How Your Brain Feels Music
The mind in which we each undergo a unique subjective experience of music is powered by the brain, the most complex organ in the body, perhaps even the universe. Because of this complexity, the brain is being studied by psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, artists, theologians, computer scientists, and neuroscientists through a multitude of overlapping and independent lenses.
Having been conscious for as long as you have, you might be very prepared to agree that the brain really is just that complicated. As such, in this post I’m going to be focusing on just one component of your brain’s interaction with music, and that’s how it causes us to feel.
Starting at the Top
If you’re a psychologist, you might search for correlations between emotional responses and personality traits– in 2012, researchers at Ohio State and Toronto Universities found that:
Listeners who liked music that made them feel sad tended to score high on Openness-to-Experience or low on Extraversion, whereas liking for music that evoked mixed feelings was associated positively with music training.
Other researchers, also from Ohio, look for a more direct relationship of pitch height, using an assortment of classical, folk, and traditional songs then asking participants targeted questions about how they made them feel, finding that:
Higher-pitched melodies sound more submissive (less threatening) than lower-pitched melodies.
They link this with other more anthropologically–founded research suggesting why smiling comes across positively, rather than as some kind of teeth-baring act of aggression:
High vocal tract resonances may also enhance the infantile character of the vocalisation by seeming to originate from a shorter vocal tract. Higher resonances can be achieved by a trumpet‐like flaring of the tract and/or by retracting the corners of the mouth. This latter gesture, I hypothesise, is the origin of the smile.
Now while this type of research gives us some useful metrics and ‘rules of thumb’ for understanding music and people in an interactive way, its relevance to us as largely jazz musicians, is limited–partly because the dominance/submissive characteristics aren’t ones which immediately seem to apply to a jazz solo, but even more importantly because it doesn’t tell us anything about what neuronal mechanisms might be being manipulated under the surface of our experience.
Working Our Way Down
For example, if you’re a computational or theoretical neuroscientist, you might be interested in an overall model of how our predictive brain derives a sense of pleasure from its expectations being challenged–perhaps by the harmonies, rhythms, and melodies of a jazz orchestra. A 2019 publication resulting from collaboration between professors in Norway, Denmark, and London describes how music:
Continuously satisfies our need to resolve uncertainty, thereby underwriting its rewarding nature.
This is something that we can see examples of in those knuckle-biting moments of a particularly on-point solo.
The predictive brain approach is in fact rapidly growing in popularity among researchers of music and cognition. Researchers in California have been looking at cortical circuits and loops between auditory and the frontal (working memory and pattern-spotting) areas of the brain through which music passes during perception. They integrate this with the role of dopamine as the primary neurotransmitter responsible for transmitting ‘prediction errors’ and rewards throughout the brain, and the limbic system which has an ancient role establishing emotional states at the level of hunger, love, and addiction.
Complementing this, the emerging field of social neuroscience looks at why we make music together - how music impacts our neurophysiology in the context of participation with other music-makers. A 2021 cross-disciplinary paper involving work from experts in Cambridge, Israel, and Chicago suggests a network model for musical affect in a social context, highlighting the role of oxytocin, a hormone which “plays a central role in social behaviour, including pair bonding, sexual activity, trust, affiliative preferences, and parent–infant attachment”. In particular, they put forward a remarkable suggestion linking the roles of dopamine and oxytocin:
The role of dopamine in supporting social bonds relates to its involvement in motivation and hedonic transformation, enabling us to feel good about those with whom we are bonding and linking the reward system to the social system in ways that support the formation of selective attachments.
Which is to say that dopamine provides the initial kick of musical enjoyment, then oxytocin allows us to bond more fruitfully–both of which I’m sure are feelings you can associate with your experiences of music performance, listening, and dancing.
The Base Layer
It’s easy to get lost in the woods with the cognitive stuff; the recent movement of embodied cognition reminds us that our bodies aren’t just vehicles for a mind which stores knowledge and produces words, but in fact the ‘me’ results from the way your movements and gestures respond to the rhythm; how the shape of your ears, mouth (remember the smiling hypothesis?), and arms affect your hearing and performance; even how your diet and daily rhythm impact your mood and stamina.
Several aspects of musical ethology are explored by the influential music researcher David Huron in a great 2015 review paper that explores modes of communication through signals and cues, comparing how vocal properties are carried over to musical performance in sneering, grief, and cuteness signals. This paper also covers how we stay in tempo through observing and simulating one another’s movements through the mirror neuron system.
The link to this paper (and others) is below. I’d highly recommend starting here if you want to explore the embodied cognition of musical feeling route further.
A Fun Departing Link
Recently I took part in a piece of research that involved causing changes in heart rate via the vagus nerve. I was surprised at how much of an impact a well designed soundscape can have on my own physiology when paying close attention. Afterwards the researcher pointed me towards a project called Wavepaths, which generates soundscapes used as tools in music therapy.
It seems to me like a refreshingly empirical approach to the spiritualised 432Hz/ pineal gland opening/ frequencies of the soul sort of stuff.
With a good pair of headphones and a few minutes of spare time you could try to observe the relationship between your own heart rate–or emotional state more widely–and the samples on the site. It’s quite a fascinating experience. Listen here.
References
Affect Induction through musical sounds: An Ethological Perspective
Effects of felt emotion and individual differences
Predictive processes and the peculiar case of music
