Whether it’s sacred or profane music, in listening to a musical song our brain elaborates the stimulus based on our previous experiences and training courses.
The story of each of us contributes to coloring the rhythms and melodies while it is the state of the moment that pushes us in the search for a modulation, activating or calming, of our sensations.
We also happen to seek confirmations outside the state that we are expanding, going to select the music that most reflects us in that moment. There are musical reasons that we like for periods, others constantly.
On this principle, for example, music with the specific aim of deactivating the state of tension linked to the wait were made: we think of “The lift music” of the Muzak Holdings or “Music for Airports” by Brian Eno that the artist conceived during the personal experience of a long wait at the Cologne airport.
Usually there are a few seconds to understand if we like that song or not and rarely the immediate assessments are based on an artistic or technical analysis; rather depend on the instinct, personality and identity of each
Our music speaks a little about us
The music we listen to communicates to others something of us, makes us recognize in that part of the world that shares those melodies and atmospheres that somehow confirm who we are.
It has been noticed in some studies that in character structures defined externalizing the music can be a means of raising the level of excitement when involved in boring and repetitive tasks (from study to domestic affairs, to sport), while in internalizing structures it can constitute an interference with other cognitive processes in progress.
In recent decades musicology, psychology and neuroscience have been interested in the mechanisms involved in the development of musical preferences. Structural elements internal to music, such as time, methods or complexity, and characteristics of the publisher, such as age, kind of belonging, type of personality and education have been compared.
Universal in music
Some universal responses to music already emerge in childhood, for example the movement of the beating of the feet and the nod of the head.
It is known that music activates the regions of the brain that control the sense-motor responses even without movement and can alter the autonomous nervous system influencing breathing, heart rate and body temperature.
At the same time, it can arouse endocrinee responses such as modifying oxytocin and cortisol levels. The ubiquitous nature of these responses suggests that music can perform an evolutionary function of which we know the importance but not yet the structural elements on which it rests.
This hypothesis is strengthened by the observation of how music and dance are central in the social life of cultures around the world.
Personality and musical tastes
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have tried to understand how the character and psychological traits are able to influence our musical tastes.
A first figure is that people listen to a certain type of music because they are consciously attracted to it, because in that way they want to communicate a certain type of information about themselves.
Through the same principle, the music listened to by others becomes an element used to formulate a judgment on them based on stereotypes that we have created on the characteristics associated with all kinds of music.
Such information would be so important to the point that platforms such as Spotify use them for purchasing proposals by assuming our tastes in the food field, travel, readings and much more, formulating probable hypotheses on our tastes starting from what we listen to.
Research
Cambridge researchers divided the sample into three categories the styles of thought:
- The empathists which nourish an intense interest in the thoughts and emotions of the ups and downs;
- the systemists which manifest a high interest in the models, systems and rules that govern the world;
- The balanced that are placed a middle ground between previous styles.
A sample of over 4,000 participants were asked to listen to about 50 musical songs of different genres indicating preferences.
Empatists preferred sweeter and more melancholy genres (soft rock and songwriters); The systemsist appreciated more decisive musical genres such as Hard Rock, Punk and Heavy Metal. The balanced were distributed on a wider range of genres.
The same research group in a similar study selected a different sample of 7,000 participants by dividing them into five groups based on personality traits characterized by:
- Opening mental: subjects described as creatives and willing to experiment with novelties;
- Conscientosity: lovers of order and routine, perceived as reliable and oriented towards achieving results;
- Extroversion: talkative and sociable, who greatly appreciate being with others;
- Empathy: who manifest affection and tend to avoid conflicts;
- Emotional stability: safe, not inclined to anger and anxiety.
It turned out that those with preferences for classical music and jazz tend to have personality traits associated with opening, creativity, fantasy and verbal ability.
Those who prefer popular music has characteristics of sociability and talkativeness, but tend to have conventional ideas and manifest little tolerance.
In pop rock music, Soul and Rhythm and blues mainly identify those who define themselves romantic and those looking for relaxation.
Punk, Rock, Heavy Metal, always according to researchers, is listened to and loved by those looking for a charge to face an environment considered hostile.
Trans-cultural aspects
An interesting work recently published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences has evaluated whether the structural characteristics of a music song and the related emotional connotations can evoke sensations in specific somatic areas and if these effects are present in individuals of different cultures.
Previous research have shown that there are intercultural similarities in the basic emotions not linked to music (emotional universals), but the consistency of body sensations evoked by music through cultures had not been examined.
The study investigated how the acoustic elements and the emotional characteristics related to a song can induce different subjective body sensations by evaluating a sample consisting of subjects of the western, US and Chinese European area. 72 songs – 31 Westerners and 31 Chinese – cataloged as sad, happy, tender, aggressive and dance were listened to.
At the end of the listening, the shape of a human body was delivered to the participants asking to indicate the somatic areas that had been stimulated by the music listened to, allowing researchers to constitute a map of the body sensations.
In a separate experiment to a different group of participants, it was asked to evaluate the same songs on the basis of pleasantness, familiarity, sadness, happiness, aggression, tenderness, fun as describing if they felt energetic, relaxed or irritated after listening.
The results found that the subjective sensations detected at listening to Asian and Western music had a high correlation indicating that, regardless of the culture of belonging, individuals presented coherent emotional experiences.
Differences were detected regarding the sense of familiarity, as if to expect: the Westerners and Asians warned greater sense of familiarity with the songs of their geographical origin.
The map of the somatic reactions indicated that the participants, in order to depend on the culture of belonging, warned the effects of a sad or tender song at the level of the head and the chest; Dance and Allegri songs I was warned at the limb level; The music described as aggressive was perceived throughout the body but in the head in particular.
It is certainly a limit to compare only two cultural groups and subjectively describe the somatic sensations without the support of physiological recordings, but it still remains an interesting starting point to lay the foundations for further studies.
Conclusions
Scientific knowledge should be made up to scholars and curious. At 5 months we respond rhythmically to music with an interest that exceeds that of language and many this trait remains. Music distracts us, comforts us, creates bonds, defines us … and much more, in a way that no scientific study can be able to explain.
Difficult to be disagreement with Victor Hugo when he said: “Music expresses everything that cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent”.
To the reader good listening.
