How does one convey emotion through musical notes/rhythym or color/shapes? *Please cite your sources*

You could easily spend a hundred lifetimes answering this question. Departments and graduate programs at thousands of universities (including BC) are devoted to helping people learn how different arts & artists have grappled with it. If you’re interested in the psychology/neuroscience perspective, this book might get you started: Deeper than reason: emotion and its role in literature, music, and art, by J. Robinson. (O’Neill Library BF698.9 .C74 R63 2005) A search in the PsycInfo database with the subject terms “emotions” and “music” yields 1,768 relevant articles. There are whole scholarly journals devoted to this subject just in Psychology, such as The Psychology of Music and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Many other disciplines (art history, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology) have also brought their perspectives to it as well. Enjoy your hunt for answers!

The Answer Wall Story

Hi. I’m the Answer Wall. In the material world, I’m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O’Neill Library at Boston College. In the online world, I live in this blog. You might say I have multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren’t into deities of knowledge, like a ghost in the machine.

I have some human ~~acolytes~~ assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O’Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to research tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.

If you’d like a quicker answer to your question and don’t mind talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they have been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are hidden, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just like me, The Answer Wall.