People around the world universally respond to music. Advances in neuroscience enable researchers to measure just how music affects the brain. It can be said to be a guessing game and our enjoyment of it hinges on whether we can predict what’s coming next. When the notes rise and fall as expected, the reward centers in our brains are activated. However, the stakes for predicting the rhythm of a song are much lower. We can afford to be wrong and sometimes, we actually like it.
Psyche Loui is an assistant professor of Music Psychology at Northeastern University. She believes that our brains like the sweet spot between monotonous and random. She thus plans on investigating why. In order to examine psychological reactions to unpredictable music, Loui exposes participants to music written in the Bohlen-Pierce scale. The scale uses a three-to-one ratio frequency that’s distinctly different from most, which is written in a two-to-one ratio, the octave. Composers are familiar with this scale. It sounds odd to most people, but after a while, people learn to find this pleasant. By exposing participants to this unfamiliar music, Loui can test whether reward can be derived solely from newly formed predictions. However, Loui has to ask why people don’t like music to answer why people like it. Music anhedonia is a neurological condition where people are indifferent to music and tone-deafness is the inability to recognise musical tones. Both of these present interesting case studies about predictions and rewards. With the help of the novel sound patterns of the Bohlen-Pierce scale, Loui plans to test whether people who are musically anhedonic or tone-deaf have a hard time learning and liking unfamiliar music.
“Looking at their brain scans might shed light on different forms of disruption in the area of the brain that derives reward for predictions,” Loui says. And that kind of information could help shape things like music therapy, and more generally, expand our understanding of how music changes our brains.
Shahjadi Jemim Rahman