Moods and emotions can be expressed through music and art. Anger, for example, it can connect to aggressive music, warm colors and broken lines; the sadness, instead, it can recall poignant music, cold colors and curved features.
Emotions are immediate reactions to the stimuli we receive from the outside, but also to thoughts that arise within us. They can be positive or negative: joy, hope, anger, fear, sadness etc. Moods, on the other hand, are more emotional tendencies or less lasting which are often linked to our personality: euphoria, enthusiasm, melancholy, aversion, anxiety.
These emotional aspects are present and pervade all the manifestations of human art.
The perception of rhythm and its connection with specific emotions are primordial and characteristic aspects of the human being. A mother’s heart rate affects the mood of the baby she holds hugged to her chest, and who hears her heart. The baby is reassured by normal, or slightly slower, frequencies, which tell him that the mother is well and calm, or even sleeping, and everything is fine. Higher frequencies indicate that the mother is alert, or anxious, and the baby responds with similar activation. This emotional response to the frequency of rhythmic sounds, particularly when they resemble the sound of heartbeats such as drums, double bass and electric bass, we carry with us throughout our lives.
The emotional effects of notes, however, are a little more complicated, and to try to understand them we must first ask ourselves why we find certain notes pleasant and catchy played together (harmony, “chords”) or one after the other (melody), and certain others unpleasant or sad. The sounds that instinctively cause us fear are noises produced in nature by potentially dangerous events such as earthquakes, landslides, lightning, explosions. All these are sounds that contain a large number of harmonics, notes that are in any frequency relationship with each other, therefore also in very complex and disordered relationships. It is natural to hypothesize that our nervous system is predisposed to consider sounds of this type alarming, unpleasant, to be avoided and that, by contrast, it finds pleasant sounds that are in simple relationships with each other or whose harmonics are simple or in any case well characterized, not chaotic, which in my opinion are capable of eliciting specific emotions.
Now I want to make an example with one of the most famous classical song ever created “the four season” by Vivaldi. The rapid progressions, the crescendo dynamics, the sense of anticipation aroused by listening can arouse emotions of anxiety and restlessness in the listener, also acting on physiological parameters. In fact, as some studies have shown, the rhythm of music is able to affect pulmonary ventilation, breathing frequency, heart rate, blood pressure and the speed of blood flow in the brain.
Another example can be
The Requiem Mass in D minor, that is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last composition. It represents a moment of extreme dramatic inspiration. Through short phrases, ascending and descending quavers on the violins and choral text, Mozart conveys desperation, creating an effect of barely restrained tears and humble and devoted prayer.
Sources
https://www.percussionplay.com/the-expression-of-emotion-in-music/#:~:text=Listening%20To%20and%20Making%20Music,the%20feeling%20they’re%20experiencing.