Empathy

The emotional significance of music has been a topic of scholarship for centuries. For example, Plato and Aristotle thought that happy music tends to make people happy and sad music tends to make people sad. But is this plausible? Notwithstanding that musical sounds can arouse human emotions, what, specifically, is there to be happy or sad about/in musical sounds alone? In reality, nothing of human consequence has happened to cause one to feel happy or sad. Or has it? Part of the answer to this query lies in understanding the connection between music and empathy.

The word empathy did not emerge in the English language until the early 1900s. Nevertheless, though the concept of empathy is recent, it is extremely likely that empathy has been part of the human repertoire of emotions and dispositions since the earliest ancestor humans emerged from Africa. If not, what motivated and enabled human ancestors to live with each other in their communities for the shared purposes of growing, surviving, and reproducing? In other words, empathy is not only a feeling; it is a practical necessity and a “tool” for relating to others and making one's way in the world. And so is music. Music is a social practice that people make and listen to with and for others. Examining music through the lens of empathy, and vice versa, is one way of bringing the nature and values of empathy into sharper focus, because, for one thing, music and empathy are intersubjective and interpersonal processes. However, to understand these connections a little more deeply, empathy needs to be examined from additional perspectives.

The phenomenon and concept of empathy has puzzled philosophers and psychologists for centuries. Until recently, scholars have made little progress in understanding what empathy involves.