Just 11 weeks of piano lessons can improve audio-visual processing

After weekly hour-long piano lessons, participants were better at detecting whether an image and sound were in sync.

25 January 2023

By Emma Young


Musical training has been linked to all kinds of benefits, including being better at recognising emotions and improved cognitive functioning even decades later. However, most of these studies have involved comparing musicians with non-musicians — and it can be hard to know whether musical training itself caused improvements, or whether perhaps the two groups were different to start with.

Now Yuqing Che at the University of Bath and colleagues report the results of a randomised controlled trial. Their paper in Scientific Reports reveals that just 11 weeks of weekly hour-long piano lessons boosts the ability to detect whether an image and sound are in sync. This is, they claim, the first evidence that musical training causes an improvement in audio-visual processing outside the realm of music-related perception.

The team ran a lab-based study on 31 healthy adults, none of whom reported formal musical training beyond school music lessons. One group received the weekly individual piano lessons while a second group spent an hour a week listening to the simple pieces of music that the others were learning. A control group read or studied quietly during these periods.

Every two weeks, the participants were tested on their sensitivity to ‘audio-visual synchrony’. They were presented with a series of circle images accompanied by beeps, and also video clips in which a man was making an ‘o’ sound. The team slightly varied the timings of the images and the sounds, so that some were presented in synchrony while others were out to some degree.

The results showed that after 11 weeks, the participants who’d had the piano lessons had got better at judging whether an image and a sound were synchronous, or not. The other two groups did not show this improvement, which was still evident two weeks after the final piano lesson.

Every two weeks, the team had also tested the participants’ ability to recognise various emotions from brief videos of faces. But at the end of the study period, those who’d had piano lessons were no better than the others at this. This supports results from earlier studies of musicians and non-musicians that have suggested that although musical training can improve emotion perception too, these benefits are restricted to recognising emotions in people’s voices but not facial expressions.

There are some limitations to the study, not least the small number of participants. Also, the researchers report some additional findings that should be considered very preliminary. For instance, they find that people who’d initially scored higher on autistic traits might have gained a greater synchrony-sensitivity benefit from the piano lessons — at least when it came to the flashes and beeps. This could be important, as autistic people tend to be poorer at audio-visual processing, which can affect speech comprehension, among other things. But as the team notes, a similar study involving autistic people would be needed to explore whether music lessons could help them in this way.

It’s also worth pointing out, though, that the musical training in this study was very limited. Perhaps more frequent lessons and/or practice, for longer, would lead to additional, or bigger benefits.

For now: “Our results show, for the first time, how 11 weeks of musical training can significantly enhance audio-visual perception,” the team writes. Importantly, “our results show that it was the music training that delivered this advantage, rather than other factors or predispositions that cannot be excluded in cross-sectional studies.”

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/just-11-weeks-piano-lessons-can-improve-audio-visual-processing(accessed 27.1.23)

Musings On Music: Seven Insights From Psychology

August 18, 2020

By Emma Young

Music and humans go back a very long way. The earliest accepted instruments, made from bones, appear on the European scene about 40,000 years ago. But for perhaps at least a million years before that, our ancestors had the throat architecture that in theory would have allowed them to sing.

All kinds of ideas have been put forward for why and how music came to matter so much to us. But what’s abundantly clear is that it does matter; there isn’t a society out there that doesn’t make and listen to music. And new research is now revealing all manner of psychological and neurological effects…

But what about people who don’t like music?

Music is a human universal, but it’s true — not everyone enjoys music. In fact, as a 2014 paper published in Current Biology revealed, some perfectly healthy people can perceive music just like anybody else, but their reward-related neural circuits don’t respond to it. (These circuits do still respond to food or money, for example, so it’s not that they’re generally defective).

In fact, an estimated 3-5% of people experience “musical anhedonia”, and get no pleasure from music. (To find out where you sit on the music reward spectrum, you could fill in the team’s questionnaire, available here.) Last year, a team that included some of the same researchers published a follow-up study in the Journal of Neuroscience. They found a neurobiological basis for their earlier observations: differences in the white matter “wiring” that connects the auditory cortex and the ventral striatum, a key part of the reward system. What causes these differences is not yet clear.

For the rest of us, what is it about a piece of music that gives us pleasure?

