Ever had that moment at a local music festival when a song drops and everyone reacts differently? Some jump on the dance floor, others sway slowly, and someone in the corner just sits there shaking their head.
A study published Monday, November 3 in Scientific Reports shows that this is not just your imagination. Music affects every listener uniquely.
Researchers Abigail Wiafe, Sami Sieranoja, and Pasi Fränti looked at 400 one-minute song clips across pop, rock, classical, and electronic music. They asked listeners to tag the emotions each track sparked—from happy, dreamy, and energizing to annoying, anxious, or neutral.
ALSO READ: How Move Afrika is turning Kigali into a gateway for global music culture
What they found was a world of messy, unpredictable feelings.
Music does more than fill the room with sound. According to research, it can spark a surge of adrenaline, leaving listeners feeling energized and excited. It can even boost focus on mental tasks and foster a sense of connection with friends and loved ones.
Elements like tempo, rhythm, volume, pitch, familiarity, and how often a song is played all work together with our personal moods to stir deep emotions and help regulate how we feel.
This means music is not just an auditory experience. It is a living, bodily act that reflects intention, movement, and the moment.
ALSO READ: Music is important to our health, says music therapist Chris Nicholson
The emotions we feel from music are rarely simple. They intertwine in complex ways shaped by our individual experiences, cultural background, surroundings, and the context in which we listen.
Almost 40 percent of the songs tested fell into what researchers called the 'mixed feelings' zone, where reactions varied widely—one listener might feel energized by a pop track while another finds it's irritating.
A classical piece might relax some and amuse others. Even within electronic music, some songs sparked anxiety, while others left listeners completely neutral. The takeaway? Music’s emotional impact isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Genre gave some hints: classical leaned toward relaxation and light amusement, pop sparked happiness and energy, and electronic was more likely to produce anxious or neutral reactions. But within each genre, reactions still varied widely.
It turns out the line between "this track is perfect” and "ugh, skip” is thinner than we think.
Behind the science of how we feel music is a growing field known as music emotion recognition, or MER. It’s a branch of research that uses signal processing and machine learning to predict the emotions a song might evoke.
What started as an academic pursuit has quickly expanded into real-world use, shaping everything from therapy sessions and video games to streaming recommendations, automatic playlists, and even visual art generated from sound.
It’s the technology behind why your music app seems to know when you need an energy boost or a calm moment, blending data with the deeply human experience of emotion in music.
For anyone curating playlists, scoring local films, or planning the next big gig in Kigali’s growing music scene, this is a reminder: emotions from music are deeply personal. What thrills the crowd in one moment may leave another group cold.
Algorithms that tag songs as simply "happy” or "sad” are likely missing the nuance entirely.
The researchers suggest diving deeper into the music itself—tempo, key, timbre—to see which elements can reliably predict emotional impact. But even then, listeners’ unique backgrounds, moods, and life experiences make musical feelings wonderfully unpredictable.
So next time a song drops at a festival or your favourite café, pay attention. Someone will be dancing like mad, another will be lost in thought, and a few may just be politely bobbing their heads. That unpredictability is the magic of music, a reminder that every beat carries a different emotional fingerprint, and every listener leaves their own mark.