Have you ever noticed how the richly resonant timbre of the cello resembles a human voice? Or how the drumbeat in a film can start your blood pumping? Music can mimic the emotional human voice. The notes can sound like a sad voice, an angry voice or a reassuring one.
We know that different sounds trigger different emotions, but how? Researchers’ work has now given us a better understanding of what happens in the body and how sound affects the neuronal pathways in the brain.
With this knowledge, researchers found a way to crack the emotional code of music: which music signals produce which emotional effects, and unlocked the therapeutic potential of musical emotions.
They did this by engineering musical stimuli to activate specific emotions, and therefore manipulate mood, building a ‘bank’ of sounds that activate specific neuronal pathways in the brain.
This opens up the possibility for people with anxiety or depression swapping meds for music. Personalised sound prescriptions could be designed to diagnose, or even treat, individual psychological or neurological conditions.
Music could even become a cognitive technology, with algorithms able to engineer it to mobilise one neuronal pathway or another, non-intrusively and non-pharmacologically.
The tools researchers developed are open-source and already being used in real-life applications in several French hospitals, especially to alleviate stress and soothe anxiety.
Musical therapy could be used even more widely, to help people with autism or to start rehabilitating people who have suffered a stroke.