The Emotions (or Categories) of Music

I apologize for my alarming lack of blog posts in November. It seems I have been overrun with school work and have not had the time to write. I have come up with many ideas for posts this month, but simply had no time to actually write them. This post is a product of this brainstorming period. I anticipate posting a lot this month, as I will have more time to do so, and have so many posts stewing in my head already.


I have always been baffled by the way people say they can derive emotion from music, or even write emotion into music. Call me a bad musician, but when I listen to music, although I may hear anger, heart-brokenness, light-heartedness, etc., I rarely ever feel those things as a result of hearing the music (unless the words themselves drive me to such an emotional state).

I thought about this as I listened to a concert several weeks ago. I thought, well, what do I experience when I listen to music?

I decided that for me, there are two main categories that music can be under, and three subcategories.

The two main categories are: meaningful and non-meaningful. Meaningful music means that there are probably words, and that those words hold a certain weight to them that I can connect with and that may induce further emotions in me. Non-meaningful music may or may not have words, but if it does, those words hold no significant emotional weight to them to me. It is rare that a wordless song is meaningful to me. (One that is, for example, is The Crisis by Ennio Morricone. Don't ask.) All music falls under one of these two categories.

The three subcategories, each which can and must fall under either meaningful or non-meaningful music, are: cool, beautiful, and boring. Any given piece of music must fit into one or some combination of two of these three categories, but it cannot fit into all three.

Here are two almost identical charts which should help illustrate what I am trying to say. All music falls into one of these two charts for me. (Please disregard the 33.3333s. Those are just there because I wanted the three subcategories to be of the same size.)

Although these graphs show the three subcategories as three distinct categories, think of the categories as more like a spectrum that wraps around into a circle-shape. Any given song can fall anywhere in or between these three categories. Placing a piece of music more toward the center or more toward the edge has no significant meaning to me as of yet. That is to say that degrees of each trait creates too complicated of a system for me to really assess music that way.

To help you understand, I'll give you a few examples of what songs might fall where. The song Babies by The 1900s just came onto my iTunes. I barely know this song and I don't know any of the words, so I would put it into the non-meaningful category, but it sounds pretty cool. It is not boring and it is not beautiful. It's kind of dead-center cool.

The song Oceans (Where Feet May Fail) by Hillsong United would be meaningful to me, and is beautiful but not cool. It is slightly boring because it is long and repetitive, but it is mostly beautiful.

In case you were wondering if there's such a thing as a meaningful, boring-sounding song, I Could Sing of Your Love Forever by Delirious? is a good example. Meaningful and little beautiful, but mostly boring.

My ideal song is, not surprisingly, a meaningful song with some combination of cool and beautiful. A good example of that is Dry Bones by Gungor or House of the Rising Sun by The Animals.

This is, I guess, how I experience music. Now you know.


God bless.