Last year, a team led by Vincent Cheung at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany published an analysis of responses to 745 US Billboard pop songs. They found that expectancy is key. When listeners were pretty certain about which chord to expect next (based on what had come before), they found it pleasurable to be surprised. When they weren’t sure what to expect, though, more predictable subsequent chords were pleasing.

Popular songs strike a good balance between both subverting expectation and reassuring listeners, the team concluded. “It is fascinating that humans can derive pleasure from a piece of music just by how sounds are ordered over time,” Cheung commented. It is also important for understanding how music influences our emotional state…

Why do we like listening to sad music?

The first point to stress is that we don’t all necessarily like it. In 2016, a team led by Tuomas Eerola at the University of Durham reported on the emotional experiences connected with sad music of 2,436 people in the UK and Finland. The majority said they enjoyed sad music, and that this pleasure boosted their mood. “However, there are people who absolutely hate sad-sounding music and avoid listening to it,” notes Eerola. The study revealed that for these people, sad music was associated with painful personal experiences, such as loss.

Still, the reports of mood-boosting effects from the majority is important. In 2015, a paper titled “Sad as a Matter of Choice?” reported that people with depression were more likely to listen to sad songs — which the team controversially took to imply that they were maintaining or even worsening their own low mood. Last year, however, a study published in Emotion found that depressed people prefer sad music because it is calming and even uplifting. As some participants in another recent study commented, when you’re feeling low, sad music can seem like a supportive friend.

Extreme emotions

Some pieces of music have dramatic effects on us. “Peak emotional states” involve powerful physical responses, such as tears, or feeling “the chills”, and often extreme sadness or joy. They can be triggered by something inherently deeply meaningful — such as childbirth — but also by a beautiful view, or piece of music. A 2017 study published in Scientific Reports explored these reactions, and found that song-induced tears were associated with subsequent calming — they seem, then, to have a cathartic, relieving function.

Some people, though, are more prone than others to feeling goosebumps or a shiver down the spine in response to a piece of music. And as a paper recently published in Social Cognitive and Effective Neuroscience has revealed, such people have stronger connectivity between auditory processing and social and emotional processing areas of the brain. These same connectivity differences have also been linked to greater empathy. As the researchers write in their paper: “Perhaps one of the reasons why music is a cross-culturally indispensable artifact is that it appeals directly through an auditory channel to emotional and social processing centers of the human brain.” Only, it does this more for some of us than others.

Connecting brains

One proposed adaptive function for music is that it unites individuals. With music, we can march together, dance together, and express emotions as one. And there’s now growing evidence that this unity can occur right down at the neural level.

Back in 2009, Ulman Lindenberger at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and colleagues reported that when two guitarists play the same piece of music together, their brainwaves synchronise. Big deal, you might think: they’re processing and playing identical notes, so why shouldn’t there be similarities in their brain activity? However, in 2012, the team reported a follow-up involving duets with different guitar parts. When these pairs had to actively coordinate their playing, there was a synchronisation in activity in some regions between the two. This, the team concluded, was evidence of “inter-brain networks”. “When people coordinate actions with one another, small networks within the brain and, remarkably, between the brains are formed,” noted Johanna Sänger, lead author of this study.

Since then, more evidence of inter-brain synchronisation during musical experiences has emerged. It’s known that when audience members are enjoying a piece of live music, their brainwaves tend to synchronise. And, earlier this year, a team led by Yingying Hou at East China Normal University revealed that when a musician is playing a piece, and the audience is enjoying it, a synchronisation in brain activity develops. The team were even able to use the strength of this “inter-brain coherence” to predict how much the audience reported enjoying a piece.

Use the beat

Humans are unique as a species in being able to perceive beat. And there’s all kinds of evidence that the tempo of a piece of music affects our behaviour. A classic study, published back in 1986, found that diners in a Dallas restaurant ate significantly faster when faster tempo (more beats per minute) music was played, compared with slow tempo music. These findings went on to influence the choice of soundtracks in restaurants the world over. But there’s also recent evidence that listening to high-tempo music while exercising can increase heart rate more than slow-tempo music and also make the exercise feel less difficult. “This means that the exercise seemed like less effort but it was more beneficial in terms of enhancing physical fitness,” commented researcher Luca P. Ardigò of the University of Verona in Italy.

Background effects

If you’re the kind of person who likes to have background music playing while you work, there are a couple of studies worth bearing in mind.

