Why We Love Music

How music affects each and everyone of us

Story by Ana Linan-Hernandez

People tend to listen to music that matches their emotional state to feel more understood. With this alone, we can tell that music is a huge factor in people’s lives. It is an easy way to change your mood and even an easy way to learn since catchy songs are often easy to memorize. This prompts the question as to why is music so catchy, and why do we love it so much?

Music psychology is a branch of psychology and musicology that studies the behavioral patterns of your brain while listening to music. This includes the processes by which music is incorporated into everyday life. Modern music psychology tends to focus on how music can affect performance, intelligence, attitude, creativity and social behavior. Humans have an exclusive ability unlike other organisms to derive joy from complex musical patterns. Some psychologists even believe this is an evolutionary accident. Dr. Elif Tekin Gurgen disagrees with this theory. She believes sounds are far too important to humans for it to be a mistake. For example, when you hear a baby cry, most peoples’ response is to go help. She believes music makes us react similarly, in that when we hear it we feel a certain kind of way. As a kid, she wanted to be a musician. As she grew older though, she realized being a musician wasn’t a stable career, and instead decided to major in musicology. Gurgen is a professor of musicology at Dokuz Eylül University in Turkey. She cannot live without music, and believes it to be an essential part of life. However, due to Turkey’s stability and condition, she was forced to become professor of musicology, and has recently been holding piano lessons. “Most musicians are jobless,” Gurgen said, “[since] they can’t find a job easily and can’t earn a job easily.” Unfortunately, most research about musicology is done in English which is why she is working on breaking that language barrier for her students. “I am currently working on a student book for my Master’s student,” Gurgen said, “because there aren’t enough books about the psychology of music in Turkish.” She will include books which served as her inspiration for her research. The two most notable were Daniel Levitin’s Your Brain on Music, and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia. Your Brain on Music is more about how your brain responds to music while Musicophilia is more about why we like certain genres of music. These books, along with many articles all of which talk about Gurgen’s favorite topic: why we are so attached to music. Gurgen is currently working on researching a very unusual connection. She has been taking Tai Chi - a form of Chinese martial arts - for two years. While learning Tai Chi, she had an epiphany: Music and Tai Chi are both about controlling yourself. “Playing an instrument needs control over your body and control over your mind and focus,” Gurgen said, “I think Tai Chi is about that.” On the other side of Europe, in Austria, there is another researcher with a passion for music psychology, Dr. Marcel Zentner. He started his career as a postdoc at Harvard University. He later became a professor of psychology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. His research has been published many times before such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Science and has featured on BBC ONE, National Public Radio and

Photo by Academia

Photo curtesy of Dr. Zenter

The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of the Handbook of Temperament. Zentner has many interests mainly in the area of personality development but one of his favorite topics lately has been music therapy. Music therapy is using music’s psychological benefits to achieve goals such as communication, social interaction, depression, etc. Using music to work out is one of the most well-known forms of music therapy as it distracts from the pain of exercise. While researching music therapy, he came up with a hypothesis that the emotions used to study this type of psychology might be too broad (happiness, sadness, anger, etc). Why should music be limited to everyday emotions after all? “They are useful for the analysis of emotions in many everyday situations,” Zentner said, “but their relevance to musical emotion is limited.” While using Zentner’s approach, he and his coworkers ran many studies in which they would have listeners describe their emotions to different genres of music in the broadest possible description. Using this research, they came up with a model called GEMS or Geneva Emotional Music Scales. With GEMS, they identified three main categories of music: sublimity, vitality and unease which also included a total of nine emotion subcategories: wonder, transcendence, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, energy, joyful activation, tension and sadness. These nine subcategories go further with all having two to five subcategories. “These are the different categories of music that evoked emotion that we really didn’t know before,” Zentner said, “For example, wonder, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the music and stunned by the music.” Music therapy has already shown much improvement since the launch of the GEMS model with research showing music to improve self esteem, productivity, motivation, reduce stress and serve as a coping skill for many. Zentner has since shifted his focus to his next project but GEMS has been frequented by many researchers as well as being used in studies on music and emotion. This was a game changer for their research since they could now use these categories to fuel music therapy research. Making the future of music therapy seems brighter than ever before.