UC Berkeley researchers have surveyed more than 2,500 people in the United States and China about their emotional responses to these and thousands of other songs from genres including rock, folk, jazz, classical, marching band, experimental, and heavy metal.
The upshot? The subjective experience of music across cultures can be mapped within at least 13 overarching feelings: amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up.
“Imagine organizing a massively eclectic music library by emotion and capturing the combination of feelings associated with each track. That is essentially what our study has done,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in neuroscience.
The findings were published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We have rigorously documented the largest array of emotions that are universally felt through the language of music,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and Greater Good Science Center founding director.
Cowen and fellow researchers have translated the data into an interactive audio map where visitors can move their cursors to listen to any of thousands of music snippets to find out, among other things, if their emotional reactions match how people from different cultures respond to the music.
Potential applications for these research findings range from informing psychological and psychiatric therapies designed to evoke certain feelings to helping music streaming services like Spotify adjust their algorithms to satisfy their customers’ audio cravings or set the mood.
While both U.S. and Chinese study participants identified similar emotions—such as feeling fear when hearing the Jaws movie score—they differed on whether those emotions made them feel good or bad.“People from different cultures can agree that a song is angry, but can differ on whether that feeling is positive or negative,” said Cowen, noting that positive and negative values, known in psychology parlance as “valence,” are more culture-specific.
Across cultures, study participants mostly agreed on the general emotional characterizations of musical sounds, such as anger, joy, and annoyance. But their opinions varied on the level of “arousal,” which refers in the study to the degree of calmness or stimulation evoked by a piece of music.
Read this article to know how music impacts your brain.
One of the most prominent issues in the psychology of music is how music affects emotional experience (Juslin, 2019). Music can evoke powerful emotional responses such as chills and thrills in listeners.
Positive emotions dominate musical experiences. Pleasurable music may lead to the release of neurotransmitters associated with reward, such as dopamine. Listening to music is an uncomplicated way to alter mood or relieve stress. People use music in their everyday lives to regulate, enhance, and diminish undesirable emotional states (e.g., stress, fatigue). How does music listening produce emotions and pleasure in listeners?
1.Musical Pleasure
The enjoyment of music appears to involve the same pleasure center in the brain as other forms of pleasure, such as food, sex, and drugs. Evidence shows that an aesthetic stimulus, such as music, can naturally target the dopamine systems of the brain that are typically involved in highly reinforcing and addictive behaviors.
In one study, participants listened to their favorite songs after taking naltrexone. Naltrexone is a widely prescribed drug for treating addiction disorders. The researchers found that when study subjects took naltrexone, they reported that their favorite songs were no longer pleasurable (Malik et al., 2017). However, not everyone experiences intense emotional responses to music. Roughly 5% of the population does not experience chills. This incapacity to derive pleasure specifically from music has been called musical anhedonia.
2. Musical Anticipation
Music can be experienced as pleasurable both when it fulfills and violates expectations. The more unexpected the events in music, the more surprising is the musical experience (Gebauer & Kringelbach, 2012). We appreciate music that is less predictable and slightly more complex.
3. Refined Emotions
There is also an intellectual component to the appreciation for music. The dopamine systems do not work in isolation, and their influence will be largely dependent on their interaction with other regions of the brain. That is, our ability to enjoy music is the outcome of our human emotional brain, and its more recently evolved neocortex. Evidence shows that people who consistently respond emotionally to aesthetic musical stimuli possess stronger white matter connectivity between their auditory cortex and the areas associated with emotional processing, which means the two areas communicate efficiently (Sachs et al., 2016).
Look into this article if music can give you chills.
4. Memories
Memories are one of the important ways in which musical events evoke emotions. As the late physician, Oliver Sacks has noted, musical emotions and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared. Part of the reason for the durable power of music appears to be that listening to music engages many parts of the brain, triggering connections and creating associations.
5. Action Tendency
Music often creates strong action tendencies to move in coordination with the music (e.g., dancing, foot-tapping). Our internal rhythms (e.g., heart rate) speed up or slow down to become one with the music. We float and move with the music.
6. Emotional Mimicry
Music does not only evoke emotions at the individual level but also the interpersonal and intergroup levels. Listeners mirror their reactions to what the music expresses, such as sadness from sad music, or cheer from happy music. Similarly, ambient music affects shoppers’ and diners’ moods.
Will music affect your mood? Read this article to know if it does!
7. Consumer Behavior
Background music has a surprisingly strong influence on consumer behaviour. For example, one study (North, et al., 1999) exposed customers in a supermarket drinks section to either French music or German music. The results showed that French wine outsold German wine when French music was played, whereas German wine outsold French wine when German music was played.
8. Mood Regulation
People crave ‘escapism’ during uncertain times to avoid their woes and troubles. Music offers a resource for emotion regulation. People use music to achieve various goals, such as to energize, maintain focus on a task, and reduce boredom. For instance, sad music enables the listener to disengage from the distressing situations (breakup, death, etc.), and focus instead on the beauty of the music. Further, lyrics that resonate with the listener’s personal experience can give voice to feelings or experiences that one might not be able to express oneself.
9. Time Perception
Music is a powerful emotional stimulus that changes our relationship with time. Time does indeed seem to fly when listening to pleasant music. Music is therefore used in waiting rooms to reduce the subjective duration of time spent waiting and in supermarkets to encourage people to stay for longer and buy more (Droit-Volet, et al., 2013). Hearing pleasant music seems to divert attention away from time processing. Moreover, this attention-related shortening effect appears to be greater in the case of calm music with a slow tempo.
10. Identity Development
Music can be a powerful tool for identity development (Lidskog, 2016). Young people derive a sense of identity from music. For example, the movie ‘Blinded’ by the Light shows the power of Springsteen songs to speak to Javed’s experience on a personal level. The lyrics help him to find a voice he never knew he had, and the courage to follow his dreams, find love and assert him.
Check out this article to know more about music and emotions.
Written By - Mohammed Ghattas
Edited By - Sravanthi Cheerladinne
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