In a world of music streaming services, access to almost any song is just a few clicks away. Yet, the live concert lives on. People still fill sweaty basements, muddy fields and grand concert halls to hear their favorite musicians play. And now neuroscientists might know why: live music engages the brain's emotion centres more than the recorded track.
Concerts are immersive social experiences in which people listen to and feel the music together. They are also dynamic—artists can adapt their playing according to the crowd's reaction. It was this last difference that led neuroscientists, based at the Universities of Zurich and Oslo, to study the brain responses of people listening to music.
A total of 160 people were recruited as volunteers and the scientists divided them into two groups randomly. In the "live" experiment, participants lay in an MRI scanner listening to the music through earphones, while a pianist was positioned outside the room. The pianist was shown the participant's real-time brain activity as a form of feedback. In the recorded condition, participants listened to pre-recorded versions of the same tunes.
The scientists were interested in how live music affected the areas of the brain that process emotions. In the live condition pianists were instructed to try and adjust their playing in order to drive the activity in one of these regions known as the amygdala (杏仁体), an almond-shaped area deep inside the brain.
The results, just published in the journal PNAS, showed that live music had far more emotional impact. Whether the music was happy or sad, listening to the pianist playing in a dynamic way led to more activity in both the amygdala and other parts of the brain's emotion processing network. The researchers also found that participants' brain activity tracked the acoustic (声音的) features of the music, like tempo and pitch, far more closely when it was played live.
