As Madonna once cleverly said, “Hey Mr. DJ put a record on I wanna dance with my baby. And when the music starts I never wanna stop, it’s gonna drive me crazy”. What is it about music that drives us crazy? As college students we are all familiar with the “beat drop”. The tension in the room builds during the absence of the bass and then once the heaviest sound returns to the song, the crowd goes wild.
Canadian research scientists developed a study that aims to target the reason behind the base drop phenomenon. Researchers from the McMaster Institute for Music and Mind set out to investigate the brains reactions to high and low pitched tones. Dr. Laurel Trainor, a neuroscientists and the head researcher involved in the study, assembled 35 random people to participate. Trainor and her team played a variety of high and low pitched piano notes for the participants. They then asked the 35 men and women to tap their fingers to the rhythm. As the participants taped the researchers monitored the electrical activity in the subject’s brains. According to the study researchers found that “people were more likely to modify their tapping to fall in sync with the low-pitched tone”. (Sara Gates)
After examining all of the data compiled during the study, Dr. Laurel Trainor concluded that “virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments.”
If something went wrong during the study it is possible that the low and high pitch tones have no correlation between a persons ability to respond to the beat, which if true would mean that the researchers findings were a false positive. Assuming the study was done correctly then confounding variables could not explain the researchers findings and in this particular study reverse causality is not likely. Therefor if the study was executed correctly it shows that there is a direct correlation between low- pitched tones and the human brains ability to detect the beat.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/02/deep-bass-sounds-music-rhythm_n_5548301.html