A few months after I passed my driving test, I crashed my dad’s car. It was no ordinary rear end bump, rather a full-frontal smash into an oak tree that flipped the ageing green Rover onto its roof. The fault was entirely mine – the combination of inexperience behind the wheel and teenage cockiness.
But sitting on the verge, surveying the crumpled wreck and waiting for my rightly furious father to turn up, another culprit presented itself. Somewhere within twisted metal and shattered glass, the keys remained in the ignition and the car stereo was still blasting out the angry thrash of guitars into the Scottish countryside.
I remember at the time feeling suddenly embarrassed – not for what I had done to our family car – but about what the roar of mid-90s Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day betrayed: I had been driving too fast; too recklessly. I had let the music take hold of my senses.
With many years to reflect since then, I know it would be wrong for me to blame the accident on the music I had been listening to that day. But as a science journalist, I’ve also learned it may well have played a role in the decisions I took leading up to that moment.
Music can be art and entertainment, but it is also a powerful tool for manipulation. We can use it to alter our mood, or it can trigger certain emotions and influence our behaviour. The right tune can lead us to make good decisions or bad ones, encourage us to take risks and spend money. It can even leave us more likely to hurt people.
An entire car-boot-load of research now exists on just what can happen to us while listening to music behind the wheel. Studies using driving simulators have shown, for example, that motorists listening to energetic, exciting music by artists such as Mötley Crüe, Metallica and Eminem drifted from their lanes more often and tended to have less control over the vehicle. A study by researchers at the University of Zagreb in Croatia found that drivers listening to fast, aggressive music such as Metallica’s Master of Puppets, made more errors than those listening to other, calmer forms of music. Interestingly, they don’t drive any faster than those who do so in silence, but eye-scanning technology showed they look around far less.
“Music represents a form of distraction that ‘takes away’ a part of our attention,” says Dario Babic, an assistant professor in traffic science at the University of Zagreb and one of those who conducted the research. This increase in mental load in a stressful driving environment could lead to mistakes.
But there are other theories for why some forms of music lead to potentially dangerous driving behaviours. A fast rhythm, for example, might increase a motorist’s heartbeat, leading to a more aggressive driving style; or the rebellious nature of heavy metal and rap could lead listeners to engage in their own form of “delinquent” behaviour while in the driving seat.
“The effects of the music on the driver’s mental state and driving behaviour can be attributed to a broad range of mechanisms,” says Costas Karageorghis, a psychologist at Brunel University London who has studied the effects of music on driving behaviour. “Across the studies we undertook, it was clear that, in a driving context, the most potent effect of music was on drivers’ emotions. If they are prone to feeling angry and frustrated while driving in an urban environment, the use of calming music in a tempo range 90-110 bpm can be helpful. Using aggressive rap or thrash metal is unlikely to optimise mental state and driving behaviour in an urban context.”
Certainly, there is some evidence that music can make us quicker to anger if driving conditions change in a way that we find frustrating. One group of around 100 volunteers taking part in a study at Liverpool John Moores University had their heart rate, blood pressure and reactions monitored during a 12-minute simulated journey to pick up a child from school. They all seemed similar – until they hit a traffic jam a few minutes into the trip.
Those who had been listening to Linkin Park, Slipknot or hardcore techno before the traffic jam suddenly saw their heart-rates soar compared to others listening to Hans Zimmer, Depeche Mode or The Temptations. With blood pumping faster around their bodies, the metal and techno group were also found to be angrier than the others when their mood was tested after the test. Some even expressed their anger verbally while behind the wheel. The researchers concluded that the intense, energetic music had primed their cardio-vascular systems to pump blood faster when they encountered a frustrating, anger inducing situation.
“Only low-activation music, like jazz trio or gentle strings, lowered blood-pressure during their experience,” explains Stephen Fairclough, a professor of psychology at Liverpool John Moores University, who led the study. These people, however, didn’t report feeling any calmer than those listening to other types of music. “This suggests that the effects of music on cardiovascular physiology are achieved without our conscious awareness.”
And this is where the power of music may really lie. It can influence us in ways we might not be aware of. But they don’t always have to be negative. The Croatian study, for example, found that participants listening to Ed Sheeran’s How Would You Feel and Beethoven’s Für Elise took their foot off the accelerator a little, driving up to 10km/h slower than those listening to heavy metal or driving in silence.
