Why Music Makes Us Feel (According to AI)

In the neuroimaging experiment, 40 volunteers listened to a series of sad or happy musical excerpts, while their brains were scanned using MRI. This was conducted at USC's Brain and Creativity Institute by Assal Habibi, an assistant professor of psychology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and her team, including Matthew Sachs, a postdoctoral scholar currently at Columbia University. To measure physical reaction, 60 people listened to music on headphones, while their heart activity and skin conductance were measured. The same group also rated the intensity of emotion (happy or sad) from 1 to 10 while listening to the music. Then, the computer scientists crunched the data using AI algorithms to determine which auditory features people responded to consistently. In the past, neuroscientists trying to better understand the impact of music on the body, brain and emotions have analyzed MRI brain scans over very short segments of time--for instance, looking at the brain reacting to two seconds of music.