How Does Listening To Music Affect The Listeners

When using music as a main means of communication and carrier of information it is important to understand how it affects the listeners. Exploring how the human brain processes that information gives interesting insights and valuable intelligence on how the listeners might be affected by the music they listen to. This type of research often gives information which even the listeners themselves might not be aware of.
A researcher from the University of Montreal, Robert Sartori (2015), interviewed for the BBC Radio 3 documentary “Why music?” (2015) talks about what part of the brain we use when we listen to music. He explains that in fact music does engage many of the mechanisms that we have in the brain. Listening to music would activate the auditory system, which is obvious because music is sound after all. However, listening to music will also activate the memory system. This happens because listening to music quite often reminds us of something. Music would certainly activate the emotion system and what scientists call the reward system in the brain. It might also engage the system which is related to attention because listening to music we might pay attention to certain lines of the music. If the music we are listening to has words, that would also involve the language system in our brains. The music experience engages a big part of the human nervous system and that is part of what …show more content…
That might be one of the explanations why many people like to listen to sad music. The feeling of sadness often described as an emotional pain, which seems to be opposite of the common understanding of pleasure. Some of the most popular pieces in the classical music repertoire are Requiems, musical compositions usually associated with death and mourning also known as Mass for the