question: Why do music notes assembled in certain ways convey feelings and emotions to us?
comment: For me, it has to do with what mode it is in. For example, generally music in Ionian mode sounds “happier” than music in Aeolian mode. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always sounds that way. There is sad music in Ionian too. There are also chord progressions, rhythms, and a million other things. For me though, mode is the biggest indicator of mood in general. Edit: changed some mode names. Accidentally put in the wrong ones.
passages: It has been argued that the emotion experienced from a piece of music is a multiplicative function of structural features, performance features, listener features and contextual features of the piece, shown as:
  
  where:
  
  Section::::Conveying emotion through music.:Structural features.
   In modern editions of Western classical works, editors often seek to eliminate the potential for different interpretations of ornamental symbology, of which grace notes are a prime example, by converting a composer's original ornamental notation into literal notation, the interpretation of which is far less subject to variation. Most modern composers, although by no means all of them, have followed this trend in the "prima facie" notation of their works.
   Semantic information is clearly a key feature of language, but is this kind of information also an important aspect of music?
  
  Most music theorists posit at least four different aspects of musical meaning:
  
  BULLET::::1. meaning that emerges from a connection across different frames of reference suggested by common patterns or forms (sound patterns in terms of pitch, dynamics, tempo, timbre etc. that resemble features of objects like rushing water, for example)
  
  BULLET::::2. meaning that arises from the suggestion of a particular mood
  
  BULLET::::3. meaning that results from extra-musical associations (national anthem, for example)
   Section::::Types.:Music.
  
  In the philosophy of music, scholars have argued whether instrumental music such as symphonies are simply abstract arrangements and patterns of musical pitches ("absolute music"), or whether instrumental music depicts emotional tableaux and moods ("program music"). Despite the assertions of philosophers advocating the "absolute music" argument, the typical symphony-goer does interpret the notes and chords of the orchestra emotionally; the opening of a Romantic-era symphony, in which minor chords thunder over low bass notes is often interpreted by layman listeners as an expression of sadness in music.
   Meaning seems to be our hunger but we should still try to taste our food. I wanted to see if I could blur the line between speaking and singing - life and art? - and write music based on these accidental melodies. So I had some musician friends play, as close as they could, these neighbourhood melodies on different instruments (Mrs. Morris on the tenor saxophone, Marisa on the harp, my daughter Ondine on the violin, etc.) and then I arranged them as though they were songs.
  
  –Charles Spearin, on "The Happiness Project"
  
  Section::::Guest appearances.
   BULLET::::- Ralph Vaughan Williams quoted the theme from the Epilogue of the third movement of Arnold Bax's Symphony No. 3 in his Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra.
  
  BULLET::::- Heitor Villa-Lobos quoted "Yara", a schottische composed in 1896 by , in his "Chôros No. 10" (1926), as well as the text added in 1907 by , from which Villa-Lobos took the subtitle of his work, "Rasga o coração" (It Rends Your heart").
   The last aspect to examine is the abstractness of linguistic syntax and its correlate in music. There are two contradicting points of views. The first one claims that the foundation for musical scales and for the existence of a tonal centre in music can be seen in the physical basis of overtone series or in the psychoacoustic properties of chord in tonal music respectively. But in recent time there is strong evidence for the second point of view that syntax reflects abstract cognitive relationships.
   Musical semantics
  
  Music semantics refers to the ability of music to convey semantic meaning. Semantics are a key feature of language, and whether music shares some of the same ability to prime and convey meaning has been the subject of recent study.
  
  Section::::Evolutionary antecedents.
   Many aspects of language and musical melodies are processed by the same brain areas. In 2006, Brown, Martinez and Parsons found that listening to a melody or a sentence resulted in activation of many of the same areas including the primary motor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the Brocas area, anterior insula, the primary audio cortex, the thalamus, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum.
   Expression on instruments can be closely related to the role of the breath in singing, and the voice's natural ability to express feelings, sentiment and deep emotions. Whether these can somehow be categorized is perhaps the realm of academics, who view expression as an element of musical performance that embodies a consistently recognizable emotion, ideally causing a sympathetic emotional response in its listeners. The emotional content of musical expression is distinct from the emotional content of specific sounds (e.g., a startlingly-loud 'bang') and of learned associations (e.g., a national anthem), but can rarely be completely separated from its context.
   Away with harmony as the cement of my architecture!
  
  Harmony is expression and nothing more.
  
  Away with pathos!
  
  Away with 24 pound protracted scores!
  
  My music must be short.
  
  Lean! In two notes, not built, but "expressed".
  
  And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment.
  
  That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion.
  
  Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way.
   Section::::Conveying emotion through music.:Contextual features.
  
  Contextual features are aspects of the performance such as the location and the particular occasion for the performance (i.e., funeral, wedding, dance).
  
  These different factors influence expressed emotion at different magnitudes, and their effects are compounded by one another. Thus, experienced emotion is felt to a stronger degree if more factors are present. The order the factors are listed within the model denotes how much weight in the equation they carry. For this reason, the bulk of research has been done in structural features and listener features.
  
