Music Science: From Mozart to Marketing

This will surprise you - space is huge! This means that scientists are constantly finding new, strange things that confound what we know. Using radio astronomy, scientists have discovered what looks like an enormous planet all on its own in deep space. Adam Murphy found out more from The Open University's David Rothery...

Adam - Our planet, the seven others, all the planetoids, and countless other rocks are held together by our bright shining star - our Sun. But not every prospective star gets to shine and not every planet gets a sun. Scientists in California, Colorado, and Arizona have found one of these orphan planets 20 light years away.

It’s as large as 12 Jupiters, the largest planet in our solar system. It’s so large that it just falls short of becoming a star. But how could something like this come to be? To learn more about it I spoke with David Rothery, Professor of GeoPlanetary Sciences at the Open University…

David - How do you get a planet floating around on it’s own. Well, there are two ways: one way is you just form the planet in the same way that you’d form a star. A cloud of gas and dust and the interstellar medium starts to contract under its own gravity. And if it’s a big enough cloud you’ll get a star and maybe some planets around the star. If it’s a small cloud, all you can get is a brown dwarf, or even a smaller cloud and all you’ll get is a rogue isolated planet formed on its own.

Another way would be it could have begun as a planet round a normal star and been flung out from that star somehow. Orbits are very chaotic in the early stages of growth of a stellar planetary system because there’s still gas and dust affecting the object’s motions so you can get objects thrown out. So maybe this object began around a normal star and then was thrown out of that stellar system to wander space on its own.

Adam - But why is it a failed star stuck in darkness? What would be different if it had just that little bit more mass to it?

David - It’s glowing too faintly to be a proper star. In fact, it’s not even what we’d call a brown dwarf. The mass estimates come out at about 12 times the mass of Jupiter which is right on the boundary of the mass that you need for a body’s own gravity to compress its interior to sufficient pressures that deuterium, that’s the heavy isotope of hydrogen, can start undergoing nuclear fusion. Bodies from 12 to about 80 Jupiter masses are called brown dwarfs, their fusing deuterium which is much less common than proper hydrogen. And they’re never going to become normal stars like the Sun because you need to be fuzing hydrogen to undergo the processes which really we think of as going on in a star.

Adam - This orphan ball of gas has a few interesting things about it though. It has an aurora like our Northern Lights which has proven to be something of a mystery.

David - Well on Earth, the aurora are caused when charge particles streaming out from the Sun, mostly protons are channeled along Earth’s magnetic field lines and hit the Earth’s atmosphere above the Poles, and that ionises atmospheric gases high in the atmosphere and you get the glow.

Now what I’ve not been able to figure out is what they think is triggering the aurora in these objects because none of them is orbiting another star or a larger object, but something is impinging on their atmospheres and causing the auroral emissions.

Adam - So is this rogue orphan planet a quirk of a near infinite universe or are they something that could be hiding everywhere?

David - There haven’t been many detections of orphan planets wandering round space on their own, but you can estimate that given we’ve detected some there could easily be as many orphan planets blundering around the galaxy as there are stars in the galaxy. These could be very very abundant objects.

 Would you let a robot influence your judgement in the same way you might take advice from your friends and family? It’s, surprisingly, an important consideration because robotic devices, including things like virtual assistants, are spreading rapidly in society, so we need to know how they can influence people, and especially children. Katie Haylor heard how the University of Plymouth’s Tony Belpaeme is going about it...

Tony - We’ve been using robots, and specifically social robots, so these are not robots that make you a cup of tea or that would hoover the house, but these are robots that would interact with you on a social level. And we’ve been using these robots in hospitals, in schools, and quite often these robots need to be very convincing there. They need to convince you to stick to a dietary programme or they need to convince you to do your homework. And we were having a chat with some psychologists about how can we measure really how convincing our robots are, and that’s how we arrived at measuring how much peer pressure a robot can exert on people.

Katie - Peer pressure is quite a common concept in terms of human to human peer pressure, right?

Tony - It is, it is. We all know that we follow the herd; we wear what the others are wearing; we say what the others are saying. In the 1950s Solomon Asch devised a very simple and elegant experiment to actually measure how much we succumb to peer pressure. So you’ve got a group of people, they're brought into a room, and all of them except one are accomplices - they’re into the game.

You let these people do a simple visual task. On the screen you show four lines and they need to say which two lines match in length. And it’s such an easy task that if you would be alone in the room you would be near perfect. But what if all people in the room actually give wrong answers? They consistently say the wrong line, the one that doesn’t match. Will you follow suit; will you succumb to peer pressure or will you stick to the correct answer? That’s the twist in the experiment. Usually it’s been done with people to see how much we follow social pressure from a group of people, and this time we replaced the people by robots.

Katie - Okay. So tell me what you did in this study.

