Following the post on the Dies Irae Principle earlier, I started thinking about the role of sound in regulating mood. Thirteen years ago, I was sitting in my undergraduate freshman music theory class, having moved thousands of miles away from home to begin university. At the time, I had enrolled in the Bachelor of Music program with a concentration in classical performance, using my voice to pay for a big part of the tuition bill and my piano skills to breeze through a lot of requirements (keeping the degree of the latter a secret for the sake of information asymmetry – I’ll still never forget the look on my accompanist’s face after my senior voice recital when I sat down and began playing). This was before the overwhelming number of accounting, finance, philosophy, science, and history classes I took because I wanted to study the world in a much broader framework resulted in me switching into the B.A. program and pursuing a general liberal arts degree with a focus on Music.
The professor, a man now retired and off living in Thailand somewhere the last I knew, explained that he was going to teach us what amounted to black magic; a forbidden art that, with a few modifications, would allow you to manipulate and control the mood, emotion, and experiences of those around you. “With a single, half step harmonic shift, you can make people uncomfortable,” he explained. “With the right chord progression, you can make them long for love.”
[mainbodyad]Why does this matter? As a business owner or investor in businesses, you should care a great deal. One illustration: The type of music played in a retail store can positively or negative influence the total revenue the store generates in a major way. This is part of a discipline known as “atmospherics“, a term originally coined by “Kotler (1973-1974) to describe the influence of visual (color, brightness, size, shape), aural (volume, pitch), olfactory (scent, freshness), and tactical (softness, smoothness, temperature) dimensions of a store”; particularly how these things encourage or discourage customers from spending more money.
This isn’t some trivial mental model to discount – it’s up there towards the top of the list. It directs billions and billions of dollars in consumer spending every year.
An Example of How Small Changes Can Evoke Different Emotions
To understand the extent of how powerful this is, let’s use a fairly common example from the books I read last week. Think about the theme to Jurassic Park, one of the most successful movies of all time. It’s this soaring, awe-inspiring melody backed with orchestration that conveys the enormity of realizing what science had accomplished when Dr. Grant and the others first step foot on the island and see the dinosaurs walking across the plains. It starts simply, then begins to build and swell, carrying the listener away with it. Around the 1:12 mark, human voices in a chapel-like hymn subtly referencing a religious epiphany are layered over the sound, almost imperceptibly, so the overtones trigger a visceral response.
Take a moment to listen to it completely because you will need this frame of reference for the rest of the discussion.
Now, having heard that, imagine if the soundtrack had been released and, as you sat in the movie theater, at that pivotal scene, that same theme was heard, only performed and orchestrated like this …
What about this? Exact same theme, yet again, only this time, if you are from the United States, you’re more likely to sense evocations of Wyoming mountain ranges and sunsets with cowboys and ranchers herding sheep. (If you have a classical background, you might also get a faint whisper of 16th century Renaissance lute music.) Whatever your association, it’s a completely different experience; it changes the spirit and atmosphere of a room completely.
In my own life, this basic phenomenon is leveraged to my advantage. I find when working through very difficult, abstract, system-wide problems, the chord structure in Corridors of Time transports me so that I almost leave my body and can think without distraction. There have been nights when I stayed up with it on endless repeat six, seven hours obsessed with whatever it was that was on my mind at the time – black holes, the implication of time travel, the possibility the universe is a simulation … the particular orchestration depends on the nature of what I’m studying and my mood. Again, the same song comes in so many manifestations … listen to the differences and how they all change the air around you.
The original …
The more subdued …
The piano only …
The two piano, one strings version …
The metal version (beginning at 1:24 or so)…
If I’m trying to solve a very specific, very mentally taxing problem, I find it becomes instantly easier when this is put on full blast …
This is one of the reasons my iTunes library is staggeringly large. From pop to classical, baroque to electronic, country to rap, ragtime to jazz, or instrumental to disco, it’s all in there, somewhere, and I reach for it like a tool to manage the atmosphere depending on what I need accomplished. Strangely, unlike other mental models where being aware of their existence seems to lessen their effectiveness, music’s stronghold seems impossible to break. Even knowing what is happening, I’m powerless to stop it.
From the psychology of sad music (that’s the layman’s version where the authors explain the findings; the actual study is here) to studies such as String Quarters as Self-Managed Teams: An Interdisciplinary Approach (PDF) from the Psychology of Music journal, cultural anthropology and human wellness cannot be understood fully without accounting for the incomprehensibly large influence music wields over the human brain.
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