Tuning music into our moods

Music therapy has been a favorite of the medical profession for more than 60 years, although the soothing effect of music has been known as long as the lullaby.

Music has an effect on conditions ranging from depression to Alzheimer's disease, from pain to nausea during chemotherapy. The modern discipline started with amateur and professional musicians playing to patients suffering from physical and emotional trauma in veterans' hospitals after the two World Wars.

Still, getting the right “dose” of music for particular patients remains subjective. While there is general agreement that certain soothing types of music are good for alleviating stress, pain and aiding sleep, and that more upbeat tunes can improve moods and aid mobility in patients suffering from conditions like Parkinson's disease, therapists say individual tastes and familiarity with the music is most important.

Often, it requires a bit of trial and error to find the best mix.

A new research effort winding up its first stage this month at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland is looking into how music conveys emotion. Eventually, the results could result in custom prescriptions for music that is more effective at treating emotional and physical pain.

The project, sponsored by Britain's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is a joint endeavor of music psychologists and audio engineers.

“The impact of a piece of music on a person goes so much further than thinking that a fast tempo can lift a mood and a slow one can bring it down. Music expresses emotion as a result of many factors,” said project leader Don Knox, an audio engineer.

Those factors include tone, structure and other technical characteristics, and lyrics also have a big impact, Knox said, but so do subjective things like where you first heard a song and what you were doing.

The researchers are working toward developing a mathematical model that a computer program could use to identify musical pieces designed to influence individual moods and alleviate particular problems.

Working with a group of volunteers, researchers played pieces of contemporary music that haven't yet been released, to avoid any personal connections the song might have had. Then the volunteers rated whether the songs communicated a positive or negative feeling along a scale and the intensity or activity level of the music on a second axis.

The researchers then used advanced signal processing methods to analyze songs that had received similar ratings from the volunteers. “So, for example, music falling into a positive category might have a regular rhythm, bright timbre and a fairly steady pitch,” Knox said.

Next, the scientists are working on assessing the impact of lyrics, and then looking at how individuals use and experience music on the subjective level, while also utilizing brain imaging studies.

Of course, there are times when a song is more annoyance than comfort — particularly when a tune gets “stuck” in our head.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati studied the phenomena in 2003 and found that up to 98 percent of all people become infected by such “earworms.” Usually, they go away in a few minutes, but can endure for hours, even days. Researchers have found that people who actively try to forget the songs, or even take memory-altering drugs, have little success.

Several researchers, including a team that tackled earworms at the University of Montreal earlier this year, found that musicians and other people for whom music is particularly important, are more prone than the rest of us to get a song stuck in their head perhaps because the musical circuits of the brain are more developed in such people.

As part of the Montreal study, doctoral student Andreane McNally-Gagnon and Sylvie Hebert, a professor of speech therapy and audiology, asked musician and nonmusician volunteers to hum and record their obsessive songs and keep a journal of their emotional state.

They found that the 16 subjects in their study tended to pick up an earworm when they were in a good mood and keeping busy with nonintellectual activities, such as walking, that require little concentration. “It may be that the phenomenon occurs to prevent brooding or to change moods,” Herbert said.