New Scientist - USA (2022-04-09)

54 | New Scientist | 9 April 2022

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Mood music

I am a big fan of classical music.

Why does some music evoke

certain emotions in the brain,

even if it doesn’t have any lyrics?

Gabriel Byczynski

Birmingham, UK

Music is a wide-reaching stimulus

for humans, activating many

regions of our brain. Even without

lyrics, the melodies and rhythms

of music have a big impact.

When listening to classical

music, we may feel relaxed

when a chord meets its climax,

happy when the pitches of notes

remind us of emotions or old

memories and scared as the

brain’s amygdala region becomes

active and releases stress and

anxiety hormones.

Talia Morris

Cape Tribulation,

Queensland, Australia

I think that, in some societies

at least, people are trained to

associate certain emotions with

particular types of music by

movies and television, because of

the formulaic way it is frequently

used in them: violins for sad

scenes; loud, dramatic orchestral

music with lots of percussion for

battle scenes; etc. It would be

interesting to see whether people

with limited exposure to such

media have similar emotional

responses to the same music.

Betty Tijms & Jochum van’t Hooft

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Music possibly predates language

as we know it today. Our pre-

linguistic hominin ancestors may

have used musical features, such

as pitch, rhythm and timbre, to

communicate intentions and

transmit emotions. From an

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evolutionary point of view,

these musical features carry

an emotional value that may

be essential for survival. This

would explain why music without

lyrics can evoke strong emotions.

Daniel Forth

Falkirk, UK

Music has tone and rhythm, much

like the human voice. We use this

to interpret a speaker’s emotions,

not just their words. This is why

Dos Oruguitas is so effective at

provoking tears in the English

version of the Disney film Encanto,

even if you don’t speak Spanish.

Sara Pascoe

Bournemouth, Dorset, UK

The musicality of vocalisation

is the real communicator across

cultures, species and the world,

not the words. The neuroscience

of “affective prosody”, the

musicality of spoken language,

reveals the circuits involved:

these are parts of the brain

known to underpin emotional

processing and perception,

including the thalamus, the

basal ganglia and the cingulate,

temporal and frontal cortices.

Just as hearing verbal threats

or loving invitations evoke

different responses in us, when

songs use similar musicality, our

brains receive and perceive them

similarly. Film and TV composers

utilise our reactions to these

sounds. Think of how different

the soundtracks are for comedy

films compared with horror ones.

The words we speak can be

less informative and reliable than

the music in our message. “Come

here...” can be anything from

seductive to threatening, and

telling a pet it is “a bad dog” in

the affectionate tones used for

“good doggy” demonstrates

the power of prosody.

Bryn Glover

Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK

I would like to respond to this

question with a plea rather

than an answer.

I was fortunate to have been

taught to appreciate music at

school, learning first how to listen

to Má Vlast by Bedřich Smetana,

then taking in Fingal’s Cave by

Felix Mendelssohn and Antonín

Dvořák’s “New World” symphony.

But this appreciation ended

abruptly when experiments

in physics classes came to the

fore in my education.

I found myself challenging the

“silliness”, as I saw it, of absorbing

uncritically what were no more

than vibrations of the air. I regret

to say that this state of affairs

persisted for some years. Later

in life, I started making violins

as a hobby and switched back to

an uncritical enjoyment of the

beauty of their output, bitterly

regretting the lost years.

I would suggest that the person

who posed this question should

end their attempt to analyse what

is going on, and instead lie back

and allow those glorious noises

to continue to inspire them.

Feed the world

How many humans would be

alive today if agriculture had

never been invented?

Hillary Shaw

Author of The Consuming

Geographies of Food

Newport, Shropshire, UK

Without agriculture, as a hunter-

gatherer species, we would (like

any other animal) breed up to the

limit the land could support and

then suffer culls by starvation

This week’s new questions

Breathless birds Do birds ever get out of breath?

Geoffrey Cox, Rotorua, New Zealand

Placebo power What is it exactly that provides the healing

effect of a placebo treatment? Richard Watts, Vancouver,

British Columbia, Canada

Hummingbirds flap their wings

many times a second, but does

that make them out of breath?

“ Spoken words can

be less informative

than the music in our

message. ‘Come here’

could be seductive

or threatening”