That award goes to the raised 7th note of the minor scale.
The study found the note F# in a song in G minor key of G minor positively correlated with high sadness ratings.
That might be the reason the narrator’s anguish is almost palpable in The Animals’ House of the Rising Sun, which uses the raised 7th of the minor scale to launch into each increasingly emotional verse.
New Territory For this experiment, the team selected three emotional pieces of music that did not contain lyrics and were not highly familiar, so no element of memory was attached to the listeners’ emotional response.
(Hearing a song that played in the background during a wisdom tooth extraction, for instance, might skew your perception.
) In the neuroimaging experiment, 40 volunteers listened to a series of sad or happy musical excerpts, while their brains were scanned using MRI.
This was conducted at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute by Assal Habibi, an assistant professor of psychology at USC Dornsife, and her team, including Matthew Sachs, a postdoctoral scholar currently at Columbia University.
To measure physical reaction, 60 people listened to music on headphones, while their heart activity and skin conductance were measured.
The same group also rated the intensity of emotion (happy or sad) from 1 to 10 while listening to the music.
Then, the computer scientists crunched the data using AI algorithms to determine which auditory features people responded to consistently.
In the past, neuroscientists trying to better understand the impact of music on the body, brain and emotions have analyzed MRI brain scans over very short segments of time—for instance, looking at the brain reacting to two seconds of music.
By contrast, in this study, using algorithms to analyze data gathered in the lab, the scientists were able to look at how people felt while listening to music over longer periods of time, not only from brain scans, but also combining data from other modes.
“Novel multimodal computing approaches help not just illuminate human affective experiences to music at the brain and body level, but in connecting them to how actually individuals feel and articulate their experiences,” said Professor Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan, study co-author, Niki and C.
L.
Max Nikias Chair in Engineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science.
Feeling Good In addition to helping researchers identify songs for the perfect workout, study or sleep playlist, the research has therapeutic applications — music has been shown to calm anxiety, ease pain and help people with disabilities or dementia.
“From a therapy perspective, music is a really good tool to induce emotion and engage a better mood,” said Habibi.
“Using this research, we can design musical stimuli for therapy in depression and other mood disorders.
It also helps us understand how emotions are processed in the brain.
” According to the researchers, future studies could look at how different types of music can positively manipulate our emotional responses and whether the intent of the composer matches the listener’s perception of a piece of music.
The paper, titled “A Multimodal View into Music’s Effect on Human Neural, Physiological, and Emotional Experience,” was presented at ACM Multimedia.
The research team also includes Ben Ma, a USC Viterbi undergraduate in computer science and a member of USC SAIL.
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