Art by Zach Christy.
This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison.
We know that music has the power to affect our moods, but you might be surprised by just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Music can affect our brains and bodies in profound ways. Professor Jessica Grahn tells us how our love for music has shaped us as humans while Nate Sloan unpacks our appreciation of music, and reveals how it can be used to manipulate us, both for bad and for good.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Little Dipper by Sound of Picture
Gruyere by Sound of Picture
Enrichment by Sound of Picture
Loll by Sound of Picture
Morning Colours by Red Licorice
Leaving by Vesky
Love Never Fails (Instrumental) by Ellie Holcomb
I'm doing me (Instrumental) by Paper Kings
One Eight Four by Skittle
Bundt by Confectionery
Lupi by Orange Cat
Thannoid by Bodytonic
Cold and Hard by Cold Case
Quiet Sill by Darby
Ozi Logo by MVM Productions
Ambient Metal by Black Rhomb
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.
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Follow Jessica Grahn’s music and neuroscience research at the Twitter handle @Neurobeats.
View Transcript ▶︎
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
[music in]
It probably comes as no surprise that music has the power to change our mood. Perhaps you’ve experienced the high of a funky song, or feel your heart break to a ballad.
Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, we pick music to suit our tastes and moods in the moment.
Which got me wondering, what’s actually going on inside our brains when we make those choices? Do we control the music, or does the music control us?
To help answer these questions I need a musicologist… and I just-so-happen to know one!
Nate: Okay. We are live. Just double check my levels. Check, check, check. Testing, testing. Looking good.
[music out]
Nate: I'm Nate Sloan. I’m an assistant professor of musicology at the USC Thornton School of Music, and I'm the cohost of the podcast, Switched on Pop.
Right now, you might be wondering what exactly a musicologist is.
Nate: A musicologist is, wow. Tough question right off the bat, Dallas.
Nate: A musicologist is someone who studies the history of music and tries to understand how it both reflects and shapes culture through close attention to the composition, theory, and reception at different moments in time and space.
And right now, you’re probably STILL wondering what a musicologist is.
Nate: So, a musicologist is a really pretentious way of saying a music historian.
Nate’s an expert in dissecting the musical devices that keep us listening. But to understand what music is doing to us, we first need to get a handle on where music really begins and ends. What’s the simplest thing we can consider to be music?
Nate: Music is organized sound. Though there's also a question to that of who's doing the organizing? Sometimes I find myself nodding along to like, the rhythmic hum of the uptown C train [SFX]. And I'm like, "Is this music?"
You can find rhythmic, organised sound in some of the most unexpected places. In the dripping of a leaky pipe [SFX], the squeak of a door [SFX], or the mechanical thunk of office equipment.
[SFX: Desktop printer]
Nate: Desktop printers, I think, are some of the funkiest instruments imaginable when they really get going. If you're doing a big print job and you have a printer that's just kind of like humming on ... I really find myself nodding my head and tapping my foot to the sound of a printer.
Nate: I have to step back and I'm like, "Wait a minute. Is this music?" I don't know. I think my answer is, "Yeah. Sure. Definitely." So organized sound, but I think that anyone can organize it, including a Xerox machine.
Maybe we don’t all get our groove on to the copy machine, but there is one uniting principle of music.
Nate: We all have a heartbeat [SFX], so when we hear music that has a beat [SFX: Music in with heart beat SFX underneath], it resonates with us in some way.
Nate: There may be certain characteristics of music that you could say, okay, anyone with a pulse is going to enjoy this. There might be some fundamental attraction we have to repeating rhythms, beats.
[music out]
Rhythm is often a key element in music. Just like a painting is a composition in space, formed by patterns over a canvas, a piece of music is a composition in time, and the rhythm is the pattern it makes through time.
And that organised beat has a surprising effect on our brains and bodies.
[music in]
Jessica: There are some basic physiological things that happen when we listen to music whether we like it or not.
That’s Jessica Grahn. She’s a cognitive neuroscientist of music at Western University in Ontario, Canada...
