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Tangerine Dream's film scores for “The Keep,” “Thief,” and “Sorcerer” are dramatic, not bland.
Three excellent choices.
Here’s something to consider. What is it about the songs that DO make you cry that produce that feeling? Is it certain notes? The way they are played? Harmonies?
Then ask yourself - is it possible to recreate that in electronic music?
I personally find electronic to be overall more cathartic than other sorts of music and yet it never crosses the threshold into full-blown tears. Plus you have to figure out where to draw the line on “electronic.” I listen chiefly (haha pun not intended) to shamanic downtempo which is by principle associated with highly emotionally charged samples but those samples aren’t actually electronically produced.
It also helps to look at the limitations of the genre and the tools used to make it. This is something that you’ve only just made me realize and appreciate that. Think about the feeling that you get when you do a really intense bend on the guitar, or the complete absorption into the timeless now that overcomes your whole being when playing a good solo or improvising something on any instrument that really catches your soul and pulls it on a journey. Whether that means accidentally stumbling upon a chord structure on a piano that harmonizes with your deepest being and hammering it out with full sustain so the walls of the house shake. Or taking part in a drum circle where you pass “the threshold” as I call it, and lose your sense of identity and separation and transcend the boundary between self and other for a time, existing in harmony with the other drummers as a single generative musical organism.
That sh*t just doesn’t happen when you’re sitting in front of a screen dropping midi notes into a DAW. And without question it’s the feeling of the artist captured in those moments that is encapsulated in the music and transmitted to the listener. When you get to glimpse momentarily into the depths of a musician’s soul the experience is bound to produce a powerful reaction and as of yet, I don’t think digital music is on par with acoustic or analog-amplified instruments as a tool for self-expression. After all people have been honing the musical instrument for thousands and thousands of years. The form and function of music is largely regarded as an avenue to express or experience those things that are inexpressible; such things are almost guaranteed to hit right in the feels.
Certainly electronic music can transmit emotions. My music is all cathartic, heavily melodic minor based stuff. But I wouldn’t expect it to make anyone cry. But as electronic music continues to get more and more refined I wouldn’t be surprised; for example there’s an AI-based vocal generative all I used once for PC and programmed it to sing a verse about being stuck in a repetitive cycle seeking love but
knowing you’re just bound to repeat the same mistake and it stuck with me. But again that’s almost because of its humanization. If not for the AI generation I would have just had a nice midi melody slapped over an E minor that would be,
indeed, emotional, but not something that’s been stuck in my head almost every day since writing it on repeat 😡
At best when producing electronic I get sucked into a trance state where I’m converting my soul into digital format. And it could very well be that I’m just not skilled enough yet, but at the moment I believe that such a trance state - while powerful and conducive to producing music that will affect others - is several orders of magnitude below the trance state built up by an indigenous drum circle passing rhythms back and forth in complete,
improvisational harmony, not knowing what’s going to come out of the experience but trusting in the raw expression of the moment that whatever it is will just be “right.”
After organizing a bunch of crappy drum circles with unenthusiastic or otherwise sloppy or drunk folk on an island I moved to i finally found synergy between a smaller group of just me, my boat-mate, and a fellow who lived in an RV up the road and fell in love with
my tabla drum the instant he saw it. I don’t think he spoke again for the rest of the night after I passed it to him and his enthusiasm was such that I provided a thundering bassline with his massive djembe and my boat-mate was tapping away on… something, I don’t remember because we were already all lost in it and when our friends partner started chanting from the back room the whole world just fell away for a while and when we came back my two friends (who had neither experienced a drum circle that actually fired off into the transcendent) both had tears pouring down my face. I was having a hard time controlling the shakes myself but they were just losing it, we all spontaneously fell into a group hug and my boatmate became giddy and said he had to leave and tore out of the RV; our new friend began pacing back and forth going “holy shit, what was there, what just happened, oh my god, that was so amazing” and it was all they talked about for the next two days.
Even with Ableton Link activated on like 10 devices with 5 people I don’t think that something like that could be electronically reproduced yet. It’s not that it sounded good (it probably did, I don’t think any of us were really aware of it) it’s the way that not just one, but three people found themselves in a state of complete selfless expression and unscripted, trusting that whatever was guiding us would take good care. And it always does.
Fiddling with knobs and dials to get the perfect sound is just a more mechanical, colder experience than letting beautiful imperfections pour out of you.
I think it may be a language issue rather than a musical issue. When we say “sad” or “happy” what does that mean? These terms are much too general. I have been conditioned by decades of blue Mondays to feel “sad” on Sundays and I still do after twenty years of retirement. There is nothing particularly “sad” about Gymnopedie for me. It is rather calm, serene, beauty.
