Two Disturbing Musical Studies

I make my living as a musician these days and I find almost any scientific study of music interesting. Here are two that have recently crossed my desk. The first is one from Nature.com and covers an idea that many have long suspected, but had little data to prove.

To summarize, over the past 50 years or so, popular music has been becoming louder and employing less variation in melody, timbre and chord progression. I can offer several anecdotal reason for this, but you should read the article and form your own opinions.

The second study is from Scientific American and discusses how harmony affects mood. To quote from the article: "Daniel Bowling, a cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, analyzed the intervals, or distances between notes, in melodies from Western classical music and Indian ragas in a study published in March in PLoS ONE. He found that in both types of music, the size of the average interval is smaller in melodies associated with sadness and larger in melodies linked with happiness."

"Bowling suggests that music mimics the natural patterns of our most primitive instrument—the voice. To test his theory, he collected speech samples from 20 English speakers and 20 Tamil Indian speakers and looked at whether the changes in frequency predicted the emotional content of their words. He found the same pattern as he did in written melodies: the sadder the speech, the more monotone the delivery."

It doesn't really take a genius to put these two studies together and see the implications and I, for one, find those implications disturbing.