For example, violins in a sad scene or a saxophone in an erotic scene. Why do we all respond to the same instrument in the same way?
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Wouldn’t it be more the melodies or chord progressions that evoke certain emotion rather than the instrument itself?
For one thing, they are cues that we are used to, so they get reused. Drums of War. Trumpets for heroes. Something vaguely mystical and native/natural? Pan flutes.
Partly evolutionary. There’s a lot of sounds that are just soothing that may mimic water flowing or how things would sound in the womb and then there’s intense sounds that mimic a heavy roar or thunder. And it’s partly cultural, different cultures do use different notes and something that sounds happy in one part of the world can sound sad in another.
Because that’s have we’ve heard them used in the past. We’ve all been exposed to roughly the same media, so we can all of are brains can make the same connections back to how the sounds are culturally ‘supposed’ to be used
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