If I were Japanese, especially from a couple of centuries ago, I think I would have a much different take on “sad”. Sad might equal “nature”.
Our western culture does us a disservice by oversimplifying emotions. The subtleties are lost, substituted with cliches begotten from early melodramas. It's not universal, of course, but as a generalization we classify emotions like fast food. It’s a burger or a fish sandwich. No shades of grey in the world of Tik Tok.
A better candidate would have been an uncontacted Amazon tribesperson.
I totally agree. Words like "sad" are laughably inadequate to describe emotions that music can prompt in me, even if those emotions result in tears. I'm not "sad" when crying from music, it's a whole nother thing.
@LinearLineman, @markk : I agree. That is why I said ‘ineffable’ - ‘too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words’ - and spoke of the best Dark Ambient and Gymnopedies provoking emotions for me which cannot be articulated, where ‘sadness’ allied to ‘beauty’ is the best analog that can be attempted. Talking about music being like dancing about architecture etcetera... The presence of tears is factitious in this account, not prescriptive. They exist, for me at least, in response to certain wholly electronic works, divorced of any conscious link to times or places especially evocative to me of my own history, which might otherwise explain the phenomenon: as to why? Ineffable.
@markk’s proposition is that electronic music by itself is inherently too ‘bland’ to provoke strong emotion. I respectfully offer up these snippets of my own encounter with it to suggest this is not a universal situation.
Hypothesis rather than proposition.
But I will cop to being provocative for the sake of responses. And remember that in my first post I described some electronic music that had had a profound emotional impact on me. I'm sure there's more.
pace @LinearLineman, ‘Melancholy’ in the Renaissance sense might be more useful a word?: ‘…a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause’; an emotion which might also be indulged in as a kind of covert pleasure:
“When I go musing all alone
Thinking of divers things fore-known.
When I build castles in the air,
Void of sorrow and void of fear,
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time runs very fleet.
All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy.”
This abstract from a paper on melancholy as aesthetic puts it well, I think:
“…we want to show the relevance and importance of melancholy as an aesthetic emotion. Melancholy often plays a role in our encounters with art works, and it is also present in some of our aesthetic responses to the natural environment. Melancholy invites aesthetic considerations to come into play not only in well-defined aesthetic contexts but also in everyday situations that give reason for melancholy to arise. But the complexity of melancholy, the fact that it is fascinating in itself, suggests the further thought that it may be considered as an aesthetic emotion per se. To this end, we argue that it is the distinctive character of melancholy, its dual character and its differences from sadness and depression, which distinguishes it as an aesthetic emotion.”
From ‘Melancholy As An Aesthetic Emotion.’ - https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/ca/7523862.0001.006/--melancholy-as-an-aesthetic-emotion?rgn=main;view=fulltext
The Portuguese have a word called 'Saudade' that fits that bittersweet kind of melancholy well, but which is generally said to have no direct English translation. But if you have listened to much Bossa Nova or 60s/70s Brazilian music you'll hear that word a lot
Definition:
(especially with reference to songs or poetry) a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament
Funny that you would bring this up as I just found a version of a song I love that moved me to tears - though it is not electronic. And so one thing I have noticed is that it is not just the song, but the presentation, the playing of the song. Some takes and some recordings just have it and others are flat. There is a Seal song that moves me - "Love's Divine" and in that song it is both the words and the music that grab me. However, only one version of the song moves me to the core (and that is the version on Seal: Best 1991-2004 (Deluxe Version)).
And usually the tears come from the beauty and the depth of feeling, how the music reaches so far into the heart beyond the here and now. And yet so completely in the present.
And often there is "Saudade" - though not always.
Here's a video of the song I mentioned originally: Philip Glass's "Closing"
I’m skeptical of any predefined ‘recipes’ for manipulating emotions with music. Such as particular keys or chord progressions or instruments or anything else. Though I think it’s possible to do that - and you hear it being used; often with movie sound tracks, pop songs, etc.. The ‘sad’ theme or the ‘heroic’ theme, the ‘happy’ theme. Those things are clichés but they apparently work.
In tv commercials, over and over, whenever they want to lull us into confidence to spend money on something, I often hear the happy whistling and/or ukuleles.
I think it’s really totally by chance; the chance of your own particular mood or frame of mind at a particular moment that can open you to be receptive to any kind of music or art.
I’m not sure what @markk means by electronic music. Is it the sound made by electronic instruments? or anything reproduced electronically? it seems too vague for a genre of music.
I guess I'm in the same camp as @supadom:
Yes! and also Fado; a very soulful Portuguese song style.
hmm… maybe you should look into that.
