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Original research article, extreme metal music and anger processing.

• 1 School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
• 2 Centre for Youth Substance Abuse Research, University of Queensland, Birsbane, QLD, Australia

The claim that listening to extreme music causes anger, and expressions of anger such as aggression and delinquency have yet to be substantiated using controlled experimental methods. In this study, 39 extreme music listeners aged 18–34 years were subjected to an anger induction, followed by random assignment to 10 min of listening to extreme music from their own playlist, or 10 min silence (control). Measures of emotion included heart rate and subjective ratings on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS). Results showed that ratings of PANAS hostility, irritability, and stress increased during the anger induction, and decreased after the music or silence. Heart rate increased during the anger induction and was sustained (not increased) in the music condition, and decreased in the silence condition. PANAS active and inspired ratings increased during music listening, an effect that was not seen in controls. The findings indicate that extreme music did not make angry participants angrier; rather, it appeared to match their physiological arousal and result in an increase in positive emotions. Listening to extreme music may represent a healthy way of processing anger for these listeners.

Introduction

Music is a widely available form of media with the ability to influence attitudes and manipulate emotions ( Juslin and Sloboda, 2010 ; Wheeler et al., 2011 ), and listeners are drawn to music that reflects or improves their emotional state ( Saarikallio, 2011 ; Thoma et al., 2012 ; Papinczak et al., 2015 ). Heavy metal, emotional (emo), hardcore, punk, screamo, and each of their subgenres form the category of “extreme” music. Extreme music is characterized by chaotic, loud, heavy, and powerful sounds, with emotional vocals, often containing lyrical themes of anxiety, depression, social isolation, and loneliness ( Shafron and Karno, 2013 ). Perhaps, due to these musical characteristics, it has been claimed that extreme music leads to anger, and expressions of anger such as aggression, delinquency, drug use, and suicidal acts ( Selfhout et al., 2008 ). Certainly, evidence is available regarding the effect of a listeners’ emotional state on their choice and preference for music listening even when angry. Research on anger processing has found that approach motivation (defined as the impulse to move forward) may be activated by anger ( Carver and Harmon-Jones, 2009 ), such that after experiencing anger we then look to act out approach motivated behaviors, for example, angry facial expression and physical retaliation. Considering the highly arousing nature of the music, along with negative themes commonly contained in the lyrics, extreme music has been interpreted as eliciting anger among its listeners, and that this may activate aggressive behaviors ( Gowensmith and Bloom, 1997 ). It is equally plausible, however, that extreme music may be chosen when a listener is angry, because the arousing nature of the music may match the already present internal arousal of the listener and allow him/her to explore and process this emotional state. This study will explore these alternative hypotheses about the influence of extreme music listening on anger processing in a sample of extreme music listeners under controlled experimental conditions.

Extreme Music

Extreme music genres began to emerge in the early 1970s with the decline of the “free love” and optimistic culture of the 1960s ( Stack et al., 1994 ). Due to the consequences of the 1960s era of drug experimentation, decline of peaceful protest movements, and the continuation of the Vietnam War, angry and pessimistic themes began to emerge in new genres of music ( Reddick and Beresin, 2002 ). Thus, punk and heavy metal music were dedicated to notions of anarchy and destruction ( Stack et al., 1994 ; Reddick and Beresin, 2002 ; Lozon and Bensimon, 2014 ). Following the rise of punk and heavy metal, a range of new genres and subgenres surfaced. Hardcore, death metal, emotional/emotional-hardcore (emo), and screamo appeared throughout the 1980s, gradually becoming more a part of mainstream culture. Each of these genres and their subgenres are socio-politically charged and, as mentioned earlier, are characterized by heavy and powerful sounds with expressive vocals.

At the forefront of controversy surrounding extreme music is the prominence of aggressive lyrics and titles, such as “Pure Hatred” by Chimaira and “Violent Revolution” from the band Kreator. In a series of five experiments involving first year psychology students and student volunteers (unselected in terms of demographic characteristics or musical preference), Anderson et al. (2003) played musically equivalent songs with and without violent lyrics to the participants. They found that listening to songs with violent lyrics increased participants’ state hostility relative to listening to non-violent songs. However, this effect was fleeting and it was disrupted when the participants did intervening tasks. Other research shows that lyrical content is one of the mechanisms linking music with emotional response, although many other musical variables, contextual variables, and individual listener variables also play a role ( Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008 ; Juslin et al., 2008 ).

The powerful vocals that exist in the most extreme genres such as screamo, where nearly all lyrics are screamed at the listener, may account for the perception by outsiders that this music is angry. From this stems a stereotype that extreme music fans, and especially heavy metal fans, are more aggressive, agitated, and more aroused than the general public ( Arnett, 1991 ; Alessi et al., 1992 ). Furthermore, extreme music has been held responsible for social problems like depression, suicide, aggressive behavior, and substance misuse ( Shafron and Karno, 2013 ). Some researchers have used the term “problem music” in reference to these genres, meaning music that is associated with psychological vulnerability and social deviance ( North and Hargreaves, 2006 ; Bodner and Bensimon, 2014 ; Lozon and Bensimon, 2014 ). In the case of substance use, for example, a correlational study of 7,324 Dutch adolescents found that when all other factors were controlled, preferences for punk/hardcore, techno/hardhouse, and reggae music were associated with more substance use, whereas preferences for pop and classical music were linked to less substance use. A preference for rap/hip-hop only indicated elevated smoking among girls and, interestingly, a preference for heavy metal was associated with less smoking among boys and less drinking among girls ( Mulder et al., 2009 ). This evidence does not support a causal view. Extreme music typically does not contain themes of illicit drug use, although some songs do contain lyrics related to alcohol use. Indeed, the movement known as “straight edge” is a subgenre of hardcore punk, whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and other recreational drugs. Furthermore, there are documented examples of rap music being used in therapeutic ways with samples of people who misuse substances ( Baker et al., 2012 ; Lightstone, 2012 ).

A review by Baker and Bor (2008) found a relationship between various genres of music and antisocial behaviors, vulnerability to suicide, and drug use among young people. However, there was no evidence in these studies for a causal link, and it was instead suggested that music preference is a reflection of emotional vulnerability in these young listeners. More recently, Bodner and Bensimon (2014) investigated personality traits and uses of music to influence emotions among 548 middle class university students aged 18–43 years, who were subdivided into two groups based on their preference for “problem music” genres ( N = 255 fans of heavy metal, punk, alternative rock, hip-hop, and rap) or “non-problem music” ( N = 293 who did not endorse any of these in their top three musical genres). There were no differences between the two samples across the big five personality dimensions (extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness). In terms of uses of music to influence emotions, there were no differences between groups in their use of music for entertainment and strong sensation; however, there were small differences in use of music for revival, diversion, emotional discharge, mental work, and solace. In each case, the problem music fans used music for emotion regulation slightly more than the non-problem music fans. The authors interpreted their findings to mean that listening to these types of music allows problem music fans to regulate their mood in a more sublimated way, instead of externalizing negative emotions, which in turn could lead to engaging in antisocial acts.

Extreme Music and Anger

Some evidence is available regarding the effect of listeners’ emotional states on their choice and preference for music listening when angry. Shafron and Karno (2013) examined music preferences in a sample of 551 university students and divided the sample into two groups: those who preferred heavy metal and hard rock genres (57%) and the rest. The heavy music fans showed significantly higher symptoms of depression and anxiety than the non-fans; however, there was no difference between the two groups on trait anger. Gowensmith and Bloom (1997) found that heavy metal fans did not show an increase in anger after listening to heavy metal music. In this study, heavy metal music was highly arousing to both fans and non-fans, and in fact, measured state-arousal was greater among heavy metal listeners. Despite the arousing influence of the music, heavy metal fans displayed no difference in self-reported anger whether they were listening to a non-preferred music genre (country) or heavy metal. Non-fans, on the other hand, did display greater self-reported anger after listening to heavy metal. It is unclear whether the non-fans were angry as a result of the musical characteristics, or because they were being asked to listen to something they did not enjoy. So, although there is evidence that heavy metal increases state arousal ( Stack et al., 1994 ; Gowensmith and Bloom, 1997 ), there is as yet insufficent evidence that it causes increased anger.

In a more naturalistic study, Labbé et al. (2007) found that after experiencing a state of induced stress or anger, participants listening to classical music chosen by the experimenter or their own self-selected “calming” music (of any genre) showed significant reductions in anger and anxiety. These reductions were evident in both self-reported ratings and in reduced physiological arousal (heart rate, respiration, and skin conductance) during music listening. In contrast, participants who listened to heavy metal after the stress induction did not reduce self-reported negative emotional states or physiological arousal. However, it is important to note that heavy metal was not a preferred music genre for these participants. This finding highlights the importance of personally selected music in determining the emotional response. Although this research suggests that a song considered relaxing by the listener should reduce anger and stress in the presence of a stressor, it remains to be seen whether this effect generalizes to extreme music genres.

Considering the Case of Music and Sadness

Related research on another negatively valenced emotion, sadness, might help to shed some light on music and anger processing. Some studies show that people listen to sad music when they are sad in order to improve their mood ( Saarikallio and Erkkila, 2007 ). For instance, Papinczak et al. (2015) showed in both qualitative and quantitative studies with participants aged 15–25 years that they used music to immerse in negative moods such as sadness – a strategy that helped to process their sadness and to feel better. Similarly, a study of 65 adults from five countries found that when they were feeling sad, sad music helped these individuals to connect with their emotions through the music to fully experience sadness and consequently improve their affect ( Van den Tol and Edwards, 2013 ). Despite evoking sadness, Finnish university students reported that they enjoy listening to sad music, and this effect was partly explained by personality traits such as openness to experience and empathy ( Vuoskoski et al., 2012 ). On the other hand, some studies have reported that listening to sad music results in a more depressed mood among participants ( Chen et al., 2007 ; Dillman Carpentier et al., 2008 ; Garrido and Schubert, 2015 ) – an effect that may be related to participants’ use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies such as rumination. So, the influence of negatively valenced music on listeners appears to depend on the listening context, their current mood, and moderation by other personality traits.

Study Aims and Hypotheses

To summarize the literature reviewed here, research on music and emotion supports the function of music to convey and elicit strong emotion. However, to date there has been a limited amount of research on extreme music genres and anger, with the exception of correlational studies showing an association, and one series of experiments claiming that listening to extreme music increases state hostility ( Anderson et al., 2003 ). Thus, the current study sought to explore this question by recruiting extreme music listeners for an experimental study on the effects of extreme music listening (compared to a no music control condition) on anger processing. Given that personally selected music is capable of determining emotional responses ( Labbé et al., 2007 ), participants were asked to bring along their personal music players to the experiment. In contrast to Labbé and colleagues’ study in which the participants were instructed to bring along music that they found relaxing, in the current study participants were allowed to listen to any music from their personal listening device that they preferred at the time.

Anger was operationalized in this study in terms of both subjective ratings of hostility and irritability and physiological recording of heart rate, which were expected to increase when participants experienced an increase in anger. The cardiovascular system is complex and has multiple regulatory subsystems from central and peripheral autonomic nervous systems and humoral influences ( Bernison et al., 2007 ). Resting heart rate may be influenced by an individual’s age, aerobic fitness, posture, and activity levels. This is less of a concern with within-subjects designs such as was used in the current study, where the participant related factors are kept constant while the experimental factor (e.g., music listening or silence) is varied. Nevertheless, an increase in heart rate may reflect various psychological states including anger, stress, excitement, or fear. Heart rate should therefore be interpreted in combination with participants’ subjective ratings (of these psychological states) for a more accurate assessment of emotional response ( Bernison et al., 2007 ).

According to the “problem music causes anger” line of reasoning, extreme music listeners who are angry would be expected to experience an increase in anger during music listening (as shown in an increase in heart rate during music listening and an increase in subjective anger ratings immediately following music listening). Thus, the first two hypotheses for investigation are:

Hypothesis 1a: that on a self-report measure of music and emotions, participants will endorse the statement that they listen to extreme music to fully experience their anger but will disagree with the statement that they listen to music to calm themselves down when feeling angry; and

Hypothesis 1b: that the participants’ subjective ratings and physiological measure (i.e., heart rate) of anger will increase during the anger induction and will continue to increase during music listening, and relative to participants in the no music (control) condition.

Another body of research indicates that listeners are drawn to music that is concordant with their current emotional state, and are able to use music as an emotion regulation technique ( Saarikallio, 2011 ; Thoma et al., 2012 ; Papinczak et al., 2015 ). According to this “music regulates anger” line of reasoning, angered extreme music fans would be expected to listen to music that matches their anger and helps them to process it and feel better. Further, in Lozon and Bensimon (2014) review on problem music, they also concluded that listeners of music containing themes of aggression and suicidal ideation seemed to feel alleviated of angst and aggression after listening. Thus the alternative hypotheses are:

H2a: that on a self-report measure of music and emotions, participants will agree with the statements that they listen to music to fully experience anger, and that listening to music helps them to calm down when they are angry;

H2b: that the participants’ subjective ratings and physiological measure (i.e., heart rate) of anger will increase during the anger induction but will not continue to increase during music listening, and relative to participants in the no music (control) condition.

H2c: that, in accordance with the idea that extreme music may be a method for processing anger, participants in the music listening condition will feel better after music listening compared to the no music control participants, as shown by their endorsement of positively valenced emotions such as “relaxed” and “inspired.”

A secondary aim for the study was to analyze what the participants in the music condition selected from their own playlists to listen to when they were angry. This analysis will investigate the features of their chosen music in terms of genre, whether the songs contained angry lyrics, and the speed of tempo (beats/min).

