Question: do different genres of music affect the brain differently or activate different parts of it?

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 17 Mar 2010:

Ooh. There is a growing body of research on the brain and music. It is true that music can produce strong emotional experiences in people, either because they really love it (positive emotions, like joy or the ‘shivers down the spine’) or because they don’t like it (for example, if it sounds discordant). There is some work showing emotional responses to music in the brain, in areas associated with positive and negative emotions. However, there isn’t so much on comparing genres, like classical with rock. There are some quite wacky findings from the early 1990s in behavioural psychology experiments on humans and animals that spending time listening to a piece by Mozart gives improvements in later performance on spatio-temporal processing tasks than listening to nothing or even a piece by another composer. This kind of stuff needs to be treated with a lot of caution, as it’s so hard to tease apart whether these effects are to do with some special intrinsic properties of Mozart’s music in general or (more likely) due to things like the particular choice of piece for the experiment or the fact that the human listeners might prefer Mozart to other composers, which in turn generates an improved mood or state of arousal for task performance. I think the same would apply to a study trying to compare neural responses to different types of music – would the differences seen be due to acoustic differences between the styles, like the types of instruments used and the types of harmonic and rhythmic complexities present, or would they be due to familiarity and preference?

I’m more interested in how we physically interact with music and how that might be processed neurally. Something people do often is tap their foot along to music with a clear beat, even if they’re not particularly paying attention to it, and they can do this task really well. I even notice myself tapping along to really bad background music that I don’t even like! In our group we have some ideas about motor and sensorimotor activity in the brain and how it might relate to group activity and social cohesion – e.g. dancing together to music, communicating emotions by laughing or cheering together. Furthermore, we are interested in how this mechanism might be related to speech output, for example in helping us coordinate turn-taking in conversation.