Researchers had already discovered that music can make us feel touched in an emotionally positive way, perhaps because we feel empathy or appreciate art.
Now, a study has found that we may simply find pleasure in feeling the sadness that music evokes.
Jonna K. Vuoskoski
"I suppose part of being human is that we just can't deal with the idea that there's something strangely pleasurable about negative emotion," says Emery Schubert from the University of New South Wales in Australia.
"But what about people who simply say, 'Well, the reason I really like this music is because it makes me sad'? Who's to say they're wrong?"
Schubert asked 50 people - mostly music students - to think of a piece of music they liked but found sad, including compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven and Taylor Swift.
According to NewScientist, they then answered an online questionnaire about the emotions they felt when listening to that piece.
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The participants were then asked to imagine that the sadness of the music they had selected could be eliminated in some way. In general, the participants said that this made them enjoy the music less, with 82% saying that the sadness contributed to their enjoyment.
In another part of the experiment, Schubert asked another 53 people - again, mostly music students - to identify a song they liked and found "moving".
These participants reported feeling sad while listening to the music, even though they enjoyed it.
It is possible that the participants are mixing the emotions of being "sad" and "moved", thus experiencing a direct link between sadness and general pleasure, says Schubert.
But Jonna Vuoskoski, from the University of Oslo in Norway, says that the sadness expressed by an artist can trigger the feeling of being moved if the listener feels empathy.
People can also relate to the lyrics of sad songs, which helps them feel less alone in what they are going through and prevents them from repressing their emotions.
Vuoskoski also wonders if the participants could really imagine removing the sadness from a song without also removing the feeling of emotion. "So it's not surprising that they imagined that they were enjoying the music less," he says.
Tuomas Eerola, from Durham University in the UK, doubts that people can "remove" the sadness from what is generally considered to be a sad song.
"The whole study is based on the assumption that listeners are able to perfectly dissect their emotional causes in relation to the music they like," says Eerola, who sometimes collaborates with Schubert, but was not involved in this research.
