Maybe sad songs have a similarly dual nature, thought Dr. Knobe and his former student, Tara Venkatesan, a cognitive scientist and operatic soprano. Certainly, research has found that our emotional response to music is multidimensional; you’re not just happy when you listen to a beautiful song, nor simply made sad by a sad one. In 2016, a survey of 363 listeners found that emotional responses to sad songs fell roughly into three categories: grief, including powerful negative feelings like anger, terror and despair; melancholia, a gentle sadness, longing or self-pity; and sweet sorrow, a pleasant pang of consolation or appreciation. (The researchers called their study “Fifty Shades of Blue.”)Given the layers of emotion and the imprecision of language, it’s perhaps no wonder that sad music lands as a paradox. “All our lives we’ve learned to map the relationships between our emotions and what we sound like,” said Tuomas Eerola, a musicologist at Durham University in England and a researcher on the “Fifty Shades” study.

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