Jessica: ...which basically means I study music and the brain.
Scientists like Jessica have spotted a trend in how us humans respond to music.
Jessica: We can't close our ears. When music is playing, we tend to process it automatically. That means that we have responses in various brain areas. So, sound processing areas immediately light up. If this is music that might be familiar to us, we'll have memory related areas. We also have reward system areas, so the areas that respond to drugs, and other things that really stimulate dopamine production in certain parts of the brain.
Jessica: If the music happens to be fast and up tempo, [SFX: sped up music] up beat, and loud, that is arousing. That stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, so our heart rate tends [SFX] to go up, our respiratory rate [SFX] tends to go up.
[music out]
So our bodies are getting a workout from our running playlist, before we even set foot on the track.
And it’s the rhythm at the core that guides our response.
Jessica: Because rhythm is the key to what makes us move to music. If we don't have rhythm, if we can't perceive the rhythm very well, if we don't really know how to predict it, we don't move along to it.
We may not all be the first up on the dance floor, but we’ve all experienced it. [music in] That irresistible toe tapping when a tune gets in your head. And it seems that moving to the music is something we start to do very early on.
Jessica: Interestingly, we move along to music from a very, very young age. Before we can crawl or move or speak. We don't synchronize accurately to the beat that we perceive in the rhythm, but even young infants [SFX: Infant giggles] will start moving rhythmically when they hear music.
[music out]
That link between music and movement is also seen in primitive cultures too.
Jessica: If you look at cultures today that are probably similar to cultures that were existing when humans were evolving, sort of hunter, gatherer cultures, some of them don't even have different words for music and dance. The idea that music was something you would have without movement is completely foreign to them.
So, in our brains and bodies, music subconsciously makes us move. It doesn’t take any learning, or practice, it just happens. That type of a primitive reaction like that might seem like an animal instinct, but amazingly, it’s almost uniquely human.
Jessica and her team have been working with monkeys to test this primitive response.
[music in]
Jessica: It does not appear to be that any of our closest evolutionary relatives show responses to music.
Jessica: It's actually very hard to even train them to pay attention to the sound because they're really not interested in sounds that aren't directly relevant, like a communication sound from another monkey.
[SFX: Monkeys communicating with each other]
Jessica: This makes it problematic because you spend so much time trying to even train the monkey to notice and respond to the auditory stimulus that it's really inefficient.
But there are other species, more distant from us humans, that do seem capable of moving along to music.
Jessica: Particularly birds that have what we call vocal learning.
[SFX: Songbirds]
Jessica: This ability to modify their vocal output based on what they hear and those birds seem to be more likely to move along to music than some other species.
Vocal learning is most obvious in songbirds like parrots that can learn the noises we make and repeat them back to us. But it’s also been found in some other mammals, like elephants, dolphins, whales and seals.
Jessica: There's a fantastic example of a sea lion named Ronan who was trained to move to a metronome [SFX: metronome], and then automatically extrapolated moving to the metronome, to moving along to music.
[music in: Boogie Wonderland]
In a video on YouTube from the Pinniped Lab at UC Santa Cruz, you can see Ronan bobbing along to his favorite song Boogie Wonderland. It really is quite a thing to see.
[music out]
But although these animals can respond to a beat, it’s not quite the same as what we as a species seem to be capable of.
[music in]
Jessica: In general, certainly, the universality of music in human culture, the early age at which we respond to it and the spontaneous production of music, it's something that we all do automatically from a very young age. A lot of these things do seem to be specifically human.
Jessica: This is a part of the way the brain operates that we don't really see in other species. It may be part of our fundamental human nature. It's certainly one of our more mysterious activities.
[music out]
So our unique relationship with music is one of the things that makes us human, and there’s an enduring theory that it helped to give our brains a boost.
[music in: Mozart]
Jessica: There is a history to music and babies, and childhood development that's gotten into the popular culture.
...that theory is that listening to classical music will give young children an intellectual head-start, to make them smarter.
