How exactly does live music affect our brains? There’s a kind of neurological resonance between performers and audience members, which allows performers to change their performance to influence the audience’s emotions. was found to cause a reaction. This partly explains why watching your favorite band perform live is so much better than listening to a studio recording. Sascha Frueholz, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Zurich, pipes real-time performances to listeners in a brain scanner and feeds the scan results back to the player in a way that maximizes emotional response. Gives instructions to play. …
Sascha – There wasn’t a lot of research into live music. We want to know how intense live music is compared to recorded music. And the other dimension was the brain. And we’re doing a lot of research on a particular part of the brain called the effective brain or the limbic system. And part of the limbic system is the amygdala, which is central to all kinds of emotional processing. So we just wanted to know how the amygdala responds to live music.
Chris – I think one of the reasons for the lack of information about live music and the brain’s response is that we can’t bring brain scanners to rock concerts. So how did you get around it?
Sascha – Well, like you said, this is probably the limit. So if you want to quantify brain activity, you need these big machines. So what we did in the experiment was we put people in a brain scanner. Therefore, we quantified brain activity in real time, particularly the activity of the limbic system, by having musicians and piano players look at people’s brain activity in a scanner in various rooms, and actually tracked brain activity. I made it possible. And we asked them, if they found that their limbic system activity was reduced, would they try changing something in their performance?
Chris – Neat. So it’s basically like biofeedback, converting the brain images from the person’s reaction to the music they’re hearing, perhaps from live musicians, during the brain scan. When you present it to live musicians, they play trying to change their brain activity in a way that does something in sync with the music. So, how did the musicians react, and how did the brains of people who heard the changes in music react?
Sascha – they changed the so-called musical timbre, that is, the sound quality. They changed the tempo and the complexity of the song, all of which were ultimately successful. Therefore, as these musicians bring about changes in the way they perform, the work we see increases the activity of those who listen.
Chris – Is this what happens when you go to live events? In a sense, the musicians on stage are subtly changing the way they play, which is in sync with the reaction they get from the audience. So there are two types of gel.
Sascha – Exactly like this, this only happens during live music. That is, the musicians are on one side, and they try to create a performance to enhance the emotional experience of the audience while playing. They look at the audience’s reaction. And if, for example, we see that the audience is not satisfied, we try to introduce some changes.
Chris – What happens if I play music to someone I absolutely hate? I mean, there are certain musicians, certain genres of music that I can’t stand. Other than that, I really love it (lol). Have you ever tried something like that to see if music that someone likes activates completely different circuits when they love music compared to someone who hates it?
Sascha – That’s a really interesting question. And we know that the amygdala is part of the limbic system, the emotional brain that responds not only to things we like, but also to things we completely dislike when it comes to music. Studies on music and listeners’ emotional responses have found positive music. In other words, there was music that made us happy, and music that made us feel uncomfortable. That is, it is negative music, one that induces emotions such as sadness or nostalgia. I express my negative emotions through music. However, some people still prefer to listen to music in this minor key.
Chris – Like eating vegetables? I know it doesn’t taste great, but it’s good for you. Music needs that kind of contrast because it stretches you emotionally. Do you think that is happening?
Sasha – Yes. In other words, music has a dimension called an aesthetic dimension. So it’s not just the music itself, the music has themes, it has certain topics, and sometimes those topics can be negative, but it’s these negative themes that still make you want to listen to this music. Because I’m interested in. end.