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In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith distinguishes three types of passions: social passions, unsocial passions and selfish passions. This classification relies on their capacity to evoke sympathy. Social passions are the most apt to arouse a sympathetic echo in their observers. This article tries to answer the question why A. Smith describes social passions as « naturally musical ». In 17th and 18th centuries sympathy is often mentioned in connection with musical topics, but the link established by A. Smith is more profound. In fact, sympathy reveals an esthetic and moral quality of « convenient », vs « discordant », passions. These passions, that produce a superimposition of agreeable echoes in the same way as a fundamental tone is expanded in a series of harmonics, can therefore be easily imitated musically, especially vocally. Indeed, in his aesthetics, Smith declares that the beauty of imitative arts does not rely on an exact resemblance but on the disparity between « the object imitating, and the object imitated ».