21
votes
MRI research shows live music makes us more emotional than recordings
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- Title
- We finally know why live music makes us so emotional
- Authors
- #author.fullName}
- Word count
- 407 words
Kind of a strange study. I feel like it was more of a "is recorded sound less stimulating that live sound that's curated to carefully match a listener's situation, played by a performer instructed to try and get a reaction from the listener via any reasonable means". It's also worth noting that both live and recorded sounds were piped in through the same speaker and the listener was not told whether or not the sounds were recorded.
Most music performed "live" doesn't take the listener into account at this level of granularity. You could argue more cheering = more energy from a band but that's nothing compared to what the study is offering.
An excerpt
I guess this inspires a world where individualized music based on the sensors we already carry around with us could mutate music to suit activity levels or situations. I don't know if that's a good thing given the pushback against generated curation of media on sites like spotify, tiktok, etc but it could be interesting.
The closest thing I could find was RockMyRun, an app for runner that tailors a playlist to your heartrate. Sadly, it's bogged down by a monthly subscription, tech issues, and music licensing limits that leave people wondering its value.
I've been to some small performances. There's a huge difference between listening to your favorite artist's album, and them making eye contact with you when they perform...even if its only for a brief moment.
The difference between porn and sex, so to speak.
I have a different view on this. I would never trade my favorite albums in exchange for memories of my favorite live moments. Live music is a fleeting feeling. Whereas I have relationships with my favorite recordings. They have meant different things at different times in my life, and they represent an ongoing possibility of new experiences and ways of thinking of them. The same as good novels. This is a personal thing too, I know, but I have had the experiences you described but just didn't enjoy it as much as I expected. I also think I have trouble really allowing myself to have a transcendental experience in a crowd (no matter how small); it's a quite uncomfortable setting for me.
In a way, familiar recordings automatically create this "optimized"(ugh) type of experience, because the more you know an album, the more your brain molds to it, and expects what it knows is coming. The musicians don't need to read a brain scan or anything.
The article is paywalled, so I can't check if the recordings were new to the listeners or not, but personally I value recordings that I'm already very familiar with much higher. So I find myself disagreeing with the headline. I know it's not true for me at least.
I won't disagree with that, especially if it was an either or. I always saw them more as complementary, that enhance each other.
That said, there are some bands with amazing albums whom are terrible live, and vice versa.
Yeah, I also found this part of the study much more interesting than the results. Although that's mostly because I don't have the background knowledge to understand the results very well. I can skim through a lot of types of academic papers, but my eyes definitely glazed over for this one.
I came here to quote this excerpt from the study:
I wonder how surreal it is to play music with a live brain scan showing how well your performance is hitting. Seems like potentially an extraordinarily valuable training opportunity as a musician.
Your bit on how this could lead to personalized music sounds both amazing and crazy. It sounds like it might be incredible to experience, but it is probably over the line as far as trying to optimize things. I could hypothetically inject myself with dopamine or heroin to optimize my feelings of enjoyment, but I have no interest in doing that. Not even it if were a painless, noninvasive, and socially acceptable system with a convenient app, like the mood organ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? So there is some line I won't cross in terms of using technology to maximize my life experiences; I wouldn't want technology to hack my senses to the degree that real-life feels boring. Then there's all the issues around dealing with collection of brain data.
Alright, sounds straightforward.
Hold on, doesn't that defeat the purpose..? Aren't they literally chasing a result here?
Perhaps live artists are chasing a result in a similar manner, but I mean, that's self evident, their feedback is directly in front of them. The article title seems to suggest it's the other way around. Not to mention the plethora of other reasons you'd be more emotional at a stage..
Well, unless you have a very strong soundsystem, It's quite a different atmosphere to listening music at home, and there's probably a lot more people too :P
I have to wonder what was the reason the researchers wanted to run this experiment. It feels like the results are self-evident without needing an MRI machine.
Sure there are a lot of other things that psyche up the audience during a live concert, but without the musicians there it would be a dud. Venues make money primarily on the appeal of live music. Even businesses that are primarily lounges, bars, and restaurants bring in live bands to drum up businesses, and they are practically never getting anyone popular to do it.