H3: it was predicted that angry participants would select extreme music from their playlists that matched their anger in terms of high tempo and angry lyrics.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

There were 40 people recruited to the study; however, one person’s data were unusable so the final sample consisted of 39 participants (72% male), with ages ranging from 18 to 34 years ( M = 22.36, SD = 3.19 years). Advertisements requested participants for a study of the potential benefits of extreme music listening. It specified that participants should enjoy one or more extreme genres of music, such as heavy metal, punk, hardcore, and screamo, and listen to these at least 50% of the time they chose to listen to music. When individuals confirmed their participation, they were asked to bring along their personal music listening device to the laboratory. Three quarters of the participants (74%) were born in Australia, with the remainder born in New Zealand, USA, New Caledonia, South Africa, Indonesia, Sweden, and Oman. Seven participants were recruited via the online recruitment site (SONA) at the University of Queensland, receiving course credit for respective first year psychology courses. The remaining participants were recruited from the wider community via word of mouth and advertising on social media and community websites. They received a $10 iTunes voucher as compensation for their time and interest.

In regards to musical involvement, 41% of the participants currently played a musical instrument or sang, 51% attended live concerts on a regular basis (at least once a month), 44% composed music, and 23% had taught music, although it was not the same subsample engaging in all of these musical activities. Of the six activities included in the questionnaire, participants engaged in an average of three, which is similar to other research conducted in unselected adult samples ( authors, unpublished research ). The average number of years playing an instrument or singing was 6.19 years (SD = 5.22 years). The most commonly reported musical preferences were: classic metal 60%, death metal 17.5%, progressive metal 15%, punk 12.5%, power metal 7.5%, melodic metal 7.5%, folk metal 5%, black metal 5%, thrash metal 5%, death core 5%, and hard core 5%. Note that, as most participants indicated more than one preferred genre, the overall figure is above 100%. Table 1 shows means and SDs on the demographic, musical, and mood variables for the two conditions (music listening and control), and t -tests indicated no differences between the two conditions on these variables.

Table 1 . Sample characteristics of participants in the music and the control conditions .

Participants were randomly assigned to either the music or control condition before the study began. To avoid extraneous influences on heart rate, participants were asked to refrain from smoking, exercise, and drinking caffeinated and alcoholic beverages for at least 3 h before participating (this was checked with questions in the questionnaire). For the baseline heart rate recording, participants were given a diagram and instructions on how to attach their recording electrodes, and then asked to sit silently for 5 min and “not to think about anything in particular.” Following this, participants were asked to complete the first set of Positive and Negative Affect Scale (see PANAS in Measures) questions (T1). The experimenter then conducted the 16-min anger interview. Following this, participants completed the second set of PANAS questions (T2). Those assigned to the music condition were instructed to select song(s) of their preference from their personal music device, and were instructed to listen for 10 min. Although all participants were asked to bring their music devices to the experiment, this was the first moment that participants were told they would be listening to music. This was done to ensure that participants would select songs that they would typically listen to when feeling angry. Participants in the control condition were asked to “wait quietly for the next part of the experiment” and sat in silence for the next 10 min. All participants then completed the PANAS items for a third time (T3) followed by a structured interview about the emotional influence of music and the final questionnaires, which included the emotional influence of music questions, DASS, and demographic and musical involvement questionnaire (refer to measures). Participants were then debriefed. The average time for experiment completion was 50 min. Ethical clearance for the procedures and materials was granted through the university ethics committee.

Demographics and Musical Involvement

Participants responded to demographic questions such as age and gender. Participants’ musical background and current musical involvement was assessed in a questionnaire consisting of seven dichotomous (yes/no) questions, such as “do you attend concerts or live music on a regular basis (i.e., at least once a month)?” Participants were also asked to identify the number of years (to the nearest 6 months) that they had played an instrument or sung during their lifetime. These seven items have been used in previous research by the authors and colleagues ( blinded for review ), and found to have good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.76).

Physiological Measure of Emotion

Heart rate was recorded according to published guidelines ( Bernison et al., 2007 ): 10-mm pre-gelled Ag/AgCl disposable electrodes were attached over the lower rib on the left side of the torso and to the participant’s chest on both the right and left to record a lead III electrocardiogram (ECG). These leads were attached to a MP150 Biopac ECG system. Signals were digitized at 1000 Hz and saved for offline analyses. Heart rate, expressed as the number of beats per min (bpm), was sampled across the following time periods: 5 min baseline, 12 min anger induction, 10 min music or no music listening, and final 2 min of music listening and silence to yield an average heart rate (bpm) for each segment.

Modified Positive and Negative Affect Scale

Repeated measures of participants’ subjective emotional state was assessed with a modified version of the PANAS ( Watson et al., 1988 ) using the time instructions “at the moment”. Participants were instructed to indicate how they felt at that very moment and rate 10 emotional words on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (very slightly or not at all) to 5 (extremely). Five emotions had positive valence (e.g., “inspired” and “enthusiastic”), and five emotions had negative valence (e.g., “irritable,” “hostile,” and “guilty”).

Emotional Influence of Music

Participants were asked nine dichotomous (yes/no) questions during a structured interview, regarding the extent to which they listened to extreme music in order to change an emotion (e.g., “ when you are sad, do you listen to music that improves your mood? ”) or to fully experience an emotion (e.g., “when you are angry, do you listen to music to fully experience that anger?”) . The emotions were: happy, sad, angry, and anxious, with two extra items relating to “in love” and “well-being”. This questionnaire was adapted from a Likert-type scale version used in an international survey of 394 adults ( authors blinded for review ), which found an adequate internal consistency of items on the Change Emotions subscale of α = 0.73 and on the Experience Emotions subscale of α = 0.71 ( Papinczak et al., 2015 ).

Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale

The Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS) is a 42-item questionnaire assessing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress over the past week ( Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995 ). Questions were measured on a 4-point Likert-type scale from 0 (did not apply to me at all) to 3 (applied to me very much, or most of the time), with seven items summed to produce each of the three subscales scores: depression, anxiety, and stress. In our sample, the internal consistency values were: depression (α = 0.91), anxiety (α = 0.84), and stress (α = 0.90). Assessment of the DASS (42) on a non-clinical sample ( N = 1771) ( Crawford and Henry, 2003 ) found means for depression, anxiety, and stress to be 5.55 (SD = 7.48), 3.56 (SD = 5.39), and 9.27 (SD = 8.04), respectively.

Anger Interview

The stress interview proposed by Dimsdale et al. (1988) , and modified by Lobbestael et al. (2008) , was used for anger induction. The interview involved participants describing one or more events that produced a strong feeling of anger over a period of 16 min. Participants were presented with a list of topics to help with prompting their recall of angering scenarios, based on those used by Dimsdale et al. (1988) such as “partner/spouse”, “work/work colleagues,” and “finances”.. Other researchers, such as Burns et al. (2003) and Malatesta-Magai et al. (1992) , have demonstrated the effectiveness of this technique in their respective studies, finding effects with only a 10-min interview.

Music and Headphones

As mentioned, participants were asked to bring in their personal music players to the laboratory, and those in the music listening condition were asked to play music from their own collection during the listening phase. Those in the experimental condition listening to their preferred music were provided with Sennheiser HD201 closed headphones.

Self-Report Results

The means and SDs on the DASS (Table 1 ) show that symptoms of depression, anxiety, or stress were in the normal range, and there were no differences between participants in the two conditions. Responses to the nine questions about extreme music influence on emotions are displayed in Table 2 . A majority agreed with the statements that they listened to extreme music to fully experience anger (79%) and to calm themselves down when feeling angry (69%). They also listened to extreme music to improve other negative moods such as sadness (74%) and less commonly, anxiety (33%). An overwhelming majority stated that they listen to extreme music to enhance their happiness (87%) and to enhance their well-being (100%).

Table 2 . Proportion (%) of participants responding “yes” to the music and emotional influence items .

Experimental Results

Means and SD on all of the emotion measures for participants in the two conditions are displayed in Table 3 .

Table 3 . Means and SDs for heart rate and PANAS ratings .

Heart Rate Analyses

A 2 (Condition: Music vs. Silence) × 3 (Time: baseline, after anger induction, after music listening/silence) mixed repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to assess changes in heart rate during experimental periods, refer to Figure 1 . A significant main effect of time was revealed, F (2, 74) = 8.54, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 18. There was no main effect of Condition; however, a significant Condition × Time interaction was found, F (2, 74) = 6.36, p = 0.003, η p 2 = 0 . 15. Tests of simple effects at each Condition revealed a significant effect of silence, F (2, 18) = 11.02, p = 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 55. Simple comparisons revealed no significant difference between Time 1 and Time 2, or between Time 1 and Time 3. However, heart rate at Time 2 was significantly higher than at Time 3 ( p = 0.001). A significant simple effect of time within the Music condition was also observed, F (2, 17) = 5.73, p = 0.013, η p 2 = 0 . 40 . A simple comparison found significant differences of heart rate between Time 1 and Time 2, p = 0.008, where heart rate increased during the anger induction. Surprisingly, no significant difference was found between Time 1 and Time 3, p = 0.068. However, there was no significant difference among music listeners between heart rate during Time 2 and Time 3, p > 0.999, indicating that the increased heart rate following the anger induction was sustained for the music listeners, but not for those in the silence condition.

Figure 1. Mean heart rate over the three time intervals for participants in the Music and Silence conditions .

Subjective Ratings

A series of 2 (Condition: Music vs. Silence) × 3 (Time) mixed ANOVAs were conducted to compare PANAS self-reported emotions with Condition as the between-subjects factor. Self-reported ratings relevant to anger (PANAS hostile, irritable, and stress) were analyzed. In accounting for discriminant changes, the positively valenced emotions relaxed, active, and inspired were also analyzed. Where sphericity assumptions were not met, tests for Greenhouse-Geisser were reported. Means and SDs for self-reported emotions at each time point for each condition are shown in Table 3 .

Hostile. A significant main effect was found for Time, F (1.50, 55.63) = 27.48, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 43 . There was no main effect for Condition or a Condition × Time interaction. Pairwise comparisons of time points revealed no significant difference between Time 1 and Time 3; however, significant differences were observed between Time 1 and Time 2 ( p < 0.001), and between Time 2 and Time 3 ( p < 0.001). The greater ratings of hostility at Time 2, compared to Time 1 and Time 3, indicated that the anger induction worked, and that both music listening and silence resulted in decreased hostility. However, music listening was no different to silence, see Figure 2 .

Figure 2. PANAS hostility ratings at three time-points for participants in the Music and Silence conditions .

Irritable. A similar pattern of results emerged for PANAS irritable ratings. A significant main effect was revealed for time, F (1.69, 62.45) = 22.62, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 38 , with no significant main effect for Condition, or a Condition × Time interaction found. Pairwise comparisons of Time found no difference between Time 1 and Time 3; however, there were differences between Time 1 and Time 2 ( p < 0.001), and between Time 2 and Time 3 ( p < 0.001), such that greater ratings of irritability were observed at Time 2 compared to Time 1 and Time 3.

Stress. Baseline ratings of PANAS stress were higher than those for hostile and irritable, although the pattern of changes across time was consistent for the three PANAS emotions. A significant main effect of Time was found, F (1.69, 62.61) = 28.98, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 54, with no main effect of Condition or a Condition × Time interaction. Pairwise comparisons of Time found no difference between Time 1 and Time 3; however, the difference between Time 1 and Time 2 was significant ( p < 0.001), as was the difference between Time 2 and Time 3 ( p < 0.001), with greater ratings of stress at Time 2 compared to Time 1 and Time 3.

Relaxed. An inverse pattern of results was found for the PANAS relaxed ratings, see Figure 3 . No main effect was observed for Condition, or a Condition × Time interaction. A significant main effect of Time, however, was found, F (2, 74) = 22.62, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 38 . Pairwise comparisons for Time found no significant difference between Time 1 and Time 3. However, there were differences observed between Time 1 and Time 2 ( p < 0.001), and between Time 2 and Time 3 ( p < 0.001), with participants reporting less relaxation at Time 2 compared to Time 1 and Time 3.

Figure 3. PANAS ratings of relaxation at three time-points for participants in the Music and Silence conditions .

Active. A significant main effect was revealed for Time, F (2, 74) = 20, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 36 , modified by a Condition × Time interaction, F (2, 74) = 6.98, p = 0.002, η p 2 = 0 . 16 . No main effect for Condition was found. Tests of the simple effects of Time at each Condition were also conducted. The Silence group displayed significant simple effects of Time, F (2, 38) = 15.25, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 45 , and this was located between Time 1 and Time 2 ( p = 0.002), and between Time 2 and Time 3 ( p < 0.001), with participants feeling more active at Time 2 compared to Time 1 and Time 3 in the Silence condition. In the Music condition, the simple effects for Time was also significant, F (2, 36) = 12.54, p = < 0.001, η 2 = 0.41. The key differences were found between Time 1 and Time 2 ( p = 0.003), and between Time 1 and Time 3 ( p < 0.001), with music listeners feeling more active after the anger induction and remaining active after music listening.

Inspired. A significant main effect of Time was revealed, F (2, 74) = 4.74, p = 0.012, η p 2 = 0 . 11 , as well as a significant Condition × Time interaction, F (2, 74) = 7.22, p = 0.001, η p 2 = 0 . 16 . No main effect was found for Condition. A pairwise comparison for Time found no significant difference between Time 1 and Time 2, or between Time 1 and Time 3. However, inspiration ratings were greater at Time 3 compared to Time 2, p = 0.022, see Figure 4 . The simple effects of Time at each Condition revealed no effects for Silence. The music group, however, displayed a significant effect of Time, F (2, 36) = 10.71, p < 0.001, η 2 = 0.37. A simple comparison found no significant difference between Time 1 and Time 2. However, significant differences were observed between Time 1 and Time 3 ( p = 0.021), and between Time 2 and Time 3 ( p = 0.002), indicating that participants felt inspired after listening to their music.

Figure 4. PANAS inspired ratings for the participants in the Music and Silence conditions, showing a Time × Condition interaction .

