It’s no secret that music can effect us in pro­found ways. Often we expe­ri­ence all sorts of phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes, par­tic­u­larly relat­ing to mood. I’ve won­dered if it were pos­si­ble to map out the responses to var­i­ous melodic struc­ture in order to write super-affective songs. Three researchers (Grewe, Kopiez, Alten­müllera) have put forth a paper detail­ing their research in pro­vok­ing chills. Though the paper is not on music’s abil­ity to induce chills  (which is a given) but rather on chills as an indi­ca­tor of emo­tional peaks, it is still inter­est­ing to know that our emo­tional response to music can be so out­wardly indicated.

Pre­vi­ous stud­ies demon­strated that chills can
be repeated in response to the same musi­cal
event over sev­eral days in one indi­vid­ual.
How­ever, they can­not be trig­gered reli­ably in
dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als in response to the same
musi­cal stimulus.

Shout out to Mind​hacks​.com for point­ing out the paper to me which you can read here.

Tags: Science

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.