Why music makes us feel, according to artificial intelligence

Your heart beats faster, your palms sweat and part of your brain called the Heschl's gyrus lights up like a Christmas tree. Chances are, you've never thought in such a detailed way about what happens to your brain and body when you listen to music. But it's a question that has puzzled scientists for decades: Why does something as abstract as music provoke such a consistent response? In a new study, a team of researchers from USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and USC Viterbi School of Engineering, with the help of artificial intelligence, investigated how music affects listeners' brains, bodies and emotions. For the experiment, the team selected three emotional pieces of music that did not contain lyrics and were not highly familiar, so no element of memory was attached to the listeners' emotional response.