Composing music to match emotions

Music is all about emotions.

Have you recently listened to some calming music and suddenly had a sense of feeling relaxed?

Or perhaps you want to motivate yourself and find some energy from somewhere, so you listen to a fast, upbeat track and you are ready for anything.

Have you ever wondered why music has this effect on you? How do composers create their pieces of music to tap into the emotions of their listeners?

Thinking about how your musical compositions match your own emotions and the emotions of your listeners, is an important part of learning to be a composer.

Let's find out more with Lightning Jelly and Nina Simone!

Nina Simone was a very famous American singer, songwriter, pianist and civil rights activist.

Nina wrote and performed songs across many genres, such as jazz, blues and folks music.

She is most well known for her songs 'I Put a Spell On You' and 'Feeling Good'.

Her songs often addressed difficult issues of civil rights, social and racial injustice. The emotional content of her songs challenged audiences as a form of social protest.

Your brain's response to a song depends on lots of things, including your mood at the time.

Your individual response when listening to a song, is just as important as the emotions the singer and songwriter felt, when writing and performing the song.

Dynamics are a very good way of changing the mood of a piece of music. Many rock bands use quiet verses and very loud choruses to convey the emotion in their songs.

Having a slow or fast tempo can influence the emotion of a song. You might choose to slow down or speed up your composition, depending on how you want your listener to feel.

Instrumentation is also important. A song played slowly and quietly on a piano, will sound very different played quickly by loud guitars and drums.

Think about a song that you enjoy listening to.

Ask yourself:

• How does this song make me feel?
• Why does it make me feel this way?
• Is the composer or the artist trying to make me feel like this, or is it just a coincidence?
• What musical features in the song give me these emotions?

Like many things with music, there aren't right or wrong answers to these questions.

However, by exploring how music makes us feel, we can begin to understand how it works.

This will help us become better composers and listeners of music.