Though technically music is just a smart combination of sounds, in reality, it has a very deep effect on our lives. Music can support us when we break up with a partner or inspire us to do something brave. It can fill us with passion or kindness. As the creators of a popular interracial dating site, we like to explore how seemingly trivial things affect our emotions, love, and feelings. Why does music make us feel something particular? Is it magic, science, or a program dictated by society?
Music is linked to chemistry
You have probably already heard that our positive emotions have a chemical trace in our bodies. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter or a chemical messenger that your nervous system uses for communication between cells. Dopamine is a so-called “feel-good” hormone. Among other functions, dopamine is a part of the brain’s reward system, which is responsible for giving us pleasant sensations. Music that we like stimulates the release of dopamine in our blood and this way helps us relieve stress and improve our mood. In the end, music targets the same pleasure center in the brain as good food, sex, and even drugs. Music can make you addicted and even help you relieve addictive behavior by affecting the same reward system.
There was an interesting experiment. Before listening to favorite music, people were offered to take a special medicine used to treat addictive behavior. Most people didn’t feel any emotions about their favorite composition. This experiment proves that listening to music works according to the same mechanism in us as drugs.
Emotional response to music can be trained
Music not only starts the dopamine reaction but also affects the brain in general. In particular, it boosts the reaction of the neocortex, the emotional brain. Some research has shown that the more people react emotionally to music, the stronger the connection between the auditory cortex and the zones responsible for emotions becomes. As these brain areas start to communicate better, your emotional response to music also gets stronger.
Listening to music can boost your memory
Hearing music makes your brain work way harder, turning on multiple connections between brain parts. Scientists proved that musical memory is the strongest one. And using music for memorizing things has a large potential.
Listening to music can change our behavior
Researches show that music patterns can cause sadness in us (for example, the compositions written by Strauss and Wagner). Scientists have also found out that Mozart’s music can enhance your productivity and even make you feel more intelligent. Hard rock often makes you feel more aggressive, provokes the development of hormones, like adrenaline, and often causes violent behavior at concerts. So on the one hand, listening to such music makes you more aggressive, but on the other hand, it helps you release negative emotions. Some particular genres of music, on the contrary, make us calm and relaxed.
The effect of music on our emotions is often used in shops to stimulate buying or calm down shoppers and make them stay for a long time inside. Likewise, restaurants use music to create a special atmosphere for diners. Slow music makes the time of waiting pass faster.
Using music consciously can let you control your life better
Pay attention to what music triggers particular behavior in you. You will notice that sad music can help you overcome depressing situations in your personal life, such as a breakup, or death. If you need to energize and finish your work faster, turn on something lively. The fast tempo makes your neurons fire in sync with the beat. However, if you need to concentrate, these fast beats can prevent you from working attentively.
As another example of music’s effect on our emotions and health, one study found out that people who dance and somehow face music every day feel way happier than people who don’t do it.
Music can help the society control crime
It is even proved that music can stimulate and combat crime. There was an experiment in the 90s in California. They used classical music in several areas, and teenagers didn’t like it. They stopped gathering in the area and the number of crimes also went down. Alternatively, there are now rising concerns that the so-called drill music can stimulate people to commit crimes that are worded in the texts of these songs.
Listening to music changes the way we see the world
There was a study at the University of Groningen that proved that listening to sad and happy music changes the way we perceive particular events in our lives. In the experiment, people were asked to identify happy and sad faces. Lively and happy music made people spot more happy faces, and vice versa. It means that music has a direct impact on how we interpret the emotions of other people.