Raucous Music May Tap Into Your Inner Animal

June 13th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

WEDNESDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) — Harsh, jarring music — a
mainstay of rock-and-roll, movie soundtracks and many garage bands —
appears to stimulate your mind by simulating the sounds of animals in
distress, a new study claims.

The research doesn’t directly prove that the distortion in a song such
as Jimi Hendrix‘s “Star Spangled Banner” makes you subconsciously think
about the screams of other mammals. However, study author Daniel Blumstein
said “it gives us the biological basis behind why certain forms of music
create emotions. What’s so nice about this is that they’re inspired by
biological forces, by 3.5 billion years of life.”

Blumstein, chair of the ecology and evolutionary biology department at
the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues are studying how
the distress sounds of mammals and birds command attention. It appears
that they “overblow” their vocal systems, Blumstein said, creating
distortion similar to what you hear if you turn your stereo volume up too
high.

The researchers sought to better understand how people react to
distortions in music. With the help of Greg Bryant, an assistant professor
of communication studies at UCLA, musician and recording engineer, they
created 10-second snippets of music. Some were bland — “Muzak-y,”
Blumstein said — and others transformed after five seconds into harsh,
rough music.

The idea was to create discordant sounds evocative of those made by
animals in distress. “We’re not increasing the tempo, we’re not increasing
the amplitude, we’re not changing keys,” Blumstein said. “We’re adding
noise, something that would be naturally produced. We’re creating
biologically inspired music.”

Forty-two UCLA undergrads who heard the snippets that included the
rougher music found them more stimulating than the other music.

However, a second group of students was less aroused if they watched
innocuous videos while they listened to the musical selections. “Music
alone seems to be able to manipulate arousal … but in our experiments,
the addition of video suppressed these arousing responses,” Blumstein
said. In other words, context influences the listener’s feelings.

Daniel Levitin, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience
at McGill University in Montreal, said the findings fit in with theories
that distorted sounds grab attention because they mimic sounds of
distress.

Also, these sounds can be loud, and “our brain interprets loud sounds
that are very near us as potentially dangerous, triggering the well-known
‘startle’ response we have if, say, a balloon pops nearby,” he said. “This
is an ancient reflex that we share with all mammals, occurring deep in the
brain stem,” added Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on
Music.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at
University College London, said the study is valid and serves as “a very
preliminary exploration of the potential evolutionary basis of musical
preferences. The main message is that distorted music may tap into evolved
biological processes or systems in our brain which have the capacity to
perceive danger even before we are conscious of it.”

But it doesn’t have applications in everyday life, he said.

Just what is the appeal of jarring music? “My experience and studies
suggest that liking distorted music is a function of being more creative
and open to novelty,” he said.

One of the next steps in research, study author Blumstein said, is to
figure out how emotionally charged video — like that in a horror movie —
affects people’s response to the sounds of distortion.

The study was published online June 12 in the journal Biology
Letters.

More information

Music therapy can help people in distress. For more, see the American Music
Therapy Association.