Tony - Because this experiment was done in the 1950s we first wanted to check if now in the 21st century people still succumbed to peer pressure in this experiment. So we did the experiment all over again and much to our surprise really, people still kind of followed suit. They follow what the others are saying even if that answer is wrong. So we knew that the setup works, the experiment works and then we kind of removed the adults and replaced them by robots. It’s a small group of robots; only three robots and we checked if the adults would succumb to peer pressure by the robots, which they didn’t.

But then we replaced the adult with a child, so now we had a child with three robots in the room doing that very simple visual test, and what we noticed was that the children followed. They succumbed to peer pressure by the robots so the robots really exert social pressure on the children to give a wrong answer.

Katie - What would you say is the significance of this finding?

Tony - On the one hand, children succumbing to peer pressure sounds sinister but it doesn’t have to be. It’s very important to us that children actually listen to what robots say and follow what robots suggest. We can make excellent use of that in education, in health care, in therapeutic support, and we’ve been doing that for many years.

But there could be a dark side to this as well. It could, for example, be that if you have one of these robots in the home and these robots suggest children to buy things, or to ask for things that they shouldn't be asking for then we know that these robots are much more convincing than any other form of technology.

We’ve had different types of technology in the home. These social robots are going to be a new form of channel through which information reaches us and it reaches us in a social manner. We now know that these robots will be able to persuade you to do things that could be good or that could be bad.

Could your personality influence the kind of music you listen to? Music psychologist David Greenberg has been gathering data from people all over the world to learn more about the relationship between music and personality, and Georgia Mills spoke to him to find out more...

David - What we found is that excitement seeking extroverts tend to like high arousal music so that means high energy music songs like Welcome to the Jungle or Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

On the other hand we found that individuals who who were high in openness to experience like more complex music, avant garde classical music to jazz, to opera, to world music. And they are preferring these qualities in music that are much more thoughtful and sophisticated. What’s interesting is if you look at it: let’s just take the example of openness to experience and jazz music. People with openness to experiences they are kind of seeking new things, and if they go on vacation they’re typically going to want to pick a new vacation spot each year. And with jazz music it’s so unpredictable that the very basic concept is improvisation and so there’s constantly something new moment to moment. And some music like that can be really appealing for someone who’s open to new experiences and seeking these new ideas and new aesthetics out.

Some people have a range of musical preferences and so if you look at their playlists there’s a range of music from rock, to jazz, to hip hop, to alternative, and it’s a bunch and they may switch day by day in what type of music they’re listening too. In another study we had found that people again who are high in openness to experience their record collections and their preferences are much more diverse than those who are lower in openness to experience.

There is another study that we had published which was looking at different cognitive styles. So we were looking at people who were high on empathy compared to systemisers who tend to analyse systems. What we found was that empathisers were preferring music that was more mellow, that had lower energy, also had negative emotions, and music that also had emotional depth. Wherease people high in systemising were preferring music that had high energy, positive emotions, and that also had intellectual depth.

So an empathiser might really like Nora Jones’ “Come Away with Me”, or Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”. Systemisers were preferring more heavy metal and punk music, but at the same time what was interesting was we found that there were systemisers that were preferring music from the avant garde classical genres. And so there’s something about the complexity and almost the puzzle-like nature of that type of music and it needed to be deconstructed that was appealing to systemisers.

Georgia - Do many people listen to music and say ah yes, that’s a clever note change or  - I don’t not much about music - or is it sort of happening unconsciously?

David - It depends upon the individual and that has to do with the type of musical engagement that people engage in. So there are individuals who look at music more intellectually and they are picking out the specific notes, thinking about the exact qualities especially if they’re a musician and have musical training they could say this is a F minor 7 chord going to a B flat 7 chord. Whereas others they’re just listening and they’re focused more on the energy of the music or maybe they’re focusing more on how it’s making their body move. And this also depends upon the personality of the individual and it will inform how they’re actually engaging and stepping into their musical process.

Georgia - Is there any evidence that listening to different types of music could actually influence what you’re like as a person?

David - That’s a great question. And it’s a very difficult one to answer so scientifically. Right now we’re doing studies that are looking at that question. And we’re trying to see if we were to play a piece of music - let’s say Adele’s “Hello”, and then play somebody else maybe Rage Against the Machine, how will that actually affect the listener and will it prime certain personality traits. If we were to play Joni Mitchell's “Blue”, would that make somebody more empathic than before when they listened to the song. And then another question is how long will that change last.

Georgia - If your personality says what kind of music you’re likely to listen to, how about musicians, does their personality influence the kind of music they make?

David - The way that I started my interest in this was that my saxophone teacher, as I was growing up, I noticed he had different playing styles and different personalities. So one who is much more emotional he would often, as a personality, he would play more emotionally. One who is much more intellectual will play a little bit more intellectually.

