The ancient marriage between music, movement and mood
Think back to that moment when you first heard your favorite song. What about it made you stop in your tracks? Was it the incessant buildup, soaring high, filling you with a sense of elation? The flirty high notes, light as wings, bringing a bounce in your step? Or the rumbling base drop, furiously cascading, sending shiver after shiver down your spine?
Music has always had a special place in my heart. Like many, I use it as an emotional outlet and a painkiller for physical aches. During one of my longer runs a while back I distinctively remember a sense of elation as a drum & bass piece with the perfect BPM came on. I matched my foot strikes to the beat, closed my eyes and ran in a state of pure euphoria. (It helped that I was one of the only people on a flat, spacious wall that hugged the ocean. I must've looked high.)
Since that run I've been musing over our relationship with music. Across the globe people describe intense pleasure from listening to music, grooving to music, exercising to music. What lies at the core of this abstract euphoria? What is it about our perception that allows us to experience all three in unison?
I hope to answer these questions with my new piece up at Scientific American MIND. It is science writing based on peer-reviewed literature; but it's also my personal ode to music.
If you have a moment please check it out, and let me know what you think!
Edit: Beau Sievers, one of the authors of the study, kindly provided feedback on Twitter. She pointed out "The SciAm piece could be misread as saying Kreung music has no tuning, timbre, or scales—they do, they are just not Western. Kreung mem music does have clear notes in it, articulated to evoke insect sounds—very 'buzzy' but still musical. Thanks for the very nice writeup!"
Hope this helped to clarify things!
Kudos to Virginia Hughes at National Geographic blogs (Phenomena: Only Human) for directing me to the cited studies. She has previously written about them individually on her blog. Her writing is FANTASTIC - if you're not a reader yet, I highly recommend her work.
