PBS NewsHour Weekend: Why does music give us chills, motivate us to work out and make us feel connected to one another? Neuroscientist and opera singer Indre Viskontas explains the power of music and its effects on our brains in her new book, "How Music Can Make You Better."
8 comments:
YAY SOUND! The brain and music is such an interesting topic. The fact that music can make us better, or as this neuroscientist says that we can be rewired when recovering from an injury. She goes on about how humans gravitate towards pattern, but we also love that there is music that suspends our expectation of that pattern, providing tension and something interesting for the brain. It’s stimulation basically. Or, alternatively, we love something that makes us think music is headed in one direction, and then we are surprised by the results. The expectation of reward is a huge part of music. That is so freaking interesting. Your brain literally releases dopamine because it likes the reward of the climax of a song. Isn’t that wild? Stuck song syndrome is also so interesting. I’ve never heard of it before. Catchy melodies that don’t have clear endings are the real bane of my existence. The fact that this lovely lady provides me with a way to get these songs out of my head is great. Definitely going to try it next time.
I don’t know how great music can affect the body but it is very interesting to hear a specialist claim about the effects that sound has on the human brain, and body. The body reacts to multiple different stimuli and the to we focus on in theater the most are visual stimulus (lighting and most design seen on the stage) and audio stimulus (sound and music). Sound has an astounding effect on everyone, including audience members of a show, yet it typically not recognized. You notice when something is wrong but when there is good sound design we don’t tend to think about it. To understand sounds effects on the body is a really interesting way to affect theater. Sound design and composition are key components to a show and most of the time it is forgotten by everyone but the sound team until something goes wrong. Like they said in the article, humans can recognize patterns and different audio stimuli can affect us in different ways. This article was more about singular songs and why some songs get stuck in our heads compared to others but I thought I would tie it back to sound as a design area.
I absolutely love the brain and I absolutely love music, so what a lovely lovely article. I love how she said that brains are great at predicting the future because of their ability to recognize patterns. I started thinking of some of my favorite songs, and the one of the reasons I like them so much is because they change patterns drastically. Whether it's a tempo change or a change in instruments, those songs stand out to me the most.
Another aspect of neuroscience that is benefitted by music is research into Alzheimer's and dementia. People with those diseases eventually lose their ability to recognize their loved ones, their own living spaces, and other household items. However, something that has proven effective in recalling memories is music. I watched a documentary that showed a woman with Alzheimer's listening to the song that she and her husband did their first dance to at their wedding, and she started remembering who he is and what he means to her. I think music has one of the strongest powers of connectivity, and I love it when I listen to songs that connect me to some of my best memories.
This article is about why and how the brain is affected by music. I was fascinated to learn that the body tends to mimic the beat of music through heart and respiratory rate. This may have been done already, but music could then be used in a medical context. Sometimes the body elevates the heart rate, even if it doesn’t need to, like in a panic attack, for example. Treating the symptoms of elevated heart and respiratory rate may decrease the effects of the problem. I also found it interesting how he said that people find Bohemian Rhapsody such a good song because it changes and keeps us on our toes and interested in what’s going to happen next. I don’t know the formula for just the right amount of change in a song, but it’s also interesting that pop songs tend to be very repetitive, maybe so we can tune it out and just have it in the background.
I love this article! I think that a lot of people know that different songs make us feel different ways, but it's hard to understand just why. Whether your generation used mixtapes or playlists, it's easy to recognize the "Get Hype!" or "Sad songs to listen to while looking out the window during a storm" mixes that people can make. I definitely have specific songs I listen to when I'm sad (more quiet and predictable, no surprises in the direction the song goes), when I want to sleep (smooth, no drastic changes in volume or switch ups in beat), and when I want to just dance and sing along loudly (earworm songs, as Viskontas described).
Everyone has their own versions of these, but it all comes down to the basic ideas Viskontas discussed about how our brain reacts to music. It's just so hard to truly describe how excited this discussion makes me about sound!
Here is my favorite quote from him:
"So both musicians and music researchers know that we don't see the rhythm, we feel the beat. The parts of our brain that are engaged in beat processing are the same parts of our brain that are engaged in motor planning and motor actions, right. So we actually feel it within our bodies and in fact there are a bunch of our biological rhythms that in train to the rhythm of different beats."
I love this article! I think that a lot of people know that different songs make us feel different ways, but it's hard to understand just why. Whether your generation used mixtapes or playlists, it's easy to recognize the "Get Hype!" or "Sad songs to listen to while looking out the window during a storm" mixes that people can make. I definitely have specific songs I listen to when I'm sad (more quiet and predictable, no surprises in the direction the song goes), when I want to sleep (smooth, no drastic changes in volume or switch ups in beat), and when I want to just dance and sing along loudly (earworm songs, as Viskontas described).
Everyone has their own versions of these, but it all comes down to the basic ideas Viskontas discussed about how our brain reacts to music. It's just so hard to truly describe how excited this discussion makes me about sound!
Here is my favorite quote from him:
"So both musicians and music researchers know that we don't see the rhythm, we feel the beat. The parts of our brain that are engaged in beat processing are the same parts of our brain that are engaged in motor planning and motor actions, right. So we actually feel it within our bodies and in fact there are a bunch of our biological rhythms that in train to the rhythm of different beats."
Music really is something. I find myself always looking at it and wondering about it. Such wonderment always occurs with why I don’t like something that Everyone else seems to enjoy. It then delves into finding facts like music being a factor that practically every civilization has created throughout history. This segment really highlights the reasoning behind it and is quite awesome! I didn’t know that music was directly related to physical responses, it was always something I sort of assumed but never really investigated because everyone does hear a song and they feel compelled to dance. The same with calming music, people use it frequently to work themselves down. Knowing that music and in particular, beat is what causes this is very enlightening. The brain is complex and pattern recognizing, hence why the top 40 songs always have similar beats, but it is fascinating to find out that its so key to our brain that it actually causes physical and emotional responses.
There was very uncomfortable distressing music playing before the performance, Tiger at the Gates. It reminded of this article, which I read before, and so I had to scroll down and come back to comment on it. My favorite drama teacher once said that the use of music in a play is “cheating”. Certainly, she did not mean to object to the use of music. Since the music can psychologically, or rather physically, bring a particular kind of emotion to the audience, it can fix how the audience interprets the play. Her point was that for actors and directors who always suffer finding out the way to deliver a certain message to the audience, the use of music can seem to be “cheating”. On the other hand, although the power of music is very strong, I believe human hearing is also very sensitive that it can easily catch incongruity. We must not rely on its effect and choose the music carefully in order to put music and play together in the most effective way.
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