How does music elicit emotions?

When sound waves enter your ears, a lot of unconscious processing occurs very quickly that helps us to evaluate threats, and musicians have learned to harness this processing to elicit specific feelings. read more

Basically, some music will elicit certain emotions in you because in the past you have learnt to associate something similar to it with stuff that was going on simultaneously. Contagion is maybe simpler to explain: music can trigger an internal expression of an emotion it tries to convey through specific musical features (speed, timbre, type of chord, etc). read more

There are two schools of thought on how we interpret emotion in music. The cognitivists' approach argues that music simply displays an emotion, but does not allow for the personal experience of emotion in the listener. Emotivists argue that music elicits real emotional responses in the listener. read more

But if music sounds like human expressive movements, then it sounds like something that, all by itself, is rich in emotional expressiveness, and can be easily interpreted by the auditory system. read more