You and I could be listening to the same song and feel completely different things. Or you could be listening to the same song on different occasions and feel different emotions each time. This technology operates on three levels: physiological, cognitive, and social. At a physiological level, changes in the basic acoustic features of sound—like tempo, timbre, or loudness—create measurable effects in our bodies. For example, a fast tempo or increasing loudness might increase our heart rate, while a scraping sound might cause us to tense up.
Because these sounds are made by concrete objects and events in our environment, through our knowledge of these associations they can lead to basic sensations of pleasure or displeasure, much like they do in our other senses. Next up is the cognitive level.
We all grow up hearing music particular to our culture, and through mere exposure to this music we develop a stylistic competency. This stylistic knowledge leads to us having certain expectations about how the music is most likely to unfold: what harmonies are most likely to accompany a particular melody, or what kind of a beat is typical for a song in this or that context.
Musicians will then play with those expectations to create moments that might feel like points of tension and relaxation in the music, leading to more complex emotions such as chills or awe or desire. Finally, there is the social level, which, I think, is the most important to how music elicits emotions. The world over, music almost always takes place in the context of some social activity that involves multiple participants.
In these situations, it colors our relationships with others by providing a structure for experiencing, if not exact, then at least very similar emotions. It does that mostly through a steady beat with which everyone can synchronize.
This, in turn, leads to positive feelings of social belonging and cooperation, which serve to strengthen the community and help it prosper. Do you have a burning question for Giz Asks? Email us at tipbox gizmodo. Oh no. The A.
Giz Asks. Though you may sense that music helps you feel better somehow, only recently has science begun to figure out why that is. Neuroscientists have discovered that listening to music heightens positive emotion through the reward centers of our brain, stimulating hits of dopamine that can make us feel good, or even elated. Listening to music also lights up other areas of the brain—in fact, almost no brain center is left untouched—suggesting more widespread effects and potential uses for music.
My choice to bring music into the birthing room was probably a good one. Research has shown that listening to music—at least music with a slow tempo and low pitch, without lyrics or loud instrumentation—can calm people down, even during highly stressful or painful events. Music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure, and decrease cortisol levels—all biological markers of stress.
In one study , researchers found that patients receiving surgery for hernia repair who listened to music after surgery experienced decreased plasma cortisol levels and required significantly less morphine to manage their pain.
In another study involving surgery patients, the stress reducing effects of music were more powerful than the effect of an orally-administered anxiolytic drug. Performing music, versus listening to music, may also have a calming effect. In studies with adult choir singers, singing the same piece of music tended to synch up their breathing and heart rates, producing a group-wide calming effect.
In a recent study , premature babies were exposed to different kinds of music—either lullabies sung by parents or instruments played by a music therapist—three times a week while recovering in a neonatal ICU. Music has a unique ability to help with pain management, as I found in my own experience with giving birth. In a study , sixty people diagnosed with fibromyalgia—a disease characterized by severe musculoskeletal pain—were randomly assigned to listen to music once a day over a four-week period.
In comparison to a control group, the group that listened to music experienced significant pain reduction and fewer depressive symptoms. In another recent study , patients undergoing spine surgery were instructed to listen to self-selected music on the evening before their surgery and until the second day after their surgery.
The researchers concluded that music is a robust analgesic whose properties are not due simply to expectation factors. Undergraduate students had their salivary IgA levels measured before and after 30 minutes of exposure to one of four conditions—listening to a tone click, a radio broadcast, a tape of soothing music, or silence.
Those students exposed to the soothing music had significantly greater increases in IgA than any of the other conditions, suggesting that exposure to music and not other sounds might improve innate immunity.
This all fed into AI, which helped the scientists crunch the numbers and understand more about why music makes us feel the way it does, by tying the three aspects neural, physiological and emotional, see above together. Using AI in this way has enabled scientists to reach a deeper understanding of what music does to the brain, the physical reactions this elicits, and what people identify to be their related emotional responses to these feelings. It also helps us understand how emotions are processed in the brain.
Click here to read the full study. Discover Music. See more Latest news. See more Latest videos. See more Latest pictures. Martha Argerich.
0コメント