What Does Music Make Us Feel?
A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our
emotional perceptions of other people
As a youngster I enjoy listening to music. Even though If I don’t
understand a word of different language songs, but was nevertheless enthralled.
Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech
sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to
alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native
spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the
commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry
– not even French.
But music does emanate
from our alarm clocks in the morning, and fill our cars, and give us chills,
and make us cry. According to a recent paper by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep
Bhattacharya from the University of London, music even affects how we see
visual images. In the experiment, 30 subjects were presented with a
series of happy or sad musical excerpts. After listening to the snippets, the
subjects were shown a photograph of a face. Some people were shown a happy face
– the person was smiling - while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial
expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of
the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely
happy.
The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the
emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier
while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown. A similar effect
was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of
music are “cross-modal,” and can easily spread from sensory system to another.
1 comments:
good work guys!keep it up :)
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