Karageorghis and his colleagues, who conducted a series of studies funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, have also found that soft, calming music might be deployed to help improve driving on the roads.
“The pleasant feelings induced by some forms of music engender a mental state that can result in safer driving behaviours,” says Karageorghis. And it appears to be particularly effective in busy urban environments, where driving is often most difficult. It could be that letting people choose low-intensity music they enjoy simply makes them happier and so less likely to get frustrated or do anything rash. It could also help to prevent drivers from becoming overwhelmed by the noise, bright lights and busy streets of city centres, suggests Karageorghis. And it could even be having a direct effect on how our brains send signals to our limbs.
“Music with lower levels of energy holds implications for the efferent nervous system, or how the brain controls the working muscles, meaning there’s a lower likelihood of hard acceleration and sharp braking,” he says.
Choosing the right kind of music when driving could help to keep people safer and reduce the risk of accidents, Karageorghis claims. He and his colleagues have even developed some playlists specifically for driving in urban areas (for anyone interested they include tracks such as Sia’s Cheap Thrills, Closer by the Chainsmokers and Beautiful People by Ed Sheeran and Khalid).
Perhaps inevitably, most studies looking at the effects of music on driving tend to be small, involving a few dozen participants, largely due to how time consuming they are to conduct. It means care should be taken when generalising the results – some of us will react differently to others when listening to music. And there is some evidence that suggests our personalities play a role.
“Extroverts tend to seek stimulation from their environment and there is a propensity for extroverts to benefit more than introverts from the stimulation that music can offer,” says Karageorghis, by way of example.
But music also has a more visceral affect on us than simply influencing the way we drive. It is universal across human cultures and used in surprisingly similar ways around the world. Lullabies are sung to send children to sleep; repetitive chants are used in rituals; rhythmic beats get dancers moving to cement group bonds; lyrics stir the emotions and create the mood for romance.
These are clues of just how deeply music is ingrained into human social and cognitive practices. Charles Darwin, the English naturalist of On the Origin of Species fame, even suggested that music had played a key part in the evolution of our species. Others have since claimed it was instrumental in the development of our large brains and complex social structures.
Music is thought to play a key role in social bonding, helping to create and strengthen a sense of togetherness among group members, and also perhaps romantically between individuals.
Rhythmic sounds, for example, are common in music we dance to – an activity typically done with others. Research at the University of Singapore has found that our brainwaves can synchronise to the beat of a drum, which may help to align the thinking and behaviour of people in a group. It might be one reason why rhythmic drumming plays such a big role in tribal ceremonies, and why armies march to a beat.
Listening to music passively is also known to activate a pathway of chemical signals in our nervous system known as the endogenous opioid system. It includes a number of small neuropeptides and hormones such as endorphins, and plays a key role in how we form friendships and other social bonds.
Indeed, a number of studies have found that people turned to music during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions as a crutch that helped them deal with the stress and uncertainty they were experiencing.
“Subjectively, music gave people a sense that they’re in touch with other people,” says Naomi Ziv, a behavioural psychologist at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon LeZion, Israel. She led one study on the use of music by people at home during the pandemic lockdowns. Other research has suggested that music can combat loneliness. “It speaks to the social aspect of music: the enjoyment of it has something to do with the connection it gives us to others. And that makes sense when you think about the origins of music – it was necessarily a social activity before we had recording equipment and loudspeakers. To hear music, you had to be physically present in a place where it was played, with other people.”
Another study by psychologists at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Columbia University in New York, found people in four different countries listened to music to help them feel more positive during the unprecedented stress the pandemic created.
The ability for music to alter our mood and emotions is something that composers and musicians have been taking advantage of almost instinctively for centuries. Filmmakers also exploit the powerful effect of music to manipulate how we feel. Think about the growing terror that two simple notes, played repetitively on a tuba with increasing tempo, still instils in anyone who hears it decades after Jaws was released. Or what about the bombastic drama of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries just moments before US helicopters unleash a hail of bullets and rockets in Apocalypse Now.
We use music to manipulate our own feelings, too. We might put on something energetic, for example, to help get our blood pumping before doing some competitive sports. People who are feeling depressed or unhappy will also often choose to listen to sad songs – but perhaps not for the reason you might expect.
