LONDON, June 15: Ever wondered why rock music sends chills down your spine? It’s because it is closely related to distress calls in animals, researchers say.
Researchers from University of California, Los Angeles, found that the sudden, jarring changes in pitch and frequency of rock music play on the same emotional mechanisms as the signals which animals use to alert one another of danger.
“Music that shares aural characteristics with the vocalisations of distressed animals captures human attention and is uniquely arousing,” study researcher Daniel Blumstein, of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
In 2010, Blumstein and his team of researchers captured media attention with a study of the soundtracks of 102 classic movies in four genres: adventure, drama, horror and war.
They determined that the soundtracks for each genre possessed characteristic emotion-manipulating techniques.
Scores for dramatic films, for example, had more abrupt shifts in frequency, both up and down. Horror films, on the other hand, had more screaming females and distorted sounds. The researchers were even able to detect recordings of animal screams in some scores.
For the new study, published in the scientific journal Biology Letters, Blumstein teamed up with Peter Kaye, a Santa Monica–based composer of movie and television scores, and Greg Bryant, an assistant professor of communication studies who’s also a musician and recording engineer.
Using synthesisers, they composed a series of ten-second music pieces of several types or ‘conditions’. “We wanted to see if we could enhance or suppress the listener’s feelings based on what’s going on with the music,” says Blumstein.
In the control condition, the music was generic and emotionally neutral, without noise or abrupt transitions in frequency or pitch—elevator music, in other words. This was compared with music that began in an easy-listening manner but then suddenly broke into distortion, much as Hendrix famously did at Woodstock.
After listening to both types, students were asked to rate them based on two factors: how arousing they found the music, and if the emotional feeling in the music was positive (such as happy) or negative (such as fear-inducing or sad).
When the music featured distortion, subjects rated it as more exciting, and were more likely to describe it as charged with negative emotion.
The researchers believe the effect of listening to music with distortion is similar to hearing the cries of animals in distress, a condition that distorts animals’ voices by forcing a large amount of air rapidly through the voice box.
“This study helps explain why the distortion of rock ‘n’ roll gets people excited: It brings out the animal in us,” said Bryant, adding that the study is the first to incorporate what scientists know about animal communication into the study of music perception. (PTI)
Trending Now
E-Paper
Follow our WhatsApp channel