In what could be the loosest connecting of a theory to a scientific finding since intelligent design, an Australian scientist claims to have discovered the secret to daggy music.
The "Differential Affect Gap" or "DAG" factor (yes, I'm serious) is the difference between a song's emotion and the emotion the listener is feeling at the time.The study was undertaken by Emery Schubert, a music psychologist (yes, apparently they do exist) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
"If a piece of music is thought to be daggy or not cool, generally it seems that those pieces will be rated as expressing too much emotion, inappropriately too much emotion for that listener," Dr. Schubert said.
"What I did for each of these scales, I took the difference between the rating for the expressed emotion and the rating for the felt emotion and what I found was that was actually a reasonably good predictor of preference, and this is a new finding."
"The smaller the gap between people's 'felt' emotion and music's 'expressed' emotion, the more they enjoy it."
Now I love a power ballad as much as the next guy, but I dare you to admit Foreigner's 'I Want To Know What Love Is' or Def Leppard's 'Love Bites' isn't daggy as all hell. It's all in the emotion people!
PS Yes, I am absolutely 100% serious that the DAG factor is the technical scientific term for this new measurement.
