Live music strikes a chord between listener and performer

What exactly does live music do to our brains? It turns out that there’s a sort of neurological resonance between performer and listener, whereby the performers alter their playing to drive the emotional responses of the audience. This partly explains why watching your favourite band play live is so much better than listening to a studio recording. The University of Zurich’s Sascha Fruehholz, a professor in cognitive neuroscience, has been piping real-time performances to listeners inside brain scanners, and then feeding the scan results back to the players with the instruction to play in such a way to maximise the emotional response…

Sascha - There was not so much research on live music. We want to see how much more intense is live music compared to recording music. And the other dimension was the brain. And we do a lot of research on the specific part of the brain that we call the effective brain or the limbic system. And one part of the limbic system is the amygdala, which is really central to any kind of emotional processing. So we just wanted to see how the amygdala responds to live music.

Chris - I suspect that one of the reasons why there's a paucity of information about live music and the brain response is that you can't take a brain scanner to a rock concert, can you? So how did you get around that one?

Sascha - Well, this is probably, as you said, this is a limitation. So if you want to quantify brain activity, we need these big machines. So what we had in the experiments, we had people in the brain scanner. So we quantified brain activity in real time, especially again in the limbic system in the different rooms we had the musicians, piano players seeing the brain activity of the person inside the scanner so they really could follow brain activity. And we asked them, if you see that the activity in the limbic system is going down, try to change something in the performance.

Chris - Neat. So basically it's like a biofeedback thing where you turn the brain images that are coming off of the person's responses to the music they're presumably hearing while they're in the brain scan are coming from these live musicians. You present that back to the live musicians and they're playing to try to make the brain activity change in a way that does something in sync with their music. So what sorts of things did the musicians do to respond and what sorts of responses did the person's brain produce when they heard the change in the music?

Sascha - They changed what we call the timbre of the music, so the sound quality. They changed the tempo, for example, they changed the complexity of the piece and all of this in the end has been successful. So when these musicians introduce changes in the way they perform, the piece we saw increases the activity of people listening.

Chris - When you go to a live event is this what's going on? You would say that the musicians on the stage are in some way subtly changing the way they play, which is synchronised with the responses they're getting off the crowd. So the two kind of gel.

Sascha - Exactly like this, and this can only happen during live music. So you have the musicians on one side and they try to produce a performance in order to increase the emotional experience of the audience while they perform. They see the responses of the audience. And then if they, for example, see the audience is not happy, they try to introduce some changes.

Chris - What happens if you play music to somebody that they absolutely loathe? I mean there are certain musicians, certain genres of music, which I can't stand. Others I absolutely love <laugh>. Did you try any of that to see whether music that one person loves activates a totally different set of circuits when they're loving it compared to someone who's loathing it?

Sascha - That's actually an interesting question actually. And we know the amygdala being part of the limbic system or the emotion brain responds to both something you like, but also if you listen to something that you completely hate in terms of music. In our study on music and the emotional reaction listeners, we had positive music. So music that makes you happy, but we also had music that we called unpleasant. So it's negative music, more inducing emotions like let's say sadness or nostalgia for example. It portrays a negative emotion music. But some people still like to listen to this minor note music.

Chris - Is it like eating your greens? You know it doesn't taste great but it's good for you. And so you need that kind of contrast in the music because it kind of stretches you emotionally. Do you think that's what's going on?

Sascha - Yes. I mean music has a dimension that we call an aesthetic dimension. So it's not only the music itself, but music also like it has a theme, it has a specific topic and sometimes these topics can be negative, but still you would like to listen to this music because you're interested in this negative theme in the end.