Emotional Depth

if we apply it to 'loveless' the 'emotion' is triggered by the new age keyboard whimsy and the echo on those vocals. the key to its appeal is that it is all combined with the guitar sonics.

''But then how do we tell whether an emotion is 'profound' in the first place.''

There was a NME issue where writers were asked to give the 100 saddest/heartbreaking albums of all time. Steven wells attacked this (very funny as ussual) and letters were received asking for a 100 happy albyums. there weren't many that people could think of.

By the above profound= sad emotions (this is very wrong, look at coldplay) (this seems to be close to the truth especially if your listening has been 'shaped' by listening to indie records, chart pop recs want to make you forget the struggle of daily life by putting a smile on your face, I bet the indie kid would say this is 'novelty' or not 'realistic').

My own answer would be that I think I listen to things which aren't very emotional. It's not that it is cold. it is neither. just ppl working through ideas and i'm listening to see whether they work or not.

Also, context. Context is everything in music. Songs I used to think were just throwaway indie-pop tunes suddenly become dictionary definitions of emotional depth when you've been dumped.

Albums are sad, singles are happy.

Singles or individual selections from an album?

Emotional depth does not necessarily equal sonic depth (whatever the heck that is) but, in my own ill-defined way it helps. But more to the point, I am thinking of overwhelming moments, and most often you can't predict them or imagine them, they just happen -- at least the first time you ever hear the song or a band in particular (Swans' "The Golden Boy Swallowed By the Sea" is a good example for me).

I'm almost filling up as I type, but I'm also well aware that to most people it's just a neat reggae/rocksteady instrumental.

I'm not sure what Dom is talking about (honesty, bleeding into an amp - yuk, falseness and shallowness). How can you tell? This brings to mind stuff like Neil Young, N. Drake and J. Buckley and that makes me feel queasy.

Ummmmm.....sometimes it's more like a feedback resonator - part of its general 'perceptual metaphor' function, like any other form of semi-representational 'art'.

The non-verbal codes are a matter of cultural association, physiology, and basic psychophysics - we are both wired and trained to 'know' that certain sounds mean sadness - and its the process of these codes becoming rendered personal and relevant or general and meaningless that can change their 'depth' and power: but because the process is both deeply localised (you've been dumped, you've made a set of 'Darling They're Playing Our Tune' connections) and also socially-contextualised (its been used in a film, or an advert, or its been Ibiza'd up and made into a hit single, or it's been placed into a commercial 'mood music' compilation) the same piece can be all over the place in terms of its effect on you at different times.
I suspect there's also just craft involved in terms of cliche avoidance in the use of the cultural codes - ArfArf's comment on the other thread also intrigued me because it seemed to imply a degree of connection between the degree of 'conscious' awareness involved in a composer's choice of sound and the extent to which they ended up with affective rather than effective output. Part of me can certainly agree with this - I made a point somewhere else about how odd it might be to meet someone for whom 'Lady In Red' is a deeply moving 'genuine' love song - but part of me also thinks that those kind of choices are an intrinsic part of music-making: being 'conscious' doesn't have to mean being 'false' - even in itself this may tie in to other simplistic notions we're embedded in about 'emotion' vs. 'thought'......*falls over*

Loveless is a good example actually (at least one that everyone has heard), there are sad, aching tugs, joyous tugs, and maybe even a few angry tugs, and all exert pressure on the fabric of the track, which makes for a deep emotional experience.

Whereas "Walking on Sunshine" and "Asleep" by The Smiths (is that the name of the last track on Louder than Bombs?) are not as deep emotionally -- both "merely" express a single feeling (quotes there because I like both tracks & they're great for what they are).

The problem is the relationship between 'abstraction', 'depth' and 'complexity'. I don't for instance hear any 'sadness' or 'happiness' in Loveless: I hear music which is expressive of something but I can't work out what - in the end it's too removed from my emotional register for me to get anything much out of it beyond the loveliness of the noises.

mabarosi is to me an emotionally powerful film, but what it's about — as much as anything — is that Big Emotion and Depression are intimately linked, as potential traps: and that living is sometimes about letting go of beauty or depth and walking away to where yr kid is playing with the dog

Taking the question a step on, its fairly obvious that (from a purely musical point of view - I'm discounting lyrical content for now), a sad song is fairly plainly a sad song, the same for a happy song or an angry song. Is it possible to replicate other emotions quite as clearly through music?

'Misery' = 'Deep & Meaningful' = 'Profound' has been the set up in our culture for a long time, for loads of reasons. There are doubtless people knocking around here who could spell out the history of this idea and its wherefores, but it seems to me there are some good possibilities why it's the case:
The very nature of 'happiness' & 'anger' is that they are much more transitory mental states - they feel like acceleration in a car. Misery can last a lot longer - it feels like grinding along at a constant speed. The psychological processes are quite different - we can be dissatisfied with a situation, have thwarted desires, for a lot longer than we can be happy at being satisfied, maybe because we are built (and trained) to want what we haven't got, not to appreciate what we have.
Misery is usually associated with a degree of interpretive 'understanding' of the world and 'sensitivity' to it in a way that happiness isn't - the Village Idiot is always depicted as a smiling simpleton, not a grumpy one - it's like that 'if you're not worried it's because you don't understand the situation' idea. And, of course, there is a degree of truth to it. We have also picked up the idea of 'how could anyone be a sensitive soul and possibly not be tormented by the world?'
Its a theme we all buy in to, to an extent, including in music: Joy Division's allure for many was that they were (inevitably) seen in this way.

Is it possible to replicate other emotions quite as clearly through music?
I think the complex emotions (eg guilt) end up being broken down into simpler components (eg regret, fear, dissonance) to achieve this, with the associated disadvantages - though since technology has moved us beyond having to use purely 'musical' instruments there might be some interesting developments. (I found I was thinking about soundtrack composers in relation to ArfArf's thought on the other 'something to say' thread, and this is related.)

Kilian - I totally agree: sometimes the pleasure of music is just about the perceptual processes of pattern detection, there certainly doesn't have to be any representational aspect - I find classic minimalism and mid-to-late baroque stuff good for that. Interesting to consider though the extent to which the idea of 'coldness' and absence of emotion is in itself a representational process - no sound without meaning? - something that used to be routinely ascribed as a criticism of electronic sound and music, before it became primarily a soundtrack for drug-gurning goodtime armwaving...
(Oops, back to the old dichotomy...and there's that social context again.)

So posit that innate qualities make something more likely to achive resonance -- these qualities being the simultaneous specificity and ambiguity of meaning -- then suppose further that all music is listened to for emotional reasons (this is not to say non-utilitarian but rather for emotional utility as an externalization and objectification of internal turmoil as transformed through social context) -- then doesn't the question amount to which forms of music make this most EXPLICIT? Or perhaps most near-explicit? (This is to say that something which declares "I will make you feel this way" succeeds less well than something which says "I am this thing you listen to because..." and THEN makes you feel some way.)

So then couldn't we argue that the class basis is really the level of analysis of art which tends to inure ppl. to that which they've gained the social facility to understand -- while ppl are UNIVERSALLY driven by a fear of being manipulated?

Aha! "authenticity" = "the ego"?