If music is self-expression then scientifically we could, potentially, show the different ways in which people are expressing their personality in theirself through music. And we’re looking at not only at our jazz musicians on average; do they have a certain personality profile compared to classical musicians? But we’re also looking to exact instrumentalists. So drummers; do they have certain personalities compared to vocalist, compared to pianists, compared to say brass players?

This is going to be important on several levels, not only just how music is performing self-expression but when we think about how we first start to play an instrument, those of us who are musicians. Many times it’s a guessing game. Parents will want or encourage their children to play an instrument or the child will have an eagerness to want to start to learn. But the question is well, what type of instrument to play. If you had a 7 year old you’re not going to give them an instrument to play that is, you know, huge. You might start them off with something that’s smaller that they can hold or they may start them out on the piano.

But what the research that we’re doing now on instrumentalists and personality, what that may eventually inform is to say “Okay, well you have an 8 year old. Let’s look at their personality profile”, and we can predict which type of instrument and even what type of musical style they might not only be most successful in, but that they’ll most enjoy.

Georgia - Has your research given any clues as to what people who play the ukulele are like?

David - Not, not yet...

It goes without saying that music is big business - whether it’s buying concert tickets or streaming music from the internet. But to what extent can music itself be good for business? What’s the science behind what shops put through their speakers, and how music is used in ads? Ian Cross directs the Centre for Music and Science at Cambridge University, and he spoke to Georgia Mills...

Ian - There are some potential reasons why music should have an effect. It can, as we heard earlier, affect our emotions, our mood. When it affects our mood affects our executive functioning - cognitive capacities. So music can change the way we behave. The extent to which those effects are direct, unambiguous, and predictable are, well, questionable.

Georgia - So if I’m in the shop and I hear a song I really like I might get really happy and this might make me more likely to buy, I don’t know, a treat for myself - buy some mangos or something? But it might be a song I like and several other people don’t.

Ian - Exactly!  If it’s as it were, the hit of the summer, whatever that is, it might be relatively novel and then quite a lot of people might feel as you do. They feel a little more exuberant and they more likely to open their wallet. On the other hand, if it’s towards the end of the summer you’ve heard it 3 thousand times, every shop’s playing it - you just leave.

Georgia - Has anyone done the study where they’ve got two very similar shops and one of them plays all the music it can, and the other one is just ghostly silent?

Ian - No. There’s probably a good reason for that. There may be a number of reasons: one is if music does make a difference in terms of increasing the amount people spend then you don’t want to be the shop that doesn’t have the music.

Georgia - No-one dares to test it out in case they lose all their money?

Ian - Just to go back to the possibility of having a shop empty of music; one of the things that music does is it kind of provides a masking function like in restaurants. There's always music there; why is that? It just makes it seem a little warmer; busier.

Georgia - What about adverts on the TV - something like that? They often have colourful tunes alongside the product, so is there anything we know about how that works?

Ian - There have been quite a few attempts to explore this. There have been even more attempts to look at the relationship between music and film or music and image. Adn what that’s shown is if you have a degree of congruence, the music fits the image, then you remember both as an integrated whole. It’s more complexly encoded in memory, and in the probably dispersed over a wider range of brain area so it’s remembered better. If the music and the image are not congruent then you might remember one or the other, but not both. The won’t, as it were, ‘gel’ in quite the same way. So that’s one possible basis for why one might use music in ads.

The other is that if you have what you might call a ‘hook’ of some sort and possibly attach some words to it that particularise that ‘hook’ around a particular product. Then that might just lodge in the brain like a sort of ear worm and come back when you’re bored or not thinking about anything, or you’re in what neuroscientists call ‘the default mode network’ where nothing really is going on then this thing is likely to pop into existence - annoyingly often.

Georgia - So if I want people to listen to the Naked Scientists all the time I should just get a really ‘hooky’ song like: listen to the Naked Scientists…

Ian- You’re going to have to work on your ‘ident.’ Absolutely!

Georgia - I mean in all these cases, do we have any idea why music is pulling the strings on our emotions in our brain?

Ian - There was an excellent study done in about - I think it was 2000 where they got people to bring music with them and to listen in a PET scanner, music that they knew gave them chills - you know, the tingle up the spine. As a control, they used the music that other people had brought along which was very unlikely to give you the ame chills as it gave the other people. What they found was that music that gave them chills the bits of the brain if I were highly active were those concerned with reward - reward centres. In effect, music can do the same things to the brain as cocaine or sex. It can make you feel really good, really motivated to engage with it, but it’s got to be music that you know does that and not all music does.

Georgia - What you’re saying is we’re all so individual that it makes it very hard to say this one exact song will make you spend more. So what can we do to defend ourselves against music might be pulling the strings? What can we do about that?

Ian - In a shopping context, in a real world situation, we need to actively attend to our auditory environment. And when we do that we’re then in a position to make informed choices because we can ask questions like; why is that music in this place? What are they trying to do to me?