The Globe and Mail - The top 10 songs that make men cry
…And music makes men weep – some songs obviously more than others. A recent British survey suggested R.E.M.’s empathetic 1993 single Everybody Hurts makes men the mistiest, with Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah following second and third, respectively…
“You can hear a song and recognize the sadness, without feeling sad yourself,” says Daniel Levitin, the author of the bestselling This Is Your Brain on Music and professor of psychology and behavioural neuroscience at Montreal’s Ď㽶ĘÓƵ. “It’s a cognitive appraisal of the song.”
Levitin, who has extensively studied the effects of emotional music, suggests a more accurate way to test the music that moves men: “I would bring people into the laboratory and play the music, and measure the tears they produce,” he says simply. “I use experimental approaches whenever I can.”
The American-born musician and neuroscientist was in Toronto on Wednesday, joining conductor Edwin Outwater and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony for an interactive concert at Koerner Hall.
The event, which attempted to demystify classical music and involved the live polling of an audience’s emotional reaction to Beethoven’s commanding Fifth Symphony, also took place on Thursday and Friday at the Conrad Centre in Kitchener, Ont.
