Play a record in the comfort of your home, either using a specialized device or on your mobile. For some it means lying on the bed or sofa, closing your eyes and enjoying the notes. While others sing at the top of their lungs and dance and jump living every chord. However, none of that is comparable to vibrating with live music. Since, in this way, it touches a sensitive chord in the heart in a way that cannot be achieved with a simple recording. This is confirmed by science, specifically, the study carried out by the team of researchers led by Professor Sascha Frühholz, specialized in Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland.
A lot of research has been done around it. Some have discovered that music promotes creativity, others its great capacity to relax and generate well-being. But, on this occasion, what has been studied is the increase in activity of a region of the brain that is responsible for processing emotions when listening live. Something that does not happen in the same way in the case of recordings.
The Swiss researchers composed a total of 12 pieces of music, each lasting approximately 30 seconds. Half were focused on inspiring positive emotions, so they were slow and based on minor chords. However, the other six sought just the opposite, that is, to evoke negative sensations. Next, it would be the turn of the participants in this experiment.
The study group was made up of 27 people, without any type of musical training, who had to be exposed to the compositions twice: once it would be performed by a live pianist and another time reproduced by recording. But they couldn’t know when they were listening to one or the other.
While listening to the music, the participants were monitored using an MRI scanner. In this way, the researchers analyzed their brain activity and were able to observe a big difference. The key was in the left amygdala.
In this region of the brain, the storage and processing of emotions occurs, both in the case of positive and negative ones. What the specialists discovered is that live music caused the activity in this area to increase. Whereas, when it came to the recordings, she seemed much less stimulated. “Here we show that live music can stimulate the affective part of listeners’ brains more strongly and consistently than recorded music,” they state in their study.