One thing I noticed listening to this is that, to me, one of the emotional qualities here are how the musicians vary the pulse/tempo in a subtle breathing way. Without that, minimalism can seem kind of lifeless. That's one of the things I've liked about the ability in AUM to change tempo and map changes via CCs.
Fado indeed is a beautiful and sad artform. I saw a Fado performance live in Coimbra and it was unforgettable
Tears are but one form of emotional response, and often borne more by triggered memories of loss and departed loved ones.
Maybe its because I am yet to experience such profound heartache in my personal life but, speaking personally, I am far more interested in the wide gamut of other emotional responses to music.. and find these trigger just as frequently (and intensely) with electronic music as with other ‘non-electronic’ styles of music.
For example the sense of the pastoral sublime, the inconceivable scale of space and time, mono no aware, and nostalgia-tinged hauntology (to name but a few).
Physical responses to these can include a surge in your chest, a blissful ennui, sudden dopamine hits, optimism, being out-of-body, psychedelia (w/o substances), the dizzying sense of existing both now and in the past, and other profound states of mind that are much harder to put into words.
In other words, the absence of physical tears makes these experiences of music no less profound.
You just reminded me that I actually wrote a song (guitar / vocals) called 'Mono No Aware' about ten years ago. Had completely forgotten about it. I think it encapsulated that mood perfectly but the chord changes were so weird that no one accompanying me could play along 😂
@tk32 : your checklist of - pastoral sublime, the inconceivable scale of space and time, mono no aware, and nostalgia-tinged hauntology - hits a lot of buttons for me, emotional spaces I love the power of some music to take me to. I’m old, so have had plenty of time to add some good old fashioned tear-your-heart-out loss to the recipe. Don’t worry: it’ll happen to you soon enough. To live is to experience loss…
Meanwhile, you clearly need to do a cover of your mono no aware track on the Mononoke @Gavinski ! A gently sad awareness of the transience of things on an app, on a device, which are both unlikely to still be here a decade hence…
I don’t know any Japanese, so I don’t know if Mononoke actually means anything along similar lines, but it sure sounds like it should.
Mononoke is the perfect app for creating yearning, wistful leanings, at least until I can scrape up enough for a Lyra 8. I used it when it first came out for a live free jam, and felt something along those lines, I think…
Be very interested to hear your complicated-chords interpretation of that emotion…
You like crying?
I could be wrong, but I think Brambos mentioned to me once that Mononoke was named after the Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli animated movie (Princess Mononoke).
The similarities with the term 'mono no aware' are purely coincidental. Or are they?
music is probably most subjective thing humans can experience.. it depends on millions of factors, millions of events which our brain processed from our birth till now, which patterns and rules brain absorbed, learned. How it analyses and interprets "music".. Very often music which is totally horrible for one is absolutely pleasant for other ..
people can argue nonstop "my music is better than yours" because it follows rules X Y Z. But that makes no sense.. there is literally no objective "better" or "worse" music, it is always subjective, just matching some framework defined by your brain.
for me electronic music is is essence of emotions.. all i find there are just pure abstract emotions.. or even better, i would call it "proto-emotions". It's like building blocks for emotions from which i can construct and experience emotions which i want.
That's why i like electronic music. It doesn't try push into my consciousness some message or idea - it just provides me playground, space (and time) to build my own ideas, emotions, visions.
I'm envious! The guitars they use are a kind of interesting hybrid too. More like a large mandolin.
I don't mean to make light of whatever you're experiencing. I always thought it was a kind of tension release valve. Not unpleasant. Also as Blake wrote: “Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.”
I'd really need to sit down and figure out the chords again lol. Mononoke would not quite be the right ios instrument for it I think, it needs something plucky.
I have to agree with @Stochastically on this. Of course you can attribute any descriptor to any emotion you like, but your experience of the natural expression of an emotion sounds pretty painful.
I imagine it would lead you to avoid crying at any cost. I’m sorry you have to experience that.
Yep definitely.... Musical taste is so heavily influenced by many factors. A few tracks that people put in here as ones that would move them, for me would definitely not cut muster, but I wouldn't judge them for it. A lot of stuff I listened to in my 20s, when I thought I had impeccably taste, I could barely listen to know, it would bore me to tears. Believing you have good taste' is basically generally just a phenomenon where enough people you respect, whether peers, those in culture media, and other people whose opinion matters to you would agree that you in fact have good taste - that may mean you're either ahead of the curve or flowing with or outside the mainstream, depending on the company you keep and your sense of self identity
Not unpleasant.
I am also unable to vomit without screaming.
Iran / Russia 😔