Researchers have found that putting on a mournful track when you’re feeling low can actually help to boost your mood, rather than dragging you further down into the doldrums. The reasons for this are complex, and somewhat disputed, but it appears many of us actually enjoy sad music. Some researchers have suggested that because this type of music often uses slow, beautiful melodies, it is aesthetically pleasing and the lyrics help to trigger feelings of empathy. This might also trigger the release of a ‘consoling’ hormone known as prolactin, which is thought to help counteract the mental pain of grief and sadness. As the music simulates sadness often in a safe setting, it may be tricking the brain into producing this hormone and helping to reduce any pain the listener is experiencing.
But not everyone is as susceptible to the effects of music on our mood as others. The strength of certain personality traits, such as absorption – the tendency to become deeply immersed in sensory and imaginary experiences – and openness help to determine how much someone will benefit most from listening to sad music.
Equally, the context in which we listen to music plays a role, too. People who are in happy relationships tend to prefer listening to love songs, while those who are dissatisfied with their love-life will tend to find laments about lost love and break-ups more appealing.
There are effects that music appears to have which do appear to be more universal than others, however. Melodies in the major key, for example, are seen as happier than those in minor keys across cultures around the world.
But exactly why music has such a strong impact on our emotions is still something of a mystery that has yet to be fully unravelled. Modern brain-scanning technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are providing some clues.
Dynaudio's chief acoustic engineer says our brains can be tricked into believing stereo sound is happening in 3D space
Music, like all sound, is picked up by our eardrums and passed along to the cochlea in our inner ear as vibrations, where they turn into electrical signals that cascade along nerves to the brainstem. But once here, music is processed by a surprisingly large number of areas in our brains – not just the auditory cortices, but also those involved in vision, movement, timing, memory, reward and those deep in our brains involved with emotion.
Unique patterns of neural activity light up when volunteers listen to clips of musical instruments selected to induce particular emotional responses. Most of the activity is found, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the auditory cortices of the brain, but also in neighbouring areas involved in recognising emotions (such when we look at someone’s facial expression or from their body language, for example) and those further away that play a role in triggering emotions and empathy.
Under the illusion
The sheer complexity of the way our brains process sound allows them to do some incredibly impressive feats.
“The processing part of our brains is basically a pattern recognition machine,” says Stephen Entwistle, Dynaudio’s chief engineer, acoustics. “This is why we can localise exactly where a sound is coming from even with our eyes shut. Our brains can figure out the size of a room from the way sound reflects off the walls and objects in it, and recognise the voices of people we know on the phone even if they’re quite distorted. They filter out interfering sounds and even replace fundamental notes from music if they are missing.”
But it also means that our brains can be tricked through the use of auditory illusions. The most familiar of these psychoacoustic effects is the use of stereo to fool our brains into believing a sound is coming from a three-dimensional space rather than a left and right speaker.
“With a really good speaker, you can localise sounds with incredible accuracy,” says Entwistle. “At Dynaudio we evaluate our speakers in stereo even though many other manufacturers follow the recommendations from the AES (Audio Engineering Society) to use mono because it’s easier to get a consistent result.”
Entwistle and his colleagues at Dynaudio use a wide range of music to help them assess the performance of their speakers as they are developing them, but he points at two particular favourites that make use of the ability to recreate 3D sound effects. The first words of Vogue by Madonna sweep across the listener before a click appears somewhere high on the left. In The Ballad of Bill Hubbard by Roger Waters, a dog barks behind and to the right of a listener before a radio appears on the floor to the left-hand side.
“A lot of this stereo imaging and immersiveness has to do with the fundamental tracking that appears when you put a properly integrated subwoofer onto a speaker,” says Entwistle. “The low-frequency information seems to help our brains process the other information in some way.”
There is some evidence that depriving ourselves of our other senses, such as sight, can also alter our experience of music. A small study conducted by researchers in Israel found that when volunteers closed their eyes while listening to clips of music from films, they experienced a greater emotional response to the music. They also showed greater activation in a part of the brain known as the amygdala, which is associated with processing emotion. Victoria Williamson, a music psychologist who until 2020 was a researcher at the University of Sheffield but now works as an independent academic, describes getting “chills” when attending a music concert held in a completely dark room because “expectation based on the performers movements was also removed, which resulted in some lovely musical surprises”.
But going to a concert or deliberately putting on music in our own homes or cars allow us to control the psychological effects of what we are listening to some degree. What happens when we experience music as part of the soundscape of our everyday lives?