Analysis of Music Selections

An analysis of the 46 pieces of music, the participants chose to listen to when angry, is displayed in Table 4 . One song was removed because it could not be found; it was assumed that song title and/or artist were incorrectly recorded. Of the accurate song titles provided, 100% of music chosen was classified as “extreme” genre. Of the songs containing lyrics, only 50% contained aggressive themes or conveyed lyrics relating to anger, with the remaining songs containing lyrical themes including, but not limited to, isolation and depression. The tempo of the selected songs ranged from 80 to 181 beats per min, with over half (61%) of selections >100 bpm, representing high tempo music expected to have an energizing or arousing effect on the listeners. In all, less than a third of musical selections (28%) were both high arousal (>100 bpm) and contained themes of anger or aggression.

Table 4 . Analysis of the music participants played when angry .

The purpose of this research was to test two alternative sets of hypotheses regarding the relationship between extreme music and anger under controlled experimental conditions. The first set of hypotheses followed an “extreme music causes anger” line of reasoning, and the second set of hypotheses followed an “extreme music matches and helps to process anger” line of reasoning. The results overall were supportive of the latter. Among our sample of extreme music fans in the normal range on symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress, the majority reported that they listened to extreme music for a range of emotional effects – most pertinently to fully experience anger and to calm themselves down when feeling angry.

These reports were supported by the experimental results. The anger induction was successful, as shown in increased ratings of hostility and irritability and increased heart rate at the end of the anger interview. Those who listened to music when angry did not show an increase in heart rate or subjective hostility and irritability. Rather, they showed a decrease in subjective hostility and irritability that was equivalent to those who sat in silence. Heart rate stabilized but did not continue to rise, suggesting that the music that participants selected when angry matched their physiological arousal and allowed them to fully experience it. In the silence condition, heart rate reduced after the anger interview, returning to baseline. These findings are consistent with Gowensmith and Bloom (1997) finding that heavy metal music was highly arousing to both fans and non-fans but did not cause an increase in subjective anger in fans. The findings are counter to the claims that extreme music causes anger and promotes aggressive behavior ( Stack et al., 1994 ; Arnett, 1996 ).

In addition, the results showed that listening to metal music relaxed participants as effectively as sitting in silence. Ratings of relaxation decreased during the anger induction but increased again during music listening or silence. This result expands on earlier research by Labbé et al. (2007) who reported that personally selected music of any genre is just as relaxing as (experimenter selected) classical music. Unfortunately, because a similar relaxation response was found in both conditions, it is unclear whether it was the music or simply the passage of time after the anger induction that may have increased feelings of relaxation. Nevertheless, ratings on two other positive emotions, active and inspired, further demonstrate that music listening helped participants to feel these positively valenced emotions. Active feelings increased in all participants during the anger induction, consistent with the idea that anger activates approach motivation ( Carver and Harmon-Jones, 2009 ). Active feelings then decreased for participants in the silence condition; yet, they continued to increase in the music listeners. Ratings of feeling inspired were relatively flat from baseline to anger induction for both conditions and were unchanged for those who sat in silence. In contrast, participants who listened to their selected extreme music experienced a significant increase in feelings of inspiration. These effects of extreme music on increasing physiological arousal and subjective inspiration are echoed in other research showing that music can evoke the experience of power – an effect that appears to be independent of musical genre and whether or not the music contains lyrics ( Hsu et al., 2015 ). Taken together, the findings support the view that extreme music listeners use music to regulate their anger and to feel active and inspired. This emotion regulation effect is similar to that found in some research on sad music listening ( Saarikallio and Erkkila, 2007 ; Vuoskoski et al., 2012 ). For instance, Van den Tol and Edwards (2013) found that people often engaged in sad music listening when sad in order to fully experience their negative affect and to enhance their mood. Indeed, participants in our study also reported listening to extreme music to improve their mood when feeling sad.

What Did Angry Participants Listen To?

A secondary aim for the study was to analyze what participants in the music condition selected from their own playlists to listen to when they were angry. It was predicted that angry participants would select extreme music from their playlists that matched their anger in terms of high tempo and angry lyrics. The analysis confirmed that all participants chose to listen to extreme music after the anger induction. The tempo and lyric findings were interesting in that half of the chosen songs contained lyrical themes of anger or aggression, with the remainder contained other themes including, but not limited to, isolation and sadness. It is difficult to account for this finding without knowing the detailed content of the angry memories that participants evoked during the anger interview. It is possible that their memories incorporated complicated feelings including anger and sadness and that their selected music matched those feelings. It is also possible that many participants did not select music on the basis of the lyrics – rather on the basis of the instrumental sounds or other musical characteristics. In terms of tempo, the chosen songs had a range of tempo with only 61% having a tempo that would be considered highly arousing (100 beats per min or over). Furthermore, less than a third of all songs possessed both angry themes and high arousal tempo. Potentially, other mechanisms may have linked the music with participants’ emotional response, such as episodic memory, emotional contagion, or a brain stem response to the acoustic characteristics of the music ( Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008 ; Juslin et al., 2010 ).

Unfortunately, it was not possible to conduct an analysis directly linking participants’ heart rate to the songs they listened to because we wanted participants to engage in naturalistic music listening and they listened to multiple songs (with varying tempos) for various lengths of time during the 10 min period. We did not have markers on the heart rate recording of which songs were listened to for which periods, and therefore the only analysis available was a summary analysis of the music they listened to (unlinked to their heart rates). Further research is required to explore whether there is a direct relationship between song tempo and heart rate among angry extreme music fans, as has been found in other samples (e.g., Etzel et al., 2006 ).

Extreme music fans reported using their music to enhance their happiness, to immerse themselves in feelings of love, and agreed that their music enhanced their well-being. What each of these responses indicates is that extreme music listeners appear to be using their music listening for positive self-regulatory purposes. Although this effect cannot be generalized to non-fans, it nevertheless lends support to a growing body of research about everyday music listening and emotion regulation ( Saarikallio, 2011 ; Thoma et al., 2012 ; Papinczak et al., 2015 ).

Practical Implications

Given that some correlational studies have reported an association between extreme music and anger, aggression and delinquency, it is understandable that some parents, teachers, and health practitioners have been concerned about their clients or students listening to extreme music and what this might mean. Earlier studies showed that an individual’s music preference is capable of biasing clinical judgment – for example, Rosenbaum and Prinsky (1991) contacted clinicians at 12 psychiatric hospitals posing as a concerned parent of a (fictitious) adolescent male who listened to heavy metal but they made no mention of symptoms of any mental illness. Ten of the services (83%) recommended admitting the adolescent to hospital. The results of our study indicate that responses like these are unjustified. On the contrary, the results show that extreme music may be used to recover from anger and to enhance emotional and mental health.

Practically, this research has various uses in applied settings. For example, greater understanding of anger processing through music may be beneficial within schools. Young people, in particular adolescents, are the greatest consumers of music ( North and Hargreaves, 1999 ; North et al., 2000 ). Thus, allowing students who are angry and upset to listen to their preferred music (including extreme genres) for 10 min may assist in self-regulation of these moods and result in increased positive affect. Moreover, these findings are extremely useful in clinical settings. Music-based interventions have been found to be effective in the treatment of a range of disorders that commonly involve emotional volatility including the psychoses ( Gold et al., 2009 ), post-traumatic stress disorder ( Zoteyva et al., 2015 ), and substance misuse ( Baker et al., 2012 ; Short and Dingle, 2015 ). The use of extreme music in therapy may also result in increased engagement and participation in therapy for fans of these genres ( Dingle et al., 2008 ).

Limitations and Future Directions

Although these results showed that extreme music matches and helps to regulate anger – this effect may be particular to fans of extreme music that are not experiencing any symptoms of distress. Further research is required to examine whether the findings generalize to fans experiencing psychological or behavioral problems. It is also important to note that the study was carried out in a laboratory under controlled conditions and with only the participant and experimenter present. Further, as participants were recruited with an advertisement for the “potential benefits” of extreme music, it partially revealed the study aims possibly leading to bias. In light of the results, it would have been beneficial to have included a third condition in which participants listened to a non-problem music genre in order to control for the general arousing effects of listening to music of any kind.

It is unknown what might happen to participants’ emotions if they listened to extreme music for prolonged periods, or what their emotional and arousal levels were half an hour or more after listening had ceased. The study would need to be replicated and extended to include a fourth time point in order to clarify this question. It is not clear from these findings how a naturalistic setting (such as at a social gathering or concert) might influence the link between extreme music listening and anger processing. Further research adopting experience sampling methods might shed light on this ( Juslin et al., 2008 ). Finally, we did not measure individual difference factors such as personality, tendency to ruminate, and other emotion regulation strategies in this study – factors that have been implicated in emotional responses to music in other research ( Chin and Rickard, 2014 ; Garrido and Schubert, 2015 ). Such musical, contextual, and listener variables may all contribute in some way to listeners’ emotional responses, as has been found in previous research ( Juslin and Sloboda, 2010 ).

What may be of interest for future research is how extreme music fans use music listening to process other emotions such as sadness and anxiety? Just over half of the participants in this study indicated that they listen to extreme music to fully experience sadness, and three quarters said they listen to improve their mood when feeling sad. However, there is currently a lack of research putting this to a direct test using experimental manipulation of sad mood. Only a third used music to calm down when anxious, which may reflect the highly arousing nature of the music. It would be interesting to find out if extreme music fans use other genres of music or other non-musical strategies (such as exercise or talking to someone) to regulate their anxiety ( Thayer et al., 1994 ).

This study found that extreme music fans listen to music when angry to match their anger, and to feel more active and inspired. They also listen to music to regulate sadness and to enhance positive emotions. The results refute the notion that extreme music causes anger but further research is required to replicate these findings in naturalistic social contexts, and to investigate the potential contributions of individual listener variables on this relationship between extreme music listening and anger processing.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to the participants, who were involved in the study, and to Dr. Eric Vanman for the supported use of his social neuroscience laboratory, and for expert comments on the draft manuscript.

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Keywords: metal music, anger, emotion processing, heart rate, arousal

Citation: Sharman L and Dingle GA (2015) Extreme metal music and anger processing. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 9:272. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00272

Received: 17 February 2015; Accepted: 27 April 2015; Published: 21 May 2015

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Copyright: © 2015 Sharman and Dingle. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Genevieve A. Dingle, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia, dingle@psy.uq.edu.au

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Beneficial effects of heavy metal music on wellbeing

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• Kate Quinn , clinical psychologist 1 ,
• Angela Glaves , senior lecturer in mental health nursing 2
• 1 South West Yorkshire NHS Foundation Trust, Wakefield, UK
• 2 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK
• katequinnpsychology{at}gmail.com

We welcome Martikainen and colleagues’ findings highlighting the potential health and wellbeing benefits of exposure to heavy metal music. 1

There is a growing body of work that suggests, contrary to previous assumptions, that listening to heavy metal music and attending heavy metal concerts can be beneficial for mental health. 2 3 For the past three years we have been running a mainly online peer support community for heavy metal fans, Heavy Metal Therapy, focused on mental health promotion for those who find the music enhances their wellbeing. This includes highlighting some of the music’s potential benefits for emotional processing and sense of community. We see from our work a range of future research opportunities looking into the relationship between engagement with heavy metal music and health outcomes.

Competing interests: None declared.

• Martikainen P ,
• Korhonen K ,
• Tarkiainen L

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Suicide, Self-Harm and Survival Strategies in Contemporary Heavy Metal Music: A Cultural and Literary Analysis

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This paper seeks to think creatively about the body of research which claims there is a link between heavy metal music and adolescent alienation, self-destructive behaviours, self-harm and suicide. Such research has been criticised, often by people who belong to heavy metal subcultures, as systematically neglecting to explore, in a meaningful manner, the psychosocial benefits for individuals who both listen to contemporary heavy metal music and socialize in associated groups. We argue that notions of survival, strength, community, and rebellion are key themes in contemporary heavy metal music. Through literary-lyrical analysis of a selection of heavy metal tracks, this paper aims to redress the balance of risk and benefit. We argue that listening to this type of music, the accompanying social relationships, sense of solidarity and even the type of dancing can ameliorate tumultuous and difficult emotions. Songs which could be read as negative can induce feelings of relief through the sense that someone else has felt a particular way and recovered enough to transform these emotions into a creative outlet. This genre of music may therefore not increase the risk of untoward outcomes in any simple sense but rather represent a valuable resource for young people in difficulty.

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Baker, C., Brown, B. Suicide, Self-Harm and Survival Strategies in Contemporary Heavy Metal Music: A Cultural and Literary Analysis. J Med Humanit 37 , 1–17 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9274-8

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October 30, 2018

Dissecting the Bloodthirsty Bliss of Death Metal

Fans of this violent music report feelings of transcendence and positive emotions; psychologists want to learn why

By David Noonan

Cannibal Corpse.

Steve Brown Getty Images

Brutality now becomes my appetite Violence is now a way of life The sledge my tool to torture As it pounds down on your forehead

Shakespeare it’s not. Those lyrics, from “Hammer Smashed Face” by the band Cannibal Corpse, are typical of death metal—a subgenre of heavy metal music that features images of extreme violence and the sonic equivalent of, well, a sledgehammer to the forehead.

The appeal of this marginal musical form, which clearly seems bent on assaulting the senses and violating even the lowest standards of taste, is mystifying to non-fans—which is one reason music psychologist William Forde Thompson was drawn to it. Thompson and his colleagues have published three papers about death metal and its fans this year, and several more are in the works.

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“It’s the paradox of enjoying a negative emotion that I was interested in,” says Thompson, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Why are people interested in music that seems to induce a negative emotion, when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion?” A number of studies have explored the emotional appeal of sad music, Thompson notes. But relatively little research has examined the emotional effects of listening to music that is downright violent.

Thompson’s work has produced some intriguing insights. The biggest surprise? “The ubiquitous stereotype of death metal fans—fans of music that contains violent themes and explicitly violent lyrics—[is] that they are angry people with violent tendencies,” Thompson says. “What we are finding is that they are not angry people. They’re not enjoying anger when they listen to the music, but they are in fact experiencing a range of positive emotions.”

Those positive emotions, as reported by death metal fans in an online survey that Thompson and his team conducted, include feelings of empowerment, joy, peace and transcendence. So far, almost all of the anger and tension Thompson has documented in his death metal studies has been expressed by non-fans after listening to samples of the music.

