Emotional responses to music | Hauke Egermann | TEDxGhent

you hello everyone thank you music is a very very ubiquitous phenomenon we make music and we listen to music in our everyday lives it brings us into the right mood it buns us to other people and it also creates shared experiences but how does that work why does music create emotions in us well I myself I'm a music researcher and I conduct experiments in order to find out how music influences our emotions right now I would like to do an experiment with you so if you agree I'm going to play you two excerpts the first one goes like this so now everyone who thinks that this sounded sad please raise your hand okay no one here who would say that this one sounded happy please raise your hand okay now let's go to the next one and who would say that this one was happy okay again no hands and who would say that this one was sad okay so I see a lot of hands so maybe we can agree on that the first one was a happy excerpt and maybe also made you feel happy a little bit and the second one was a sad excerpt it made you feel a little sad however maybe not everyone raised their hand so and there's some similarities and your feelings however not everyone may have agreed on that so there might have been a source of some differences so where does it come from why does music create emotions in us I brought you here now for different explanations the first one says that this is based on learned associations so all of you are probably from Belgium you've been raised in a Western European world in a similar cultural environment and you may have just learned to associate the music musical patterns I just presented to you with emotional contacts that made the music emotional so for example excerpt one may have used features that have been used in a happy movie for example and you see where people laugh and people smile and then you just learn to associate these features with happiness and excerpt - could have been associated with sad contacts which made this music sounds hat there's another explanation which is based on learning which is termed or which was termed musical expectations we think that in our everyday experience of music we acquire statistical knowledge about the properties the statistical properties of musical structures we actually learn musical patterns musical styles so may for example you may have experienced that once you were in your car and you print on the radio and you heard a song that you've never heard before however you may have been still able to sing along with that song that's because you've got musical knowledge about the probabilities of musical patterns then your knowledge about the musical syntax and this knowledge may create expectations and these expectations may turn into emotions so for example you may anticipate that something in the music will come which you like a lot and this will create pleasure there could be also tension because you know that something in the music is about to come but you don't know when and what is going to happen and there may be also surprise now when we conducted a study some years ago we presented our participants a piece that had this in other segments in it and this particular musical segment sounded like this and in the context of that piece our participants told us that this is what very unexpected to them it was computationally difficult to predict from the musical structure and we could also measure that this segment and also the other segments that we're surprising to our participants induced physiologically and subjectively arousal in our participants the third explanation says that music induces emotions because of expressive emotional movement let's look at happiness and sadness again of course when we're happy and we're sad there's a subjective feeling of happiness and sadness associated with these emotions however there are also particular behaviors that go along with that and they may be the reason why we experience happiness and sadness when we are happy we tend to become active and we are approaching things and we're moving in a fast way however when we're sad we become slow the way we stopped our current behavior we're frustrated because we didn't reach a certain goal and along with these movements there are also expressions and these expressions of emotions that can be sometimes hurt I brought you a recording of a person now who's in a happy state have fun again all right even from the sound of footsteps that's something we found out in the study and people can recognize and the emotional expression or the emotional state person is in now let's listen to someone who's in a sad mood have fun again alright so if we compare the two expressions now the happy expressions were louder faster and higher in pitch now let's listen to the happy music again and now to the sad music again so also the happy music was louder higher and faster and sorry higher in pitch and faster so we think music may be emotional because it sounds like someone is moving an emotional way and these emotional expressions can be also to some extent be universal and in the study that some colleagues of mine conducted they asked people to control certain acoustical parameters of music and there that those that are I just mentioned and there asked them to express happiness and sadness and what they observed that people use very similar settings and two very different isolated cultures without any contact with each other same goes for emotion recognition so in another study that some colleagues could conduct it they observed that people also from two very distinct and I'll say light isolated cultures were able to recognize happiness and sadness and happy Western and sad western music but how does recognizing an emotion become to feeling an emotion for yourself we think that this is realized through a process that is similar to empathy so for example if we think of X or one that may have made you feel happy you may have empathized with that person you imagined that was expressing happiness in order to test all these ideas of the universalness of emotion induction we conducted an experiment some years ago at McGill University and established a collaboration with an ethnomusicologist she went to the northern M Congo rainforest and visited a population of Congolese pygmies that lived there without electricity without access to electronic media and that were very unfamiliar with Western music they basically have never heard it before we then presented to those participants and also to Canadians Western music when we then categorize it into Western positive music and Western negative music so that's the Western opinion about music we saw that the responses to these two types of music were very different for the two groups so there was no universal emotion induction for valence so for positivity or negativity however when we grouped our music with respect to its arousing potential so also the Western opinion again we could see that in both groups arousing music compared with calming music induced subjective and physiological arousal so the sympathetic nervous system are participants in both groups became active and the arousing music and again was louder faster and higher in pitch however there could be also fourth explanation of these findings which does not relate to expressive movement it could be also that music is also just activating sound that has a very diverse influence on our sympathetic nervous system where that creates a tension or orientation and subjective sorry and subjective and physiological arousal this could be similar to your alarm clock in the morning that wakes you up now let me conclude and summarize and why music creates emotions in us I just presented you four different explanations the first one says that this is based on us learned associations the second one says this is because of your knowledge about musical structures that builds up musical expectations the third one says that this is tutor expressive movements and the fourth one says that this is due to activating sounds the top two mechanisms are based on learning and may explain why our emotions that can be sometimes very rich when we listen to music can be very individual and different however the bottom two mechanisms and explanations I just presented to you may be based on more Universal response patterns and help to explain why our responses are sometimes very similar and yeah maybe binding us together in creating shared experiences thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

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Keywords: tedx talks, Psychology, Science (hard), tedx, ted talks, tedx talk, English, TEDxTalks, ted x, ted talk, Belgium, ted, Music (topic)

Id: kzFgoaZ9-VQ

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 02 2014