ELI5- Why does different music make us feel different feelings?
In: Biology
There are so many answers to this. I answered a question very similar to this one on the same subreddit a while ago. Go ahead and look through my comment history, but TL:DR the intervals between notes and the reliance on the subtle differences between musical modes can make music feel different. The 2nd in a Phrygian Scale is an example of this.
That really isn’t a ELI5 answer so I’m going to try something different. Go on YouTube and find an online keyboard, where you play it by typing the numbers. Play the notes F and B in rapid succession. Notice how it sounds so bad? Well you’ve just made a Diminished Fifth, or Augmented Fourth, otherwise known as a tritone. The reason why it sounds bad is because you are creating dissonance.
A great example of this is the Lavender Town theme from R/B/Y. notice how it never feels resolved. By avoiding a resolution to the tonic, and by using dissonance, it makes you feel lost, sad, and hopeless. The song knows you want it to resolve to the tonic and it prevents it for as long as possible to TORTURE you.
The opposite of this is the exact same song, Lavender Town, but remixed in G/S/C. Here, while there is still dissonance, it is immediately resolved in a bittersweet sort of way. The song still knows that you want a resolution, so this time it makes you work for it.
This is only the surface of music. There are an infinite number of ways to affect emotion in music. Just know that basically everything in music will have some effect on something.
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