Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, assistant professor of music in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, replies:

Music intertwines with memory in fascinating ways. One of the clearest examples of the special relationship between music and memory is the "they're playing our song" phenomenon, whereby background music that incidentally accompanied an emotional event - the song on the radio when you first met your spouse, for example - can come to seem permanently imbued with the full impact of that moment. "Danny Boy" carries poignant associations in part because it is so often played at memorial services and other occasions of remembrance.

But the connections between music and emotion are not purely incidental. Certain structural elements have been shown to elicit tears more than others. One example is sequences, episodes in which the same musical material is restated at different pitch levels. "Danny Boy" features a series of subtle ascending and descending gestures, and these little arcs can seem to be evocative of a bittersweet combination of tenderness and sorrow. Moreover, performers stretch and bend the notes of "Danny Boy" in ways that seem to trigger ascriptions of agency and elicit empathetic projection.

Music stirs emotional reactions in a very different way from language - consider the reduction in impact if the words of "Danny Boy" were read rather than sung - making it a compelling object of study. Researchers have only recently begun looking to music to understand broader questions about emotion and communication. But the fact that the power of Danny Boy rests on its sequence of pitches and rhythms, not just on its sequence of words, suggests that researchers interested in the cognitive science of emotion have a lot to learn from the relatively understudied domain of music.

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