I was driving home from school when a song played on the radio. It. Was. Freakin. Amazing. I'm not quite sure if I heard it before but I don't know it just really captured me, it felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I remembered the scene from 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' because I wanted to drive through a tunnel and stand at the back of a pickup truck except that I was stuck in traffic and I was driving a sedan. Anyway, I just wanted to ask how does music affect our emotions? And how are we able to identify songs or melodies? Gaaah I am still looking for the song, wish me luck! And thanks in advanced!
Amme Nostaw
I hope you find your song! I experience the same thing when a song suddenly plays and I just lose myself and I just want to dance, dance, dance. So what is in a song that makes us stand on the back of pickup trucks or dance like the world isn't watching?
The Perks of Being a Wallflower Tunnel Scene
Before answering that question, let's first talk about how we identify melodies. Fortunately, there is a study conducted by Schulkind, Posner, and Rubin (2003) to help us with this. Earlier studies on melody identification have proposed two different kinds of processing. The first kind is analytic processing which occurs when a listener breaks the melody down into its basic parts, analyzes each component on a note-to-note basis, and adds up all of the information contained in each note to understand the stimulus (Schulkind, Posner, and Rubin, 2003). However, the problem with this is that some listeners can recognize familiar melodies transposed to new keys or registers. Another way is to analyze the intervals between consecutive notes or the sequence of intervals. Listeners can, for example, remember the song "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as having contour directions like this ↓↓↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓. Listeners represent these kind of contour information at this level of detail and the presiding representation depends on the familiarity and length of the melody (Schulkind, Posner, and Rubin, 2003). An analytic approach to melody identification is thus comprised of matching the strings of elements in the physical stimulus with a corresponding sequence that is stored in memory (Schulkind, Posner, and Rubin, 2003). Since melodies are stored as ordered strings of distinct, coherent elements, it is possible that information on individual notes may be lost because they are mixed into a unified percept. The individual elements are combined to form one meaningful object that is represented by its temporal structure and global pitch instead of the summation of its parts. This brings up the second approach which is holistic processing which states that listeners analyze the overall shape or structure of the melody. This may be achieved by matching the information about the global structure of a melody with its correspondent psychological representation.
After conducting a two-phase experiment, the researchers reached the conclusion that melody identification is more of a holistic process rather than analytic. Five musical characteristics were significant predictors of melody identification and four of these were holistic in nature. The first was phrase placement which is the placement of a note within a musical phrase. Another significant predictor were notes that completed successive alterations between rising and falling pitch contours. Thirdly, pair patterns were also significant predictors because they are easily encoded and remembered since they are salient. Lastly is the meter of the melody which provides the global framework of a piece. The only significant predictor that was analytic in nature was duration.
Now that we know how we are able to identify melodies, let's answer the other question: how does music affect our emotions? A neuroscientist and composer, Professor Daniel Levitin explains that the brain's emotional, language, and memory centers are connected when we process music which can be considered as a synesthetic experience (Mohana, 2013). Music has the ability to produce feelings and images that does necessarily need to be directly reflected in memory. The overall experience still keeps hold of a certain level of mystery; the reasons we get thrills when listening to music is strongly tied in with the many theories based on synesthesia (Mohana, 2013). The connection between the emotional, language, and memory centers is different for all of us, that is why there are people who have the ability to create music that is overflowing with emotions while some others cannot. Our preference for certain types of music also has an effect on our experience of it. If you love listening to music, your high level of experience allows you to create and imagine music that other people cannot. Truly, music is a very important part of our lives.
I hope I answered your questions, Amme. Good luck again, I hope you find your song! :)
Senserely Yours,
Holly
References
Schulkind, M.D., Posner, R.J., & Rubin, D.C. (2003). Musical features that facilitate melody identification. How do we know it's "your" song when they finally play it? Music Perception, 21(2), 217-249.
Photo Credits
http://radioresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/knob.jpg
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