Does Adele's music move you to tears? Scientists identify the bits in songs that make you cry



She romped home with six Grammy awards on Sunday night, three of them for her hit Rolling In The Deep.

Nevertheless it's Someone Like You that has pushed Adele to iconic status, thanks mainly to its power to reduce audiences to tears.

But what can explain the emotive effect of the south London girl's tear-jerking power ballad? Psychologists believe they have the answer.

Moved to tears: Adele cries as she accepts her Grammy for Album of the Year. But its usually her listeners who are the ones whose eyes are welling up

Researchers have long known that certain features of music are consistently able to elicit strong emotional responses from listeners.

The British psychologist John Sloboda identified some of these in a simple experiment conducted 20 years ago. He got music lovers to point out parts of songs which reliably gave them goose bumps or brought tears to their eyes.

Twenty tear-jerking passages were identified, and when Dr Sloboda analysed them he found 18 contained a musical device called an appoggiatura, a note which clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonance.

'This generates tension in the listener,' Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia told the Wall Street Journal. 'When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.'

It's at these moments of resolution that chills descend on listeners. When several occur next to each other it creates a cycle of tension and release, provoking an even stronger reaction.

That's when the tears start to flow. Someone Like You is, it turns out, peppered with ornamental notes similar to appoggiaturas.

Dr Guhn points out that Adele also slightly modulates her pitch at the end of long notes just before the accompaniment goes to a new harmony, further winding the spring.

Powerful: Adele performs on stage at the Grammy Awards. Her power ballad Someone Like You contains all the elements to send tingles down your spine

Alongside Dr Marcel Zentner, Dr Guhn co-wrote a 2007 study on the emotive effects of music where they identified several musical excerpts which reliably produce chills. They then measured listeners' physiological reactions, including heart rate, sweating, and goose bumps.

According to the findings of their study, music is most likely to give listeners the tingles when it contains surprises in volume, timbre and harmonic pattern.

Someone Like You is a classic example. It begins with a soft, repetitive pattern, as Adele keeps the notes within a narrow frequency range.

Then, when the chorus breaks, Adele's voice jumps an octave and belts out the notes with increasing volume. At the same time, the harmony shifts and the lyrics become more dramatic.

Depending on the context, the state of arousal is interpreted as positive or negative, happy or sad. Which leads to the next question. If Someone Like You makes listeners sad, why is it so popular?

A team of of neuroscientists at McGill University last year reported that emotionally intense music floods the brain's pleasure and reward centres with dopamine in the same way as food, sex and drugs.

Measuring listeners' responses, the team, led by Dr Robert Zatorre, found the number of goose bumps a song caused correlated with the amount of dopamine released - even when the song was very sad.

That suggests that the more emotive a song is - whether depressing or joyful - the more audiences crave it, just as they would crave anything which they are addicted to.

Based on the evidence of these studies, Michaeleen Doucleff, writing in the Journal, suggests Adele and her co-writer Dan Wilson have 'not only crafted a perfect tear-jerker but also stumbled upon a formula for commercial success'.