In a paper titled “ Who enjoys listening to violent music and why? ,” published earlier this year in Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Thompson and colleagues sought to identify specific personality traits that distinguished death metal fans from non-fans. In the study, which involved 48 self-described death metal fans and 97 non-fans (all in their 20s), he deployed an arsenal of established psychological tools and measures. These included the Big Five Inventory (BFI) of personality—which assesses openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism—as well as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a 28-item measure of empathy.

Notably, on measures of conscientiousness and agreeableness, the scores of death metal fans were subtly but reliably lower than those of non-fans. One possible explanation for this finding, the authors write, “is that long-term, persistent exposure to violent media may lead to subtle changes in one’s personality, desensitizing fans to violence and reinforcing negative social attitudes.” But Thompson emphasizes that we just don’t know. It is also possible that people with these personality traits are more likely to gravitate to death metal.

Results from the IRI showed the fan group and non-fan group with similar scores on the four dimensions of empathy that the index measures. When listening to death metal, however, study participants with lower empathy scores were more likely to experience higher levels of power and joy than those with greater empathic concern.  That was true as well, Thompson found, for people whose personality assessment showed them to be more open to experience and less neurotic.

In the study, each participant listened to four out of eight 60-second samples of popular death metal songs (selected by the researchers from multiple online lists) and answered questions about the feelings the music evoked. The songs included “Slowly We Rot,” by Obituary and “Waiting for the Screams,” by Autopsy, as well as “Hammer Smashed Face.”

In one set of responses, the subjects rated (on a scale of 1 to 7) the emotional effects of the music, using pre-selected terms such as “fear” and “wonder.” In a second step, they described in their own words how death metal made them feel. “With its repetitive, fast-paced tempo, down-tuned instruments and blast beats, it is virtually impossible not to be excited!” one fan wrote. “It sounds like messed-up teenagers making throaty, irritating noises about how bad their lives are,” wrote a non-fan. “It’s annoying.”

The fact that the study relies on self-reporting by the subjects is a red flag for Craig Anderson, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has spent his career researching the links between media violence and aggression, and who was not involved in Thompson’s study. Self-reporting “may or may not reflect reality,” Anderson says. “People may be lying to you, or, more likely, people don’t have direct access to many of the kinds of effects that media have on them. They can construct an idea or hypothesis, and self-reports are essentially that kind of data. People may report that ‘Oh yeah, this makes me feel this way,’ without recognizing whether that’s really true.”

The paper acknowledges the limitations of self-reporting. But the researchers  add that “the convergence of evidence” from the personality assessments and other measures, along with the fans’ enthusiastic embrace of death metal, “suggest that the dramatic differences in emotional and aesthetic responses between fans and non-fans are genuine.

Chris Pervelis, a founding member and guitarist of the band Internal Bleeding (whose songs include Gutted Human Sacrifice and The Pageantry of Savagery ), is confident that the positive emotions he experiences when he plays and listens to Death Metal are the real thing. “When I’m locked into it, it’s like there’s electricity flowing through me,” says the 50-year-old, who runs his own graphic design business. “I feel really alive, like hyper-alive. And the people I know in Death Metal are smart, creative and generally good-hearted souls.”

In an essay published in August in Physics of Life Reviews , Thompson and his co-author Kirk Olsen considered the possible role of brain chemistry in the response to violence and aggression in music. The high amplitude, fast tempo and other discordant traits of death metal, they write, may elicit the release of neurochemicals such as epinephrine—which “may underpin feelings of positive energy and power reported by fans, and tension, fear and anger reported by non-fans.”

As for the central riddle of death metal—how explicitly violent music might trigger positive emotions in some people—Thompson cites a 2017 paper on the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences . The paper, from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics,  suggests a mental process that combines “psychological distancing” and “psychological embracing.”  In other words, a lack of real-world consequences—it’s just a song!—may provide the distance necessary for fans to appreciate the music as an art form and embrace it.

A large body of research, by Anderson and others, has established a clear link between aggression and multiple types of media violence including video games, film, television and music with violent images and themes. “But no one is saying that a normal, well-adjusted person—who has almost no other risk factors for violent behavior—is going to become a violent criminal offender simply because of their media habits,” says Anderson, whose research includes a 2003 study of the effect of songs with violent lyrics. “That never happens with just one risk factor, and we know of dozens of common risk factors. Media violence happens to be one.”

One finding from Thompson’s research—that many death metal fans say they listen to the music as a catharsis, a way to release negative emotions and focus on something that they enjoy—is also familiar to Pervelis. “I call it the garbage can,” he says of the music he’s been involved with for decades, “because it’s where I can dump all my bad, emotional baggage. I put it into writing riffs and letting it all out on stage, and it keeps me level and completely sane.”

In his ongoing study of violent and aggressive music, which includes a June paper in the journal Music Perception about the intelligibility of death metal lyrics (forget about it, non-fans) , Thompson has found that the limited appeal of the form may be one its key features for fans—one at least as old as rock itself. He cites a 2006 paper by the late Karen Bettez Halnon, who found that fans of heavy metal (as has certainly been the case with many other genres and sub-genres over the decades) view the music as an alternative to the “impersonal, conformist, superficial and numbing realities of commercialism.”

In that vein, one possible function of the gruesome lyrics that are the hallmark of death metal, says Thompson, may be to “sharpen the boundary” between fans and everybody else. Pervelis, who compares the violent imagery to the “over-the-top, schlock horror films of the 70s,” says feeling like an outsider and an insider at the same time is at the core of the death metal experience. “This music is so extreme and so on the fringe of the mainstream that people who listen to it and people who play in death metal bands belong to an elite club. It’s like we’ve got a little secret, and I think that’s what binds it all. It’s a badge of honor.”

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• Published: 30 August 2019

The effects of playing music on mental health outcomes

• Laura W. Wesseldijk 1 , 2 ,
• Fredrik Ullén 1   na1 &
• Miriam A. Mosing 1 , 3   na1  

Scientific Reports volume  9 , Article number:  12606 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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• Behavioural genetics
• Psychiatric disorders
• Risk factors

The association between active musical engagement (as leisure activity or professionally) and mental health is still unclear, with earlier studies reporting contrasting findings. Here we tested whether musical engagement predicts (1) a diagnosis of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar or stress-related disorders based on nationwide patient registers or (2) self-reported depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms in 10,776 Swedish twins. Information was available on the years individuals played an instrument, including their start and stop date if applicable, and their level of achievement. Survival analyses were used to test the effect of musical engagement on the incidence of psychiatric disorders. Regression analyses were applied for self-reported psychiatric symptoms. Additionally, we conducted co-twin control analyses to further explore the association while controlling for genetic and shared environmental confounding. Results showed that overall individuals playing a musical instrument (independent of their musical achievement) may have a somewhat increased risk for mental health problems, though only significant for self-reported mental health measures. When controlling for familial liability associations diminished, suggesting that the association is likely not due to a causal negative effect of playing music, but rather to shared underlying environmental or genetic factors influencing both musicianship and mental health problems.

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Mental health and music engagement: review, framework, and guidelines for future studies

Daniel E. Gustavson, Peyton L. Coleman, … Miriam D. Lense

Biological principles for music and mental health

Daniel L. Bowling

Introduction

The high suicide rate among famous musicians over the last few years, e.g. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, Avicii and the Prodigy’s Keith Flint, has received a lot of media attention and raised the question about a possible relationship between mental health problems and musicianship. In line with that, a recent survey among 2,211 British self-identified professional musicians found musicians to be up to three times more likely to report depressive problems than individuals in the general population 1 . Furthermore, several famous people engaged in creative professions other than musicianship were also known for their psychiatric illnesses, like Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway or John Nash. It has been shown that unaffected relatives of individuals with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia have higher levels of creativity 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . Overall, such findings suggest that creativity and musicianship are risk factors for mental health problems.

On the other hand, there are many studies that report positive relationships between musical engagement and indicators of mental health, thus suggesting the opposite, namely that engagement in music could be protective against psychiatric problems. Although epidemiological studies investigating the association between music and the risk of mental health problems are rare – for a review, see 6 – the few existing ones all tend to suggest a positive effect of music 7 . For example, singing or playing music has been reported to be have a positive influence on various subjective health outcomes, including anxiety and depression 8 . Singing in a choir is related to higher self-rated quality of life and satisfaction with health 9 , and playing an instrument, and singing or performing in theater, tend to be associated with increased self-rated health in women, but decreased all-cause mortality in men and not vice versa 10 . Hours of music practice has been shown to be associated with lower alexithymia (i.e., a dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating) 11 . Finally, in 50,797 Norwegian males, but not in females, it was found that active participation in music, singing or theater predicted significantly lower depressive symptoms 12 . It is important to note that the measures of health outcomes in these studies are retrospective self-reports. Therefore, the outcomes could partly reflect characteristics of the rater and may be subject to a recall bias.

Furthermore, there are numerous reviews on the effect of music interventions, both active (e.g. performing) and passive (e.g. listening), on individuals in clinical settings, e.g. during medical procedures or in mental health clinics (for reviews in children, see 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ; for reviews in adults, see 18 , 19 , 20 ). The majority of reviews conclude that music interventions have a positive effect on pain, mood, and anxious or depressive symptoms in both children and adults in clinical settings. This suggests not only a positive association in line with the epidemiological research, but also potentially a causal relationship. It is important to note that most of the music interventions described in these studies have been tailored to address individually assessed needs of a client by a music therapist, which differs significantly from self-initiated musical engagement in daily life. Furthermore, as pointed out in most of these reviews, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about protective effect of music due to the mixed quality of many of the conducted studies, i.e., studies had small samples, suffered from bias due to methodological issues, and there was great variability among the results of the studies.

In sum, the direction of the association between musical engagement and mental health is still unclear with powerful population based research still failing to establish a relation unequivocally. Furthermore, it seems that differentiating between active amateur and professional musicians might explain the discrepancy between, on the one hand research reporting beneficial effects of music in everyday life on mental health, and on the other hand the high rate of depression and suicides among professional musicians. This view is in line with findings from the recent study of Bonde, et al . 21 in which active professional musicians reported more health problems than active amateur musicians, while active amateur musicians reported significantly better self-reported health than non-musicians. Possibly, the strain and pressure experienced by professional musicians may override a possible overall positive effect of musical engagement. Furthermore, an association between engagement in music and mental health problems on a population level does not necessarily reflect causal effects; it could also reflect reverse causation or underlying shared genetic or shared environmental factors that influence both the choice to engage in music and the development of psychiatric problems. It is well known that genetic factors play a role both in mental health problems 22 and in individual variation in music-related abilities 23 . In line with that, there is evidence that the association between creativity and psychiatric disorders is largely driven by underlying shared genetic factors 24 . Studying twins can reduce genetic and shared environmental confounding and strengthen causal inferences.

Here, using a large genetically informative sample of Swedish twins, we aim to investigate whether there is an association between active musical engagement defined by whether an individual plays an instrument, on an amateur and professional level, and mental health and if so, whether the relationship is consistent with a causal hypothesis, i.e., that musical engagement truly affects mental health. We use data from the Swedish nationwide in-patient and outpatient registers for psychiatric diagnoses (i.e., diagnosis of depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar, stress disorder) as well as self-reports on mental health problems (depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms). As the association between playing sport and mental health is already well established, we conducted sensitivity analyses investigating a protective effect of sport against psychiatric problems in this sample.

Participants

Data for the present study was collected as part of “the Study of Twin Adults: Genes and Environment” (STAGE), a sub-study in a cohort of approximately 32,000 adult twins registered with the Swedish Twin Register (STR). The STAGE study sent out a web survey in 2012–2013 inquiring about, musical engagement and musical achievement and other potentially music related traits. The 11,543 responders were aged between 27 and 54 years and data were available for 10,776 individuals on musical engagement and for 6,833 on musical achievement.

The National Patient Register (NPR) records the use of the health care system in Sweden, which has nationwide coverage ensuring equal access to health care for all residents, using a 10-digit personal identification number assigned to all Swedish residents 25 . The NPR includes an in-patient register (IPR) and out-patient register (OPR). The IPR contains information about hospitalizations since 1964 (with full national coverage since 1977), while the OPR covers outpatient visits since 2001 26 . The Cause of Death Register (CDR) contains information from death records since 1961 27 . The Swedish twins from the STAGE study were linked to records from the IPR, OPR and CDR.

Informed consent was obtained from all participants. The study was approved by the Regional Ethics Review Board in Stockholm (Dnr 2011/570-31/5, 2012/1107-32, 2018/866-32). All research methods were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.

Musical engagement

Participants were asked whether they ever played an instrument. Those who responded positively were asked at what age they started to play, whether they still played an instrument and, if not, at what age they stopped playing. From these questions, a music status variable was created (0: does not play, 1: used to play, 2: plays).

Sport engagement

Participants reported on whether they ever actively trained a sport (excluding exercise training or physical activity in general). Information on age they started training a sport, whether they still played and at what age they stopped playing resulted in a sport status variable with 0 ‘does not play’, 1 ‘used to play’ and 2 ‘plays sport’.

Musical achievement

Musical achievement was measured with a Swedish version of the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) that assesses different domains of creativity, including music 28 , 29 . Individuals were asked to rate their musical achievement on a seven-point scale: 1 ‘I am not engaged in music at all’, 2’I have played or sang privately, but I have never played, sang or showed my music to others’, 3’I have taken music lessons, but I have never played, sang or showed my music to others’, 4 ‘I have played or sung, or my music has been played in public concerts in my home town, but I have not been paid for this’, 5 ‘I have played or sung, or my music has been played in public concerts in my home town, and I have been paid for this’, 6 ‘I am professionally active as a musician’ and 7 ‘I am professionally active as a musician and have been reviewed/featured in national or international media and/or have received an award for my musical activities’. To differentiate between amateur and professional musicians, we converted the scale to three groups: 1 ‘no engagement in music’, 2–4 ‘making music on an amateur level’, and 5–7 ‘professionally active in music’.

