Why sad songs can fall on deaf ears in the East

THE mournful notes of Chopin’s Funeral March may be enough to reduce some of us to tears – but it falls on deaf ears outside Western cultures, a study reveals.

Researchers found that music in minor keys did not invoke sadness in the participants who lived in the East.

The team at Durham University said this was because they had not grown up with European classical music.

Dr George athanasopoulos, a junior research fellow at the university’s department of music who conducted the study, said: ‘When we listen to tunes, we rely heavily on our memory for the body of music we’ve heard all our lives.

‘Our research shows that outside of Western cultural circles the emotional connotations between happy and sad and major and minor music can be quite different.’

a sample of 169 participants from the UK and from the Kalash and Khow tribes in remote north-west Pakistan listened to a wide selection of music. The researchers found that harmony alone, rather than other emotional cues such as tempo, could colour the response of a listener, but only if it tapped into cultural connotations.

They also found that acoustic roughness, which typically renders sounds unattractive to Western ears, resulted in the perception of anger regardless of culture.

Previously a link had only been demonstrated between roughness and anger in speech perception in Western listeners.

The researchers, whose work is published in the journal PLOS One, added that it was remarkable to note the impact of acoustic roughness across cultures in both speech and music.