In a world of music streaming services, access to virtually any song is just a few clicks away. Yet the live performance lives on. People still fill sweaty basements, muddy fields and gilded concert halls to hear their favorite musicians play. And now neuroscientists may know why: Live music engages the brain's emotion centers more than its recorded counterpart.
Concerts are immersive social experiences in which people listen to and feel the music together through crescendos, key changes and drops. They are also dynamic: performers can adapt their playing to the audience's reaction.
It was this last difference that led neuroscientists at the universities of Zurich and Oslo to study the brain responses of people listening to music. In the 'live' experiment, participants lay in an MRI scanner and listened to the music through headphones, while a pianist stood outside the room. The pianist was shown the participant's real-time brain activity as a form of feedback. In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same melodies.
The scientists were interested in how live music affected the areas of the brain that process emotions. In the live condition, pianists were instructed to try to modulate their playing to control activity in one of these regions known as the amygdala, an almond-shaped area deep in the brain.
The results, just published in the journal PNAS, showed that live music had a much greater emotional impact. Whether the music was happy or sad, listening to the pianist play in a dynamic way generated more activity in both the amygdala and other parts of the brain's emotion processing network. The researchers also found that the participants' brain activity tracked the acoustic characteristics of the music, such as tempo and pitch, much more accurately when it was played live.
The study was far from replicating the real experience of a performance, and the authors noted that the live music ultimately sounded very different from the recorded songs, which may have caused some of the differences in the participants' brain activity. But the results indicate that artists' ability to change the way they play in response to audiences may be one aspect of what makes live music special. Some musical acts are now trying to recreate the real performance experience with everything but the performer: ABBA Voyage is a social, immersive show performed entirely by pre-recorded hologram avatars. But without Benny's ability to read the mood of the room, it will never quite match the real thing.
Curious about the world? Sign up to enjoy our mind-bending science coverage Just scienceour weekly newsletter, exclusively for subscribers.
© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
Unlock a world of benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time inventory management, breaking news and a personalized news feed – it's all there, just one click away! Log in now!
View all business news, market news, breaking news events and breaking news updates on DailyExertNews. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates.
. or less
Published: Apr 28, 2024 5:29 PM IST