Overview: Music evokes different emotions and helps us better understand different cultures. But what is it that makes us listen to more songs than others? Predict, and your prediction determines whether you like the song or not.
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A few years ago, Spotify online interactive map of music tastes sorted by city. at the time, Added Jeanne Popular in Paris and Nantes, London skewed toward local hip-hop duos Klepto and KronanIt is well established that musical tastes vary by time, region, and even social group.
But most brains look the same at birth, so what’s going on in the brain that makes our tastes in music so different?
Emotions – The Story of Prediction
If you are presented with an unknown melody and it stops abruptly, you can sing whatever notes you think are best. At least professional musicians can!and study Published in Journal of Neuroscience In September 2021, it was shown that similar predictive mechanisms occur in the brain every time we listen to music, but we don’t need to be conscious of it.
These predictions are generated in the auditory cortex and integrated with the sounds actually heard, resulting in a ‘prediction error’. We used this prediction error as a kind of neural score to measure how well the brain predicted the next note in the melody.
return 1956the American composer and musicologist Leonard Meyer theorized that emotions can be induced in music, either by satisfaction or frustration derived from the expectations of the listener. helped identify links between musical expectations and other, more complex emotions.
for example, one study Tone sequences could be remembered much better if they could accurately predict the notes the first time.
Now, basic emotions (e.g. joy, sadness, or frustration) can be broken down into two basic dimensions. valence When psychological activation, which measure how positive emotions are (e.g., sadness and joy) and how exciting they are (boredom and anger), respectively. Combining the two helps define these basic emotions.
two studies from 2013 When 2018 showed a clear relationship between prediction error and emotion when participants were asked to rank these two dimensions on a sliding scale. For example, in these studies, notes that were not accurately predicted led to emotions with greater psychological activation.
throughout the history of cognitive neuroscienceespecially with regard to learning processes, pleasure is often associated with reward systems. the study We show that there are specific dopaminergic neurons that respond to prediction errors.
Among other functions, this process allows us to learn and make predictions about the world around us. Whether pleasure facilitates learning or vice versa is not yet clear, but the two processes are definitely related. This also applies to music.
When we listen to music, the greatest pleasure comes from events predicted with moderate accuracy. In other words, overly simple and predictable events, or indeed overly complex events, do not necessarily provoke new learning and therefore produce little pleasure.
Most joy comes from events in between, those that are intriguingly complex but match our predictions well enough to form patterns.
predictions that depend on our culture
Nevertheless, our musical event predictions are inexorably tied to our musical upbringing. To investigate this phenomenon, a group of researchers met with the Sami people who live in the area stretching between the northernmost point of Sweden and Russia’s Kola Peninsula.their traditional song known as Joikdiffers significantly from Western tonal music due to its limited exposure to Western culture.
for study In this book, published in 2000, musicians from the Sámi region, Finland, and the rest of Europe (the latter from various countries unfamiliar with joik singing) performed joik songs that had never been heard before. I was asked to listen to an excerpt from I was then asked to sing the next note of the song, which was deliberately omitted.
Interestingly, the data spread varied significantly between groups. Certain notes were seen more often than others within each group, although not all participants gave the same answers.
It was the Sámi musicians who most accurately predicted the next note in a piece, followed by Finnish musicians who were more exposed to Sámi music than those from other parts of Europe.
Learning new cultures through passive exposure
This brings us to the question of how we learn about culture. culturalization. for example, musical time You can split it in various ways.Western music traditions commonly use quadruple time (often heard in classic rock and roll) or triple time (as it sounds in a waltz).
However, in other cultures, Western music theory is asymmetric meterBalkan music, for example, is known for its asymmetric time signatures such as: nine times Also Seven beats.
To explore these differences, 2005 survey We examined folk songs in symmetrical or asymmetrical time signatures.
In each, beats were added or removed at specific moments. This was called “accidents” and participants of different ages listened to them. Infants up to 6 months of age listened for the same amount of time regardless of whether the song had a symmetrical or asymmetrical time signature.
However, when “accidents” were introduced to symmetrical meters compared to asymmetrical ones, the 12-month-old spent significantly more time looking at screens.
From this, we can infer that subjects were more startled by an accident with a symmetrical meter, as they interpreted it as a disruption of a familiar pattern.
To test this hypothesis, researchers played a CD of Balkan music (in asymmetric time signature) to young children at home. The experiment was repeated after one week of listening, and infants looked at the screen for the same amount of time when the accident occurred, regardless of whether the meter was symmetrical or asymmetrical.
This means that passive listening to Balkan music allowed us to build an internal representation of musical metrics. This allowed us to anticipate patterns and detect accidents with both meters of his type.
a 2010 survey Surprisingly similar effects were seen among adults. In this case, the pitch was affected rather than the rhythm. These experiments demonstrate that passive exposure to music can help learn specific musical patterns in specific cultures. culturalization.
Throughout this article we have seen how passive music listening can change the way we anticipate musical patterns when presented with new songs. We also explored myriad ways to predict such patterns and how we can distort our perceptions by making us feel pleasure and emotions differently. It has opened new avenues for understanding why there is such diversity in the musical tastes of Americans.
What we do know so far is that our musical culture (i.e., the music we’ve listened to all our lives) distorts our perceptions and , that you prefer certain songs over others.
About this music and neuroscience research news
author: Guillem Marion
sauce: conversation
contact: Guillem Marion – Conversation
image: image is public domain