Jessica: We buy this baby Einstein music CDs, and other, try to enrich the environment. Some people even buy headphones that they can put on their bellies when they're pregnant, to transmit music to the fetus earlier, because earlier is always better, right?
Jessica: There really is zero evidence for that.
[music out]
Nate: I think there's a pervasive myth that listening to classical music, listening to Mozart will make you smarter, and that is categorically untrue.
That’s not to say that studying music doesn’t have ANY effect…
Jessica: There are some studies that suggest that a year of music lessons leads to an increase in six year olds an IQ of five or six points.
Jessica: However, almost all of these differences really seem to be minimal by the time kids get to college. That's in part because people do a lot of things with their time. You might be intensively doing music, but someone else might be intensively doing other types of activities that are also developing.
So if it’s not intelligence, why are we humans so obsessed with music?
[music in]
Another theory is that it helps to shape us as social creatures.
Jessica: The idea is that people who move together tend to feel more positive toward each other, more socially bonded, and are more altruistic to each other.
Jessica: Music, and particularly in a steady drum beat is one way of synchronizing massive groups of people. This is why we can have rock concerts with thousands of people attending all moving or clapping together, because sound is a very effective synchronizing cue. And one thought is that the groups in which music was present were moving together, and were more socially bonded, more altruistic, so would perhaps be better at resource sharing and other evolutionarily youthful behaviors.
So the early humans that leaned in and embraced music were the ones that succeeded, and survived.
[music out]
Nate: So on one hand, there's the experience of playing music, composing music on your own. [SFX: Solo Tabla Player] I liken that to the experience of writing, I don't know, writing in a journal or going on a walk or something or staring out the window on a train ride, meditating even. I think it's a mindful activity.
Nate: And then there's the experience of making music with other people. [SFX: Indian Ensemble comes in] That is one of the most extraordinary social experiences you can have. I think one of the big reasons for that is that it often transcends verbal communication
[music out]
Nate: That's pretty exciting and almost kind of addictive in a way because I wonder if it's not a way of actually getting closer to people than you could by ever talking to them.
Nate: There's an intimacy there in communicating through the medium of music that can be really healing and really just a powerful force for bringing people together.
Of course, despite all these theories about how evolutionary and socially important music can be, many of us don’t share that experience. Some people just don’t consider themselves musical.
Jessica: A lot of people feel they can't dance or they can't sing, or we test people's rhythm abilities and they come in, and, "Oh, I can't keep a beat." Most of the time, the people that come in can do these things completely adequately. I think what they're saying really reflects a terrible thing that western culture has done to music, which is to make a divide between performers and consumers. Performers are ever more the experts, and no one should be forced to hear anybody's music except somebody who is deemed good.
But that’s not how music is used in all cultures worldwide.
[music in]
Jessica: In fact, one of the best things about music is the fact that it is something we all pick up on from a very early age and respond to, and can continue to respond to without any formal training. Things like folk dancing, or Ceilidh dancing in Scotland. These are activities that are based around music that are appealing because absolutely everybody can participate at some level.
So music made us the social creatures we are, and today, it’s still a powerful force to unite us. But music is also deeply personal. We pick our music to suit our mood, our taste, and our personal identity. But that gives others the chance to use our musical choices to manipulate us, for good, and for bad.
We’ll find out how, after the break.
[music out]
[MIDROLL]
[music in]
Our appreciation of music is one of the things that makes us uniquely human, and although it might not make us more intelligent, it certainly helps us to be more socially successful.
But for many people, musical choice is incredibly personal. Often, we choose to listen to a certain kind of music based on how it makes us feel.
[music out]
Jessica: Music can be an enhancer of a mood that we're in, loud and intense music can increase physiological arousal, but exactly what you do with that and how that gets expressed is really dependent on the person and the situation they're in, and what they want to achieve with this music.
It’s like when you might put on sad music when you feel sad just to really lean into it. Or maybe you put on some peppy music to get you through some household chores.
[music in]
Jessica: People usually have a pretty good intuitive sense of what the music is doing for them.
