort of emotion.

Interestingly enough, quite arguably all intellectual activity is based on emotion... it's been shown that the same neural circuitry that produces emotional responses is also crucial to learning and memory.

Or all emotions are based on intellectual processes?

Apart from the definition problem of emotions and the possible link with intellectual responses/processes/reactions, I still find this question strange. Of course it is not pointless. The point isn't the emotion. But the organisation of the music is universal (to all humans).

The strongest emotional responses to music come from things totally unrelated to the music itself. For example, memories linked to a piece of music, ie broken heart of funeral. You can't say a piece of music is really good because it moves you because to you the music is linked to sad or emotional memories which are powerful and invoced upon listening.

Or all emotions are based on intellectual processes?

Sorry, one simply can't argue philosophy here, unless you feel like going against solid peer-reviewed science with an unsupported philosophical hypothesis. It's pretty clear from the fMRI results, and from pretty much all of our knowledge of neuroanatomy, that it is emotion that exists at a "lower" level than learning and memory. Learning and memory recall tasks activate the limbic system structures and regions of cortex associated with emotion, as well as other cortical areas. On a pure psychological level, education research has also shown that students perform best on exams when they take the exam in the same emotional state in which they learned the material, regardless of how positive or negative said state is.

I think you can write a music piece without emotions, but if either the performer, or the audience will not generate emotions from it, then where is the point? That piece will be just a masterpiece of null.

Yeonil

Can't argue philosophy? I am pretty sure the only thing you can do is argue in philosophy since there is no way to prove anything and if there is it is no longer called philosophy. Do you mean cognitive psychology?

I think you are mixing things up. How can you experience music without memory? You can't.

Music isn't experienced first by emotions and then by the rest. When sound comes in the brain it goes through some kind of language ordering system that is going to make sense of all those sounds and order/structure it.

Didn't you yourself say that all these processes are so mixed up you can't draw lines through them? Actually, that statement was the basis on which you claimed one was based on the other.

The more primitive and basic parts of the brain are more primitive. But that doesn't mean everything originates there. Also, some emotions are based on higher brain functions. If you are sad because you betrayed or backstabbed a friend and you feel very guilty then this emotion originates from higher reasoning because the primitive parts of the brain don't know about things like loyality. It's just that the higher brain reasons you should be sad and then the basic brains create some kind of emotion to match it.

So music is first processed by 'the intellect' and then emotions are applied. Like you said, memory and emotion are strongly linked. So the strongest emotions you will get from music come from the memory; lost friend/family, broken heart.

I think you can write a music piece without emotions

How does one do that? Performer and audience will always project their own emotions/humanity on the piece they perform/listen. Music itself has no emotions. And the emotions the composer has may be totally irrelevant to what he writes down.

I agree to that. I didn't mean the music itself can contain no emotions, but the composer :)

And the prhase that music contains emotions means for me that performer/audience can make their own emotions out of the music.

Yeonil

I think you can write a music piece without emotions

Maybe 'humanity' is a better word.

But this is curious. We can write computer programs that create/compose music. It doesn't sound any different from 'normal' music. You can't really point out that it has no emotion or 'humanity'. You can't hear it is created by a computer.

Music is considered for humans only, as far as now, so we need to be anxious about the end user, not in the origin of it. It's the "end user" on who we are focused on, and if he is capable of getting something from particular music, then we can equally judge the quality of it. It is not important how the music was made, as far the objective audience is concerned. (of course the method of making music is a criterion to judge the composer, not the music itself)

We, as composers, in my opinion, have very little teachable knowlege about managing and administrating emotions, every one of us need to develop his/her own method of doing so. Maybe because as generations pass, the emotional feedback changes rapidly, and every new wave of composers need to readjust the principles?

Yeonil

...though one cannot forget the effect music has on its makers. The making of the music is a much more interesting phenomenon to me than passive listening.

More on emotion, though - is emotion an object? If an emotion is caused by the release of chemicals into the brain, then we have a fleeting continuous moment of 'feeling.' Is it possible to 'use emotions'? We have little control over their arousal, as they are a result of our train of thought. And I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel very very not in control of my thoughts.

But I'm a border case. I've got everything so glossed over with intellectualism that I don't even know what an emotion is any more. I get 'feelings' but they are more physically felt than anything, and they don't even have emotional connotations. One is a tightening in my stomach that I must say feels very right (nothing sexual about this), but that's more of a trigger than an effect.

I decided to create a poll here to spice things up a little.

If I had answered that question only a few months ago, I would have said yes. I believed that if music did not make you feel differently after you had heard it compared to before you had heard it, it served no purpose and there was no point in listening to it. However, recently I have come to appreciate the beauty of classical music, the perfection and logic that makes it attractive to the ears.

Any thoughts?

Huh? Are you saying classical music is emotionless? Lyrics aren't the only things that form emotion. Sure, it helps, but honestly, MOST of the emotion comes from the music itself. Then again, is it even possible to right music without emotion? The artist had something in his mind, and it surely came out on the piece. Music is emotion put into listenable form. So yes, without emotion, music is pointless.

Huh? Are you saying classical music is emotionless? Lyrics aren't the only things that form emotion. Sure, it helps, but honestly, MOST of the emotion comes from the music itself. Then again, is it even possible to right music without emotion? The artist had something in his mind, and it surely came out on the piece. Music is emotion put into listenable form. So yes, without emotion, music is pointless.

I remember the days in which I was a scrafty musician learning what I could, a lot of my friends we're getting into theory but I felt it would have made everything too 'textbook' and not personal enough, almost like reading already spoken words rather then making your own.

I suppose I was wrong! I learnt composition mainly by ear and later in my era when I started learning theory I noticed my past work was actually based off certain scales (modes theory etc etc).

So in general I've come to the conclusion learning as much as you can is absolutely not emotionless what so ever. It's giving you the tools you need to use the creativity in your mind.

Now about the thread, music is emotion technically, music is a very opinionated art. Nothing is better or worse when it comes to 'genres'. It all depends on personal prefrence. Unless your some sort of android music you create/hear will have emotion. Some people can't see them though, and thats fine, it just means it's not your artist/genre/song etc.

I think music isn't pointless without emotion, but it isn't necessarily what produces the best music. For example, 60's atonal compositions, while fascinating to analyze, sound god-awful. Not to suggest that the composers of atonal music do not put emotion into their pieces.

Another thought, what if instead of conveying or including emotions in a composition, you simply included yourself? In zen buddhism there is a concept called kokoro ire, literally the inclusion of one's own spirit. If you were to make your composition an extension of yourself, the piece would become a living, breathing thing, because you are a living, breathing thing. It's similar to including emotion, but instead of the piece saying, "This is what meloncholy sounds like," it would be "This is me when I am sad."

Wow. Zomborz.

But I say no. To say yes is to discount every scrap of absolute music. Not to mention dance music.

How the music was created is irrelevant. There is no "emotion" in music...

The emotion is generated in the beholder (behearer)... It's perfectly fine to be "moved" by beauty in nature, or by art created purely by mathematics.

No emotion required.