Registry-based mental health outcomes

For each individual we derived information (diagnosis and date of first diagnosis) on incidence of depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or stress disorder based on clinical diagnoses after any inpatient or outpatient visit, or underlying cause of death registered in the national registers according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes as reported in Table  1 . We created an ‘any psychiatric diagnosis’ variable indicating whether the participant has ever been diagnosed with any of the five categories of clinical diagnoses above. For this variable, we selected the earliest date of diagnosis in case of comorbidity.

Questionnaire-based self-reported mental health

In addition, self-reports on mental health outcomes (i.e., depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms) obtained in the web survey were analyzed. Depressive symptoms were measured with the depression scale of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist 30 . This scale contains of six items all ranging from 0 to 4 (0 ‘not at all’ to 4 ‘extremely’), measuring depressive symptoms in a work-related context, with higher scores indicating more depressive symptoms. Burn-out symptoms related to work were measured with the Emotional exhaustion subscale of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey 31 . This scale consists of five items that range from 1 (every day) to 6 (a few times per year or less/never). Therefore, as higher scores reflect less burnout symptoms, we reversed this scale so that higher scores indicate more burnout symptoms in line with the other mental health outcomes. Schizotypal symptoms were measured with the “Positive Dimension Frequency Scale” of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (CAPE) questionnaire 32 . The score is based on 20 positive symptom items that can be answered with four different symptom frequency levels, from 1 ‘never’ to 4 ‘almost always’. Higher scores indicate more schizotypal symptoms. The Cronbach alpha reliability in present study was 0.89 for the depressive symptom scale, 0.87 for the burnout symptom scale and 0.79 for the schizotypal symptom scale.

Level of education

Educational achievement was dichotomized into ‘low and intermediate’ (1 to 7; unfinished primary school to bachelor education) and ‘high’ (8 to 10; master education to PhD).

Statistical analyses

All analyses were conducted in STATA 15.

Survival analyses , i.e., Cox proportional hazard regression, were conducted to explore the effect of musical engagement and musical achievement on the risk to receive a registry-based diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder 33 . Survival analysis is a method to analyze data where the outcome variable is the time until an event happens. The time (years) from the age of twelve to either the date of first receiving a psychiatric diagnosis or to the date of censoring (i.e., date of death or end of follow-up at January 1, 2015) were used as the time scale (i.e., the survival time). For the analyses on the effect of musical engagement , we had to take into account that some individuals had not yet started playing an instrument at the age of twelve (i.e., would start at a later age), or stopped playing at some stage. Therefore, years were split on whether the individual did not play, stopped or started playing, or currently played a musical instrument using the stsplit statement to differentiate between the three levels of musical engagement. We used Cox proportional hazard regressions, a method that assumes the effect upon survival to be constant over time, to calculate hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals. The HRs represent the effects of 1) playing an instrument versus never having played an instrument or 2) having played an instrument (but stopped before diagnosis) versus never having played an instrument on the baseline risk for a mental health diagnosis (independent of playing status) during the follow-up period. A HR value greater than one indicates an increased risk, while a value below one indicates a protective effect. Additionally, we conducted the survival analyses to estimate the effect of musical achievement in a lifetime on the risk of a mental health diagnosis, in which the HRs represent 1) the effect of having performed music as an amateur versus not being involved in music, or 2) the effect of having performed music professionally versus not being involved in music. As we analyzed the three level musical achievement in a lifetime, we did not split years on age (assuming that individuals have been on a lifelong ‘achievement’ trajectory). To correct for relatedness in the twin sample, the robust standard error estimator for clustered observations was used 34 . We fitted separate survival models for each of the five psychiatric disorder diagnoses as well as for the ‘any psychiatric diagnosis’ variable. Thus, first, we in total fitted six models for the effect of musical engagement and another six models for musical achievement. All models included sex as a covariate. Additionally, we fitted all models corrected for level of education, resulting in a small loss of data due to missing information for some individuals, therefore reducing the power. For each model, the proportional hazards assumption was tested using Schoenfeld residuals. No evidence for deviation from the proportional hazards assumption was found for any of the models (all p values > 0.01). As a sensitivity analysis, the above-described models for musical engagement (in which we used the stsplit statement) were repeated with sport engagement as the exposure variable instead, to estimate the effect of playing sport on registry-based psychiatric disorder diagnoses.

Self-reported mental health outcomes

Linear regression analyses were performed to explore the effect of musical engagement and musical achievement on the self-rated continuous measures of depressive symptoms, burnout symptoms and schizotypal symptoms. To correct for relatedness in the twin sample, we used the robust standard error estimator for clustered observations. We included sex as a covariate. Additionally, we ran the analyses corrected for level of education. As a sensitivity analysis, we estimated the effect of sport engagement on depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms using linear regression analyses.

Co-twin control analyses (within-pair analyses)

Within-pair analyses in identical twins were conducted to further explore the association between musical engagement and receiving a mental health diagnosis when controlling for genetic and shared environmental factors. As monozygotic (MZ) twins are genetically identical and share their family environment, studying identical twins excludes confounding in case a genetic predisposition or shared environmental influence affects both outcome (mental health problems), and exposure (music engagement). Therefore, if music engagement truly causes a lower/higher risk for receiving a mental health diagnosis, we would expect the MZ twin that plays music to have a lower/higher risk of psychiatric problems than his or her co-twin that does not play music. Conditional Cox regression models, with the strata statement to stratify by pair identifier, were fitted for the mental health diagnoses to estimate HRs with 95% confidence intervals. Notably, only complete identical twin pairs discordant for exposure (i.e., music engagement) and outcome (i.e., the psychiatric disorder diagnosis) contribute to the within-pair analyses. The conditional logistic regression estimates the effect of the difference between the two observations in the strata. Twins are regarded as discordant for the outcome when the time of the psychiatric diagnosis differs. Due to the low prevalence of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the complete twin pairs, these phenotypes were excluded from the within-pair analyses.

Additionally, to explore further the effect of music engagement on the self-rated continuous measures of depressive symptoms, burnout symptoms and schizotypal symptoms, we conducted within-pair linear regression analyses using the xtreg fe statement to stratify by twin pair. In within-pair analyses in identical twins correcting for sex is not required as each twin is matched to his or her co-twin. To increase power, we also included data from same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins (who share on average 50% of their genetic makeup and 100% of their family environment).

Descriptives

Information on mental health outcomes and musical engagement was available for 9,816 individuals [2,212 complete twin pairs (1,055 MZ, 661 dizygotic same-sex (DZ), 496 dizygotic opposite-sex (DOS) twins) and 5,392 individual twins]. Among these individuals, data on musical achievement were available for 6,295 individuals [1,208 complete twin pairs (627 MZ, 342 DZ, 239 DOS) and 3,879 individual twins]. Characteristics of the participants are reported in Table  2 .

Women were more likely to initiate playing an instrument than men (37.7% of men versus 20.5% of women), while roughly the same amount of men and women remained actively involved in music in adulthood (23.3% of men and 21.9% of women). More men (8.5%) than women (5%) played music professionally.

Although overall, there was an overall trend towards a somewhat elevated risk for psychiatric disease in those engaged with music, neither playing music nor having played music in the past (Fig.  1 ), nor professional musicianship (Fig.  2 ) was significantly associated with the risk for any of the psychiatric disorders. The analyses adjusted for level of education showed similar results (see Table  S1 for musical engagement and Table  S2 for musical achievement, in the supplementary material), with the exception that individuals who played an instrument had a significantly higher risk (39%) of being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder (HR 1.39, CI 1.01–1.92) compared to those who never played an instrument. In terms of covariates, we found females to have a higher risk for depression (92%), anxiety disorder (92%), and stress-related disorders (58%) (Table  S1 ). Additionally, individuals with higher levels of education had a significantly lower risk for psychiatric disorders, depression, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (Table  S1 ).

Music engagement and registry-based mental health outcomes. Sex is included as covariate.

Music achievement and registry-based mental health outcomes. Sex is included as a covariate.

Self-reported mental health

Results of the regression analyses with self-reported mental health symptoms indicated that playing an instrument was significantly associated with more schizotypal symptoms and depressive and burnout symptoms in a work context (see left part of Table  3 ). Having played an instrument in the past did not significantly influence any of the self-rated mental health outcomes. Furthermore, even though professional and amateur musicians report more burnout and schizotypal symptoms than non-players, individuals who played music professionally did not experience significantly more depressive, burnout or schizotypal symptoms than individuals who play music on an amateur level (see right part of Table  3 ). When analyses were repeated adjusting for level of education (results not shown) all results remained the same.

Sensitivity sport analyses

Results of the sensitivity analyses on the registry-based mental health outcomes showed that individuals who actively played sports were less likely to develop any psychiatric disorder, as well as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder (see Fig.  S1 ). There was no sustained beneficial effect of past sports engagement after stopping with exercise. The analyses adjusted for level of education showed the same results.

Regression analyses on the self-reported mental health outcomes showed that individuals who actively play sports were significantly less likely to report depressive symptoms (β = −0.23, p < 0.001) and burnout symptoms (β = −0.20, p < 0.001), but not schizotypal symptoms (β = 0.00, p = 0.96). Past sport activities were unrelated to the self-reported mental health outcomes (p values range between 0.08 and 0.20). Including level of education in the analyses did not affect the results.

Co-twin control analyses

Results of the co-twin control analyses for both the registry-based and self-reported mental health measures are shown in Table  4 . None of the within-pair estimates were significant. However, overall, the effect sizes (HR or beta) moved closer to zero with increased controlling of shared liability.

We aimed to investigate the association between musical engagement in everyday life and mental health in a large cohort of Swedish twins. Although the findings were somewhat mixed, overall results suggest that individuals who actively play a musical instrument (but not necessarily professionally) may have a somewhat increased risk for mental health problems. However, when controlling for familial liability these associations became weaker and non-significant suggesting that the association is likely explained by underlying shared factors influencing both musicianship and mental health problems.

While analyses using registry-based mental health diagnoses showed no significant association between music playing or professional musical engagement and psychiatric diagnoses, the direction of the effect was trending towards a somewhat increased risk for psychiatric diagnoses for those actively engaged with music. Results from the self-reported mental health outcomes further supported this; individuals playing an instrument report more depressive, burnout and schizotypal symptoms. This is in contrast with previous epidemiological and clinical studies reporting positive effects of musical engagement on anxious and depressive symptoms 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 . Further, a recent study by Fancourt and Steptoe 35 found cultural engagement to decrease the development of depression in older ages. However, it appears likely that it is important to distinguish between general cultural engagement, i.e., visits to the theatre, concerts or opera, the cinema or an art gallery, exhibition or museum) and active playing of a musical instrument, which is the focus of the present study. Playing a musical instrument is much more narrowly defined behavior and involves many (cognitive and physical) processes different from engaging in cultural musical activities or listening to music. On the other hand, our findings are in line with results from the survey among British professional musicians 1 and with previous findings of associations between creativity and mental health problems, i.e., that people engaging in creative activities tend to experience more psychiatric problems 4 . It is important to note that the previous epidemiological studies on mental health, the British musicians study, but also our continuous mental health outcomes, were based on self-report. An explanation could be that results of self-report reflect a different attitude towards mental health among more creative individuals, with higher acceptance and awareness of mental health problems, possibly resulting in over-reporting in the field.

Further, there is evidence that the association between creativity and psychiatric disorders can be largely attributed to underlying shared genetic factors 24 , 36 . This is in line with present results of our co-twin control analyses, which showed that the association between musicianship and mental health was attenuated when controlling for genetic and shared environmental confounding (although all analyses were non-significant). This suggests that the observed associations would partly be explained by a shared underlying etiology, (i.e., genetic or family environmental factors which affect both, individuals differences in music playing and mental health) and not by a causal effect of playing music. The within-pair results, however, should be interpreted with caution as only discordant twin pairs contribute to the co-twin control analyses, which reduced the power to find significant associations.

We found significant differences between professional or amateur musicians and non-players in self-rated health outcomes, which are in line with our findings on playing music in general. However, in neither self-rated nor registry-based data, we observed any significant differences in mental health problems between professional musicians compared to amateur musicians. This is in contrast to findings from the study of Bonde, et al . 21 in which active professional musicians reported higher numbers of overall health problems than active amateur musicians, while active amateur musicians reported significantly better self-reported health than non-musicians did. Whilst this was also a large population-based sample, this study analyzed general health instead of mental health, which likely contributes to the difference in findings.

The discrepancy in findings between registry-based mental health diagnoses and self-reported mental health could be due to an influence of rater and recall biases captured in the self-reported mental health outcomes, as discussed above. However, another explanation could be less power in the analyses with the registry-based mental health diagnoses to detect an existing effect. The power of a method to analyze survival time data depends partly on the number of psychiatric diagnoses rather than on the total sample size. In the present sample, observed post-hoc power for the survival analyses to detect a HR of 0.8 for music engagement is 88% for the incidence of a psychiatric disorder, 67% for depression, 61% for anxiety, 7% for schizophrenia, 18% for bipolar and 45% for stress disorder, reflecting the different incident rates of the disorders. As the self-reported mental health problems were measured on a continuous scale, these analyses have higher power (i.e., no cut-off score needs to be reached to obtain a full diagnosis). Nevertheless, our sensitivity analyses in the registry-based outcomes on the effect of sport did show a significant protective effect of sport against the risk of receiving a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder, depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder in this sample, suggesting that an association can be found with the present distribution of the data if existent. Therefore, we conclude that a lack of power is not a likely explanation for our null findings in the registry-based health outcomes, and that if there truly were an effect, it would be very small.

