 Leaving behind the topic of how and why we respond emotionally to pure music, I turn to the question of why we seek out music that arouses “negative” emotions in us, such as sadness, assuming henceforth that we are in fact aroused to such emotions. (Since this problem is a close analog of the “paradox of tragedy”, some of the references below are to literature not explicitly about music, but the transposition of the arguments to music is not difficult to imagine. See also  imagination, section 5.4.  One obvious suggestion is that our negative emotional response is a price we are willing to pay for the benefits of engaging with the piece in question, such as “positive” emotional responses. While this sort of reasoning may play a role, it cannot be a complete solution, since for most pieces that elicit negative responses there are many others that elicit fewer or less intense negative responses for the same positive payoff. More sophisticated versions of the same suggestion argue for a more intimate link between the negative emotional response and the payoff. One such is that we cannot understand the work we are engaging with without understanding its expressiveness, which brings the negative response with it (Goodman 1968: 247–51; S. Davies 1994: 311–20; Goldman 1995: 68; Robinson 2005: 348–78). Closely related is the benefit of an aesthetic or artistic appreciation of the expressiveness responsible for the negative response.