I am a composer and I have composed a lot of emotional music. When writing music you need to be emotional and it's not very easy for everyone, so I have compiled the theory behind emotions to this article so that you can understand emotional music and hopefully apply that to your music.
It's not just about being emotional, theory of music also plays a part.
Tip #1 - Different keys have different emotions
As said in the title different keys have different emotions. You've probably known about major being happy and minor being sad for now. But when it comes to every key the music composed can get other emotions and also extreme emotions when you change the keys.
C: innocence, happiness with a spiritual feeling.
Cm: innocence, sadness, heartbroken and evokes yearning.
C#m: passionate and deep. It evokes sorrow, grief, despair, wailing, and self-punishment.
Db: depressive masked by an air of happiness. Evokes grief and despair.
D: triumphant and victorious. It feels like War marches or holiday songs.
Dm: serious and melancholic. It evokes concern and contemplation.
D#m: deep and anxious. It evokes distress, terror, darkness, and hesitation.
Eb: it evokes cruelty, but also devoted love, openness, and intimacy.
E: it evokes dissatisfaction, a ready-to-fight feeling, but also joy and delight.
Em: it feels like restless love, grief, and mournfulness.
F: it can evoke optimism and the will to explode.
Fm: dark and funereal. It evokes deepest depression, death, loss, and misery.
F#: ****it is perfect to portrait a **** conquest story. It evokes relief, triumph, victory, and clarity.
F#m: this key is full of resentment, discontentment, and lamentation, but with a little hope.
G: happy but serious, idyllic, and poetic. It evokes calm, satisfaction, tenderness, gratitude and peace.
Gm: it feels like discontent, uneasiness, failure, concern, and struggling.
Ab: it evokes death, eternity, judgment, darkness.
Abm: related to wailing, suffocation, lamentation, struggle, and negativity.
A: ****induces joy, reciprocated love, satisfaction, optimistic, trust, and spirituality.
Am: sad but tender.
Bb: joyful and cheerful. It evokes love, consciousness, hope, optimism, and peace.
Bbm: evokes the night, darkness, blasphemy, death, and destiny.
B: evokes **** strength, wildness, passion, jealousy, fury, negativity, and the will to fight.
Bm: ****it evokes solitude, melancholy, patience, calm, submission, and acceptance.In a song, not all chords of the key are usually used. So, how can we choose the chords of our progression to evoke a particular emotion?
Tip #2 - Sadness Capacity changes from instrument to instrument
According to an experiment conducted on sadness and instruments related they have found that some instruments are good at sadness than others.
Huron, David & Anderson, Neesha & Shanahan, Daniel. (2014). “You Can’t Play a Sad Song on the Banjo:” Acoustic Factors in the Judgment of Instrument Capacity to Convey Sadness. Empirical Musicology Review. 9. 29. 10.18061/emr.v9i1.4085.
Accordingly,
Tip #3 - Tempo makes a big difference
A slow tempo is always used to evoke sadness, serenity and relaxation as well, and a fast tempo evokes happiness, excitment, anger and een fear. Always compare your heartbeat to the tempo and the emotion.
Tip #4 - Use noises and other sounds in your music
There are soft sounds, lush sounds, as well as different type of noises namely brown noise, white noise, pink noise etc that you can use according to your emotion.
Tip #5 - Theory knowledge plays a part
Lastly, knowing just a little bit of theory and chord progressions will get you a long way.I will be creating courses on that so stay tuned.
Those are my 5 best tips for any composer...
So those are my 5 best tips for any composer and if you found this arrticle helpful please be kind enough to leave a comment below this post.
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