♪ In the arms of the angels ♪ - We're all familiar with the saddest ad of all time.

But did you know that it helped raise over $30 million for the ASPCA?

(light music) Hey, Nahre.

- Hey, LA, what's up?

(laughter) - Okay, so, I was watching the sad animal commercial with Sarah McLachlan.

In the arms of an angel.

And it's the saddest thing ever.

How did they make that commercial so sad?

How did they get that effect?

I know it's complicated, but could you explain the basics of what makes a song sound sad to us?

- You know, I think that's just a topic where songwriters are really so far ahead of scientists that I feel hesitant to dispense any suggestions.

- So there are many techniques that songwriters use to make a song sound sad.

Although with all of these techniques, there are plenty of exceptions.

Stereotypically speaking, people associate major chords with happiness and minor chords with sadness.

But oftentimes this isn't the case.

For example, "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan is in the key of D flat major.

♪ In the arms of the angel ♪ ♪ Fly away from here.

♪ - On the other hand, there plenty of party anthems written in the minor key, and they definitely don't sound sad.

♪ Every day I'm shuffling ♪ ♪ Party rockers in the house tonight ♪ ♪ We just wanna see ya shake that ♪ - But still here are some ingredients that can help you write a sad song, including the use of minor chords.

Western music is generally based on the relationship between the following chords.

Here it is in C major.

(plays piano) Now in C minor.

(plays piano) Let's take the C minor chord in its most basic form.

It's comprised of three notes, C, E flat, and G. If I play a note that it is not part of this chord, it's called a non chord tone.

For example, F is not a part of these three notes.

(plays piano) Now if I play this F and I bring it back to one of the chord tones, in this case, E flat.

(plays piano) This movement is called an appoggiatura.

(plays piano) Applied to the previous chord progression, they sound like this.

(plays piano) Let's now add some more notes to create descending lines.

This type of movement downwards tends to create a sense of longing.

(plays piano) Repeated notes and figures can also create a more somber effect.

For example, let's compare this figure.

(plays piano) To this one.

(plays piano) Now, of course a lot of the emotional effects that come from these notes depend on the way that you play them.

(plays piano) - One of the main ingredients for a sad song would be a slow tempo.

- One thing people think about has to do with how we move and speak when we're sad.

And this idea that music kind of borrows or mimics those characteristics.

So if you think about what it would sound like if I was talking to you and I was really sad.

(laughter) Right?

I might slow down, my voice might get lower.

And so all these kinds of things that you might do musically when you're trying to express sadness.

- If you were to speed up the song "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan, it wouldn't sound very sad at all.

♪ In the arms of the angel fly away from here ♪ ♪ From this dark cold hotel room ♪ ♪ And the endlessness that you feel ♪ ♪ From this dark cold hotel room ♪ - So, "Angel" has a slow tempo, and there are some repeated notes and chord movements that create some tension, but overall I couldn't find that many sad song techniques used in the song.

So I wonder, is the commercial sad because of the song itself, or because of the visuals that go along with it?

- There are lots of studies in music perception that ask exactly that kind of question.

And the way they'll ask it is they'll play people just the song and then they'll show other people just the imagery, just the sad dogs.

And they'll show other people the whole commercial and get people to rate how sad it seems.

And usually the type of thing that research finds is that those visual images are really seeping into the sounds themselves.

You feel like you're responding to the music, but it's really quite impactfully shaped by the imagery you're seeing while you're listening.

And not only for that hearing, but much later.

So you could hear that song, you know, years later when you've forgotten the sad dogs, like, you don't remember overtly the dogs.

However, you know, they've left their mark, in the sense that the song continues to sound really devastating to you.

- Is there something that happens to the brain when you're processing these types of emotions, when you're listening to something sad?

- There's something called mirror neurons or the mirror system in the brain.

So these are basically neurons in the brain that are active both when are observing another person carrying out an action, such as grasping an apple, for example, and when ourselves are grasping an apple.

So basically these are neurons that help us understand the actions of others by actually stimulating them internally, so as if we ourselves were carrying out that same action.

This is also related to a phenomenon called emotional contagion.

For example, if we are speaking with someone who is sad, we start to mimic or imitate, mirror their sad facial expressions and their posture, and we might ourselves kind of start feeling sad as a result.

- And can this happen when you're listening to music?

Can you mirror what's happening in the music, and, say that I'm happy today and I listened to something that's sad.

Can I all of a sudden turn sad because I'm mirroring these emotions?

- We don't really have any solid evidence on it yet, but there are quite a lot of theoretical papers proposing that this is probably what might be happening while are listening to sad music as well, that our brain is engaged in this sort of mirroring.

- So, we thought it could be fun if we tried to make the music psychologist sad by putting all of our sad ingredients into one original song.

And of course, we couldn't forget the saddest ingredient of all: homeless animals.

(sad music) - First of all there's this sort of lamenting pattern, this very old kind of pattern that's like a sigh, right?

And there's also this kind of stasis, right, in that excerpt where it feels like you're kind of stuck and that's a very kind of common experience during sadness or depression, right?

That you can't kind of move beyond it.

I guess that's probably, you know, not as helpful to you, but it's very helpful to me, to like listen to, you know, what people do when they're writing sad music, sure.

♪ You're in the arms of the angels ♪ - Hi, I'm Nahre Sol.

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