  Section::::Conveying emotion through music.:Contextual features.:Conflicting cues.
   Many techniques are used to analyze music. Metaphor and figurative description may be a part of analysis, and a metaphor used to describe pieces, "reifies their features and relations in a particularly pungent and insightful way: it makes sense of them in ways not formerly possible." Even absolute music may be viewed as a, "metaphor for the universe," or nature as, "perfect form" ( cited in ).
  
  Section::::Techniques.:Discretization.
   Section::::Techniques.:Composition.
  
  Analysis often displays a compositional impulse while compositions often "display an "analytical" impulse" but "though intertextual analyses often succeed through simple verbal description there are good reasons to literally compose the proposed connections. We actually "hear" how these songs [different musical settings of Goethe's "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt"] resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another [...] in a way, the music speaks for itself" . This analytic bent is obvious in recent trends in popular music including the mash-ups of various songs [see ].
  
  Section::::Analytical situations.
   The language theories contribute to the concept that in order to conceive the structure of a sentence, resources are consumed. If the conception of a this structure is difficult due to the fact that distant words belong to each other or an expected structure of the sentence is violated, more resources, namely the ones for activating low-activation items, are consumed.
   BULLET::::- "Constraint 17": A reductionally organized pitch space is needed to express the steps and skips by which cognitive distance is measured and to express degrees of melodic completeness.
  
  BULLET::::- [completedness resembles implication-realization theory (Meyer, 1973 and Narmour, 1977), the "Zug", "Urlinie", and "Bassbrechung" (Schenker).]
   One of the most important aspects of an advertisement's music is the "musical fit", or the degree of congruity between cues in the ad and song content. Advertisements and music can be congruous or incongruous for both lyrical and instrumental music. The timbre, tempo, lyrics, genre, mood, as well as any positive or negative associations elicited by certain music should "fit" the nature of the advertisement and product.
  
  Section::::Applied research areas.:Music in society.:Music and productivity.
   After each interview I would listen back to the recording for moments that were interesting in both meaning and melody. By meaning I mean the thoughts expressed, by melody I mean the cadence and inflection that give the voice a sing-song quality. It has always been interesting to me how we use sounds to convey concepts. Normally, we don’t pay any attention to the movement of our lips and tongue, and the rising and falling of our voices as we toss our thoughts back and forth to each other. We just talk and listen. The only time we pay attention to these qualities is in song. (Just as when we read we don’t pay attention to the curl and swing of the letters as though they were little drawings.)
   In 1785, Michel de Chabanon proposed that music was best understood as its own language, which then prompted an emotional response linked to but not limited by the musical expression. The same music could be associated with a wide range of emotional responses in the listener. Chabanon rejected the rhetorical approach to music, because he did not believe that there was a simple correspondence between musical characteristics and emotional affects. Much subsequent philosophy of music depended on Chabanon's views.
  
  Section::::Romantic era.
   The question concerning the kind of structure that features tension and resolution in music is linked very close to the relationship between order and meaning in music. Considering tension and resolution as one possible kind of meaning in music a hierarchical structure would imply that a change of order of musical elements would have an influence on the meaning of the music.
  
  Section::::Comparison to linguistic syntax.:Musical syntax.:Abstractness.
   Examples of musical quotations in classical music include:
  
  BULLET::::- Arnold Bax quoted a theme from Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan und Isolde" in his 1919 symphonic poem "Tintagel"
   The nature of musical expression has also been discussed at a theoretical level throughout of the history of classical music. One common view is that music both expresses and evokes emotion, forming a conduit for emotional communication between the musician and the audience. This view has been present through most of musical history, though it was most clearly expressed in musical romanticism. However, emotion's role in music has been challenged on occasion by those like Igor Stravinsky who see music as a pure art form and expression as an irrelevant distraction.
  
  Section::::Mimesis and rhetoric.
   BULLET::::- "Saudade", a Portuguese term, referring to an important element of fado; "saudade" is a mood, described as "a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably can not exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness, but an indolent dreaming wistfulness", with roots in "Islamic fatalism, sailors' loneliness, and the unrequited love which was the perennial theme of troubadour poetry"
   The Pythagorean Jean-Philippe Rameau followed a similar route when he established a connection between our perception of musical intervals and mathematics, and stated that according to him melody stems from harmony, through which it can "allow us to hear the numerical ratios enshrined within the universe".
  
  More recently, a large number of composers such as Harry Patch, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Ben Johnston, Wendy Carlos, David B. Doty and Robert Rich have employed a variety of microtonal scales in just intonation.
   After 1950, psychoanalytical musicology started to flourish. Within a few years several studies were published by the French André Michel (1951), Ernst Kris (1952), Anton Ehrenzweig (1953), Theodor Reik (1953), and others.
  
  Theodor Reik (1888–1969) was one of Freud’s earliest students. Reik took up the theme of the "haunting melody" in Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915–1917) to demonstrate, by contrast to Freud, that musical structure can represent feelings. In Reik's view, melody can convey emotion far better than words.
  