People use music every day to capture a mood without thinking about it. There’s break-up music; wedding music. When inspiration is needed, one might summon up the theme from “Rocky.”
Few of those listeners may actually consider the biological and psychological effects their music has on them, but a new course offered in the University’s psychology department aims to enlighten what happens when humans put on a beat.
Surprisingly, for all its importance in everyday life, music is hardly an exhausted field of study. University Professor Mike Wehr’s psychology of music class, first offered last spring, attempts to blend several sources of contemporary research of just how the brain reacts to music everyday, both biologically and psychologically. That research, Wehr said, is still very much an active field.
“There are no easy answers those questions,” he said. “Those are the kinds of questions that motivate me to see how close we can come to answering them.”
Wehr said he frequently uses music samples that students bring into class, which have included The Velvet Underground and Jimi Hendrix this term. Though it is still largely unclear exactly how the brain reacts to different genres, the general reaction is subjective, he said.
“It doesn’t sound good to everybody,” Wehr said. “Different people like different kinds of music.”
Nevertheless, the different approaches the class takes to the subject offer alternative ways of looking at – or appreciating – music.
“We talk a lot about the differences between how a physicist would describe music and how we actually perceive music, because the perception is not always the same as reality.”
The class attracts mostly psychology majors at this point, Wehr said, but there is a good portion of music majors as well. As Wehr learns and researches the subject himself, he said the diverse backgrounds of his students in the class also add a lot to the discussions.
“It’s been fun. It’s been a great experience, and one of the interesting things about the class is that the material is so broad,” Wehr said. “We can talk about all these different things … and there’s no one person that’s an expert in all of those things.”
Though Wehr’s background is primarily in neurobiology, his self-designed course focuses on both music theory and the biology of the auditory system. Both the music majors and psychology majors typically have to “catch up” in the others’ respective fields, Wehr said.
“It becomes a kind of collaborative effort, which is kind of fun,” he said.
University student Jeff Hunter, who is studying both psychology and biology, said he decided to enroll in the course this term after hearing about it from a friend who took it last spring.
“I really like it,” Hunter said. “It’s a bit more intensive than I thought it would be.”
Hunter also has significant experience in music, having played the trombone, baritone and guitar, among other instruments, which he said has helped his understanding of that aspect of the curriculum. Hunter also enjoys the novel approach the course takes in mixing science with music theory.
“I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I think it’s very interesting,” he said. “I don’t think people think about it enough.”
There is no official textbook for the course this term, Wehr said, but he is currently reading and considering using the recently published “This Is Your Brain on Music” by 1996 University graduate Daniel Levitin.
Levitin, who worked as a professional musician and record producer before his current teaching position at McGill University in Canada, said people can gain more than just a practical understanding for music by looking further into the subject or his book.
“I think the layperson will gain an appreciation for how complicated the processes are that take this auditory stimulus – molecules bombarding our eardrums – and turn them into something coherent and aesthetic – music,” Levitin wrote in an e-mail.
Many people, he said, simply use music as a form of therapy.
“Most of us use music for self-medication and mood regulation, every day,” he said. “We use music much the way we use drugs – caffeine and alcohol, for example.”
Despite the complexities of the listening process, there is little argument over the potential impact of music, Wehr said.
“It can cause some profound emotions. Music can move us tremendously,” Wehr said. “But exactly how that happens, how that taps into our emotional networks of the brain, is still something that we’re trying to figure out.”
Wehr said he plans to offer the course once per year in the future, and it could very well change from his original design as researchers perform more studies on the subject.
“That’s cutting edge research,” he said. “There’re a lot more questions than answers.”
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