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Music

We Love to Love Sad Music

Nothing beats putting on the headphones for a wallowing self-pity fest.

“Sad” music is the best music. Who’s with me on this? I spent middle and high school listening almost exclusively to The Cure and Thom Yorke’s wounded-baby-bird voice, and now I can’t stop listening to Wit’s End. That moody theme music from Blade Runner sometimes appears in my dreams. Sure, I listen to all that punk, hip-hop, smiley indie garbage, and of course an embarrassing smidge of top 40, but nothing ever seems to beat putting on the headphones for a wallowing self-pity fest, right?

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Why does this happen? Why would we want to be sad?

The fact that we get pleasure from any music, let alone sad music, is a complicated question in the first place. Valorie Salimpoor and a team of researchers published a great article last year in the journal Nature that showed the connection of music to the release of the all-powerful pleasure chemical dopamine in the brain. They argued that “intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry.”

Read the rest at Motherboard