There are some limitations of this study in addition to the ones we already touched upon. We analyzed data on psychiatric diagnoses obtained from the Swedish nationwide in-patient and outpatient registers. However, the outpatient register only reached full coverage in 2001 and it is therefore possible that some individuals were not classified with a psychiatric disorder, although they did experience mental health problems before 2001. The same holds for individuals with mental health problems who did not visit a doctor. In addition, the dichotomous rather than dimensional nature of psychiatric diagnoses excludes large parts of the continuous variation among individuals in psychiatric problems. The continuous symptom scales increase the power to detect an effect of engagement in music or sports, but may be somewhat biased. Furthermore, our study explored potential effects of active musical engagement (i.e., making music) in everyday life and therefore our findings do not allow for any conclusions about the potential effect of (personalized) musical interventions on mental health problems. Lastly, as mentioned earlier, the sample of discordant twin pairs contributing to the co-twin control analyses was small, resulting in low power to detect effects.

To our knowledge, the present population-based study is the only genetically informative large-scale study to investigate associations between active engagement in music (both as a leisure activity and professionally) and registry-based as well as self-reported mental health outcomes. Rather than a protective effect of music engagement in everyday life as often suggested, our findings suggest that individuals actively engaged in music playing, but not only professional musicians, may have a somewhat elevated risk for mental health problems. This association may at least partly be due to shared underlying etiology and it is unlikely that it reflects a causal effect of playing music.

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Acknowledgements

The present work was supported by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (MAW 2018.0017), and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (M11-0451:1). We acknowledge The Swedish Twin Registry for access to data. The Swedish Twin Registry is managed by the Karolinska Institutet and receives funding through the Swedish Research Council under the grant no 2017-00641. Open access funding provided by Karolinska Institute.

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Fredrik Ullén and Miriam A. Mosing jointly supervised this work.

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Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Solnavägen 9, SE-171 77, Stockholm, Sweden

Laura W. Wesseldijk, Fredrik Ullén & Miriam A. Mosing

Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 5, 1105 AZ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Laura W. Wesseldijk

Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Nobels v 12A, 171 77, Stockholm, Sweden

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F.U., M.M. and L.W. developed the study design. L.W. performed the data analysis and interpretation under the supervision of F.U., M.M. L.W. and M.M. drafted the manuscript, and F.U. provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

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Wesseldijk, L.W., Ullén, F. & Mosing, M.A. The effects of playing music on mental health outcomes. Sci Rep 9 , 12606 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49099-9

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Heavy metal music meets complexity and sustainability science

• David G. Angeler 1  

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This paper builds a bridge between heavy metal music, complexity theory and sustainability science to show the potential of the (auditory) arts to inform different aspects of complex systems of people and nature. The links are described along different dimensions. This first dimension focuses on the scientific aspect of heavy metal. It uses complex adaptive systems theory to show that the rapid diversification and evolution of heavy metal into multiple subgenres leads to a self-organizing and resilient socio-musicological system. The second dimension builds on the recent use of heavy metal as a critical thinking model and educational tool, emphasizing the artistic component of heavy metal and its potential to increase people’s awareness of environmental sustainability challenges. The relationships between metal, complexity theory and sustainability are first discussed independently to specifically show mechanistic links and the reciprocal potential to inform one domain (science) by the other (metal) within these dimensions. The paper concludes by highlighting that these dimensions entrain each other within a broader social-cultural-environmental system that cannot be explained simply by the sum of independent, individual dimensions. Such a unified view embraces the inherent complexity with which systems of people and nature interact. These lines of exploration suggest that the arts and the sciences form a logical partnership. Such a partnership might help in endeavors to envision, understand and cope with the broad ramifications of sustainability challenges in times of rapid social, cultural, and environmental change.

What does complexity theory (for definitions of terms in italics see Table  1 ) tell us about heavy metal music and its links to complex challenges as those present in global environmental sustainability ? This question has been inspired by earlier scientific (Bachelard 1934 , 1936 ) and artistic (Breton 1936 ) writings and recent calls (Angeler et al. 2016 ), which advocate the connection of isolated knowledge from different disciplines into a broader model of scientific inquiry. Specifically, this paper links the auditory arts, using heavy metal as an example, with two scientific disciplines, one comprising basic science (complexity theory) and the other applied research (environmental sustainability).

The choice to link heavy metal with two apparently disparately distinct scientific disciplines is on purpose. Isolated knowledge from different disciplines can be linked in different ways and vary in their degree of subjectivity versus objectivity (Ratner 2002 ), the reciprocity by which one discipline informs the other (Rinia et al. 2002 ), or research method (qualitative and/or qualitative) used in transdisciplinary research (Angeler 2016 ). This variability is manifest in the approach used in this paper (Fig.  1 ), in which links between knowledge domains are made along three dimensions. The first dimension emphasizes the scientific component of heavy metal music (Brown 2011 ) in which it is linked to complex adaptive systems theory, a branch of complexity science, to describe the emergence of a socio - musicological system (Fig.  1 ). This paper will scrutinize the reciprocal potential to inform one domain by the other; that is, where heavy metal music potentially contributes to inform complex adaptive systems theory and vice versa (arrows in both direction in Fig.  1 ). Although this paper will only explore linkages theoretically, it is deemed possible that numerical analysis, which have been used in the study of complex adaptive systems (Holland 2014 ), might be used to study the heavy metal socio-musicological system. The potential to objectively study socio-musicological systems is shown by thick arrows in Fig.  1 .

Schematic showing links between distinct, apparently unrelated knowledge domains. Shown are: (1) The links between heavy metal music and complex adaptive systems theory to describe the emergence of a socio-musicological system ( light blue ellipse ). (2) The potential of heavy metal music as an educational tool to increase awareness of environmental sustainability challenges ( purple ellipse ). (3) The links between complex adaptive systems and environmental sustainability that mediate social-ecological system dynamics ( dark blue ellipse ). (4) An emerging broader, unified picture of social-cultural-environmental dynamics ( green circle ). Arrow directions and thickness represent reciprocal versus unidirectional information potential between domains and interpretational objectivity versus subjectivity, respectively (see “ Background ” section)

The second dimension builds on the recent use of heavy metal as a critical thinking model and educational tool (Angeler et al. 2016 ; Schmaltz 2016 ), emphasizing the artistic component of heavy metal (Kahn-Harris 2007 ) and its potential to increase people’s awareness of environmental sustainability challenges (Fig.  1 ). Information potential in this link is unidirectional; that is, heavy metal music informs only sustainability science. This unidirectional connection is made via allegories. These relate the music with specific environmental change challenges and ensuing human tensions with the aim to elicit thought and educate people about, and increase their awareness of environmental change. The thin arrow that symbolizes the unidirectional link (Fig.  1 ) means that the connection between heavy metal music and sustainability is entirely subjective. The unidirectional link also suggests that environmental sustainability issues currently do not influence metal music in ways to result in integral song architectures (lyrics, singing, rhythms, instrumentation) from which a “sustainability metal subgenre” might emanate. Figure  1 also shows a third dimension, in which complex adaptive systems theory and environmental sustainability are linked to describe the dynamics of complex systems of people and nature ( social - ecological systems ). The complexity of social-ecological systems dynamics has been reviewed recently (e.g., Allen et al. 2014 ) and will therefore not be explored here. However, this third dimension will be considered in the broader discussion of the synthesis between heavy metal, complex adaptive systems theory and environmental sustainability.

This paper will be structured in three parts. The first part emphasizes the scientific component of heavy metal music. It briefly sketches the claims of complex adaptive systems theory and then examines metal through the lens of this theory, including the description of operational terms to portray the emergence of a socio-musicological system. The second part of the paper focuses on the artistic component of the music and provides an overview of social-ecological systems challenges that are relevant from the perspective of environmental sustainability. It uses heavy metal songs in which their song architecture becomes allegorical to specific environmental challenges and potentially associated human tensions. These links are discussed within the context of environmental awareness and education. The paper concludes by synthesizing the linkages between the different knowledge domains in an overarching discussion of a broader and more integral understanding of social-cultural-environmental dynamics in times where planet Earth undergoes fast change of climatic, ecological, economic, production, communication and other technological systems (green circle in Fig.  1 ) (Folke et al. 2002 ; Berkes et al. 2003 ; Walker et al. 2004 ). This paper is intentionally descriptive to provoke thought and provide a source to stimulate future transdisciplinary research and cross-pollinate currently distinct disciplines.

Heavy metal music: a complex adaptive system

Complex adaptive systems theory, a branch of complexity science, studies the systemic behavior of complex systems that results from the interaction of distinct features, including adaptation, recalibration and self-organization (Holland 2014 ). Complex adaptive systems dynamics have been described for a plethora of systems, including the cell, brain, and immune system of humans, ecological (social insect colonies, ecosystems, the biosphere), economic (global macroeconomic network, stock markets), technological (internet, artificial intelligence), political (geopolitical organizations, terrorist networks) and other social systems (schools, health services) (e.g., Meadows 2008 ; Holland 2014 ; Sundstrom et al. 2014 ). The use of complex adaptive systems theory for explaining the dynamic organization of disparately distinct systems suggests that an examination of metal as a complex adaptive system is worthwhile.

Heavy metal music, a fast evolving form of the auditory arts belonging to the genre of rock music that originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, mainly in the United Kingdom and the USA, has been regarded in recent years as a cultural esthetic worthy of scientific study in its own right (Brown 2011 ). This is reflected in an increasing amount of scientific publications (Hickam 2014 ) since the first scholarly publications by Weinstein ( 1991 ) and Walser ( 1993 ). During the last 50 years, metal has diversified rapidly into more than 20 subgenres out of traditional or classic heavy metal (Sharpe-Young 2007 ; Table  2 ). Nowadays it spans a wide range of song architectures, lyric themes, and instrumentation, including distorted guitars, emphatic rhythms, dense bass-and-drum sound, and vigorous vocals, and the genre at large continues to develop fast (Brown 2011 ). This development has reached a complexity that is reminiscent of complex adaptive systems dynamics. That is, the development and diversification in metal has been the result of the broader and complex interaction between musicological, psychological, cultural, social, technological, marketing, and other economic aspects of social and technological change (Seppi and Stoycheva 2015 ), leading to a self-organizing socio-musicological system (Patel 2010 ).

Meadows ( 2008 ) and Holland ( 2014 ) give simple overviews of complex adaptive systems, and provide the basic criteria for a relatively uncomplicated examination of metal through the lens of complexity science. My examination of metal as a complex adaptive system is based on a theoretical model because of two reasons. First, metal is a very young field with many gaps in the scientific literature, and it currently lacks the necessary broader peer-reviewed quantitative and qualitative information to populate/parameterize models empirically and realistically. Second, even if this knowledge was available, model predictions are highly uncertain because, as noted by Holland ( 2014 ), a full description/understanding of complex adaptive systems is impossible. There is, for instance, emergent behavior that cannot be described by the sum of individual components, which often results from non - linear processes , delays , and complex feedback loops (see descriptions and examples in Table  1 ). However, theoretical models have value in building a foundation for future research (Meadows 2008 ).

My theoretical model of the metal socio-musicological system is based on the description of the general elements that make up a complex adaptive system (Fig.  2 ). Basic elements of a complex adaptive system are: hierarchical organization , information flow within and between these hierarchies and other complex systems (i.e., connectedness ), non-linear patterns and delays resulting from information flow, and the deriving reinforcing and balancing feedback loops (Meadows 2008 ; Holland 2014 ). These feedback loops comprise the manifold processes that drive system behavior, and help the system recalibrate and adapt to disturbance. From these basic system elements emerge innovation and learning, resilience, self-organization and system-level persistence.

Simplified complex adaptive system model of heavy metal music showing discrete hierarchical structure and the connections between those. Non-linear interactions (connectivity between agents) are symbolized by different colors . These colors are not an absolute representation of dynamic interactions and only serve to visualize non-linear system connectivity; interactions and similarities are therefore not an absolute representation of dynamic interactions in the heavy metal complex adaptive system

Hierarchical organization

The hierarchical organization of the metal complex adaptive system is based, from a structural point of view, on a series of “actors” and begins with the musician at the lowest operational level. Lowest operational level means that there are more levels down the hierarchy; that is, musicians as humans are built up of organs, cells, organelles, molecules and atoms but these levels are likely marginal for the understanding of the metal complex adaptive system. The structure of the complex adaptive system increases in complexity with increasing hierarchical level, which is reflected in an increasing number of actors. That is, the next level up the operational hierarchy of the metal complex adaptive system is the band comprising various musicians. Various bands playing similar musical styles collectively comprise the subgenre, the next level in the hierarchy (Table  2 ; Fig.  2 ). The highest operational level is the genre of heavy metal music. This level is not only composed of the plethora of musicians and bands across the multiple subgenres but also other actors from distinct social environments that interact with each other. These include fans, music producers, technologists, scientists from different fields (e.g., culture and art studies, anthropology, psychology), marketing professionals, and politicians. Combined, this broader community of different actors makes up the socio-musicological system that comprises the metal complex adaptive system. There are further levels up the hierarchy (e.g., the whole biosphere); however, these may go beyond the upper boundaries necessary for describing the structure of agents and thus the highest operational hierarchies of the metal complex adaptive system. This does not mean, however, that there aren’t functional linkages (some of these will be explored in the Synthesis section). That is, if the whole biosphere undergoes significant biophysical change it is likely that it will affect all the levels subsumed within it.

Information flow

Information flow and connectedness among the structural agents in complex adaptive systems is critical for system function and behavior. Connectedness reflects the structural linkages between agents in the complex adaptive system; these linkages can vary in strength and connect some agents more and others less in the system. For instance, musicians in a band are closer connected to each other than with the musicians of another band. Information flow reflects the functional linkages between the connected agents. That is, the “information” created from the vocalists, guitarists and drummers “flows” between the musicians and leads to the emergence of a song. This example shows that information flow in complex adaptive systems is goal oriented. Specifically, in the metal complex adaptive system it is the generation of a specific form of music that often reflects transgressive cultural and political norms and values (Kahn-Harris 2007 ; Brown 2011 ). These norms and values often build on the incorporation of pornographic and forensic themes in their lyrics (e.g., pornogrind, grindcore; Table  2 ). To this end, agents need to be connected within and across hierarchical levels (Allen et al. 2014 ), but these connections follow certain rules and vary in strength. In the metal complex adaptive system, individual musicians either act as front man, play the guitar, bass, drums, occasionally synthesizers, and sometimes subgenre specific instruments (Table  2 ). The rule is that different combinations of these musicians are needed to qualify as a metal band that generates that specific style of music (metal; not classical music). A choir composed of only singers does not qualify as a metal band that plays metal music.

