Researchers suggest that we spend around 40% of our working time listening to music both actively and passively and it affects our emotions and feeling around 60% of the time we spend listening to it. That’s why happy music is more likely you put you in a good mood and sad music is likely help you spiral down into an abyss of despair.
When we compare the human today with our cavemen ancestors we have a couple of things in common when it comes to music. It is our ability to create and respond to music, dance or move to the beast of time. Babies can hear the mother’s heart beat inside the womb. Newborns get soothed by their mother’s heartbeat and voice. We grow up with sound and music all around.It’s simply a part of us. That’s why children love to clap their hands or bang on the table with a spoon pretending to be drumming. As you can see we learn to respond to rhythm from at a very early stage of our lives.
Prefer for sounds and music changes over time. Have you ever heard a song that sent chills down your spine? This experience of chills in connected to the reward system in our brain. Music which you find pleasurable can activate the same areas in your brain like drugs or alcohol. Studies show that the right hemisphere of the brain is preferentially active when we are listening to a song we find emotional. This side of the brain is activated even when we are just imaging the music. Music is even used as type of therapy and has even proven successful in treating clinical depression and decreasing of seizures.
Music can be used in deliberately regulating your emotions. If we steer our emotional state by listening to certain type of music then why not just play happy music all the time? Different people prefer kinds of music and more importantly react different to specific songs. So, while classical music might be relaxing for one person, another person might find it annoying. The best way to use music as a tool for increasing the happiness levels in your life is to find out what works for you. Just think which songs makes you smile.
Music has been reported to evoke the full range of human emotion from sad, nostalgic, and tense, to happy, relaxed, calm and joyous. Neuroimaging studies have shown that music can activate the brain structures that are part of the limbic system like the amygdala and the hippocampus as well as the pathways that transmit dopamine. The relationship between music listening and the dopaminergic pathway is also behind the chills.
However, we don’t always listen to music to be moved. Sometimes people use music for other effects like to concentrate or do better in a demanding cognitive task. It is suspected that many cognitive benefits people experience from music listening actually stem from its effects on emotions because positive affect can improve cognitive performance. So even though you might not be selecting for music that induces the chills effect but something to help you get stuff done. The way that music strums your emotions may still be helpful.
Many mechanisms and principles were brought up to explain the mechanism behind music-evoked emotions. For instance, the role of memories in music-evoked emotion is quite a familiar to most people. Many people have break-up song-pieces they listen during emotional time and that can instantly bring on the emotional state experienced during the break-up event at a late time.
Humans are one of the extremely few species that can synchronize their body movement to music. Brain imaging studies have shown that the motor areas of the brain are active during passive listening to musical rhythms without any movement. It has said that music prepares people to movement. Aforementioned human mirror neuron system could in fact also encode the movements in music like physical movements. Upward movement is typically related to experience like jumping for joy, this mirroring in the brain contribute to the recognition and experience of emotion conveyed by the music. It also seems that acoustic features of music as well as characteristic of physical movement maybe interpreted to represent specific emotions. Movement be it in musical or physical form is also important way of conveying emotions.
Listening to sad music might make a person always utterly despondent. Why is it then that sad music and the sad feeling that it evokes are still pleasurable experience for a listener? This is due to the fact that similar to the endorphins the body releases in response to physical pain, emotional pain results in the release of prolactin hormone causing feeling of gratification and relaxation. The greatest gifts of music lies in its capability to allow people to experience emotions without the burden of having to experience the life events that lead to them.
When two people interact, numerous mechanisms are at play that creates a connection between the individuals. Without knowing people often tend to mimic each other’s postures and speech styles during discussion. Emotions are contagious. Mimicking and contagion of emotions may rely in part on the putative human mirror neuron system. It is said that mirroring and resulting emotional contagion does not only happen only between people but also during music listening. For instance, music could be perceived as sad as the commonalities it has with the prosody of sad speech. (low pitch, low volume, slow, dark timbre)
By: Anjalee Lunuwilage
Editorial board – SSS 2019