Jessica: I also use music to emotion regulate. So I've learned that if I'm feeling a bit irritated or frustrated...and there's really nothing I can do about it right now...then I absolutely have some music that I use to do that. Despite having a degree in classical piano, most of the music that I go to tends to be pretty cheesy pop music.
Jessica: The intensity of the music, I think for me, matches the intensity of what I'm experiencing, which is somehow helpful.
[music out]
So while Jessica is working through her feelings with cheesy pop, others might prefer 80s ballads, or some soothing jazz.
Nate: It would be wrong to assume that we have some objective relationship with music, some objective physiological relationship... that when you, Dallas Taylor, listen to a song and I, Nate Sloan, listen to a song that we hear the same thing, that we as common members of the human species have the same reaction to a song.
Nate:You may listen to death metal [SFX: Metal] and come away with it with a feeling of, wow, that was loud. That was intense. That was overwhelming. That was scary. That made me uncomfortable to listen to because it has all those musical qualities. And yet I wouldn't want to say therefore we have, as humans, have a biological reaction to heavy metal, death metal, black metal, with those qualities, you know, scary, overwhelming. Because if you talk to a death metal fan, they will not tell you that's how they experience that music.
...and it just so happens that we have a serious metal fan here at 20k HQ. None other than our ace producer Sam. So I thought I’d test out Nate’s theory, and ask her about her relationship with metal.
[music in]
Dallas: So this is really, really straightforward. What kind of music do you like, personally?
Sam: I mainly listen to metal, like melodic metal.
Dallas: And how does metal make you feel?
Sam: It's a lot of emotions actually, it makes me feel happy, but it makes me think, because a lot of the music I listen to is incredibly thoughtful and it's difficult, and there was a lot of work put into it.
Sam: Sometimes puts me in this trance. I go into my own little world while listening to metal, but it could also make me really energized.
Sam: The funniest thing I notice when you meet people that listen to metal is that they are the happiest people. And when they find other people that listen to metal and when they listen to metal together they just jam out, and it's just a silly, fun experience and you just geek out over it.
[music out]
So understanding what music appeals to us, and what it does to us, is harder than it might seem. But doing just that has become a holy grail for some surprising… companies. It’s not only music producers aiming to get the next best-selling hit, it’s also shops and restaurants looking to maximize profit.
Nate: That's why there is a whole subset of the music industry that is involved with using music to influence, for instance, our shopping patterns.
Nate: But again, it quickly emerges that that's not necessarily that there's a certain kind of tempo or pitch or sound that will induce someone to go shopping.
Nate: It's much more cultural. It's like what kind of music will entice a younger target audience to go shop at Forever 21 versus perhaps the older audience that will go shop at William-Sonoma, or something I guess.
[music in]
Consumer neuroscience, or neuromarketing, is nothing new. Businesses tap into our unconscious minds with colours, pictures, and music that a target group is likely to respond to.
Jessica: We form our musical identities, usually in our early teens up to early 20s. And we may continue to stay up to date on the latest music, but the music of that time does have a special influence on us.
Jessica: Stores absolutely know this, and when they want to send a message for, you know... who this clothing line is for, they can do that through music. Same with eating establishments. [SFX: Restaurant chatter, followed by Classical music] If this is an upscale expensive place, playing a little bit of classical music will fit people's perception of, "Oh yes, I should be paying $65 for a steak, because this is a nice place."
Jessica: Whereas if someone's playing rock or pop music at a high volume [SFX: Rock pop music with restaurant chatter, "I'm Doing Me - Instrumental"], you might influence turnover, so you might not want people to linger. You might want to get them in, eat quickly, and get out, and louder music seems to have that effect.
[music out]
Musical neuromarketing might not always get it spot on, but the effects of music on our shopping habits HAS been proven in scientific studies. And to make it more difficult for the musical neuromarketers, musical preference often changes with age and life experiences.
Nate: I love every kind of music. You can throw anything at me and I will say, "I have nothing but love and respect for that."
Nate: I think I used to believe that there was objectively good and objectively bad music and that I could play a song for anyone and they would understand how I felt about it or if I could just make them understand.
