McGill Study Suggests We Don’t Just Listen to Music, We Become It (w/Video!)

Our brains and bodies physically resonate along with music, according to an international study co-authored by McGill psychologist Caroline Palmer.

“This theory suggests that music is powerful not just because we hear it, but because our brains and bodies become it,” said Palmer, Professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill and Director of the Sequence Production Lab.

The study, “Musical neurodynamics“, was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in May of last year and goes on to talk about the implications of these findings.

From the abstract:

Building on principles such as resonance, stability, attunement and strong anticipation, we propose that people anticipate musical events not through predictive neural models, but because brain–body dynamics physically embody musical structure. The interaction of certain kinds of sounds with ongoing pattern-forming dynamics results in patterns of perception, action and coordination that we collectively experience as music.

We don’t get into the groove, so to speak, because we know what’s coming, we are actually in the groove because music speaks directly to our physiology. Nice.

The study goes into some detail about the influence elements of music including Rhythmic and Tonal timescales, PRAT and timbre in hifi lingo, have on our brains and bodies. This deeper connection with music, resonating along with it, gets us well beyond typical hifi concerns but to my mind speaks to the importance of the pursuit. Of course I’d think that—I have a degree from a liberal arts college and write about hifi for a living—but nonetheless it’s not a stretch to suggest that the quality of the music-listening experience can directly impact how deeply we become it.

Fascinating stuff, especially so when coupled with the fact that music has the ability to heal [footnote 1]. While I don’t like overstating my case, our shared hifi hobby, whose goal is the enjoyment of music, reaches well beyond the surface and a smile. Our understanding of the experience is just beginning to get interesting.

Then again…

“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.” — Plato, The Republic (c. 375 BC)