The science of music: how it controls everything from taste to our spending habits

A new exhibition looks at music’s mysterious power over our bodies and minds. Photo / 123RF

People around the world listen to an average of 18 and a half hours of music each week, according to recent research by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. But did you know that the music we hear can affect our sense of taste or how safely we drive? Or that music can influence what we buy when out shopping? Or that our innate sense of rhythm is determined by the speed at which our parents walked when we were babies?

These insights and more are explored in a wide-ranging new exhibition now running at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, England. Turn It Up: The Power of Music looks at the science behind music’s mysterious hold over us. It contains some dizzying findings that may make us all pause the next time our finger absent-mindedly hovers over the shuffle button on our phones. It turns out that our music choices matter in more ways than we could ever imagine.

Curator Dr Emily Scott-Dearing says: “The idea of the exhibition is to show just how music affects our bodies and our minds. It also drives us to innovate, create and share. We’re interested in the science and technology angle of something that is a really relatable subject for us all. Music is part of everyone’s lives.”

A perception exists that as humans we’re either musical or we’re not. This is nonsense, says Scott-Dearing. “People say, ‘I’m not really musical, I gave up the violin at whatever age.’ We are quite quick to write ourselves off in terms of our musicality,” she says. “But scientific research reveals shared human responses that we all have to music, some of those from our biology and some from our cultural backgrounds.”

Turn It Up will be dotted with interactive installations that will let people discover the science behind music. Charles Spence is a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University. His research on the impact of music on food perception will be reflected in the displays. Spence has found that you can effectively season your food or drink by selecting different kinds of music (“sonic seasoning” as he calls it). While high-pitched piano music brings out a flavour’s sweetness, dissonant and jarring music will bring out sourness and low-pitched musical soundscapes will bring out bitterness. Just how does this happen?

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“The first thing to note is that I can’t turn water into wine with music: the taste or the flavour has to be there to begin with,” Spence explains. “But if you’ve got a complex taste – coffee, wine, whisky or something – then you can draw people’s attention to something in that tasting experience. And by drawing their attention to it, it becomes more salient.”

But what’s the science behind high-pitched being sweet and low-pitched being bitter? “If you take sweet and bitter, then my favourite Just So story – which is yet to be disproved – is that if you take a new-born baby chimp, rat or human and put a sweet taste on their tongue they stick their tongues out and up to ingest the sweetness. Put a bitter taste on a newborn baby’s tongue – cross-species and cross-cultures – and we all stick our tongues out and down to try and eject what is potentially poisonous,” Spence says.

The gurgles that we make with each tongue action are differently pitched (tongue up produces a high-pitched gurgle, tongue down a low one). Hence the associations between ‘up and sweet’ and ‘down and bitter’ are wired into our brains. There are other reasons. The language of smell is often the language of sound, Spence says: sweet-smelling perfumes are said to have high notes, for example. The associations stick.

Sonic seasoning has commercial clout. Spence worked with chef Heston Blumenthal on his signature Sound of the Sea dish at the Fat Duck in 2007 (a conch shell contained an iPod that played waves crashing as diners nibbled their sashimi). One Italian company has recently designed hyper-directional speakers so that individual tables in restaurants can have bespoke “sound showers” depending on what people order, Spence says. Visitors to Turn It Up will be able to listen to tracks and guess the flavour of food they’re associated with.

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Other research has looked at how music affects our spending habits. Classical music has been found to make people spend more in restaurants, so if that bistro playing Brahms forced you to max out your credit card, you know why. Adrian North of the University of Leicester, who carried out the research, has also found that stereotypically French and German music can influence supermarket shoppers to buy French or German wine. The exhibition in Manchester will feature a pop-up supermarket.

Music and exercise are as closely aligned as music and food. Professor Costas Karageorghis is professor of sport and exercise psychology at Brunel University. His research has found that music changes how our muscles perform by reducing our perceptions of exertion during low- to moderate-intensity exercise. In technical terms, music blocks messages traveling through our afferent nervous system to our brain. In non-technical terms, music tricks us into having greater staying power. While randomly selected music reduces our perceived exertion by eight per cent, music that we really love cuts it by twelve per cent.

Music can psyche us up. Tunes can have what Karageorghis calls an “activating affect” even if they’re not very fast. “Before I go running I will listen to the late great Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire, and I visualise those athlete in St Andrews in their long white shorts striding across the sand. The tempo is only 68 beats per minute, which is about resting heart rate. But the associated imagery really serves to inspire me,” he tells me. As well as inspire, music can calm. A former pupil of Karageorghis’s was heavyweight boxer Audley Harrison. When he went to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Harrison would calm his anxiety between bouts by listening to Japanese classical music. It’s hardly the Rocky soundtrack but this didn’t matter. “Audley understood the mind-body relationship and how it could be influenced by music,” says Karageorghis. The result? Harrison won gold for Great Britain.

Karageorghis has also carried out research into how music can be used to increase driver safety on the roads. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found that young male drivers in the UK are over-represented in national accident statistics. So he tested all manner of music – fast and slow, lyrical and instrumental, loud and quiet – on urban and motorway drivers.

His research found that vocal-free music played at a low intensity resulted in the most apt emotional state for safe urban driving. The message is clear: choose moderately calming music over heavy metal or banging techno. “You won’t look as cool but you’ll definitely be safer,” Karageorghis says. At Turn It Up, visitors will listen to music and decide which tracks would make them safer drivers.

But humans’ connection with music begins at least 17 years before they can sit behind a wheel. Dr Sinead Rocha, lecturer in psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, has shown it starts at birth. Her research has found that a baby’s sense of rhythm is influenced by how quickly or otherwise their parent or carer walks. She proved this by walking on a treadmill while carrying babies in slings and measuring the speed at which they drum before and after the walk. After a fast walk, the babies would drum faster than before. After slow walks their drumming was slower. The tempos that we enjoy change over time as our motor functions change – older people prefer slower rhythms than young people, Rocha says.

So, the big one. Why does music make us want to dance? Rocha explains that our brain is primed for prediction. It takes external sensory information and processes it, which is why we know when to catch a ball that’s flying towards us, for example. And she says that good music embodies the perfect level of prediction: it contains enough elements of surprise to keep us motivated to guess what will happen next. Music fires our brain and keeps us interested. And that’s what dancing is: humans joyously predicting what comes next. “Other people have argued that music is this useless by-product of other behaviours that we engage in. [But] I think it has its own intrinsic rewards,” she says.

Turn It Up will also demonstrate music’s crossover with technology (such as the use of artificial intelligence in composition) and medicine too. After Manchester, it will travel.

Scott-Dearing hopes visitors will leave feeling “uplifted and more tuned into their own musical landscape”. The science of music is everywhere, from the fast lane to the wine aisle and from the womb to the dining room. “Music has such power and I don’t want to blast away all its secrets,” she says. “It remains a mysterious force. But it’s fascinating to discover some of the extraordinary things that science is revealing about it.”