Extract A
University of California Berkeley scientists have surveyed more than 2,500 people in the United States and China about their emotional responses to thousands of 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 12 overarching feelings: Amusement, joy, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, anxiety, scariness, annoyance, defiance, and feeling pumped up.
"Imagine organising a massively eclectic music library by emotion and capturing the combination of feelings associated with each track. That's essentially what our study has done," said study lead author Alan Cowen, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in neuroscience.
"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 founding director of the Greater Good Science Center. 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 general emotional characterisations 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.
For the study, more than 2,500 people in the United States and China were recruited. First, volunteers scanned thousands of videos on YouTube for music evoking a variety of emotions. From those, the researchers built a collection of audio clips to use in their experiments.
Next, nearly 2,000 study participants in the United States and China each rated some 40 music samples based on 28 different categories of emotion, as well as on a scale of positivity and negativity, and for levels of arousal.
Using statistical analyses, the researchers arrived at 12 overall categories of experience that were preserved across cultures and found to correspond to specific feelings, such as "depressing" or "dreamy."
Extract B
The audience sits down and waits for the performance to begin…
Here they come; four black figures, carrying instruments, and seat themselves facing the white squares under the downpour of light; rest the tips of their bows on the music stand; with a simultaneous movement lift them; lightly poise them, and, looking across at the player opposite, the first violin counts one, two, three -
Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep, race under the arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift waters, now swept into an eddy where-it's difficult this conglomeration of fish all in a pool; leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins; and such a boil of current that the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and round-free now, rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in exquisite spirals into the air; curled like thin shavings from under a plane, up and up .... How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world! Also in jolly old fishwives, squatted under arches, obscene old women, how deeply they laugh and shake and rollick, when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah!
"That's an early Mozart, of course-"
"But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair - I mean hope. What do I mean? That's the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now - I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I'm laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the old gentleman opposite .... But suppose - suppose - Hush!"
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the birds singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in the moonlight. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow - crash!
The boat sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.
Why then grieve? Ask what? Remain unsatisfied? I say all's been settled; yes; laid to rest under a coverlet of rose leaves, falling. Falling. Ah, but they cease. One rose leaf, falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flutters waveringly. It won't reach us.
Extract C
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And overthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
Extract D
It's very hard for us to measure how music affects someone because our opinions are subjective. But what we do know is what's going on in the brain. First, the component of our brain that perceives sound -the auditory cortex- recognises music as non-verbal sound.
From there, it impacts the limbic system, a crucial part of our emotional response system, which can then affect our physical response. This is how something that we listen to can affect our body. While music can give us sudden chills and tingles, our bodies can also react in ways we don't perceive, such as specific patterns in our heart rate or a change in blood pressure. By measuring these physiological signals, we can learn what a piece of particular music is doing to our bodies.
As a researcher, I conduct experiments where I ask my participants to sit down and listen to music, such as Love Yourself by Justin Bieber, whilst wearing a watch and headset. As they listen, these devices use advanced sensors to record the physiological reactions of the participants; things like heart rate, skin temperature, sweat glands, and brain waves. I've built an artificial intelligence system that can use this data to automatically learn patterns in relation to the type of music and the emotional and physiological reactions.
Then the AI can predict the emotions the participants are feeling almost better than they can! Ninety-six per cent of the time my system knows what genre of music they are listening to and how it's making them feel.
Music can influence our mood and improve concentration while doing different tasks. During this global pandemic, many people have reported a drop in their attention span while working from home. Since February last year, there has been a 300 per cent increase in people searching "how to get your brain to focus", a 110% increase in "how to focus better", and a 60% rise in "how to increase focus". Listening to the right music can help improve focus in daily life activities, but what type of music is right for you?
You might have seen articles saying, "listen to this music for three minutes and it will help you work all day long", or "listen to this music and you will immediately relax and go to sleep" - a modern-day take on the Mozart Effect. But do they work for everyone? Many of these music pieces are created with particular beats that aim to enhance a specific brain wave. Often this is the gamma wave, which is associated with increased focus, concentration and problem-solving ability. So in one of my experiments, I asked my participants to listen to this music that was said to induce gamma waves to increase concentration.
Interestingly, many of my participants did not like the music. One of them said they "disliked the continuous underlying tone, it became quite irritating". Another one said "the background droning noise was off-putting, it sounded sci-fi-like". I also asked them to do some tasks as they were listening to this music. And to my surprise, they performed very poorly at the task.