Emotional responses to music | Hauke Egermann | TEDxGhent

hello everyone, thank you,

music

is a very ubiquitous phenomenon, we make

music

and listen to it in our daily lives, it puts us in the right frame of mind, brings us together with other people and also creates shared experiences, but how does that work? Why do you create music? emotions in us well, I am a music researcher myself and I conduct experiments to find out how music influences our emotions right now. I would like to do an experiment with you, so if you agree, I will present two exercises to you. the first one says like this so now everyone who thinks this sounded sad please raise your hand okay no one here uh who knew this one sounded happy please raise your hand okay now let's move on to the next one and who would you say this? one was happy okay again no hands and who knew this one was sad so I see a lot of hands so maybe we can agree that the first one was a happy excerpt and maybe it made you feel a little too happy and the The second was a sad excerpt and it made you feel a bit said, however, maybe not everyone raised their hand so there are some similarities in your feelings, however, not everyone may have agreed on that, so there may be some differences, so where is it?

They come from why music creates emotions in us. I brought you here now four different explanations. The first says that this is based on learned associations. So all of you are probably from Belgium and grew up in the Western and European world. in a similar cultural environment and you may have learned to associate the mut musical patterns I just presented to you with

emotional

contacts that made the music

emotional

, so, for example, in an excerpt one may have used features that have been used in a happy movie, for example in a scene where people laugh and people smile and then you learn to associate these characteristics with happiness and exercise 2 could have been associated with sad contexts that made this music sound sad.

There is another explanation that is based on learning that is called or was called. musical expectations we think that in our everyday experience of music we acquire statistical knowledge about the statistical properties of M musical structures, we actually learn musical patterns, musical styles, so for example you may have experienced that you were once in your car y You turned on the radio and heard a song you had never heard before, however, you may have still been able to sing that song because you have musical knowledge about the probabilities of musical patterns and your knowledge about musical syntax. and this knowledge can create expectations and these expectations can become emotions, so, for example, you can anticipate that something will come in music that you will really like and this will create pleasure.

There could also be tension because you know that something in music is about to come, but you don't know when or what is going to happen and there can also be surprises, when we conducted a study a few years ago, we presented our participants with an article that had this and other segments, um and this one in particular. musical segment sounded like this and in the context of that piece our participants told us that this was very unexpected for 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 surprised them our participants induced physiological and subjective arousal in our participants.

The third explanation says that music induces emotions due to expressive emotional movement. Let's look at happiness and sadness again, of course when we are happy and sad there is a subjective feeling of happiness and sadness associated with these emotions, however there are also particular behaviors that go along with that and perhaps are the reason why that we experience happiness and sadness. When we are happy, we tend to become active and approach things and move quickly. However, when we are sad we become sluggish, maybe we stop our current behavior, we are frustrated because we did not reach a certain goal and along with these movements there are also expressions, uh, and these expressions of emotions that can sometimes be hurtful. um, I brought you a recording of a person who is now in a happy state, have fun again, even with the sound of his footsteps, that is something we discovered in the study and people can recognize the emotional expression or the emotional state in the one where the person is.

Now let's listen to someone who is in a bad mood have fun again. 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 the sad music again. Also, the happy music was louder and faster and I feel it higher and with a pitch and faster, so we think that music can be emotional because it sounds like someone is moving emotionally and these emotional expressions too They can be, to a certain extent, universal, in a study that Some colleagues of mine conducted asked people to control certain acoustic parameters of the music and there the ones I just mentioned and they asked them to express happiness and sadness and what they observed is that people use very similar environments in two very different isolated cultures without any contact with each other applies to the recognition of emotions, so in another study carried out by some colleagues they observed that people also from two very different and isolated cultures could recognize happiness and sadness and happy western music and sad western music, but how do you recognize it? an emotion becomes feeling an emotion for oneself, we believe this is achieved through a process similar to empathy, so for example, if we think about an experience that may have made you feel happy, you may have empathize with that person you imagined. he was expressing happiness to test all these ideas about the universality of emotion induction.

We conducted an experiment a few years ago at McGill University and established a collaboration with an athon musicologist. She went to the rainforest of northern Congo and visited a population of Congal pygmies. uh, they lived there without electricity, without access to electronic media and they were very familiar with UNAM Western music, basically they had never heard it before. We then introduced those participants and also the Canadians to Western music when we then categorized it into Western positive and Western music. negative music, so that's the western view on 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 veence, so for the positivity or negativity, however, when we grouped our music with respect to its arousing potential, so also Western opinion we could again see that in both groups the arousing music compared to the relaxing music induced a subjective and physiological arousal, for However, there could also be a fourth explanation for these findings that is not related to excessive movement.

It could also be that music is also activating sound that has a very diverse influence on our sympathetic nervous system, where that creates attention or orientation and subjective feeling 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 why music creates emotions in us. I have just presented you with four different explanations, the first says that this is based on learned associations, the second says that this is because your knowledge about musical structures generates musical expectations, the third says that this is due to expressive movements and the fourth says that this is due to the activation of sounds, the two main mechanisms are based on learning and can explain why our emotions, which can sometimes be very rich when we listen to music, can be very individual and different, however, the basis of the mechanisms and explanations that I have just presented to you may be based on more universal response patterns. and it helps explain why our answers are sometimes very similar and, yes, maybe you bring us together and create shared experiences, thank you.