What emotion are you trying to convey?

This is something that I don’t really think much about in my music because I’ve mostly been writing music either purely for enjoyment or for self expression. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a useful question to ask.

When writing music it can be incredibly useful to ask yourself this question. What specific emotion do you want your song to convey? Maybe you just think it sounds cool and that’s it, but maybe you’re trying to write a piece of music that could work as background music during a love scene for example. That’s what I did when I was at Berklee studying film scoring a lot of the time.

We’d take a scene and re-score it. We’d re-compose the music and put our own take on the scene.

It’s difficult to convey one specific emotion if you’ve never done it before because you might end up writing something that’s a little too hopeful, or maybe not hopeful enough. Or maybe you write something that’s supposed to sound like a love theme, but it ends up sounding too melancholy. That happened to me a few times.

It can also be useful to flip the question as a listener. What specific emotion is being conveyed?

This one can be a little difficult to do, again if you haven’t ever done it.

Is it a melancholy theme or is it a sorrowful theme? The difficulty isn’t in deciding whether something sounds happy or sad to you, but rather in deciding what specific type of happy or sad it sounds.

Does it sound jubilant or triumphant?

Those are two positive emotions, and we might describe both of those songs as “happy”, but they’re very different emotions and would require very different musical ideas to convey them.

Give it a try next time you’re listening.

ISJ