What is it about certain songs that instantly transform us into misty-eyed puddles of melancholy? And why do we love them? BRIAN BOYDsniffles his way through the science of sad music
SAD SONGS say so much. Such has been the ubiquity of Adele's tear-jerking ballad Someone Like Youthat scientists have been hauled in to explain just what is it about that particular collection of notes and words that moves so many people. They didn't just find that Someone Like Youis one of the most perfectly composed, arranged and delivered sad songs of all time but a whole lot more besides . . .
Lyrically, there are no secrets to Adele’s ballad – she’s singing about the end of her first “real relationship” (it was a long-term affair) and how she feels on hearing that her ex is now happily married to another: “I heard that you settled down/That you found a girl and you’re married now. I heard that your dreams came true/Guess she gave you things I couldn’t give to you”.
Magnanimously she states: “I wish nothing but the best for you” but there’s that “what could have been” entreaty of “Don’t forget me” before she remembers and reconciles herself to the line he used when they broke up: “Sometimes it lasts in love but sometime it hurts instead”.
Heartbreaking lyrics maybe but words can only do so much in a song and the real secret of the song’s universal appeal is to be found in the music. Research carried out over the past 20 years (and continuing) has found that particular musical structures can send reward signals to our brains that rival any other pleasure going – whether that music inclines us to happiness or sadness.
British psychologist John Sloboda, in a famous study in the early 1990s, asked listeners to identify those particular passages of songs that provoked a physical reaction. When Sloboda studied all the selected moments he found that the majority contained a music device known as an "appoggiatura". And Adele's Someone Like Youis dripping with appoggiaturas.
Basically an appoggiatura (the name comes from the Italian verb meaning “to lean upon”) is a type of musical ornament or embellishment that doesn’t serve any purpose in carrying the melody line but can have very emotional consequences for the listener.
Typically, an appoggiatura clashes with the melody to produce a dissonant sound which creates a form of tension for the listener. When the appoggiatura leaves the musical picture, the tension resolves and the melody line gets back on track – where we expect it to go.
Put several appoggiaturas together within the confines of a three-minute pop song and you're well into Oh-God-I'm-tearing-up territory. Those successive runs of tension/release, tension/release, tension/ release do the trick. If you just play the 10-second piano intro to Someone Like You,you'll hear that tension/release use of appoggitura over the melody line.
But Adele ratchets it up even further – and one suspects unconsciously so – by re-creating the effect of a musical appoggiatura with her voice. Listen to how she slightly modulates her pitch at the end of the long notes in the song directly before a new harmony line is introduced.
That's more tension/released added to the lachrymose torrent that is Someone Like You.
Focus on how she dips the “you” at the end of the line: “Nevermind, I’ll find someone like you”. Our brains are wired to expect musical consonance so when she dips down for the “you” it provides a dissonance which is enough in itself to trigger an emotional response.
But there’s even more to the song than the artful use of appoggiaturas. Studies done on why certain passages of classical music provoke such intense feelings in listeners, wherein heart and pulse rates were measured, show that moving from “soft” to “loud”, the sudden appearance of a new harmony line and the expansion of the frequencies played within the music are all vital components for inducing emotion. Essentially, we respond most viscerally to a song when we are surprised by changes in volume, timbre and harmony.
Back to Someone Like You. The song begins with a soft piano line and gentle vocalising within a narrow frequency range. It's just nice and sad – no fireworks happening. But when Adele gets to the chorus she dramatically goes up an octave, raises the volume and begins to belt it out as the harmony line shifts. Everything about the song has broken out of its pattern and, scientifically speaking, our system goes into a state of high alert. Depending on the song we interpret this state as one of happiness or sadness.
The final science bit comes with the obvious question: if Adele’s song makes us feel really, really sad why do we keep going back to it and why is it the most anticipated moment of her live show? Easy-peasy.
Emotionally intense music (whether happy or sad) releases dopamine into the pleasure/reward centres of our brain. It’s a type of benign addiction. Paradoxically, the sadder the song the more we crave it. We’ve all been there.
If you’re a songwriter and, from the above, you’re thinking that just dropping a few appoggiaturas into your next dirge will make it one of the most played songs of all time, think again. It’s not a “secret trick”. It’s the how, where, when and why you use them that matters. An appoggiatura is just one ingredient of many that go into making a powerful ballad.
Someone Like Youis a co-write between Adele and Dan Wilson (he used to be in Semisonic and wrote a song called Secret Smile – you'll know it when you hear it).
"We wrote Someone Like Youabout a desperately heartbreaking end of a relationship," says Wilson. "She was really, really feeling it at the time and it was a case of walking her back through the experience. When we hear the song, we walk in her shoes."
Wilson says he had never heard of the term "appoggiatura" and would have had no idea what it meant before writing the song. "There is no scientific method for writing a heartbreaking hit – if there was I'd be writing a Someone Like Youevery day," he says.
Yes, there may be appoggiaturas, volume shifts, expansion frequencies and tension/ release dynamics to play with. But what Adele really does on Someone Like Youis to sing her heart out. Honestly and painfully.
5 HEART BREAKERS
MARIANNE FAITHFUL
SISTER MORPHINE
"Here I lie in my hospital bed. Tell me, Sister Morphine, when are you coming around again?" Debilitating.
BETH GIBBONS AND RUSTIN MAN
MYSTERIES
A side project by the Portishead singer. You probably don't know this song. You should.
TINDERSTICKS
TRAVELLING LIGHT
Singer Stuart Staples has one of the great battered-and-bruised voices and on this duet he croons with a rare dignity about "hurt, guilt and memories". Devastating.
GRANT LEE BUFFALO
WE'VE ONLY JUST BEGUN
You know The Carpenters version and while this isn't a sad song per se just listen to what Grant Lee Buffalo do to it here. Intensely moving.
NEIL YOUNG
FROM HANK TO HENDRIX
One of the great relationship songs. They're about to get divorced - "There's a new distance between us" - but they're desperately trying to hold on: "Can we still walk side by side?"
