Don’t you ever come home after a terrible day and put on some music, and you start to feel better? Is there that one song that leaves you in tears? Have you ever wondered just why that is the case? According to a journal article that was summarized in a BBC news article, music releases a chemical called dopamine in the brain, which makes you feel happy. Dopamine is usually released to reward beneficial actions, such as eating, but it is also released when we listen to music.

But does music really induce emotions in us? Philip Ball writes that music can express emotions, but it is harder to know whether it induces emotions or not because it is hard to measure emotions (Ball 260). How do you rate how happy someone is? Ball suggests that some of the emotions that music does induce are induced because of the acoustic properties of the sound. He gives loudness as an example, saying that our pulses will be quickened by  sudden loudness (Ball 261). He means our physiological responses aren’t just caused by our emotional enjoyment of the music. Many people report feeling chills when listening to music but emotions are so interdependent it is hard to say which ones music effects (Ball 261).

Here Daniel Levitin talks about how music affects our mood. He explains it very well. Take a look:

Despite the difficulties, there have been investigations into how music affects our emotions, and these investigations focus on the physiological effects of music, or how the body reacts to music. As mentioned before, music releases several chemical molecules into the blood, the most well known of these being dopamine. It also activates various brain centers and muscles (Trainor Schmidt 312). A study investigated how different genres affected us. They made people listen to pieces of music expressing sadness, happiness, serenity, and agitation. They found that the respiration rate was higher in the happy and agitated excerpts than in the serene and sad ones (Trainor Schmidt 313). These findings do suggest that music affects emotion, but since emotions are so complex and hard to measure or communicate, it is hard to find exactly how music affects our emotions. However at the moment new methods are being used to investigate the brain, including PET, fMRI, and EEG machines.