Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker
From The Wall Street Journal:
On Sunday night, the British singer-songwriter Adele is expected to sweep the Grammys. Three of her six nominations are for her rollicking hit “Rolling in the Deep.” But it’s her ballad “Someone Like You” that has risen to near-iconic status recently, due in large part to its uncanny power to elicit tears and chills from listeners. The song is so famously sob-inducing that “Saturday Night Live” recently ran a skit in which a group of co-workers play the tune so they can all have a good cry together.
What explains the magic of Adele’s song? Though personal experience and culture play into individual reactions, researchers have found that certain features of music are consistently associated with producing strong emotions in listeners. Combined with heartfelt lyrics and a powerhouse voice, these structures can send reward signals to our brains that rival any other pleasure.
Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an “appoggiatura.”
An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. “This generates tension in the listener,” said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. “When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.”
Chills often descend on listeners at these moments of resolution. When several appoggiaturas occur next to each other in a melody, it generates a cycle of tension and release. This provokes an even stronger reaction, and that is when the tears start to flow.
. . . .
Chill-provoking passages, they found, shared at least four features. They began softly and then suddenly became loud. They included an abrupt entrance of a new “voice,” either a new instrument or harmony. And they often involved an expansion of the frequencies played. In one passage from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488), for instance, the violins jump up one octave to echo the melody. Finally, all the passages contained unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony. Music is most likely to tingle the spine, in short, when it includes surprises in volume, timbre and harmonic pattern.
“Someone Like You” is a textbook example. “The song begins with a soft, repetitive pattern,” said Dr. Guhn, while Adele keeps the notes within a narrow frequency range. The lyrics are wistful but restrained: “I heard that you’re settled down, that you found a girl and you’re married now.” This all sets up a sentimental and melancholy mood.
When the chorus enters, Adele’s voice jumps up an octave, and she belts out notes with increasing volume. The harmony shifts, and the lyrics become more dramatic: “Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead.”
. . . .
With “Someone Like You,” Adele and Mr. Wilson not only crafted a perfect tear-jerker but also stumbled upon a formula for commercial success: Unleash the tears and chills with small surprises, a smoky voice and soulful lyrics, and then sit back and let the dopamine keep us coming back for more.
Link to the rest, including musical examples, at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)
PG wonders if there are similar dopamine-inducing writing techniques.
Here’s Adele:
Here’s another example of the technique, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
As I read the article I immediately thought of Adagio for Strings, and was pleasantly surprised to see it included in the end! I listened to that song over and over during a 12-hour labor with my second child. It still takes me somewhere melancholy and joyful when I hear it.
If only someone could parse out a similar formula for writing romance novels…hmmm….
Lovely song about unrequited love. Didn’t make me cry though. Started the Adagio video, saw the twin towers and almost lost it. Had to turn it off.
As far as chills…the opening strains of Jimi Hendrix’ Purple Haze shoots them up my back every time.
PG, if you want that dopamine effect when writing, hurry over to thewritersstore.com or http://www.writersmind.com and order a CD called “Writer’s Mind.” It’s music/sounds to write by.
Thanks for the tip, Patricia.
Patricia, what a coincedence that you bring up music with binaural beats. I recently read a novel that included them as a plot point (The Memorist by MJ Rose), went and did some reading up on them, and downloaded some music with them (from http://www.seekingwithin.com, which also has one for the “writer brain”). I’m enjoying them very much.
Fascinating article.
Something like this dynamic exists in the fundamental structures of emotional narrative. I call it the ‘feint to the negative’. In fully orchestrated plot beats you have an example like the nightmarish ‘Potterville’ sequence in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It’s this bleak vision that makes the relief of the finale so overwhelming.
But the same device can also work in dialogue. Take the famous reconciliation scene at the end of “Jerry Maguire”. Jerry makes his case, in front of the “womens’ group” run by Dorothy Boyd’s sister, and if you re-watch the moment you’ll see that Dorothy’s first response is to interrupt him by saying “Shut up. Shut up.”
For a split second we think — ‘It’s hopeless, he’s too late, it’s over’ … though her earlier “I love the enemy” speech about men in general ought to have tipped us off. It’s into that plunging moment of despair that she drops the clarifying. redeeming truth: “You had me at hello.”
The line would b3e much less effective without the ‘feint to the negative’ that preceded it. If you start looking for this device, you’ll see it everywhere.
Because it works.
Romance writers (and likely everybody else for all I know) call this the “BBM” (Big Black Moment). This is the moment when all is lost. The gulf is too wide for the hero/heroine to cross. Or one of them is on the brink of doing something irrevocable (standing at the altar with another person). Then one of them takes a step (and it has to be a step that shows they’ve grown and changed from the person they were on the first page). And then there is the relief, the HEA (Happily Ever After). But the HEA has no value at all without that BBM first.
I think you’re onto something regarding the BBM, which typically happens at the height of a novel’s climax. Adele’s song, more than having the “appoggiatura,” is also a four chord song, which is representative of an inordinate amount of hit pop songs in the last fifty years. If you trace out the chord progression of a typical four chord song and compare it to a diagram of the three-act structure of screenwriting, you’ve just drawn the same curve. It’s almost like these kinds of structures in our art trigger some sort of hard-coded satisfaction center in our brains.
You know, there’s an anime series called “Majin Tantei Nōgami Neuro” where one of the characters is a pop star who became incredibly famous because she was scientifically able to break that stuff down and use it to her advantage. The character is introduced in episode 9. It had occurred to me that there was some scientific basis to the character’s abilities, I just didn’t realize that someone was actually doing that in real life yet.
It’s a really powerful series after you get past the first few episodes (and very dark in spite of the comedy). (Mentioned in case someone did want to see the show and start watching from the beginning rather than from that episode.)
A little off topic maybe, but I enjoy listening to the Buddha Machine while writing. Allows you to set up your own combination of zenny loops
http://www.zendesk.com/wall/
Music is used by a lot of writers to create mood. I do all the time. The words and music can be quite inspiring to create mood in scenes and evoke tears or anger in your characters that hopefully spill over to your readers. Music can be very powerful. You don’t need a special CD for that. Just listen to the music around you.
WOW! The analysis is right on – the somber and mellow tone with a powerful follow up – that does elicit tears.
P.G.
Ah, so that’s Adele. I’d heard the hype, but not the music.
I spent some time working as a repetiteur for WNO, years and years ago, so I’m familiar with the term appoggiatura. Oft used within the orchestra pit to describe when the Sopranos go off their meds and fly about adding flourishes that no one else could see in the fullest score.
Adele, oh dear. I hate to be contrarian, but the voice and the song do nothing for me, famously lachrymose during emotional musical phrases.
Not my cup of Nilgiri. Coarse, rough voice, flat a goodly amount of the time, sounded like she’d been gargling with house bricks.
brendan
Wow, really? You didn’t like it? I love her music. To each her/his own I suppose. =o)
Sorry Melissa,
Kinda why I was late on this post. I didn’t know whether yet again, to be the one swimming against the tide. Plus, I’d not heard her music prior to watching that Utube video present in the post.
It isn’t just because she is about as universally popular as one can get nowadays. I genuinely don’t like the voice, the way it is used, and the lyrics plod along.
I’m shutting up before the men in black come for me:)
brendan