How music impacts the brain, changes and reflects moods

[caption id="attachment_16914" align="alignleft" width="300"] Musicians from Fandalism perform a Perfect Day, an optimistic song[/caption]

Carol Forsloff---Parag Chordia is a musician and researcher who has examined the impact of music on those who perform it and those who listen. “Most of us are musicians or deeply touched by music,” he tells us, as he offers information on how music actually impacts the brain.

Chordia is the director and founder of the Music Intelligence Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is partly funded by the National Science Foundation, that asks questions according to Chordia as: “How is sound pro­duced, how can it be manipulated—and, also, how is it perceived?” “How does the brain organize sound, and why does it elicit the types of responses and emotions that it does?”

“We said, okay, when a person is hap­py, their speech sounds different than when they’re sad,” he explained. A sad person speaks softly, slowly, often mumbles, and has a darker tone; a happy person speaks more quickly and brightly. “We started to wonder, is music bootstrapping off of the same processes? In other words, are those fundamental acoustic cues being used to signify happiness and sadness in music?”

His research has established that people do perceive music differently according to its pitch. Pitch does assist in establishing the emotion one feels in music, so the lower pitch is identified as sad and the higher pitch as happy. Chordia says, “I think what’s really interesting about music is that it plays off of both these things,” said Chordia, who has studied this phenomenon through computational and statistical modeling of music’s structure. “One of the ways that we describe music is ‘safe thrills.’ It’s like a roller coaster. On the one hand, you know nothing really bad is going to happen, but there are all these pleasant surprises along the way. A lot of music is like that: you set up a pattern and expectation, and then you play with it.” That might mean slightly varying the drumbeat, changing the chord pattern, or add­ing or removing instruments. “Those little surprises, it turns out, can be very pleasurable.” 

In Chordia's research the type and pitch of the music was selected for the subjects. Psychologists have found that when people select their music they also do so according to their moods. So the happy person will select a song that is upbeat, and the depressed person will select music that is sad.

Music is also a way for people to cope with their surroundings or to achieve a desired emotion. We often will pick a song that brings about the emotions we want to have at any given time, so those who want to feel energetic will select music with a strong and lively beat. And it can calm an individual who is stressed or angry. Music indeed soothes the savage beast.