About Music And Health Again

About Music And Health Again.
Certain aspects of music have the same upshot on nation even when they live in very different societies, a new study reveals. Researchers asked 40 Mbenzele Pygmies in the Congolese rainforest to keep one's ears open to short clips of music. They were asked to lend an ear to their own music and to unfamiliar Western music. Mbenzele Pygmies do not have access to radio, boob tube or electricity. The same 19 selections of music were also played to 40 amateur or educated musicians in Montreal.

Musicians were included in the Montreal group because Mbenzele Pygmies could be considered musicians as they all squeal regularly for ceremonial purposes, the study authors explained. Both groups were asked to rank how the music made them feel using emoticons, such as happy, sad or excited faces. There were significant differences between the two groups as to whether a determined piece of music made them feel good or bad.

However, both groups had nearly the same responses to how exciting or calming they found the different types of music. "Our major revelation is that listeners from very different groups both responded to how exciting or calming they felt the music to be in similar ways," Hauke Egermann, of the Technical University of Berlin, said in a gossip release from McGill University in Montreal. Egermann conducted part company of the study as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill.

So "This is undoubtedly due to certain low-level aspects of music such as tempo (or beat), pitch (how tall or low the music is on the scale) and timbre the quality of a musical sound, but this will need further research". The Montreal participants felt a wider selection of emotions as they listened to the Western music than the Pygmies expressed when listening to either their own or Western music. This may be due to the distinct roles music plays in the two cultures.

And "Negative emotions are felt to harass the harmony of the forest in Pygmy savoir vivre and are therefore dangerous," Nathalie Fernando, of the University of Montreal's faculty of music, said in the news release. "If a newborn is crying, the Mbenzele will sing a happy song. If the men are shocked of going hunting, they will sing a happy song - in general, music is used in this mores to evacuate all negative emotions, so it is not really surprising that the Mbenzele feel that all the music they hear makes them intuit good".

The study was published recently in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. "People have been distressing to figure out for quite a while whether the way that we react to music is based on the culture that we come from or on some universal features of the music itself," Stephen McAdams, of McGill's School of Music, said in the telecast release supplement. "Now we differentiate that it is actually a bit of both.