In the world of music streaming services, access to almost any song is just a few clicks away. Nevertheless, the live program continues. People still pack sweaty basements, muddy arenas and gilded concert halls to hear their favorite musicians. And now neuroscientists may know why: Live music affects the brain’s emotion centers more than its recorded counterpart.
Concerts are intensely social experiences in which people hear and feel music together through crescendos, key changes, and drops. They are also dynamic – performers can adapt their playing according to the crowd’s reaction.
It was this last difference that inspired neuroscientists at the Universities of Zurich and Oslo to study the brain responses of people listening to music. In the “live” experiment, participants listened to music through earphones while lying in the MRI scanner, while a pianist was stationed outside the room. The participant’s real-time brain activity was shown in response to the pianist. In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same tunes.
Scientists were interested in how live music affects areas of the brain that process emotions. Pianists in the live condition were instructed to try to organize their playing to trigger activity in one of these areas called the amygdala, an almond-shaped area deep inside the brain.
The results, published in the journal PNAS, showed that live music had a much greater emotional impact. Whether the music is happy or sad, listening to a pianist produce greater activity in the amygdala and other parts of the brain’s emotion processing network. The researchers also found that participants’ brain activity more closely tracked the acoustic characteristics of the music, such as tempo and pitch, when it was played live.
The study was far from replicating the actual experience of a program, and the authors noted that the live music sounded quite different from the recorded tracks, which could have led to some differences in the participants’ brain activity. But the results indicate that the ability of performers to change their playing style in response to the audience may be one aspect of what makes live music special. Some concerts now attempt to recreate the real gig experience with everything except the artist – ABBA Voyage is a social, immersive show presented entirely by pre-recorded hologram avatars. But without Benny’s ability to read the mood of the room, it will never match the real thing.
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© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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Published: 28 April 2024, 05:29 PM IST