Nate: And now I don't think that's true any more. I think we all have our ears. Our ears are shaped by the time and the place that we live in.
Nate: And music isn't bad or good. It's like people are bad or good and what we do with that music is bad or good.
People have used music to do some pretty bad stuff. If you think musical neuromarketing is manipulative, it gets MUCH worse than that.
[music in]
Nate: During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when the American military had the go-ahead to use so-called enhanced interrogation techniques
Nate: One of the forms of sonic torture they would use would be to expose Arabic prisoners to Western pop music and often music that was designed specifically to be offensive to their cultural or religious sensibilities.
So, female singers could be offensive, or it could have lyrics that insult God. And even the Barney music has been used for bad stuff.
[SFX: Barney theme]
Nate: Eminem, I think, was pretty popular as well [Music clip: Eminem - The Real Slim Shady] as a form of torture. Now, if you're Eminem that probably feels horrible. But again, is that his fault? No. Music is something that can be used as a force of good or a force of harm, but music itself isn't good or harmful. It just is. It's just music. It's how we use it and how we deploy it and what we do with it that affects people.
[music in]
To balance the intentional harm being done with cruelly chosen music, others are working on using music to help and heal.
Jessica and her team have been studying how music can be used to help people that have difficulty moving.
Jessica: One of the populations we've been studying are people with Parkinson's disease who'd have problems in the later stages of the disease with walking.
We’re most familiar with the tremors that Parkinson’s causes, but the loss of nerve cells in the brain can have other, wider effects on the body’s movement.
Jessica: Often just initiating the movement, getting the movement going is tricky, and they may have problems with the speed that they move, as well as freezing where particularly if they go through a doorway or pass by somebody, they may suddenly find that they're feet are frozen to the ground, and not responding to any commands to move.
But that can change when a rhythmic sound is involved.
[SFX: Simple, steady beat, getting gradually more complex]
Jessica: For some patients, playing a regular steady beat or playing music that has a steady beat seems to make this much better.
If we play music that makes them want to move, they tend to walk faster, and we can measure this scientifically in the lab. This seems to happen regardless of whether they enjoy the music.
[music out]
[music in]
So music can make us happy or sad. It can be used to cause harm, and it can also be used to heal. It helped to shape us into the social animals that we are, but it can also help us work through our most private emotions. Jessica thinks it’s similar in many ways to language.
Jessica: It's made by people for people and as long as it's achieving the functions its set out to achieve, in the case of language, communication, it doesn't really matter if you're grammar is perfect or you got everything right, if somebody understood what you meant, then you have achieved the function of language, and I think the same is true for music. If in producing music or in sharing your music or in listening to somebody else's music, you have been affected, it's something you enjoy, it's something that you want to continue with, then that music has done exactly what it is supposed to do.
And each of us has a unique relationship with music. We may love it or hate it, or we might not care all that much. There’s no right or wrong way to feel about it, but it can tell us so much about ourselves and others, if you are willing to keep an open mind.
Nate: I prided myself on someone who hated Britney Spears and loved avant-garde jazz. How wrong I was, Dallas. How much better my life has come now that I've let all sounds into my ears. This is incredibly hokey, but forgive me. They say don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I think you could alter that. You say don't judge someone until you've listened an hour through their ears.
[music out]
[music in]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defactosound.com.
This episode was written and produced by Leila Battison, and me Dallas Taylor, with help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin and Jai Berger.
Thanks to our guests, Nate Sloan and Jessica Grahn. Nate co-hosts the podcast Switched on Pop, all about the making and meaning of popular music. I love it, and you should definitely go subscribe. Nate also has a brand new book, also called Switched on Pop.
Jessica’s music and neuroscience lab is actively researching music’s effect on our brains. You can see what she’s up to at the twitter handle @Neurobeats.
Thanks also to Sam Schneble, for offering a surprise insight into the world of a metal fan.
Is there a certain type of music that you use to change your mood? If so, tell us on Facebook, Twitter, or by writing hi@20k.org.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
