Adele Gedda-Shaheen Prof. Abby ENG 1520 9/20/14 Expressing Emotions Emotions is defined as a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. This paper will show how one can directly express their emotions in a variety of ways through music. Music is a powerful way to express multiple types of emotions. There is an unlimited amount of music out there for every mood and every person. Music can affect the emotion of someone by the song lyrics, the song melody, the song meaning or the overall feeling they get when listening to it. Some may say that music that music cannot directly express what one is feeling but many studies have I found proved that statement too be untrue. By the end …show more content…
The lyrics are said to be the most personal aspect about a song. It can tell the story of why the artist is writing the song and how they felt when they were writing it. Carol Krumhansl, a Cornell University psychologist in Current Directions in Psychological Science stated that “Despite variation in any given person's life experience, studies have shown that music listeners largely agree with one another when it comes to the emotions presented in a song. This may be independent of lyrics; musical sounds themselves may carry emotional meaning”.(Krumhansl, 2012) When the listener can relate the song lyrics to a moment in their life it helps them express how they feel a certain time in their life. Lyrics can give a person hope, joy, or even sadness about many different situation that could be occurring or already …show more content…
That the listener is being distracted from how they are truly feeling to how they want to feel. Patrik N Juslin, a professor of psychology at, Uppsala University, wrote an article on what music actually expresses. He stated “The fact that people like to use the term “expression” suggests that music somehow reminds them of the ways humans express their states of mind in real life”.( Juslin, 2013)This statement may be true but it could be looked at as a positive thing rather than negative. Most people need help on expressing how they are feeling. People are always looking for a different high, to escape their reality, and music is a big contributor of that. The best thing about songs is that a listener can hear a feel one thing while another listener hears and feels another. There is a music genre or song made for every type a person. When a person finds the song that makes them feel how they want to feel, it make them be able to get an idea of how they feel or how they want to feel. Hearing a song that you can relate to makes it easier for all listeners to show how they are feeling at that