At the band level of the metal hierarchy, the information flow, which comprises the distinctive and characteristic series of sound structure that emerges from the combination of vocals and instruments, is manifested in a song architecture that characterizes the band’s label. For instance, doom metal bands typically use slower tempos, low-tuned guitars, and “thicker” or “heavier” sound than other metal subgenres, and the music and lyrics evoke a sense of despair, dread, and impending doom. In metalcore and deathcore, a harsher version of metalcore, a distinguishing characteristic is the breakdown, whereby the song is slowed and the guitarists play open strings to achieve the lowest-pitched sound. Folk metal blends heavy metal with traditional folk music, including the widespread use of folk instruments and, to a lesser extent, traditional singing styles. These examples show the higher within-subgenre similarity rather than between-subgenre similarity of band styles, and more broadly how subgenres are connected. Metalcore and deathcore with their breakdowns are more similar to each other than to death metal and trash metal without breakdowns. However, when compared with symphonic metal and classic metal, which are more melodic subgenres, the former metal subgenres become more similar to each other with their overall harshness and aggression. Sometimes metal subgenres are so similar to each other that it is difficult to draw boundaries (Tsatsishvili 2011 ). As a result, some umbrella terms have been defined that unite similar metal subgenres (Table  2 ).

That agents in a complex adaptive system are linked and information flows with different strengths among agents reflects another critical hallmark of complex adaptive systems, their nonlinear patterns and processes. Such non - linearity can be seen in different patterns of connection of elements of the metal complex adaptive system. For instance, from a scientific viewpoint, many papers dealing with metal have been published in psychology, meaning that there is high information flow and connectedness between metal and psychology (Brown 2011 ). To my knowledge none exists between the music and complexity and sustainability science, highlighting the lack of connectedness and information flow between these domains. There is no linear relationship when comparing connectedness in these examples. Similarly, from a cultural-political perspective, Western music is more connected to metal than middle Eastern cultures, in which this form of music doesn´t meld well with cultural, religious and ethical belief models (Stanton et al. 2012 ). Metal is emerging in countries in Asia and Latin America (Wallach 2005 ; Varas-Díaz et al. 2014 ), and this emerging link suggests an increasing degree of connectedness of these countries with metal.

Connectedness also has a temporal, dynamic dimension, operating at different speeds across hierarchical levels in the metal complex adaptive system. A metal song typically lasts from seconds to minutes. A subgenre needs years to develop. Metal has now evolved over the past 5 decades. These temporal patterns are also nonlinear, and can comprise a feature characteristic of complex adaptive system dynamics: delays (Table  1 ). The different speeds also have implications when delays can be perceived. A delay in a complex adaptive system becomes evident when accumulated structural and functional changes in the system suddenly become evident (Table  1 ). At the song level, such delays are often manifested in unusual time signatures, resulting from unrhythmic patterns when sound elements are synchronized or unsynchronized with lags. This is a characteristic of mathcore, grindcore, and progressive metal. In songs from these subgenres rhythmic delays can be perceived immediately. Other metal subgenres (symphonic metal, power metal) are more melodic and are therefore characterized by fewer rhythmic delays.

At the other extreme, at the highest operational level, the perception of delays might not be easy because current system dynamics operate so slowly that their effects eventually manifest in the future, as is the case with substantial biophysical change in social-ecological systems (Folke et al. 2004 ). Metal is currently seeing transforming social perceptions and music industries. Music digitalization, rapid popularization of online streaming services (YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, SoundCloud), subscription models, and social media websites facilitate broad exposure. Quickly expanding regional and global metal markets, festivals, and conferences enable social engagement worldwide (Seppi and Stoycheva 2015 ). In this regard, metal shows a similar “teleconnection” as social-ecological systems (Adger et al. 2009 ). That is, geographically disparate regions are becoming increasingly connected and one region may affect another remote area due to this global connectivity (e.g., metal styles that have emerged in Sweden [djent] may inspire metal in the USA and elsewhere). In social-ecological systems, for example the production of food and fiber shows similar teleconnection (Rist et al. 2014 ).

It is clear that the globalization of metal, and music in general, can lead to novel interactions. A case in point is the interaction of metal with other musical genres or sounds from emergent technologies. Nintendocore exemplifies how chiptune elements and other sounds from video gaming (a technological invention) can entrain heavy metal music, leading to a new subgenre. Alternative metal, especially its crossover forms rap metal and nu metal, incorporate elements from hip hop music, a form of contemporary music characterized by rapping (chanted rhythmic and rhyming speech). On the other hand, symphonic metal and cello metal emphasize a strong classical component, particularly in terms of instrumentation used.

Metal is influenced by other genres, but also affects other musical genres. For instance, certain metal elements are reflected in brostep, an emergent form of dubstep, which is a genre of electronic dance music. These interactions between metal subgenres and other music forms and technological inventions exemplify a vast potential and source of dynamic interactions between complex adaptive systems (Kahn-Harris 2007 ; Brown 2011 ). These dynamic interactions often follow from the constant recalibration of a complex adaptive system in response to a changing environment. However, the outcomes of these dynamics are currently highly uncertain, partly because of delayed responses that might arise from these interactions. Delays, or time lags, also make predictions of when and why systems are changing extremely challenging.

Uncertainty, highlighted in the above examples, is a general phenomenon in complex systems dynamics. It stems from the stability of current patterns and processes in a resilient complex adaptive system. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to maintain structures and functions in the face of disturbances, and when this capacity is exceeded systems reorganize into a new regime with different structures and functions (Holling 1973 ). Critical to the understanding of resilience are feedbacks, or feedback loops, that arise from the flow of information and connectivity in the complex adaptive system.

Feedback loops

As is the case with many complex adaptive systems (Sterman 1994 ), there are potentially far more feedbacks in the metal socio-musicological system than can be currently envisioned and enumerated in this paper. However, some examples shall help make the point that feedback loops essentially contribute to complex adaptive system dynamics in metal.

There are reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, and these can operate within and across hierarchical levels in the complex adaptive system and affect processes from both directions in the loop (Meadows 2008 ). Imagine at the band level agreement among musicians and similar opinions about music style and where to perform concerts. Based on these criteria, bands compose new songs and make a new release or concert. After each release or gig the band composes new songs and releases a new album and presents it at another festival. The band works in a balancing feedback loop, whereby the generation of new music is partly contingent on the music created before. In this calibration process, the musicians and the band at large learn, and this learning process builds the source for future experimentation and innovation. A reinforcing feedback loop becomes evident when there is disagreement and escalating conflict between band members; that is, the reinforcing feedback loop results in an initial conflict that increases over time to further even more conflict in the future. Less cooperation can lead to less songs being produced and consequently fewer releases and/or concerts. With increasing escalation of conflict learning, experimentation and innovation is de-emphasized, contributing to a downward spiral that can culminate in the band´s dissolution. There can be of course other factors (personal, professional) leading to the disappearance of a band.

Balancing and reinforcing feedbacks at the band level may scale up to the next hierarchy, the subgenre level of metal. When balancing feedback loops dominate over reinforcing feedback loops, the whole subgenre is likely to persist and further develop. If the relationship is inverse, a subgenre likely disappears. Balancing and reinforcing feedback loops have influenced metal subgenres distinctly. For example, many subgenres see a rapid diversification into derivative styles, based on the constant recalibration resulting from learning that balances feedback loops. For instance, alternative metal diversified into nu metal and funk metal, and death doom, drone metal, funeral doom, and sludge metal derived from doom metal (Table  2 ). The New Wave of British Heavy Metal that peaked between 1975 and 1985 and which has seen posterior reformation exemplifies that feedback loops can change over time.

Broader social-political environments can exemplify feedback loops at the highest operational hierarchies. Western countries do not generally impose restrictions on cultural, artistic, and scientific development within permitted legal settings. This contributes to and facilitates recalibration, innovation and progress across social environments, and ultimately systemic evolution. As stated before, there are many feedbacks operating between the constantly developing scientific, musicological, economic and marketing aspects in the metal socio-musicological system that ultimately allows it to evolve. On the other hand, in many countries with conservative politics or specific belief models there are more restrictions to development. Progress is often limited due to suppressive and penalizing action that may reinforce incompatibilities between cultural models. Such incompatibilities can be reinforced to such an extent as to lead to violent action, as witnessed during the recent terror attacks at a metal concert in Paris. So too, is the use of heavy metal (and children´s TV programs Barney and Sesame Street) in psychological operations used in a negative context, for instance during the interrogation of detainees (BBC 2003 ) that can reinforce hard feelings towards metal. These examples highlight that top hierarchies are connected to and influence behavior at lower levels.

In short, metal has seen an expansion and gain in world-wide popularity (Trilling 2007 ), despite some periods of turmoil in the 1990s that forced musicians to distance themselves from the genre, due to a plethora of factors including aversion by the media and music industry (Konow 2002 ). Despite this, metal has been resilient to this disturbance. It shows that balancing feedback loops have dominated over reinforcing feedback loops thus far in the evolution of metal.

In summary, the broader dynamics of metal abides within a dynamic state space that adapts and flexes constantly based on the complex interaction of agents in the system (Lansing 2003 ; Frenken 2006 ), dynamics which can be seen in art at large (Levine and Levine 2011 ). Social theory on diffusion of art forms shows that some elements climb up and thrive in this state space, and others fizzle out as dead ends based on the structure of social interactions (reminiscent of the viral dynamics of marketing; Leskovec et al. 2007 ). The state space of the metal socio-musicological system comprises similar complex dynamics driven by endogenous and exogenous factors (social perception, changes in music production and routes of exposure, human behavioral, cognitive, and cultural aspects) and interactions. Ultimately, these dynamics highlight the ability of the metal complex adaptive system to persist in broader social and cultural environments. It has become a self-organizing, self-maintaining, resilient socio-musicological system.

Metal and environmental sustainability

The previous section emphasized the scientific component of heavy metal music (Brown 2011 ) and explored its merger with complexity science to describe the emergence of a complex socio-musicological system. This section uses an independent line of inquiry. It emphasizes the artistic component of heavy metal and explores its use as an educational tool to increase people’s awareness about environmental sustainability challenges on planet Earth that undergoes fast change in climate, ecological, economic, production, communication and other technological systems (i.e. global change) (Folke et al. 2002 ; Berkes et al. 2003 ; Walker et al. 2004 ). The use of metal music as a critical thinking and educational tool has been recently highlighted (Angeler et al. 2016 , Schmaltz 2016 ).

Sustainability science is concerned with the ability of systems of people and nature to adapt to changing social-environmental baselines (Kates et al. 2001 ). Natural disasters (floods, wildland fires, hurricanes, infectious diseases), terrorism, or mass migrations of people due to humanitarian crises have increasingly shattered the world in recent years. In its extreme form, the entire globe can undergo a fundamental reorganization because of the broader overexploitation of resources and climate change (Rockström et al. 2009 ; Hughes et al. 2013 ). There is much uncertainty about global change outcomes, but negative consequences (conflicts, health problems) and associated human tensions (distress, aggression, depression, torture, despair) are and will likely become a more common denominator in people´s lifes in the future (Horner-Dixon 1991 ; McMichael et al. 2008 ). Sustainability science is in critical need of qualitative and quantitative approaches to address these and many more consequences that result from global change, to facilitate citizens’ comprehension of the scientific and potential policy dimensions of environmental change, especially because it is the general public that bears the costs of transformation and adaptation measures (Angeler 2016 ).

Here, metal is explored as one qualitative tool that provides a critical thinking and education model about such complex challenges. Artists and scientists are increasingly collaborating (e.g., EcoArt movement) to communicate the nature of problems, heighten awareness of ecological concerns, search for new solutions, and design ecological activity to enable public action (Kagan 2014 ). A series of approaches is used to communicate environmental change problems, ranging from realistic (e.g. photography) to abstract, often aiming to elicit human tensions (Peeples 2011 ). Shock tactics are often used to reinforce the surprise component and stimulate people´s learning and long-term memory formation (Timms 2004 , Lisman and Grace 2005 ). With regards to art, and similar to the Dada movement in the early twentieth century, it has been argued that forms of heavy metal have systematically transgressed the boundaries of the accepted in the auditory arts (Kahn-Harris 2007 ), and other music forms (e.g., post-punk, New Complexity School) might similarly deviate from these boundaries. This suggests that metal can symbolize artistically when change potentially takes people out of comfort zones.

Although not unique to metal music alone, individual subgenres of metal (Table  2 ) have song structures that become allegorical to and can symbolize specific aspects of human tensions associated with disturbances in social-ecological systems (e.g., natural disasters, terrorist attacks, humanitarian crises; see below). Songs from these subgenres can be linked with these specific social-ecological system challenges artistically, although these specific links are entirely subjective, as many artistic expressions are in general. I showcase this potential with selected examples (Table  3 ) from a potentially vast spectrum of application. Note that band and song names are of subordinate importance in symbolizing these sentiments. That is, although the songs were not always written to intentionally make the connection to environmental sustainability challenges, it is possible to draw a comparison between the sounds and lyrics the music inspires in many people´s emotions and sustainability challenges. In the examples below, emphasis is placed on contextualizing metal songs with specific environmental change challenges from which emotional reactions in people possibly ensue. The metal allegories comprise an approach, based on the visual arts (Thomsen 2015 ), which has potential to reconceptualize “hearing” as “questioning”. That is, the allegorical expression of environmental change issues through metal might trigger a chain of questioning: for instance, what is environmental change and why do we need to study it? How do these challenges relate to sustainability? What are elements of uncertainty and surprise, and how do they manifest? This process can improve learning and connect people more closely with environmental sustainability issues (e.g., Ryan 2001 ; Angeler 2016 ). A combination of metal with visual underpinnings (e.g., photography; Thomsen 2015 ) may further bolster people´s connection to environmental change problems. Also, there is precedence in the use of metal sound tracks to provide auditory support in war (Black Hawk Down), horror (Valentine), action/science fiction (The Matrix), or fantasy (The Crow) movies and film series (Resident Evil). O’Brien ( 2012 ) deals specifically with the use of metal in combat movies.

