Marching to a different tune: researchers unlock the motivational power of music
This is the text of my article for The Conversation published there on 12 July 2013.
“Music has charms to
soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak”, wrote William
Congreve in 1697. We take this for
granted, and therefore often tend to overlook how genuinely mysterious it is
that simple patterns of sound vibrations can have profound effects on our minds
and bodies. This power of music to on the one hand soothe, but equally to
energise, has long fascinated musicians and philosophers. Most recently, psychologists
and neurophysiologists have turned their attention to music, and have sought to
measure, and explain in empirical terms, how music can have so much influence
our moods and levels of energy.
A Belgian study published today has shed some further light
on how this might work. Marc Leman and colleagues at the Institute for
Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music and Ghent University analysed the effects
of listening to different pieces of music on the walking speed of 18 adults. Researchers have long known that people will
synchronise their steps with the tempo of music – after all, this is why we
have marching bands. So for this study,
the researchers chose 52 pieces of instrumental music with contrasting moods
and styles, but exactly the same musical tempo – 130 beats per minute.
Sure enough, almost all the participants stepped in time
with the music. What was more
interesting was that certain pieces of music caused the participants to walk
more energetically – to take larger strides, and cover a larger total distance
– while other pieces caused the opposite effect.
For the record, the piece of music that created the most
vigorous walking in the study was:
While the gentlest response was to:
After the walking test, the participants were then asked to
rate the pieces they listened to in terms of opposed pairs of adjectives: was
the piece good or bad? Stuttering or flowing?
Tender or aggressive? Soft or
loud? Unsurprisingly, the participants
walked with more of a spring in their step to music rated as stuttering, loud,
or aggressive, while gentler, softer, flowing or more complex music had a
relaxing effect.
This effect appeared to be independent of musical genre: the
list of the most arousing music included classical, techno, world music and
house, while the top ten most relaxing pieces ranged from Baroque solo viol
music to contemporary Korean dance tracks.
The effect also seemed to be independent of the participants own musical
preferences – the music had the observed affect whether or not the participants
liked that particular style or genre.
Leman and colleagues speculate that this musical effect on the vigour of
physical response might happen at an autonomous or subliminal level. This suggests several possible practical
applications of the research, for instance in sports performance or physical
rehabilitation.
What makes this study relatively unusual is that the
researchers then analysed these objective cognitive results in terms of a
sophisticated music theoretical model.
They were attempted to discover exactly what the musical features were
that were associated with the arousing or relaxing effects. Nearly 200 sonic features of each piece were
analysed – the loudness of various parts music, the sharpness of the attack,
the structure of the beats, the distribution of pitches and so on – and this
musical analysis was then correlated with the results of the walking
experiment. Surprisingly, only a handful
of features were shown to cause arousal and relaxation, and these all had to do
with the regular structure of the rhythm, which musicians call “metre”. Put simplistically, music with a march-like
rhythm (“binary metre”) causes more arousal, while music with a waltz-like
rhythm (“ternary metre”) causes greater relaxation.
So when you next see a batsman stride to the crease or a
boxer enter the ring to the blare of aggressive, pounding motivational music,
it’s more than just theatre. There’s a
genuine physiological effect at work. And it might be that the Blues’ best chance in
next week’s State of Origin decider will be to make sure the Queensland team
runs out to the sound of the Blue Danube Waltz.
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