Music can evoke all kinds of emotions anatter whether you headbang to Metallica or are mov to tears by Bach. Yet the musical styles of these two are not at all similar. Why is it that they can both evoke the same emotion? And how can music cause sensations in the first place, both in body and mind?
That’s what Japanese and British scientists decid to investigate. They want to understand why some chord progressions (sequences of chords) feel different than others. They look specifically at the musical chords that evoke feelings in the heart and stomach and the emotions that go with them.
Method
They ask over five hundr participants to listen to various audio fragments that they had made themselves. These audio fragments were obtain by studying the chord progressions of almost 900 pop songs. The scientists thus target industry database arriv at eight different sets of four chords that they then put in a random order, resulting in 92 unique chord progressions.
In addition to the chords and their order in these 92 fragments differing, the randomness also ensur that they follow each other in a prictable, or in a (slightly) unprictable way.
Body map
If a C chord feels natural as a continuation of the previous chord, and a C7 chord follows (which, compar to a C chord, only has effective email marketing strategies an extra note add), then this is not much different from what was expect. Especially compar to a completely different chord.
The participants then had to indicate in which part of their body they felt an emotion while listening within ten seconds, in order to ar numbers capture the music in a body map. They also had to indicate which emotion this was. This show that some chord progressions were clearly felt in the heart, while others evok a feeling in the stomach. In addition, certain combinations of chords evok a kind of ‘aesthetic appreciation’, which caus the participants to feel fewer negative emotions, such as discomfort and fear.
