You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (17 page)

In contrast, men watching women found ‘hip-body ratio’ to be more indicative of sensuality, sexiness and positive mood. ‘Hip-knee phase angle’ (the degree of synchrony between the movement of the hip and knee) was positively related to perceived mood and interestingness of the dancer.

This study shows that the way men and women respond to music by dancing leads to a number of impressions in potential romantic partners. In fact, movement to music was found to be a more helpful cue to attractiveness in this study than many of the more static measures of body symmetry or ratios. Music therefore provides an important medium by which we can display visual attractiveness cues through the synchronised movement of our bodies. Speaking from personal experience, this all seems very convincing. I met my partner through a salsa event a few years ago and to this day he captivates me when he dances.

Music for romance

Now that this chapter is firmly placed in a romantic frame of mind I will move on to look at the use of music in other courtship behaviours and the potential importance of music for the success or failure of such endeavours. In this section we will see how music can attract a mate before you even meet them and can influence their reactions to a subsequent romantic approach.

Match making

Your musical likes and dislikes speak volumes to a potential mate. That is one reason why dating agencies all over the world ask about musical preferences before attempting to pair people up. In Chapter 3 I discussed the importance of music as
a social signal for teenagers. As an adult your musical preference remains an important part of your social identity.

Differences in musical taste are unlikely to be a deal breaker for people choosing who to date but similarities in tastes are a key variable in early attraction. A study at a midwestern United States university carried out by Dolf Zillmann and Azra Bhatia
¹⁴
looked at 239 heterosexual undergraduates’ evaluations of a potential date based on a videotaped presentation. Everything was kept the same about the videos except that the potential suitor talked about her or his love of classical, country, soft rock, or heavy metal music.

A love for country music was associated with a slight lowering of ratings given by both men and women. A love of heavy metal music made men more attractive to women but a similar musical fascination made women less attractive to men. The reverse interaction was true for classical music, which lowered the attraction of men but increased ratings for women.

What I find more interesting than the general trend in genre reactions in this study (which is naturally biased by the location and age range of the participants) is the perceived importance of having matched tastes, which varied by gender. Women appeared to care less about whether a man shared their musical tastes but this same factor had a big influence on men who, whatever the genre, were more likely to give high ratings to a woman if she shared their musical tastes.

This is one area of research where we would benefit from new studies to track how our responses to and levels of attraction towards potential dates based on musical preferences may have changed as music has become more a part of everyday life. No doubt reactions to different musical genres depend on time and place in the world. The most important finding here is that when we are seeking a mate many of us place a heavy weighting on avoiding a music mismatch.

Pick up line

Music not only acts as an attractor based on preferences, it can also impact more directly on the success of our courtship attempts.

Imagine the following scenario: you are a single, available woman (sorry gentlemen, but there is a reason for this request as you will find out below) and you are taking part in a survey about organic products. Your role in this research is to eat some organic and non-organic cookies and then to chat about your opinions of the two products with another person who is also taking part in the study. Could background music affect your responsiveness to a potential advance from this fellow participant? According to sneaky psychologists, it can.

The above scenario was part of an experiment conducted by Nicolas Guéguen and colleagues in 2010.
¹⁵
Unknown to the female volunteers in this study, their discussion partner for this organic cookie experiment was an actor who was in league with the researchers. The actor (or ‘confederate’) was a male who had been chosen specifically as someone that the female volunteer would be likely to find attractive, although not too attractive or people might be suspicious – about a ‘5’ on a rating scale of 0–9.

This confederate had a script to follow during the experiment to ensure that he gave the same responses to every woman when discussing cookies. Before entering the main discussion room, the female participant was told that her discussion partner was late, and asked to wait in a separate room. In this waiting room background music was playing, music that had been pre-chosen by other people as either romantic or not romantic (neutral). She spent three minutes in the room before being summoned for the experiment.

The two strangers were then introduced by the experimenter in the main discussion room and had their five-minute chat about cookies. The experimenter came back into the
room and announced that the study was over but that she needed two to three minutes to finalise the data. The experimenter then left the room.

During this period of time the confederate launched into the key phase of the whole experiment. According to the paper, ‘he was instructed to smile and to say to the participant: “My name is Antoine, as you know. I think you are very nice and I was wondering if you would give me your phone number. I’ll phone you later and we can have a drink together somewhere next week.”’

The whole point of the study was to determine whether the female volunteer was more likely to give out her phone number if there had been romantic music playing in the waiting room before the fake cookie survey. It turned out that in the romantic music condition the man’s success rate was 52 per cent; he got 23 out of 44 phone numbers. In the non-romantic, neutral music condition he got only twelve numbers.

In a recent follow-up study the same researcher group took their paradigm out on the streets.
¹⁶
In this case the male confederate (again he was called ‘Antoine’, but it is unclear if it was the same actor) approached ladies on the street to ask for a date when he was carrying a guitar case, a gym bag or nothing at all. Again there was a script for his approach to the unsuspecting members of the public and the researchers noted his success in getting phone numbers.

When he was accessory-free, Antoine’s success rate was 14 per cent. When he was holding a sports bag this rate went down, though not significantly, to 9 per cent. When he carried a guitar case he was significantly more successful, with a 31 per cent phone number conversion rate.

