Music and Culture
The sequence of sounds of music tends to provoke intense emotions. It is not all about good vibration; music can evoke other feelings such as anxiety, boredom, and anger. The impact of music on our emotions is significant such that explaining it is a problem. However, Phillip Ball’s article Will We Ever Understand Why Music Makes Us Feel Good provides insights that correctly link music and people’s expectations. People tend to have expectations that are culturally-based. What people of the 21st century expect has dramatically changed from what people in the previous centuries expected because the culture is dynamic. The paper presents that argument that the arousal of emotions due to music happens due to manipulating expectations.
Although it is difficult to test, emotions due to music are caused by manipulating and violating expectations. Music provides tremendous opportunities for the creation and manipulation of expectations. According to research quoted by Ball (2013), listening to pleasurable music is linked to activated brain regions called limbic and paralimbic connected to euphoric reward responses like those experienced in sex, good food, and addictive drugs. Music tempts us to make unconscious predictions about what is coming next. When the projections are met, the brain rewards itself by enlivening us with the pleasurable play of emotions.
Expectations are based on what is appreciated to be normal (Ball, 2013). The expectations we put in music are found on our values, beliefs, and artefacts. Hence, emotions aroused due to playing music differ from people to people due to different cultures. While simple rhythms such as waltz time in Western Europe are regarded as natural, Eastern Europeans dance to metres that sound extraordinarily complicated to most parts of the world. Apart from attached expectations and predictions, other factors impacting our emotional response include past good or bad experiences. Because music composers understand the emotional impact of music, they fashion passages that manage to provoke extreme emotions using the most innocuous stimuli imaginable.