Searching for a Song's Emotional Arc By
Susan Rogers
June 9, 2023
Susan Rogers
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
-Albert Einstein
In theory, crafting a record must involve some attention paid to the record's emotional arc. This point is frequently emphasized in Berklee's music production and engineering classes. It seems logical that record makers should, after all, consider how their work might make someone feel. Yet the perspective is faulty. No amount of craft can inject emotion into a record because, well, records don't have feelings.
A large body of evidence from behavioral, physiological, and neuroimaging studies shows that experiencing an emotional response while record-listening is contingent on a number of factors: internal, such as attention, motive, and preferences; and external, such as context and cultural norms. To complicate matters, time has a way of reweighting each factor as our lives and our world change.
Musical events that cause chills are often those that parallel the sound of a child or animal in distress.
Our music-loving brains begin forming in utero. By the time we reach adulthood, the neural assemblies tasked with processing melody, lyrics, rhythm, timbre, and music's aesthetic features such as novelty, abstraction, and authenticity, have conspired with the dopaminergic reward system to shape our unique listener profile. Your profile is similar to your taste in food and fashion; you know what you like because-through trial, success, and error-you have discovered what works for you.
Music's primary job is to serve some purpose for a listener. Because we have a variety of needs, we typically enjoy a variety of music genres. Some of your favorite records are cherished for their lyrics, others for their rhythms or melodic changes. Some cause you to feel nostalgic while others launch your dreams of the future. No record maker can build in such responses or predict what listeners will consider to be the perfect part or performance gesture. What record makers can do is capitalize on ancient brain circuitry that ignites the sympathetic nervous system: the chill response.
When Whitney Houston hits a high note with an extraordinary dose of power to spare, or when Jonny Greenwood plunges into a guitar solo from the melodic high dive, the acoustic features of these sounds can trigger goosebumps. Also known by its technical term-piloerection-the chill response has a social origin. Musical events that cause chills are often those that parallel the sound of a child or animal in distress.
Like many primates, we humans are quick to recognize the contact calls of our own offspring, and we can ignore nonemergency calls that don't concern us. Distress calls, on the other hand, are a special class of signal, the kind that generates an innate response. This privileged signal causes our auditory, motor, and emotion systems to alert the entire nervous system that something needs immediate attention. Distress-like sounds in music can trigger a chill.
In theory and in practice, composers and record makers employ unexpected chord changes, arousing timbres, and emblems of emotional contagion to guide a listener's ear toward those musical treats sprinkled throughout the composition. Yet the moment a record, as an acoustic pressure wave, excites the listener's eardrums, it elicits a unique one-of-a-kind mental event. Examining the emotional arcs of listeners is far more complicated than the theoretical parsing of a record's emotional arc. Getting in touch with our own listener profiles and teaching students how to do the same helps us align both the theory and the practice of music.
Susan Rogers wrote and teaches the new Berklee Online course Music and Neuroscience and is the author of This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You (W. W. Norton & Co.).
Related Categories
Berklee Today
Most Popular
Image by Libby Danforth
Viral TikTok Song If I Were a Fish Is a Joyous Call for Acceptance Berklee alum Corrine Savage, who performs as corook, wrote the song with their partner as a way to cope with feeling unaccepted by society for being different.
Latest
Image courtesy of Sam Banister
Student Spotlight: Sam Banister The music therapy major unpacks his Berklee summer program experience, shares insights about the psychology of music, and picks songs from Sons of Kemet, Kamasi Washington, and more.
Charlie Rosen 12 won his second Tony Award for Best Orchestrations, this one for Some Like It Hot.
Image by Nessie Nankivell
Three Alumni from Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory Win Tony Awards Conservatory alumni Ben Simpson and Mike Mosallam won for Best Revival of a Musical, while College alum Charlie Rosen '12 won his second Tony for Best Orchestrations.
Susan Rogers
Searching for a Song's Emotional Arc
Read All
Subscribe The latest sounds, stories, and ideas, sent to your inbox weekly.
North America Stories
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
Searching for a Song's Emotional Arc By
