Why does music unleash emotions?
From a simple, lonely melody to a complicated sonata, sometimes it feels like music can speak directly to your heart, in a language you don't know but understand your emotions. And that's because music is a language. The Language of Emotion. Music has structure, progression and syntax, just like language. The brain even processes the musical syntax using the same area it uses to process the language syntax. The next time you hear someone emotionally listen to the acoustic characteristics of their voice, they will mirror with the same emotion: fast, loud and high for excitement and happiness, slower and softer for melancholy.
Music Reading
So if music is a language, how does it convey its meaning? It has no words after all, right? At the most basic, physical level, loud and fast sounds arouse us more than slow silent sounds because our brain stem is tuned to pay attention to these types of sounds in the environment. Certain chords sound pleasant due to the way we divide tones into different pitches: harmonically simple, consonants, such as majors, are easy to do so, but harmonically complex chords, such as tritones, are harder to distinguish and so we find them dissonant. But these automatic brain mechanisms are just the beginning of how we read meaning in music.
