Pleasure from music tracks closely, and that has been shown with , an objective measure, while people listen to music they already know. Knowing the piece brings expectation and prediction with it, so the correlation might depend on memory rather than on sound. Testing that needs music nobody has heard. So 33 listeners were given 70 entirely excerpts.
With unfamiliar music the link disappeared. Across two sessions with 70 excerpts none of the listeners knew, there was no relationship between the degree of pleasure experienced and emotional arousal as measured by electrodermal activity. A second experiment then repeated the novel music to establish a sense of familiarity experimentally. The paper’s conclusion is that familiarity mediates the relationship between arousal and pleasure.
Emotional arousal appears to be a major contributor to the pleasure listeners experience from music. A strong positive correlation between self-reported pleasure and electrodermal activity, an objective indicator of arousal, turns up reliably when people listen to familiar music.
Familiar is the word carrying the weight. Listening to music you know involves expectations and predictions based on of the piece. So memory factors could be playing a major role in a correlation that looks like a direct link between body and pleasure.
The authors tested that by using musical stimuli entirely unfamiliar to listeners. In the first experiment, 33 listeners were presented with 70 unfamiliar musical excerpts across two sessions. There was no relationship between the degree of experienced pleasure and emotional arousal as measured by electrodermal activity, which is the opposite of the familiar-music finding.
A second experiment repeated the novel music to establish a sense of familiarity experimentally, asking whether the correlation could be induced. A note on sourcing belongs here: the cached record for this paper cuts off partway through that second experiment, so this card does not report its figures. What it can report is the first experiment’s null and the conclusion the paper states in its own title, that familiarity mediates the relationship between emotional arousal and pleasure during music listening.
wat. Unfamiliar music produced no link between pleasure and bodily arousal, and the connection appears to need knowing the piece.
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It identifies what the arousal is made of. If the body only responds in step with pleasure once you know what is coming, then the feeling is built out of prediction rather than out of the sound arriving.
How do we know?
Van den Bosch, Salimpoor and Zatorre presented 33 listeners with 70 unfamiliar musical excerpts across two sessions while recording electrodermal activity, then ran a second experiment repeating the novel music to induce familiarity.
What is still unknown
The cached record for this paper cuts off partway through the second experiment, so this card reports the first experiment’s null and the conclusion stated in the paper’s own title, without the second experiment’s figures.
Learn something?
Where to next
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