Please Don’t Stop the Music
Have you ever met someone who didn’t like music? Of course we all have our favorite types, but music, overall, has a universal appeal. Even if someone doesn’t like a specific genre or song, they can still be affected by the music. I, for instance, am not a fan of Miley Cyrus’s music. But as soon as I hear Party in the U.S.A, I find my foot and body bopping to the music.
Cognitively, the song does nothing for me, but it does end up affecting my body. Why does music have this intense effect on us? According to Jeffery Walker, it’s the music’s techne that affects our dispositions. He states:
While in medicine the application of pharmakon causes the secretion of “juices” from the body, resulting in a pleasurable feeling of well-being, in the case of logos or music, the pharmakon is a particular techne—such as the application of a particular rhythm or melodic mode—that causes the soul of the hearer to be “put into a state” (both Aristotle and Gorgias use the verb kathistani) or to have its “disposition” (taxis) rearranged according to the “disposition” (taxis again) of the pharmakon or techne applied, and this “state” is expressed behaviorally and physically as a particular type of pathos: “fearful shuddering”, “much-weeping pity”, “lament-loving longing”, and so forth (pg 78).
Walker believes that the beats and rhythm of a song changes your disposition to the “sad” or “happy” melody the music exudes. As we have read from Massumi, affect is the reasoning behind our emotion and dispositions. But if the beats and rhythm are the cause of the affect, then music is not self contained. Because as Edbauer would say, the beats do not have the emotions of happiness or sadness instilled in them. The beats produce a disposition which “hovers” around the music like a virus, ready to infect its next victim. This is one of the reasons why music can so quickly and easily affect us. And sometimes, we can be affected without cognitively realizing it!
Music is influential and powerful. But few may realize just how important music is. A recent theory suggests that emotion, affect, and music are pre-adaptations to the formation of language. Jaak Panksepp explains Dan Shanahan’s theory in The Power of the Word May Reside in the Power of Affect. According to Panksepp, the human brain evolved to in a way that produced the areas that control emotion and music. Eventually, the evolution led to the development of language. Like Damasio, Panksepp writes that emotions arise from the lower subcortical part of the brain. As the subcortical area evolved, our ancestors may have developed gestures and/or vocals. But Panksepp believes that the gestures and vocals would have been more musical or poetical, then the language seen today. The step from the musical or poetical stage of evolution would be the beginnings of developing language.
“Just as emotional communication may have been a pre-adaptation for human invention of music, both may have been essential for the emergence of language,” states Panksepp (pg. 49). In his journal he states specific evidence to supports his theory. This includes:
1) Animals communicate affectively by sounds
2) Proto-musical competence precedes language in human mind development,
3) Music is the “language” of emotions and its affective power arises from subcortical emotional systems.
Just like with Walker, Panksepp makes the connection of affect and music. But his claim states that without the progression of emotion/affect/and music, language might not have developed. The progressions between these stages may be the reason why these concepts are still interconnected. Language “was never completely liberated from the affective-musical motivational ground from which it arose (pg. 49).”
Modern psychologists have realized the power and influence that music has. That is why numerous studies have been conducted to analyze it. Research on music ranges from the way the music is played to how certain brain disorders affect response to music. Looking through the research, two specific studies had results that interestingly connected with our readings throughout the semester.
Study 1: Similar Patterns of Age-Related Differences in Emotion Recognition from Speech and Music
For this study, researchers wanted to see if aging had an effect on emotion recognition and intensity. The study was conducted through vocal expression and music. Subjects included 20-33 year olds who were labeled as the young group. Participants ranging from 65-85 were placed in the older group. For the musical part of the study, four professional musicians played a melody on an electric guitar. The musicians played the melody with a weak, strong, and neutral intensity. But they also had to play the melody, with the different intensities, to produce four separate emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness). All participants in both the young and old groups heard 27 variations of the melody, i.e. high intensity and happiness, low intensity and fear. Researchers asked the subjects to evaluate the emotion the melody produced.
After the results were combined, it was discovered that there were age-related differences in emotion recognition. The older subjects had a harder time recognizing the negative emotions of fear and sadness in the music. But both the young and the old groups didn’t have problems in recognition of positive or neutral melodies.
What is interesting about these results is that they contradict the characteristics that Aristotle described for elderly man. In Aristotle Rhetoric, Aristotle states in regards to older men, “they are cowardly, and are always anticipating danger, unlike that of the young, who are warm-blooded, their temperament is chilly; old age has paved the way for cowardice; fear is, in fact, a form of chill (pg. 36). In this quote, he depicts elderly men as fearful of everything. While the research study did include women, almost half of the subjects were male. So if elderly men are suppose to be fearful of everything, why weren’t they recognizing the negative emotion of fear in the music?
