Author Topic: How to relate your emotions to your music? (Read 20106 times)

trifonic · « **Reply #15 on:** January 12, 2016, 07:37:44 am »

I think you learn the skill of translating emotion into your music, through developing your ear and critically listening to tons of music. You don't have to know music theory (but it certainly doesn't hurt,) but I believe you do need to develop an intuitive sense of harmony, melody and phrasing by critically listening, singing along, and dissecting music.

Try listening to music that makes you feel a certain emotion and then try to pin-point why it makes you feel that way? I think a big portion of the emotion in music is expressed through various forms of tension and resolution. Sometimes that is in the form of setting up an expectation for the listener and then either following through with it, or subverting their expectation. Try to listen for how tension and resolution is created in music that you like. The better you can articulate how music makes you feel and dissect the elements that create those feelings, the easier it will be to inject your own emotions into your music.

Final Kindgom · « **Reply #16 on:** January 12, 2016, 08:00:08 pm »

Like other have said, you don't need theory for putting your emotions into the music. All you need for that is your creativity. Theory knowledge will help you arrange/compose faster and will make your decisions more deliberate, but that's about it. Chances are that if you feel detached from your own music, you also feel detached from other people's music. My advice to you would be to listen to other music and relate them to your emotions. If you can do that with other music, you can certainly do it to your own.

wayfinder · « **Reply #17 on:** January 12, 2016, 11:15:07 pm »

The big game changer for me was learning improvisation. When I was 15-17 I spent most of my free time for about a year or two first learning enough piano to improvise meaningfully (I took lessons for that) and then losing myself in just trying things out, developing a sense of which techniques evoked which emotions, spending untold hours finding pieces – chords, turns of musical phrase – that did something, something specific. I built a musical vocabulary that way, one that loosely translates to emotions. And the foundations I laid then still serve me well now, more than 20 years later. I'm happy that I did this on my own, without deliberately analysing other people's work (at least initially.) It gave me a sense of discovery, and ownership, and made me feel like it was my language, my emotions that I was developing.

Kabuki · « **Reply #18 on:** January 14, 2016, 06:14:24 am »

Last year I had a really weird and rocky situation with a girl that I had been friends with for ages. It took a good 6-8 months to settle down, but while I was doing that I wrote music. I ended up writing a 9-minute song with 3 different sections that really translated my feelings into music, and yet none of it was intentional. After the whole situation settled, I looked back at the song and realized that I had been channeling what I felt into its composition.

Point is: if you're gonna try really, really hard to push a particular emotion, feeling, memory into your music, you are gonna spend weeks smashing your head on your desk. Keep practicing and keep working at it, and it'll come naturally.

After all, everyone will hear your music differently. You never know what others will hear in it!

Final Kindgom · « **Reply #19 on:** January 15, 2016, 07:12:41 am »

Quote from: Aris Opus on January 15, 2016, 06:11:52 am

i am a firm believer that the less you know about music theory the more you are creating from the heart. that doesn't necessarily mean you are getting things out in key though. it takes a lot of errors and the more you make the quicker you figure out how to get what you need out. i have known one too many people that were classically trained in one instrument or another who could play the shit out of something, but couldn't "play" the shit out of something. that doesn't apply to all though.. everyone is different

While I see what you're getting at, I don't agree with that first statement. Anyone that's classically trained isn't trained to be creative; they are trained to play to the best of their ability. I have also seen classically trained musicians that just don't have the same soul as musicians of other disciplines (jazz, self-taught, other, etc) do, so I see what you're saying there; but don't confuse that with simply knowing music theory. I've taken lessons for various instruments (not classically trained) and have taken theory classes over the years. I'd say that music theory helps me translate what I feel into sound, not diminished my ability to create anything with feeling.

wayfinder · « **Reply #20 on:** January 15, 2016, 07:39:16 am »

Quote from: Aris Opus on January 15, 2016, 06:11:52 am

i am a firm believer that the less you know about music theory the more you are creating from the heart.

Yeah I think that's a romantic notion that is not true at all.

wayfinder · « **Reply #21 on:** January 18, 2016, 08:20:33 am »

I think you have a very fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of creativity.

Any creative output is always a re-combination of input. There is no innate place from which a pure and untainted emotion flows just as long as we don't ruin it with outside knowledge.

There's nothing spoiled by learning how music works (which is notably different from "how music should work"!)

Bertie South · « **Reply #22 on:** January 18, 2016, 04:09:31 pm »

Quote from: wayfinder on January 18, 2016, 08:20:33 am

Any creative output is always a re-combination of input. There is no innate place from which a pure and untainted emotion flows just as long as we don't ruin it with outside knowledge.

I've been trying to put this into words for ages - the idea that nothing is truly original, because what exactly you create depends totally on your experience and exposure to certain things. I'm totally fascinated by how the subconscious process of creativity works, but I guess we might never know because it's subconscious.

I checked 'Phizzy Drink' on your Soundcloud btw, like it a lot. Is it getting released?

Mussar · « **Reply #23 on:** January 18, 2016, 04:38:18 pm »

I'd have to agree with wayfinder here. Music theory helps you understand why the things written in the past sound the way they do, and provides a lexicon for the things that you find yourself grasping at straws to describe. As I've been learning the various scales and how they sound and beginning my training in harmony, I'm starting to hear things that provided a specific emotional context but I until that point could never understand how. A diminished chord FEELS suspenseful or anxious; you don't need theory to understand that, but it sure helps when you are looking for a way to express that feeling. I'm not picking the diminished chord because theory says it feels that way, the theory just says it's the root with a minor third and a flattened fifth. I'm picking the diminished chord because the sound that I wanted just so happened to have been codified by the mathematical laws governing music theory with that label.

Arktopolis · « **Reply #24 on:** January 19, 2016, 08:23:08 am »

If I want to write something sad, I'll just write it in D minor, the saddest of all keys.

Jokes aside, there's one distinction that I think is useful to make: do you really want your music to channel your emotions (as a sort of therapy), or do you just want to evoke a certain emotion in the listener?

Regarding the former, my opinion is that while your emotions can definitely feed your creativity, it is not necessary to feel that sort of a deep emotional connection to your music. Or at least the emotion doesn't need to be there first, you can involve it during the writing process (this tune makes me happy -> I'm happy, and things are going pretty well right now).

For the latter, as has been already repeated in this thread, knowing theory does help in writing music that you know will probably affect a listener in a certain way. When you write music by trial and error, you ARE involving your emotions in the process, by choosing what sounds good to you (evokes a certain emotion). It's just that you can't always be certain that the listener will experience the same emotions, so it helps to have those guidelines.

There is also some interesting research being done on how music evokes emotions (why the theory works, kind of), check out for example http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Anticipation-Psychology-Expectation-Bradford/dp/0262582783.

Author Topic: How to relate your emotions to your music? (Read 20106 times)

trifonic

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

Final Kindgom

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

wayfinder

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

Kabuki

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

Final Kindgom

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

wayfinder

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

wayfinder

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

Bertie South

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

Mussar

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?

Arktopolis

Re: How to relate your emotions to your music?