Listening even to music that you enjoy can interfere with working memory, which could impair mental arithmetic, a study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology has found. And though it has been suggested that music can encourage creativity, in fact it “significantly impairs” it, according to a 2019 paper published in the same journal. The researchers, from the UK and Sweden, gave participants verbal insight problems, which are meant to tap into creativity. (For example, they were given the words “dress”, “dial”, and “flower”, and asked to identify a single word that could be combined with each — “sun”). Background music with foreign lyrics, instrumental music without lyrics and music with familiar lyrics all made the participants worse at this. Again, the researchers think that this is because music disrupts working memory; in this case, verbal working memory. “To conclude, the findings here challenge the popular view that music enhances creativity, and instead demonstrate that music, regardless of the presence of semantic content, consistently disrupts creative performance in insight problem solving,” they write.

It’s worth noting that the negative impact of familiar music was observed even when a participant said it boosted their mood, reported liking the song, or said that they typically studied with background music playing. So if you do typically work with music, and think it helps, surely it’s worth at least trying to go without.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/08/18/musings-on-music-seven-insights-from-psychology/#more-40074(accessed 18.8.20)

Why Do People With Depression Like Listening To Sad Music?

We all know the powerful effect that music can have on mood. You might be feeling rather chirpy, but then a tear-jerker comes on the car radio and you arrive home feeling morose (conversely, of course, happy tunes can lift our spirits). For most of us, these effects are not a big deal. But what if you are living with depression? Now the implications become more serious. And, according to a provocative study published a few years ago, far from seeking out uplifting music, people diagnosed with depression are notably more inclined than healthy controls to choose to listen to sad music (and look at sad images). The controversial implication is that depressed people deliberately act in ways that are likely to maintain their low mood. Now a study in the journal Emotion has replicated this finding, but the researchers also present evidence suggesting depressed people are not seeking to maintain their negative feelings, but rather that they find sad music calming and even uplifting.

“The current study is the most definitive to date in probing depression-related preferences for sad music using different tasks, and the reasons for these preferences,” write the team at the University of South Florida, led by Sunkyung Yoon.



The research involved 38 female undergrads diagnosed with depression and 38 non-depressed female undergrad controls. The first part of the study was a replication attempt using the same materials as the 2015 paper that found depressed people preferred sad music. The participants listened to 30-second excerpts of sad (“Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber” and “Rakavot” by Avi Balili), happy and neutral music, and stated which they would prefer to listen to again in the future. Successfully replicating the earlier research, Yoon and his team found that their depressed participants were more likely to choose the sad music clips.

However, unlike in that earlier research, Yoon’s team also asked their participants why they made the choices they did. The majority of the participants with depression who favoured sad music said that they did so because it was relaxing, calming or soothing.

The second part of the study used new music samples: 84 pairs of 10-second clips of instrumental film music, contrasting happy, sad, fear-inducing, neutral, and also high and low energy tracks. In each case the same participants as before indicated which music they’d prefer to listen to again later. They also heard all the samples again at the end and stated what effect they had on their emotions. The researchers found again that people with depression had a far greater preference than controls for sad, low-energy music (but not fear-inducing music). Critically, though, when they heard these clips again, they reported that they made them feel more happiness and less sadness, contradicting the provocative idea that depressed people are seeking to perpetuate their low mood.

This study is unable to speak to why depressed people find low-energy, sad music uplifting, although common sense suggests that if you are feeling down, then a fast-paced, happy clappy tune might be irritating and inappropriate, whereas a more soothing, serious tune could be comforting. Further clues come from another recent study that investigated why (non-depressed) people generally like listening to sad music when they’re feeling down – for instance, some participants said the sad music acted like a supportive friend.

The new research involved only a small sample of female undergrads, and it only looked at emotional effects over a short time frame. Yoon and his colleagues acknowledge more research is needed to find out why exactly depressed people favour sad music. For now though, the new findings suggest that this preference “… may reflect a desire for calming emotional experience rather than a desire to augment sad feelings.”

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/04/24/why-do-people-with-depression-like-listening-to-sad-music/(accessed 2.5.19)

Why music has a hotline to our emotions

In the first of our new series answering your questions, we explore why music can be so emotionally charged.