The presence of music or a musical instrument does not, of course, guarantee that any eventual dates will be successful or that a person will even turn up to a date once they have
had a chance to go away and think about the situation, but it does apparently help to create a mindset where individuals are more accepting of an on-the-spot romantic overture.

The scientists argue that these two studies demonstrate the effect of music and musicianship on immediate prosocial thoughts, choices and behavioural responses. Admittedly this is rather gender-biased work given that the research has only been done on a male approach to a female, but this general argument is supported by previous UK research where ‘positive music’ (that is, uptempo pop music that was perceived as ‘uplifting’) was associated with an increase in prosocial behaviours such as agreeing to distribute leaflets for a charity.
¹⁷

How does the effect work? In the case of the cookie study it could be that the romantic music puts people in a better mood and this in turn makes them more likely to accept the charming confederate’s advances. Or it could be a more direct effect whereby the romantic music primes congruent responsive behaviours. For example, the act of recalling past romantic actions and/or events from life is known to result in more chivalrous behaviour in males.
¹⁸
In the ‘on the street’ case it may be that in a young attractive man the appearance of being a musician is associated with additional physical and intellectual abilities. These intriguing possibilities still need to be picked apart, and looked at properly across genders, if we are to fully understand the effect of music and musicians on our heartstrings.

Music and films

Cinema has used music longer than voices. The world of the silent film was far from silent, being filled with dramatic orchestral, piano and organ scores including some of the best film music ever made. You only have to watch the recent Oscar-winning silent film
The Artist
to experience the cinematic power of music in the absence of the human voice.

Music is undoubtedly intertwined with film thanks to its ability to trigger emotive responses in the listener. But how does this happen? And do films really
need
music? We have been talking romance for a while now so let’s examine two of the other key functions of cinema: to trigger fear or joy, and to make us cry.

Emotions

Have you ever watched a really scary film without the music? Most people that I know (I have been observing them slyly since I started to write this book) tend to do one of two things when a film reaches a really scary moment: they cover their eyes or stick their fingers in their ears. I am an ears person, every time.

This anecdotal evidence suggests that a great film soundtrack has a big influence on our emotional reactions; in the case of a scary film, silencing the expertly crafted fright music can be sufficient to render an otherwise unbearably scary moment watchable again.

Does film music really have the power to scare us? Our subjective feeling of fear is associated with the activity of several brain areas but in particular one small structure called the amygdala (from the Greek word for almond, as it is shaped like one), which sits more or less in the centre of your brain (see diagram on
page 83
). The amygdala is a relatively primitive brain structure that has reportedly changed very little throughout mammalian evolution.
¹⁹
It is part of the limbic system, which is associated with the regulation of emotional responses.

The amygdala sends out messages that trigger activity in our sympathetic nervous system, which regulates many aspects of body function including the famous ‘fight or flight response’ whereby our body prepares for action when faced with a threat: our breathing quickens, our pulse races as blood floods into our muscles, and we begin to sweat.

Numerous studies have shown that emotional music can trigger activity in the amygdala.
²⁰
One patient who suffered amygdala damage reported that he could no longer experience the peak emotional responses to music that were common for him before his brain damage.
²¹
Another study of patients with amygdala damage found that they could no longer experience fear when listening to scary soundtracks such as the theme tune to
Jaws
.
²²

All this evidence suggests that scary music directly activates our brain fear centre; however, it is also likely that activation of the amygdala is linked to the context of the music, since the amygdala has an additional role in memory formation. Is it really the music that we find scary, or is there something magic going on between music and film?

Eran Eldar and colleagues
²³
explored whether context is important to how much we feel moved by film music. Volunteers in their study rated novel ‘scary’, ‘joyful’ or ‘neutral’ music alone for arousal (low to high) and valence (negative to positive emotions). The volunteers then made a similar rating when each of the music clips was combined with twelve seconds of neutral, no-dialogue film, such as a scene where a car drives across a desert.

Sure enough the neutral music added no emotion to the neutral film clips, whereas the negative music made the same clips seem more scary (high arousal and negative emotion) and the positive music made things more joyful (high arousal and positive emotion). This result supports our suspicions that music can inject emotion into an otherwise bland and meaningless film scene.

Importantly, the people in this study also rated the films, the music and then the combination of music and film for their ‘concrete content’. Concrete in this sense means that something is tangible or real as opposed to feeling abstract. The music in isolation was all rated as very low in concrete
content, reflecting the fact that music on its own in this case means very little. The film clips with and without music, by contrast, were rated as significantly higher in concrete content.

One final key finding was that the addition of music significantly increased the concrete nature of the film. Therefore this study shows how music can give film its emotional overtones and film in return gives music a tangible meaning.
²⁴

What is happening in the brain when all this is going on, and more specifically in the amygdala? In a second phase of Eldar’s experiment, new volunteers lay in an fMRI scanner and watched the film clips while they were paired with the positive (joyful), negative (scary) or neutral music. When people heard the negative music combined with the film there was greater activation in the amygdala compared to when they heard only the music or saw only the film clip. A similar pattern was identified for the positive music/film combination but this was less consistent, which makes sense since amygdala activation is more strongly associated with fear than happiness.
²⁵

The combination of fearful music and a neutral but concrete film clip therefore triggered a greater matched emotional reaction than either the music or the film alone, as rated by hand in the first study and as evidenced by brain activity in the second.