Science News Review

Getting In The Groove

Mar 20 at 4:04pm by Aileen

Music as Universal Brain-Language

With the return of the sun and spring popping out all over, the season’s long list of open-air music festivals is prepared to launch in cities, towns, parks and fields somewhere near you. Obviously, human beings share a collective appreciation for music and aren’t shy of demonstrating that on a regular basis.

So it is probably not too surprising that biologists from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany published research this week in the Journal Current Biology that scientifically establishes the well-known fact that music really is the “Universal Language.”

Language of music really is universal, study finds

Researchers wanted to find out if the expression of emotions in Western music would be appreciated by people who had no exposure to it. They chose as their test subjects the Mafa, an isolated ethnic group in the African nation of Cameroon. Predictably, the Mafa listeners did recognize emotional expressions made through the music, including happiness, sadness and fear. The scientists determined that the clues relied upon by the listeners to types of music they’d never heard were primarily tempo and mode, devices that musicians use to elicit certain emotions even in people who don’t know the language of a song.

Guitarists’ Brains Swing Together

Meanwhile, a different group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development used electroencephalograms [EEG] to record the brain activity of eight different pairs of guitarists playing a sort of jazz-fusion melody together. Reported lead researcher Ulman Lindenberger,

“Our findings show that interpersonally coordinated actions are preceded and accompanied by between-brain oscillatory couplings.”

That’s Sci-Speak for what most of the rest of humanity recognizes readily as “getting in the groove.”

So here’s hoping the weather is great for your neighborhood’s spring music fest, and that the groove goes on and on!