CBS-13 in Davis, California, reported yesterday on a coming study of music and emotion.
UC Davis neuropsychology professor Petr Janata just received a $1 million dollar grant to study how people experience emotions and have spiritual experiences when they're engaged with music.
Over the next three years he'll study several religious groups and compare them to hard-core rock music fans. Believe it or not, there are similarities.
“It all combines to produce these transcendent or deeply emotional or what those people would characterize as spiritual experiences," said Janata.
This isn't really new. Back in the mid-1980s, when I used to listen to NPR, they interviewed a professor who had studied emotion in classical music (minor keys evoke sadness, e.g.). They had him on the air because they always got overwhelming response whenever they played Ray Lynch's "Celestial Soda Pop" as their between-stories music. He said that song evokes joy.
I hope Professor Janata studies the differences between men's and women's emotional responses to music, because I have a theory. I believe women listen to music with their emotions much more than men do, who listen more with their minds.
When I was married, my husband liked to listen to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, but I couldn't listen to the title song. There's something about the swirling music that would grab hold of my emotions and drag me down a vortex into depression. I would have to leave the room and turn on some happy music. My husband never understood the emotional effect music had on me. The music he liked was because he appreciated the skill of the musicians.
Maybe you can't generalize from the two of us, but most of my women friends agreed with me. We preferred the oldies station, while the men in our lives preferred harder rock.
Just a theory. I'm hoping Professor Janata will be able to clear all this up once and for all.
3 comments:
John,
We men are being caged a bit by society, which frowns upon our being aggresive, which is in our nature. Rock music allows us to release some of that aggression.
I've never looked at it like that before. My ex-husband is a numbers and engineering kind of guy who is a bit detached from his emotions and not very good with words. So if music made him feel the things you do, he wasn't able to express it.
I'm not a happy-music-only kind of woman, so there are times I seek out other emotions. Battlefield Band's "Lord Haddo's Favorite" is very sad and very sweet. And there's a Polish Christian song, Golgoto, that's in a very minor key and is so haunting and so evocative of what Christ did on the cross for us. I love to listen to them, just not all the time.
Anyway, I'm always willing to adjust my theories when better explanations come along, and yours is way better than mine. I yield the point.
Still, I hope the good professor gathers separate data for men and women, just in case he finds something significant.
I actually agree with John, at least on some points, because I had planned to make the same point.
I am a musician. I have a music education degree, so I've done some more in-depth learning about music. I would fall into both the male and female categories because the emotional aspect touches me, but I also appreciate the technical side of music...to the point where poorly written/performed music can really ruin the experience. I tend to be a lot more critical of music than some...but I digress.
When I was in college, I wrote several research papers on the effects of music on our lives. I focused on a lot of different areas, from its effects on learning to how it makes us exercise longer and better. Music is EXTREMELY powerful and influential in so many ways. It has effects on us in ways that can be seen and felt but also in more subtle, unnoticeable ways. It's fascinating stuff.
As a side note, I can remember doing my research and learning that the "elevator" music that is played in public places is actually very carefully planned. If, during the busy Christmas shopping season for instance, a department store wants to keep people moving and get them in and out quickly, they will play more upbeat, loud music. If they want people to take their time and browse, they will play slower, calmer music.
It's really a very simple concept, but it plays on something subconscious in our brains that directly affects our behavior. To me, that's rather fascinating.
Christina,
Your research sounds fascinating. I love the psychological aspects of it.
But you missed out on something the good professor noticed: There's a million bucks available for this kind of research.
Oh, if only...
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