By David Robson18 September 2015


Q: Why does music have a hotline to our emotions? What is the evolutionary advantage of this?
Philip Le Riche, via email



David Robson, BBC Future feature writer, answers:

Who hasn’t ever felt a song pulling at their heartstrings? Whether it is the feeling of euphoria in a club, or a lonely cry to a heartbreaking ballad, music can cut us to the core, expressing emotions more eloquently than words ever can.

But as our reader, Philip, points out, the reasons for this are far from obvious. “It's clear to me the appeal of rhythm, and I get all the stuff about anticipation, surprise and fulfilment of expectations. These all help to explain why music is interesting – but why it moves us at such a deep level remains a mystery to me,” he explained in an email to the BBC Future team.


Is music just “auditory cheesecake”, or does it have a deeper meaning?

Posing this question puts Philip in good company. Even the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, was stumped by our musical faculty, calling it one of “the most mysterious with which [humankind] is endowed”. Some thinkers, such as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, have even questioned whether it has any particular value at all. In his view, we like music because it tickles some of the more important faculties, like pattern recognition. By itself, he says, it has no value – it is mere “auditory cheesecake”.

Yet if that were true, human beings across the world would be spending an awful lot of time on an activity that has absolutely no inherent value. If you think you’re obsessed with music, consider the BaBinga people from Central Africa, who haveelaborate dances for almost every activity, from gathering honey to hunting for elephants. The anthropologist Gilbert Rouget, who lived with them in 1946, found that sleeping through the ceremonies was considered one of the greatest crimes. “It cannot be more clearly stated that singing and eating are equally necessary to stay alive,” he wrote. For this reason, many people (including myself) struggle to believe that music was simply a small, incidental soundtrack to the human story of evolution.





Long descending tones seem to have a calming effect (Credit: Alamy)



Fortunately, there are alternative theories. One popular idea was that music arose from “sexual selection”: like the peacock’s tale, it’s a sexy display that makes you stand out from your rivals. The evidence is thin, however: a study of 10,000 twins failed to show that musicians were particularly lucky in bed (though Mick Jagger and Harry Styles may disagree).

Others have proposed that music emerged as an early form of communication. Certain motifs in music may, in fact, carry some of the signatures of the emotional calls made by our ancestors; upwardly rising, staccato sounds tend to put us on edge, while long descending tones seems to have a calming effect, to give just two examples. Such patterns of sound seem to carry a universal meaning shared by adults of different cultures, young children, and even other animals. So perhaps music built on associations from ancient animal calls, helping us to express our feelings before we had words. As a form of “protolanguage”, it could have even paved the way for speech.


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When you move in synchrony with another person, your brain starts to blur its sense of self

What’s more, music may have helped gel human societies as we began to live in bigger and bigger groups. Dancing and singing together, seems to make groups of people morealtruistic, and to have a stronger collective identity. According to cutting-edge neuroscience, when you move in synchrony with another person, your brain starts to blur its sense of self. It is almost as if you are looking in the mirror: you think they look more like you, and that they share your opinions. And as you’ll have found with your own toe tapping, music is the best way to get people moving together.

Although it may heighten the impact, active participation in music is not absolutely necessary for these benefits: as we recently explained at BBC Future, simply listening to a song that produces pleasant musical frisson (also known as “skin orgasms”) can also increase altruism. That’s comforting for people like me, whose musical life revolves around their sofa and iPod.





It makes sense that music would tug at the heartstrings, helping us to create an emotional connection (Credit: Alamy)



With increased solidarity and less in-fighting, a group may then be better equipped to survive and thrive. This is perhaps most extensively illustrated by the BaBinga’s “musicking”. As Rouget, the anthropologist, wrote: “The engagement seems to be paired with a certain self-effacement, as each individual becomes one with the body of singers”. But music’s role as a social glue can also be seen in work songs sung by slaves, sea shanties among sailors, and soldiers’ chants. Music, it seems, really does bond us closely.

Lying at the heart of our relationships in this way, it makes sense that music would tug at the heartstrings, helping us to create an emotional connection. Each culture may then build on this rudimentary instinct, creating their own musical lexicon of certain chords or motifs that come to be associated with particular feelings.

Whatever its early origins, today we can’t help but associate certain music with the most important events in our lives. It is the soundtrack of conception, pregnancy, births and funerals, and everything in between. No wonder we all imbibe such a heady cocktail of feelings and memories whenever we hear our favourite tunes.

SOURCE:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150918-why-music-has-a-hotline-to-our-emotions(accessed 21.9.15)