The researchers considered two possibilities that could be the reasons for the outcome of the results. The first consideration was that the areas in the brain that emotion recognition relies on could change with age. Not only does the frontal cortex lose volume as we get older, there is also a theory that the right hemisphere ages faster than the left—negative emotions are processed in the right side. This idea relates back to Damasio’s thinking of the biological affecting the social. In Descartes’ Error, Damasio talks about patients who have “Gage matrix”—side effects from brain damage that are similar to Phineas Gage. One such patient, A, had massive damage in his frontal lobes on both the left and right sides, with the right side having a larger exercision. Because of the damage, the patient no longer showed or felt emotion. Damasio emphasizes that “there was no sign of embarrassment sadness, or anguish at such a tragic turn of events (pg. 56).” Because the patient had damage in the same areas that the researchers in the study were predicting caused the lack of emotion recognition, it is a strong possibility aging affects brain processes and recognition.
The other explanation to clarify the results of the study had more to do with motivation. According to the socioemotional selectivity theory, in order to keep their well-being, older people focus more on positivity rather than negativity. But young individuals are more likely to focus in on negative aspects. From an evolutionary perspective, this would be smart because the young would want protect themselves from anything that could injure or kill them, which would limit their reproduction of offspring. But for older adults, focusing on negative aspect is no longer a “useful investment”. Elderly people have most likely already reproduced, so looking out for danger or negative situations would be less necessary for them. If the socioemotional theory is the reason for the results found in the study, it seems that Aristotle would have been wrong in his characteristics of older men. But on cannot be too harsh at Aristotle because he was not aware of how evolution plays a big part in whom and what we are.
Study 2: Mixed Affective Response to Music with Conflicting Cues
In the second study, researchers wanted to disprove the theory that emotions are only bipolar. If this theory were true, then one would not be able to feel emotions at the same time, i.e. happy and sad. The researchers believed the best way to test this out would be to use music because it can produce non-intentional feelings. Two experiments were conducted to see whether music with conflicting cues could create mixed feelings in the subjects. Experiment 1 had 40 undergraduates individually listen to forty-eight 30-s excerpts from different genre recordings. The pure and mixed feeling clips were chosen from the same genre, artist, and CD, so no confusion would be made because of musical style. After each excerpt, participants rated the clip on how it made them feel on a scale, 0-not at all to 6-extremelly. The scale included happy, sad, pleasant and unpleasant.
The second experiment also used 40 undergraduate subjects and the same procedure as that of experiment one. What changed in this trial was that instead of rating their feelings on a scale, participants marked their responses on a two-dimensional grid. The first grid axis were happy and sad, while the second grid was pleasant and unpleasant. Like the first experiment, the axis was numbered 0-6. Subjects were told to pin point their feelings on the axes.
What the researchers found was that in both experiments, conflicting cues in music did produce mixed feelings of happiness and sadness. Experiment 2 was the best indicator of this because it did not use a unipolar scale like experiment 1. The researchers indicate that these findings are important. Not only does it prove that emotions can simultaneously be produced, but it also shows that mixed feeling are not wholly independent of another.
This is not the first time we learn about bipolar emotions. In Rethinking “the Public”: The Role of Emotion in Being-with-Others, Smith and Hyde talk about emotions on a line of continuum. The authors describe Aristotle’s opposites of emotion, i.e. anger-calm, kindness-cruelty, and how in order to provoke an emotion in the audience, the rhetor must move along the line of emotional continuum. The research study would contradict this notion because its results indicate that the continuum is not necessary. But Smith and Hyde do bring the point that emotions affect each other. In their article, they discuss how being scared at something can also make you angry at what made you fearful. While they say that this is moving along the lines of continuum could it be, like in the experiments, that these emotions are mixed in together? Like the researchers noted in their discussion, mixed feelings are not completely independent of one another.
The results from the research study may sound familiar. In Massumi’s Autonomy of Effect, he opens up the article with the story of the German children and the film of the snowman. Researchers in that study found that the children were experiencing both sadness and pleasantness when watching the wordless version of the film. This was due to the the primacy of the affective in image reception. Intensity, affect, is especially prevalent when there is an unexpected jolt that produces suspense and potentiality. In the case of the children and the film, the jolt may have come from the fact that they were seeing a film without words. This may have been a surprise for them, and their skin conductance was showing this (more skin response more pleasantness). In the case of the study with the conflicting music cues, it may be that the participants were jolted as well. Because people usually associate the music they are listening too with one feeling, hearing the conflicting cues may have jolted the subjects. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the researchers also looked at the skin response of the music participants. It may be that the music’s subject’s skin response would increase with the conflicting cues music, just like that of the German children and the wordless film.
(Conclusion in progress)
Music power and influence over our affect and emotion is undeniable. Studies on music are beginning to show us new and old ideas on the realm of