ART : Music

 

ART

    One most important in this earth is art. Art is something that stimulates an individual's thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. Works of art can be explicitly made for this purpose and one of them is music. Music is my favorite thing in this world.

The reasons why we love music:

1. Music affects happy or sad emotions

Music is one of the most powerful elicitors of subjective emotion. Even when we hear music unconsciously our brain responds, reacting differently to happy or sad music. One study shows that after hearing a short piece of happy or sad music, respondents value photo’s according to what they just heard.  Prior listening to a happy (sad) music enhanced the perceived happiness (sadness) of a face irrespective of facial emotion.

2. Music in rituals

Music is a manifestation of emotion and is actively used to provoke emotion in others. This emphasizes the social use of music and partly explains the use of music in rituals. Music promotes pro-social behaviour and bonding during these rituals. In this respect music can be seen as behavior that evolved in ancestral humans because it contributed to their survival and reproductive success.

3. Music releases dopamine

Music can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving. Music that people describe as highly emotional activates areas in the brain involved with motivation, reward and emotion. Recently neuroscientists found that the pleasurable experience of listening to music releases dopamine, the neurotransmitter important for more pleasures associated with rewards like food and sex.

4. Music plays with your expectations

Especially the time course of dopamine release is interesting. It is not only released during the fragment one loves best, but also just before it. Anticipating on the beauty that is to come the brain releases the natural drug for happiness. This way music engages in the brain’s reward system. When we listen to music, these brain networks actively create expectations based on our stored knowledge. Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better.

5. Music kills pain

You probably know from experience that music can be of great assistance in difficult and painful situations. For example when your heart is broken. Historic analysis shows that people in the distant past were also aware of this fact. In many parts of Africa music was used to reduce anticipated pain during, for instance, circumcision, bone setting, or traditional surgery. Nowadays there is a growing field of health care, known as music therapy, that even uses music to heal. It draws on the several positive effects of music on the body and mind, such as changes in brainwave activity levels, breathing and heart rate.

 

1. Advertisers use music to make you buy stuff

Your brain belongs to Starbucks and Apple and McDonald’s. They use music to mold our brains into product-buying machines. Ohio State University did a study called Music in Advertising: An Analytic Paradigm. They found that “the association of music with the identity of a certain product may substantially aid product recall.” They also noted that “music tends to linger in the listener’s mind...even when the mind is an unwilling host.”

So, even if you don’t realize it, the music Apple used in their latest commercial could subconsciously be making you more likely to buy the product. And if you’re a musician who makes music for TV and film, you may already know how much thought and time is put into making and choosing the perfect song for a commercial.

“…Advertising music is perhaps the most meticulously crafted and most fretted-about music in history,” the study says. “Nationally produced television advertisements, in particular, may be considered among the most highly polished cultural artifacts ever created.” So, yeah, companies sort of control your brain with music.

2. Music can get you high

If you want to get a release of dopamine and oxytocin in your brain, turn on a song you love. According to The New York Times, the “reward” part of the brain lights up when you hear music. They say “the idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome)” is a fact in neuroscience.

So when you listen to a song, your brain is trying to figure out what’s going to happen next without you realizing it. Then, whether or not your brain predicts correctly, it rewards itself with a shot of good-feeling chemicals. That’s why anticipation is a great tool to use in your song. It’s the thing that gets you high on music.

3. Music can heal the brain

There’s a thing called music therapy where licensed professionals help people with brain damage, heart problems, or with many different physical issues through the power of music. It’s especially useful for people who have trouble speaking or comprehending language, whether because of a stroke or some other brain injury. Therapists use a style of singing with certain rhythms that can help bring back the cadence of speech.

The right side of the brain processes music while the left side processes language, so music therapy can help bridge the gap between the two. Music helps create new neurological pathways.

According to Harvard Medical School, patients with speech problems are “capable of singing words that they cannot speak.” And that’s why using “melody and rhythm has long been recommended for improving” speech and language comprehension in patients.

4. Music improves your memory

How did you learn the alphabet? Probably by learning the song. At some point, you probably learned every state in the US, right? It was probably thanks to a song.

One reason for this is that the part of the brain that processes music is the same part of the brain that creates and stores memories, states Key Changes Therapy Services. So when you hear a song you know, it’s often attached to a memory.

That’s because of the dopamine release we get when we hear a song we like. So your brain makes a positive connection between a song and a memory. Then your brain can more easily recall memories or things you’ve learned.

5. Music can relieve your stress

We already know how music can help us be less stressed. Surely we’ve all experienced this regardless of your preferred genre.

Listening to music helps reduce the release and production of cortisol, which is called “the stress hormone.” Less cortisol means better learning capability and memory, lower blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol, and a less likely chance of heart disease.

So you should stop reading this post right now and go listen to some music you love.