What is it about music that moves people? The lyrics we connect with? Although it may seem the obvious answer, because music is a form of poetry, but lyrics might not necessarily be the cause, according to Mark Changizi, who discussed how music affects our emotions in his article "Why Does Music Make Us Feel?". He recalled that as a young man, he loved to listen to French instrumental programs, even though he didn't speak a word of French. This is because "speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire". In an experiment conducted at the University of London, 30 subjects were showed a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. Then after listening to the snippets, the subjects were shown a photograph of a face. "Some people were shown a happy face – the person was smiling - while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely happy. "
Source: www.all-science-fair-projects.com
"The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown. A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are 'cross-modal', and can easily spread from sensory system to another." Music differs from plain speech in our brains, and has a more drastic effect on our mood, especially when it comes to influencing our decisions like it did with the 30 subjects of the experiment.
The author also explores the idea that maybe music is so nice to listen to because a lot of the time when we're listening to music, we are the most connected to it when we're watching it. What kept the author so into the show was not the meaningless French, but the young actress who sang it... "The show was a pleasure to watch because of the humans it showed, especially the exhibited expressions and behaviors." And it only makes sense, humans connect best with other humans. It's just our nature to form bonds with one another.
In my next blog post, I plan to further explore the emotional effect that certain genres of music have on certain people, as well as the physical benefits of music on our brains.
