Posts tagged music

ScienceDaily (June 13, 2012) — Ever wonder why Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” moved so many people in 1969 or why the music in the shower scene of “Psycho” still sends chills down your spine?

Jimi Hendrix (Credit: Public domain image, courtesy of UCLA)

A UCLA-based team of researchers has isolated some of the ways in which distorted and jarring music is so evocative, and they believe that the mechanisms are closely related to distress calls in animals.

They report their findings in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Biology Letters, which publishes online June 12.

"Music that shares aural characteristics with the vocalizations of distressed animals captures human attention and is uniquely arousing," said Daniel Blumstein, one of the study’s authors and chair of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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