What Makes A Song Sad?

Where does sad music get its sadness from? And whom should you ask—a composer or a cognitive psychologist?
Scientific American recently reported on a Tufts University study that purportedly lends experimental reinforcement to the widely accepted, albeit vague, notion that the interval of a minor third (two pitches separated by one full tone and one semi-tone) conveys sadness, in speech as in song.

From the Scientific American article, by Ferris Jabr:

Almost everyone thinks "Greensleeves" is a sad song—but why? Apart from the melancholy lyrics, it's because the melody prominently features a musical construct called the minor third, which musicians have used to express sadness since at least the 17th century. The minor third's emotional sway is closely related to the popular idea that, at least for Western music, songs written in a major key (like "Happy Birthday") are generally upbeat, while those in a minor key (think of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby") tend towards the doleful.

While there might be a loose correlation—reinforced by our particular musical tradition—between minor scales and "sadness," it's a mistake to think that the moods evoked by music can be confidently reduced to tonality in and of itself. Indeed, those recalcitrant minor key songs that defy generalization about the link between tonality and mood may tell us something more important about music than the ones that conform.
Don't forget: The main reason "Happy Birthday" sounds "upbeat" and "Eleanor Rigby" sounds "doleful" is that their composers intended that they should. And because that's what their composers obviously intended, that's the way the songs are typically performed. But there's much more than tonality that goes into evoking those moods.
Take "Eleanor Rigby." It's actually a very bad example of the idea that minor key tonality is inherently sad. The best evidence for that view would be minor key songs that are stubbornly, ineffably sad despite other song elements—lyrics, arrangements, tempo, etc.—that are emotionally neutral or positive. The worst kind of song to adduce in support of minor key determinism is one in which any sadness intrinsic to the melody gets a lot of "help" from the other parts of the song. And "Eleanor Rigby," remember, was considered a breakthrough for the Beatles precisely because it was one of their first songs of this kind, one that combined song elements in mutually reinforcing ways to create a unified artistic whole...

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Daniel Wattenberg @'the Atlantic'

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