Music in shops, for example, can have a surprising impact on what we choose to do. A number of studies have demonstrated that background music can influence how long we spend perusing the aisles in a supermarket (slow music can lead people to linger for 15 per cent longer than fast music). Part of this may be due to the way music messes with our sense of time – slow music, it seems, causes people to underestimate the time they spend shopping.
Playing pop music in a cafe frequented by students in one study led them to spend more than when stereotypical ‘piped’ music was used, perhaps because it created an atmosphere they found more lively and enjoyable.
But music can also cause us to gamble more with our money too. Strangely, a study by Ziv and her colleagues found that calming, low-tempo music seems to lead participants to make riskier financial decisions about where to invest their money than those listening to high-tempo electronic music.
“Music can affect people in different ways depending on the situation,” says Ziv. “It is possible that the low-tempo music made people feel like everything was fine and calm, so they went ahead and took risks. The high-tempo music may have increased their arousal, and they were more alert and careful as a result. But it depends on the individual person too – if you like the music, or if you are a person who has a high ability to focus.”
Ziv’s research has also focused on some other, rather disturbing aspects of the way music can influence us. She has found that listening to happy music – specifically tracks like James Brown’s I Got You (I Feel Good) – can alter people’s moral judgements, making them more willing to accept unethical behaviour and cheating. She has found that it can even lead people to be willingly callous towards other human beings.
In one study she and her team asked participants to call a female student to tell her she could not take part in the study, even though she needed to in order to complete her course, or they were asked to tell another student who had been off sick they couldn’t have lecture material they had been promised. Those who were asked to do these ‘favours’ were more likely to say yes if upbeat, easy-listening music had been playing in the background.
The reason for this willingness to do someone else’s dirty work? Being in a good mood can make you more compliant. Other research has shown that music can be used to manipulate people in other ways. Young, single women were more likely to give their phone number to a man of roughly the same age when he asked for it, for example, if they had been exposed to music containing romantic lyrics beforehand.
“Music can also conjure stereotypes,” adds Ziv. “Think about how you might perceive someone who likes classical music compared to someone who likes country or pop.”
She is currently working on a study to examine just how these musical stereotypes impact how we might judge the personalities of people we have just met. “People are not aware of how music colours your experience and the traits you attribute to people,” she says.
Music can also alter the way our other senses work. The music you listen to while eating could well change how your food tastes and even the type of food you crave.
“The more we like the music, the more we like the food experienced while listening to it,” explains Charles Spence, a psychologist at the University of Oxford who studies how our different senses affect our experience of food. He and his colleagues have experimented with how music can create ‘sonic seasoning’ in food and drinks, even creating menus with carefully curated musical accompaniments. Some research suggests that the simple tinkling of a piano can induce a sweeter taste. But many albums, and even singles tracks, can change mode midway through – such as Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. This can alter the taste sensations you might experience while drinking the same glass of wine, according to some studies.
But how you listen to the music can have an effect too. “Noise suppresses taste when it gets too loud,” says Spence.
Music’s effect on our choice of food can also be profound. Listening to jazz led participants in one study to have a preference for savoury foods such as a vegetable sandwich while classical music saw them reach for sweeter options like chocolate.
“We are rarely aware of music’s influence over our food and drink choices,” says Spence. “However, our food choice, and possibly the perceived authenticity of a dish, is affected by our semantic associations with music. For example, flamenco makes people more likely to order paella.”
But while Spence is hoping to harness music to enhance our dining experiences, there are others who believe music could have more wide-ranging impacts on our health and wellbeing. It is common, for example, for people to use music to help them drift off to sleep at night. Some researchers have been using music’s strong connection to memory as a therapy for dementia patients. Others are using music to help treat sufferers of post-traumatic stress. And one study has shown specially composed musical tracks may help to reduce levels of acute pain in people. Music has even been found to trigger changes in the immune system that could be beneficial for fighting off disease.
They are all good reasons to put on a playlist we enjoy and let the music work its magic. But Costas Karageorghis, the psychologist at Brunel University London, has one small tip for when I get behind the wheel of a car.
“Police often find vehicles with music blaring at the site of road accidents,” he reminds me. “We recommend a sound intensity of around 70dBA.” This should be loud enough to enjoy, but not to mask the sounds of other potential hazards on the road. “The potential benefits of music do not increase with increases in sound intensity or volume, and so finding the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of volume is a key consideration for drivers.”
His research suggests that soft, non-lyrical music can be most effective at optimising the emotions of people when driving. So next time I get in the car, maybe I’ll put on a bit of Chopin.