Metal, human tensions and environmental sustainability

Disturbances as manifestations of social-ecological system dynamics can be associated with a variety of metal subgenres that are allegorical to human emotions. That is, these subgenres have the necessary diversity to characterize allegorically distinct sustainability issues and experiences and sentiments of people prior, during and after disturbances.

In a social-ecological context, imagine a society that lives in a peaceful environment, urban or rural, where their basic requirements for livelihood are covered, including recreational and other services provided by nature. People live with a sense of relative security and happiness. These conditions and sentiments can be expressed with the more melodic symphonic metal subgenre or power metal that seeks to empower the listener and inspire joy and courage. However, the sense of security can be false when people take their comfort for granted. Occasionally sludge metal, and stoner metal with its psychedelic elements, which reflects a temporary altered state of consciousness induced by the consumption of psychedelic drugs, can symbolize feelings of false reality or security as catastrophes can happen at any time.

With climate change, the frequency, duration and magnitude of disturbances are altered. For instance, devastating wildfires or extreme precipitation events that result in flashfloods occur more often in a changing climate (Christensen and Christensen 2003 ; Gillett et al. 2004 ). The devastation of torrential floods or wildfires occurs relatively fast, causing death and destroying the basis of people’s livelihoods. Metal genres with fast tempo and overall aggression in sound and vocals, like speed metal or trash metal, can symbolize the fast devastation when floods or fires unleash and peoples reactions to these catastrophes. People´s despair, agony and suffering in the aftermath of these disturbances becomes allegorical to many sentiments that doom metal inspires with slower tempos, low-tuned guitars and thick/heavy sounds.

Similar sentiments can be expressed with social disturbances. The world currently witnesses large scale human migrations caused by war. The sense of agony of people fleeing their countries with an associated loss in economic and social potential, culminating in humanitarian catastrophe, can be brought to mind with the sentiments death doom and funeral doom inspire. Crust punk and grindcore, which consciously emphasize political and social ills, can symbolize the sources of conflict that can result from corrupted and/or authoritarian governance regimes.

Chaos and uncertainty are high during and immediately after disturbances, resulting in discomfort from not knowing how the disturbance will end or what the future holds. Uncertainty and chaos may be associated with the patterns of mathcore’s, grindcore’s, and progressive metal´s rhythmic complexity. These subgenres are characterized by unusual time signatures, atonality and dissonance in the manifestation of song elements that are reminiscent of chaos. The listener is constantly challenged to digest and anticipate dynamically interacting and often antithetical sound patterns and rhythm structures. These metal subgenres, along with other types of media and art, have therefore high potential to increase people´s awareness about the sentiments and behavior of uncertainty and chaos that people may experience as a result of natural disasters.

Similar applications of metal allegories can be used in other contexts, highlighting their broader use to symbolize disturbances in social-ecological systems. There is a wide range of social issues that lend themselves to the emotional content of metal, such as the stresses particular to urban living for instance, recurring overarching problems in public transportation during rush hours, attacks in schools, or broad-scale terrorist massacres in urban public places.

In social-ecological systems disturbances can ultimately lead to wider systemic changes resulting in substantial reorganization of the system’s structure, function and dynamics (i.e., regime shifts). Regime shifts occur when for example a shallow lake with clear water and submerged vegetation shifts into a nutrient-enriched, turbid-water regime with frequent algal bloom outbreaks. This nutrient-enriched regime is stable, meaning that the lake will not return to a clear-water regime without substantial management. Such systemic changes of social-ecological systems can be explored through metal songs from distinct subgenres. Regime shifts per se that characterize the non-linear transitions between system regimes can be characterized with metalcore and deathcore songs. These songs symbolize the dynamism inherent in non-linear transitions in the form of “breakdowns” that introduce sudden changes in beat and rhythm patterns in a song; that is, breakdowns in metalcore and deathcore is figurative of the existence of and can inspire people about dynamic changes between alternative regimes in social-ecological systems. A further systemic aspect of social-ecological system change becomes evident when systems have shifted and locked in a new regime after a disturbance threshold has been passed. Similarly to the above examples of sentiments people may experience in the aftermath of a disturbance, metal allegories based on more abrasive and harsher black metal, can be used to characterize the persistence of an undesired post-disturbance regime; for instance, when a system locks in poverty traps, which are characterized by limited access to credit and capital markets, extreme environmental degradation (which depletes agricultural production potential), corrupt governance, capital flight, poor education systems, disease ecology, lack of public health care, war and poor infrastructure (Bonds et al. 2010 ). To demonstrate such cases, metal can be used to increase people´s awareness that systems are often not able to rebound from disturbances, but rather become trapped in an undesirable regime for humans, and which are very difficult to escape (e.g., Cinner et al. 2009 ).

The preceding sections explored hitherto nonexistent links between metal, an auditory art, complex adaptive systems and environmental sustainability science along two independent dimensions; that is, from a socio-musicological systems point of view and an environmental education/awareness perspective (Fig.  1 ). These lines of inquiry show that metal as an art form has potential to describe distinct and independent facets of the complexity of systems of people and nature. The paper concludes with an examination of the overarching implications that may derive from the merger of these independent explorations.

There are many different complex adaptive systems in systems of people and nature (Sundstrom et al. 2014 ). Arguably, art comprises a complex system that is embedded in a broader social-cultural-environmental complex adaptive system (Fig.  1 ). Within the arts there are many forms and genres that might be nested and interacting complex adaptive systems. Using heavy metal as an example, this paper shows how a musical form can become its own complex adaptive system or socio-musicological systems. Such systems are often artificially separated in scientific research, which impedes the development of appropriate models and knowledge of system dynamics. The emergence of metal not only reflects cultural change in modern societies, its dynamics follow those described for complex adaptive systems. Metal thus provides a valuable addition to complex adaptive systems research and further highlights that considering the arts as a form of complex adaptive system is long overdue. The bottom line is that it is uninformative to consider the arts and sciences as discrete units (Friedenwald-Fishman 2011 ). The arts and the basic and applied dimensions of science are integral to humanity. People cannot be understood as separate from our environment, be it ecological, cultural, political.

Heavy metal diversifies and evolves fast in response to rapidly changing social and technological factors. These dynamics mirror the equally rapid changes in the ways modern human societies interact with the environment, and which are driven by the same factors (exemplified by the social-ecological systems dimension in Fig.  1 ). However, the interactions between people and the environment have reached dimensions that have become potentially detrimental to the planets capacity to support humankind (Rockström et al. 2009 ). Although it is highly uncertain how current patterns of human-environment interactions will unfold in the future, several social-ecological challenges, as those exemplified in this paper, will likely interfere with mankind’s welfare and the way humans interact with each other. Tribal societies have for thousands of years used music as an art form to express sentiments about and show emotional responses to phenomena observed in nature (Morely 2013 ). The counter-culture arts (Dada, Surrealism) of the 1920s in Europe both informed and were informed by socio-cultural-political revolutions, including rejection of traditional modes of authority and conservative societies. Those revolutions in the cultural landscape were connected partly to the music that helped drive those changes, as well as reflected those changes (LeBaron 2002 ). Similar dynamics can be observed in this Millennium, exemplified with the dynamics of heavy metal as a complex socio-musicological system.

Exploring apparently unrelated connections between different disciplines and art movements, such as surrealism and quantum physics (Parkinson 2008 ), or mental illness and political leadership (Ghaemi 2011 ), have shown opportunities for scientific inquiry that are not commonly practiced in academic circles. However, such lines of exploration open ways for a broader understanding of complex adaptive systems and have potential to inform our ability to understand, predict, and cope with their dynamics and change. It was the aim of this paper to show that the use of heavy metal as an art form can contribute to such an endeavor, exploring the use of the music to inform two different areas of scientific inquiry, complexity and sustainability science. While novel in itself, the independent discussions of the contribution of metal to the basic and applied sciences begs the question how metal as a socio-musicological system (Dimension 1; Fig.  1 ) and as a tool for environmental education (Dimension 2) are linked. Both dimensions entrain with each other and a plethora of other dimensions of social-ecological system dynamics not discussed in this paper to lead to the emergence of a broader social-cultural-environmental system (Fig.  1 ). The emanation of such a broader system cannot be explained simply by the sum of individual explorations of dimensions. In these dynamics the individual dimensions behave like actors that weave together and inform cultural, social and environmental facets in a broader complex adaptive system. Imagine a human body where the central nervous system modulates sensory, visual, auditory and olfactory stimuli. These processes are likely independent from each other and operate in distinct lobes of the brain, yet all are integral to the functioning of human live and coordinated by complex adaptive processes of the central nervous system. Music and its application to complexity and sustainability science can be similarly considered as independent; however, both are integral to human society and coordinated by broader social-cultural-environmental dynamics (Fig.  1 ). The patterns described for the brain and social-cultural-environmental systems are analogous and lay at the very heart of complex adaptive system dynamics described in this paper.

In conclusion, heavy metal, complexity theory, and sustainability science are not mutually exclusive. Together they become poietic in Plato´s sense; that is, bringing into existence the previously inexistent in endeavors to better understand the broader dynamics of and the multidimensional ramification of environmental change on complex systems of people and nature. Progress in human culture occurs in concert with, rather than independently of, art, science and the environment. Thus, there is need for integral models for envisioning and potentially dealing with the complexity of fast-changing social-ecological baselines that currently affect and are affected by humanity. Connecting the arts and sciences has enormous potential to provide learning opportunities about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns associated with global change problems. Combining apparently unrelated entities, like heavy metal music and different scientific disciplines, may help people better envision and boost critical thinking about the complexity that drives the dynamics of broader social-cultural-environmental systems. Such approaches are necessary to facilitate citizens’ comprehension of the scientific and potential policy dimensions of environmental change, especially because it is the general public that bears the costs of a transforming planet.

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Acknowledgements

This paper has been conceived of and written during a period of personal turmoil. I thank my family, María José, Michael and Carmen, for their unconditional love, and my friends, colleagues, students and health care professionals for support. Their help has converted my crisis into opportunity. Feedback by Shana Sundstrom, María José García, Sophia Renes, Magnus Nilsson, Didier Baho, Stina Drakare, and anonymous reviewers is acknowledged. The Swedish Research Councils VR and Formas provided financial support. This paper is dedicated to my late grandmother, Theresa Camilleri.

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The author declares that he has no competing interests.

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Angeler, D.G. Heavy metal music meets complexity and sustainability science. SpringerPlus 5 , 1637 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-016-3288-9

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-016-3288-9

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Classical Antiquity in Heavy Metal Music

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Interesting Research about Heavy Metal Music Impact on Students Performance

by Metal Insider | Dec 29, 2020 | News Around the World | 0 comments

Heavy metal music has been long seen as a genre associated with ideas of violence, suicide and death and even mass shootings. Recent research shows that heavy metal music can have positive effects as well, with the genre being a source of catharsis and even motivation.  So, can metal music be useful in boosting the academic performance of students? This article is all about answering this question.

Change in Outlook through Metal Music

Heavy Metal Music came at an age where people developed a negative attitude towards the systems of the world and started having outlooks opposite to those that divide different behaviors into the categories of good and bad.  This retaliation against norms and beliefs, along with the coarseness of the music, make metal music a genre not appreciated by everyone. Those that listen to this music are seen as people spiraling into chaos.  But research considers how this outlook changing genre could lead to new ideas in terms of logical reasoning and even scientific thinking, bringing new ideas to compete with the existing ones. 

A Cathartic Genre 

There’s always a lot of pent up stress and frustration among students. Metal music, with its loud music and distinct sound, helps people relieve themselves of frustration.  As students, stress and anxiety can come from a variety of sources, be it a big bunch of notes gathered in the last class or the huge number of assignments to finish in the next two days.  Not only that, we all struggle with our personal lives, with heartbreaks and unrequited love, bad decisions and an almost empty bank account. There are options in the form of EduBirdie though, a renowned  term paper writing service  that can help with academic assignments at affordable prices. Also when you fail to write essays while studying something more important, you can take help from this academic writing service.  Metal music can help channelize the anger and frustration that might be build up inside. While meditation works for some, metal music works for others. 

Metal Music Can Pump You Up

Studying can get boring and tiring. But metal music can help bring back energy in your mind and body to get back to your chair and start studying again.  Metal music includes many distinct and sharp notes, something your brain picks up as an alerting signal. As your brain focuses on these notes, it’s pumped up and more vigil, thus taking in every piece of information it is fed with more interest than it did before.  Consider this as a brain exercise or even a shot of caffeine, waking your brain up from its nap and pushing it to learn the information it is being fed. So if you’re a student wanting to wake up early and sitting down to study, try listening to Guns and Roses in the morning and you’ll see yourself sitting down with enthusiasm you’ve never even imagined!

Improvement in Cognitive Functioning

Talking about brain exercise, metal music and its rhythmic music can help exercise those brain muscles that are constantly tracking every beat and note in the song, which is quite a rigorous exercise for your brain when it’s listening to heavy metal music.  Research  shows that students who listen to heavy metal music end up developing better focus, faster reaction times, and greater memory power. Metal music can further motivate students to work on exercising the brain constantly, thereby improving the effect it has on their academic performance and  physical health .

Memorizing With Music

Metal music cannot directly help you with greater memory power, but it can be a medium to  remember more effectively . How?  When it comes to memorizing, one of the most efficient ways is music. You can fit a sheet of notes or a definition into a rhythm that exists and sing it back to yourself whenever you need it. We all remember the rhythms of songs, don’t we? So why not use it to memorize the most boring of concepts?  Metal music can help you remember these concepts by embedding them into the songs. