Music is a universal language. Despite having different tastes of music, people tend to find a connection and familiarity through the tunes and the lyrics or the rhythm. The best examples are the clubs or music festivals where hundreds of people gather together to enjoy the same rhythm and move together to match their movements to the beat and create synchronisations through the music. Psyche Loui, an assistant professor of Music Psychology at the Northeastern University, also says "music brings people together". In tough times, such as the present pandemic, music is similarly helping people all around the world to connect.
Psyche Loui works in a lab which mainly studies music and the brain and the reason behind all the cultures around the world for having the music of their own. We can easily distinguish the origin of a particular music or genre while listening to the tunes and the rhythm. Psyche believes that the main concept behind music lies in the connection between the auditory system and the reward system.
The professor talks about how music also creates predictions and violates our predictions at the same time. She mentions an example of the house music where the disc jockey turns the music faster leading to a boost in our anticipation and suddenly stops to make way for the beat drop when all of our movements synchronise and produces a rush of dopamine through our brains. According to her, this is the reason behind music being so rewarding other than only fulfilling our predictions and making us aware of the differences between anticipation and reality.
Being aware of the predictions, especially during such an unpredictable time as now creates a bonding which is advocated by songs and music. Psyche herself wrote a song about coronavirus to hammer the importance of social distancing. While the whole world is stuck in the same situation, the ability to interpret music and act on artistic creativity is in a way uplifting in the hard times.
Rubena Bose