Why music moves us

Tears and chills

John Sloboda, a psychologist at Keele University in England, asked 83 music lovers in 1991 what happened in their bodies when they listened to it. More than 80% said they had at some time felt shivers, laughter, tears or a lump in the throat. He then asked them to point out the exact passages that set off those reactions and analysed them one by one.

He found a pattern. Tears came mostly with phrases that repeat a little higher or lower, and with notes that brush against the one the ear expects and take a moment to arrive at it. Shivers came with new or unexpected harmonies. Music moves us, to a large extent, by playing with what we expect to come next.

What they saw in Montreal

The neuroscientist Robert Zatorre has spent decades studying music in the brain at McGill University in Canada. In 2001, he and his team measured the brain activity of people listening to pieces they had chosen themselves because they gave them goosebumps. The more intense the chill, the more the areas linked to reward and emotion were activated, the same ones that respond to food and other basic pleasures.

In 2011, Valorie Salimpoor took a step further in the same laboratory. Her advertisement was answered by 217 people who felt chills with music, and after several tests she chose 8 for whom it happened every time and in a measurable way. Each brought their favourite pieces, all instrumental and in very varied styles: classical, folk, jazz, rock, tango. The pieces the others had chosen served as neutral music.

With the music that moved them, the brain released dopamine, a substance involved in pleasure and in the wish to repeat something. And it did so in two stages: in the seconds before the peak moment, when the person could already see it coming, an area called the caudate nucleus was activated; at the chill itself, a different one, the nucleus accumbens. It was the first time it had been shown that a pleasure as abstract as music makes the brain release dopamine. The study involved only eight people, chosen precisely because music moved them so strongly.

The pleasure of what is about to arrive

That first stage explains something almost everyone knows: part of the pleasure lies in the wait, in sensing that something is about to arrive. That is why a song you know by heart can move you every time at the same bar.

In 2013, the same team had a group of people listen to songs they had never heard before and let them bid money for them. The best predictor of how much each person would pay was the activity of the nucleus accumbens, and above all how connected it was with the areas that analyse sound. The pleasure is born from this meeting between what we hear and what we expect, and what we expect depends in part on the music each of us has listened to throughout our lives. That is, in part, why a different music moves each person.

That goosebumps feeling is similar to what psychologists call awe: something that overwhelms us for a moment and leaves us speechless.

When music says nothing

It does not happen to everyone. In 2014, a team from the University of Barcelona and the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute, with Zatorre’s collaboration, studied 30 healthy people and described some who, without depression and enjoying other rewards normally, such as winning money in a laboratory task, felt no pleasure in music. They could hear it well and understand it, but it did not move them. They called it specific musical anhedonia.

If that is you, there is nothing wrong with you. Different things move different people: a landscape, a book, a conversation.

Why we look for sad music

It seems a contradiction: when we feel low, we often put on sad music. In 2014, Liila Taruffi and Stefan Koelsch asked 772 people from Western and Eastern countries about it. The emotion that this music aroused most was not sadness but nostalgia, and almost always through memories.

Those who listened to it said it helped them sort out what they felt and that it comforted them. It was appreciated more by people with more empathy. And one of the reasons they gave is that it is a sadness without consequences in real life: you can feel it, and even cry, without anything breaking.

Music that is shared

Music also brings people closer. In 2006, Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling asked strangers to chat in order to get to know one another, and the topic that came up most was music. In another study they saw why: just by knowing what music someone liked, other people formed a fairly accurate idea of what they were like.

Saying what music you like is telling something about yourself. That is why giving someone a song, or asking them what they listened to when they were young, can open a conversation that would not otherwise happen.

Giving music your full attention

If the emotion depends in part on following the music and anticipating what comes next, it makes sense to give it the chance to do so:

• Sometimes listen to a whole piece, without doing anything else and without skipping to the chorus.
• Try it with your eyes closed or in low light, when nothing distracts you.
• Notice the exact moment that moves you. It is usually a change, something you did not expect.
• Go back to the music of the important stages of your life, and ask your loved ones about theirs.
• Now and then let in something you do not know: pleasure also appears with what you had never heard.

That song

We all have a song that takes us back to someone. If one came to mind while you were reading, give thanks for it on a star with “What I’m grateful for”; and if that person is gone, it can shine “For someone who is gone”.