Imagine your favorite song. Now think about how you feel. Chances are you didn’t have to think too hard to identify this feeling. And chances are if you asked a friend how that same song made him feel, he’d have the same answer.
Alan Cowen wanted to know if people who lived in a place far from ours would also react this way.
“Emotions are interpreted by language and culture,” he says. He thought it was possible that the music that Americans consider angry is seen as scary by people who live elsewhere.
Cowen is a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, where he examines how people express their emotions with their faces and their voices. He organized a study of more than 2,500 people in the United States and China. He and his fellow researchers played many types of music for them, including heavy metal, rock, jazz and classical.
They found that everyone had roughly the same emotional response to music. For example, “The Star-Spangled Banner” made people proud, while “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran made them happy. But even if people in China and the United States felt angry to listen to a particular song, said Cowen, “They differed whether they thought the experience was good or bad.”
Previous research by other scientists has shown that people from different cultures share up to six basic emotions: fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness and happiness. But Cowen’s study identified 13 emotional responses or feelings “felt through the language of music”: fun, joy, desire, beautiful, relaxation, sadness, reverie, triumph, anxiety, fear, annoyance, challenge and bloated feeling .
Perhaps the coolest of all, the researchers created an interactive map of these musical emotions. You can play with it online to see if your answers match those of the people in the study. Find the menu on ocf.berkeley.edu/~acow en / music.html #.
Teachers around the world use this card in their classes. This helps students find new words to describe their emotions.
“They range from saying,” It’s good music “to” It’s provocative music, “” says Cowen.
This ability could help them control their own emotions or better understand the feelings of others. Cowen says depressed people “often look at facial expressions and see more negativity.” Having different words to describe emotions could be a tool to help them reconsider what they think they are seeing.
Humans are not the only animals to react to music. Music decreases anxiety in shelter dogs and helps cows to produce more milk. So why are humans the only ones who succeed?
Cowen says there are parallels to music in the sounds of other creatures. A low growl from a tiger, for example, “announces its size and strength”, while human parents of all cultures “soothe infants with sharper sounds that indicate comfort”.
Music, however, is what Cowen calls “cheesecake” for the human brain. It’s something nice that we didn’t need for evolution but that “completely transforms the way we live life,” with at least 13 emotions.
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