Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
By Brooklyn Jang
Music is an integral part of our lives, as it is everywhere: live concerts and adding your favorite songs to the queue. But different genres of music influence our moods differently. Upbeat music provides an energy boost, while soothing genres help one stay calm and focused.
The first thing that happens when music enters the brain is the triggering of “pleasure centers” that release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes one feel happy. The response is so quick that the brain can even anticipate the most pleasurable peaks in familiar music and prime itself with an early domaine rush.
One of the reasons why music influences us is because it can cause emotional responses in listeners. This depends on factors such as its variation throughout the piece (dynamic, tempo, rhythm) and tonal intervals (scales).
In variation, the way that most of these factors convey emotions is through the imitation of one or more aspects of an emotional state. For example, if a composer wants listeners to experience feelings of excitement, the dynamic tends to be loud, with a faster tempo and animated rhythm. On the other hand, if the intention is a more somber emotion, the dynamic is generally soft, with a slower tempo and steadier rhythm.
Music with a fast tempo arouses the most positive emotional reactions with activation in the temporal and motor processing areas. Music with a medium tempo, which is close to humans’ physiological rhythms, arouses a strong emotional response by triggering the autonomic neural activation of the emotional processes. Music with a slow tempo receives the weakest emotional arousal.
Tonal intervals in music, however, are a bit different—the association arises through the imitation of scales of a voiced speech uttered in an emotional state.
A scale is a specific arrangement of eight consecutive notes going up and down that begin from and return to the same note, and the most widely used today are referred to as the major and minor scales. The main reason for the universality of these two scales is their distinctly different affective impacts.
Music emphasizing the tones of a major scale tends to be perceived as happy, bright, and exciting, while music emphasizing tones of minor scales tends to be perceived as sad, subdued, and gloomy.
The main reason for the tonal distinctions between excited and subdued speech is the frequency of the speaker’s voice. When a speaker is excited, tension acting on the vocal folds increases, and the chest cavity raises the frequency of the voice. On the other hand, when a speaker is subdued, the decrease in tension lowers the frequency and decreases variation or dynamic.
Because the tones in major music have more variation, while minor compositions have less, we associate the excited speaker with major music and the subdued speaker with minor music.
No matter what the music’s variation or tonal characteristics are, in one way or another, they evoke emotional responses in listeners.
Works Cited
Purves, Dale. Music as Biology. Harvard University Press, 2017.
Parncutt, Richard. “The Emotional Connotations of Major versus Minor Tonality: One or More Origins?” Sage Journals, vol. 18, no. 3, Aug. 2014.
UAGC Staff Member. “How Does Music Affect Your Brain?” The University of Arizona Global Campus, 7 June 2017, www.uagc.edu/blog/how-does-music-affect-your-brain.
Liu, Ying, et al. “Effects of Musical Tempo on Musicians’ and Non-Musicians’ Emotional Experience When Listening to Music.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, 13 Nov. 2018, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02118.
Huron, David, and Matthew Davis. “The Harmonic Minor Scale Provides an Optimum Way of Reducing Average Melodic Interval Size, Consistent with Sad Affect Cues.” Empirical Musicology Review, vol. 7, no. 3-4, July 2013, p. 103, doi:https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v7i3-4.3732.
Musical U. Team. “Hearing the Difference Between Major and Minor Keys.” Musical U, 14 Feb. 2017, www.musical-u.com/learn/major-minor-keys/.
