"Dissonant music brings out the animal in listeners"

Ever wonder why Jimi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" moved so many people in 1969 or why the music in the shower scene of "Psycho" still sends chills down your spine?

A UCLA-based team of researchers has isolated some of the ways in which distorted and jarring music is so evocative, and they believe that the mechanisms are closely related to distress calls in animals.

They report their findings in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Biology Letters, which publishes online June 12.

"Music that shares aural characteristics with the vocalizations of distressed animals captures human attention and is uniquely arousing," said Daniel Blumstein, one of the study's authors and chair of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

When the music featured distortion, subjects rated it as more exciting than the compositions without distortion. They also were more likely to describe the music as charged with negative emotion.

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Most of the effects, however, are undermined if the music is paired with unevocative imagery, the researchers found.

In a second study, they paired the same music compositions with 10-second video clips designed to be minimally evocative, showing, for example, people walking or drinking a sip of coffee. The researchers presented the pairings to another group of undergraduates. When the subjects heard the distorted musical pieces in the context of the videos, they did not find the music arousing but they did find the pieces more negative than when they were not paired with the videos.

"The video eliminated how exciting the distorted-sounding music seemed, but it didn't trump the emotional content of the music," Bryant said.

(zoob you forgot the link).

Here is the actual article (zoob you forgot the link).

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla...he-234656.aspx

I was wondering if the reactions they noted could be the pre-conditioning of the test subjects to certain types of music they relate to certain movie genres, and sure enough, when the music was shown with opposing video, the impact was removed or lessened considerably.

This brings to mind the (opening movement to) Moonlight Sonata, as played in Crimson Tide. It felt rather eerie.

Tvtropes.org even has a page on this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...rackDissonance