Turns out that music really is intoxicating, after allBy Matthew Lasar | Last updated about 6 hours agoAn "outburst of the soul," the composer Frederick Delius called music. The sounds associated with the form produce "a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without," observed Confucius. It is the art "which is most nigh to tears and memory," noted the writer Oscar Wilde.It turns out that these guys were more on target than we thought. Our experience of the music we love stimulates the pleasure chemical dopamine in our brain, concludes a new study produced by a slew of scholars at McGill University. The researchers followed the brain patterns of test subjects with MRI imaging, and identified dopamine streaming into the striatum region of their forebrains "at peak emotional arousal during music listening."Not only that, but the scientists noticed that various parts of the striatum responded to the dopamine rush differently. The caudate was more involved during the expectation of some really nice musical excerpt, and the nucleus accumbens took the lead during "the experience of peak emotional responses to music."In other words, just the anticipation our favorite passage stimulates the production of dopamine. "Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies," the writers conclude.Chills and thrillsTo learn more about the music/brain/stimulation process, the McGill researchers followed subjects through the 'chills' or 'musical frisson' response moment. You may have thought that chills were just a subjective concept, but that isn't the case. They involve a "clear and discrete pattern of autonomic nervous system (ANS) arousal," the experimenters say, which facilitate "objective verification through psychophysiological measurements."Bottom line: the chills moment "can be used to objectively index pleasure." So these scientists rounded up a cohort of people who had a proven record of getting the "verifiable chills" when listening to their favorite songs.It took a while to find these folks. 217 people responded to an advertisement looking for chill-susceptible music lovers. Each candidate provided ten pieces of instrumental music that set them off in some way. The genres included tango, techno, punk, rock, electronica, jazz, folk, and classical. They then filled out a questionnaire designed to make sure their chills were authentic, and went through a mental illness screening session.Degrees of pleasureThe process produced a cohort of 10 subjects for the actual experiment, who were scanned over two sessions. The participants listened to music that they experienced as pleasurable or to which they felt neutral. They also kept track of their chills themselves, including the "number of chills, intensity of chills and degree of pleasure experienced from each excerpt."Nature neuroscienceMeanwhile these frisson seekers were MRI scanned during the listening experience, and images that correlated with chill laden moments were examined."We found that hemodynamic activity in the regions showing dopamine release was not constant throughout the [musical] excerpt, but was restricted to moments before and during chills and, critically, was anatomically distinct," the researchers note.The McGill group says that this experiment is "the first direct evidence that the intense pleasure experienced when listening to music is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system, including both dorsal and ventral striatum."Thus dopamine "is pivotal for establishing and maintaining behavior," the researchers conclude:If music-induced emotional states can lead to dopamine release, as our findings indicate, it may begin to explain why musical experiences are so valued. These results further speak to why music can be effectively used in rituals, marketing or film to manipulate hedonic states. Our findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry and serve as a starting point for more detailed investigations of the biological substrates that underlie abstract forms of pleasure.It also may explain why, as Oscar Wilde suggested, we experience bursts of pleasant recollection while listening to the music that we enjoy. As studies of nicotine use show, the cigarette induced release of dopamine stimulates the remembrance of things past.Nature Neuroscience, 2010. DOI: (About DOIs).
For their upcoming release, Linkin Park are switching it up yet again, but not in the way you'd expect for a band that recently blew peoples' expectations wide open. They're celebrating the success of the experiment by embracing their strengths, and mixing what they learned on that sonic walkabout with what the rest of us already know they're good at: heaving guitars, walls of textured electronics, and emotive lyrics that feel both deeply personal and somehow universal."On the last two albums," says Bennington, "if someone brought in a song that felt very 'Linkin Park,' we were like, 'Mm, let's move on.' We now know we have the skills and the tools to take those ideas and make them into what we’re actually looking for, as opposed to getting into it and discovering that it just sounds really nü-metal. That's always going to be gross to us, but we can take elements of that and reinvent the vibe, make it now and fresh."Shinoda and Bennington played five of the new songs for SPIN and sure enough, they felt like an improvement on an old family recipe (albeit one you'd most likely use to piss off the rest of your family). "Lost in the Echo" featured a staccato guitar attack, tribal drums, crystalline keys and some brutal screams, but it also interweaved contemporary sub-bass boom and clangy industrial effects. "In My Remains" is both dark and triumphant, built for an arena at the end of days.The melancholic "Castle of Glass" offers a steam-engine chug and a mountain of sound while Bennington sings about being but a small crack in the titular edifice, illustrating belonging and futility in the same stroke. On "I'll Be Gone," his metallic vocals come from a character who's either forced or chooses to leave home before the sun comes up. Amidst the lo-bit glitch and seismic stomp comes an unlikely cameo: strings courtesy of Arcade Fire arranger Owen Pallett."He's incredible," says Bennington, leaning back against the wall of the studio. "You send him notes and he's immediately like, 'I just sent you the track. Like, five minutes ago. It's done.' "Last but not least, they cue up their upcoming single, "Burn it Down," a seared but still high-sheen slab of cross-pollinated pop driven by four-on-the-floor pump and the pulse of guitars and synths irreparably fused together. Shinoda delivers his bars with force and finesse, and joins Bennington to sing: "We're building it up to break it back down / We're building it up to burn it back down / We can't wait to burn it to the ground." Are they talking about a relationship? Music? Society?"Once we start hitting lyrical themes that can whack you from all these different perspectives, we know we’re onto something special," says Bennington. "That’s when the hair starts standing up. We don’t sit down and go, 'People are uneasy about the economy. Let's write about that.' We got a little more poetic, a little more colorful this time. A lot of the songs revolve around people — a drifter, or a soldier returning home, or a child finding his or her place in the family.""Some of these songs started off really mellow," says Shinoda. "Some sounded very electro, and a few were folk, essentially. It's bizarre to remember that now, hearing what's so clearly a mix of all of our influences. Our tastes have gotten even broader since we started, if you can imagine that. It's like wrangling kittens." Bennington weighs in: "It's also what we've based our career on — that we have a little bit of something for everyone. That's been our little fountain of youth."
I already like this more than half of A Thousand Suns already. http://www.spin.com/articles/linkin-park-open-about-hybrid-vibe-june-album
