THE EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO MUSIC

There are different emotions connected to music, varying from person to person; certain music can make people smile, laugh, or cry. Listening to music is a common habit, and the effects on people’s mood is a crucial factor to analyze. The emotional reaction to music can be explained with six principles.

• Positive feeling: Certain music can help us feel good, bringing up some potential health benefits of listening to that particular kind of music. Creative thinking also has a close connection with the positive reaction to music.
• The startling effect. The brain is hardwired to respond to sudden, loud, or dissonant events. Those reactions can be associated with surprise, laughter, or fear. Music able to trigger that jumpy response is not conducive to creative thinking, affecting more profoundly people who suffer from anxiety.
• Being in sync. The body works with an internal rhythm, which can be altered by music. The heart rate would speed up or slow down as a response to different music. Being in synchronization with the music brings pleasure and an internal sensation of peace and well being; this may explain the urge to move the body in synchrony with the beat, as it happens while people dance. Similarly, babies synchronize their heartbeat to calming songs, inducing their sleep. On the other end, calm and soothing music is not the most popular choice for a high-intensity workout routine.
• Emotional contagion. Humans tend to “assimilate” the emotions of others when recognizing their emotional expressions, that is one of the factors that trigger empathic responses. That explains why it’s more common to laugh at a comedy act with a full audience or why it’s more recurrent to help somebody in need when people see them face to face. The most noticeable form in which musical events can produce contagion effects is through the non-verbal expressions shown by performers.
• Emotional events. Music responses are also conditioned to the connection to our environment. Conditioning is a potent source of emotion. A big part of our musical preferences indicates our experiences. For example, the song “eye of the tiger” evokes very different emotions on Millenials than on people belonging to Generation X, or Baby Boomers. When a memory is retrieved, so are the associated feelings with that memory.
• Musical surprise. The human brain has evolved to predict, based on previous experiences and the thinking process. Discrepancies between predictions and events take the brain by surprise, causing strong emotions. A creative composer can delay a chord to enhance emotional excitement.

CREATIVE THINKING

In the times in which we must adapt to a “new normal,” creative thinking can make the difference between crashing into our emotions or finding a way to utilize the situation to our advantage. As many people are still scrambling resources to gather the whole picture, similar to assembling an extremely challenging puzzle, music can be their copilot and even cooperate to come up with the right idea. Playing the “right music” is up to each individual. Ideally, a familiar playlist associated with our very own positive emotions will help to smooth up the pathway.

THE IDEAL WORKOUT PLAYLIST

Physical activity is crucial to keep the physical and mental health. It’s the time to make yourself the priority. Coming up with the right workout playlist it’s up to every single person individually. As individuals, we all have different experiences, and those occurrences have triggered different personal emotions; therefore, different songs are associated with different stories and will trigger different moods on each person. Make some time to put together the playlist in Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, or Napster that synchronizes your body to the exercise and bring pleasant memories at the same time.