Musicians+in+Tune+With+Emotions

=Musicians in Tune With Emotions= By Janani Sridharan

A Musical Ear
Do expert musicians hear something different when listening to a song than your average shower-singer or car-radio accompanist does? Several researchers have attempted to find differences between musicians and non-musicians when it comes to how they perceive auditory stimuli. Many experimenters have published results concerning perception of dissonance, chord progression and tonality, generally showing that musicians are more sensitive to these musical phenomena.

A study conducted in 2001 recorded Event Related Potentials (ERPs), and found that non-musicians accurately identified dissonance in chords 81% of the time while musicians identified dissonance at 97% accuracy. (Regnault, P., Bigand, E., & Besson, M.)

In another study (Wolpert, R.S. 1990), musicians were found to group melodies together based on tonality, even if the two tunes were played on different instruments. Non-musicians were more concerned with timbre, pairing together melodies played by the same instrument and disregarding whether or not the tunes created dissonance or unpleasant harmonies. From the two studies, and other similar experiments, it appears that trained musicians are slightly more sensitive to technical aspects of music such as dissonance and tonality.

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While these comparative studies have mainly focused on differences in pitch-related audio perception — producing results that are far from shocking, considering the stark contrast in amount of musical training between the two groups — a recent experiment creates a novel connection between music perception and another realm of cognitive psychology.

Getting Emotional
Published in the //European Journal of Neuroscience// this February, a collection of researchers from Northwestern University — including Dana L. Strait, Nina Kraus, Erika Skoe and Richard Ashley — have discovered one biological basis for a connection between music and emotion. Before delving into their study, however, it’s worth taking a brief glance at previous research concerning the two fields.

It goes without saying that music has the power to evoke a wide range of emotions from listeners, and this attribute of music perception has been the center of many studies in recent years. A.J. Blood and R.J. Zatorre’s work from 2001 dealt with “intensely pleasurable responses to music,” and how these reactions correlated with activity in brain areas involved in reward, motivation and emotion. Using positron emission tomography (PET), changes in blood flow were found in these brain locations while the autonomic nervous system reacted to the pleasurable musical experiences.

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Blood and Zatorre’s work is just one of numerous attempts made by neuroscientists to connect music and emotion biologically.

Putting it all Together
What sets apart the experiment by Strait et al. is that it differentiates between different levels of musical expertise. Looking at musicians and non-musicians, they find the first biological evidence supporting the claim that musical experts display an enhanced perception of emotion when listening to human speech compared to their non-expert counterparts.

While watching a subtitled nature film with no sound, subjects in the study were presented with 250-millisecond vocal samples from distraught infants. Musicians displayed higher responses to the complex parts of the sound that correspond to emotion and less response to the non-complex portion. The non-musicians, on the other hand, showed no bias to the complex qualities of the sound waves, exhibiting a decreased response to these portions in comparison to the musical experts.

The experiment’s conductors used electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings to obtain results. All of the subjects wore electrode caps during the trials.

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Conclusion and a Few More Questions
Strait et al.’s experiment provided clear-cut evidence of a growing sensitivity to emotion with more years of musical training. (The experiment also showed that if the training begins before the age of seven, the effect is even stronger.) With the discovery of a biological basis to prove the emotional sensitivity of musicians, new sets of questions arise. For starters, what is it about a musician’s training that causes this to happen? Does this sensitivity affect other facets of a musician’s life such as personality or character? These are difficult questions to answer, but they open up a domain of research that could clue us in on how music has the power to control our emotions.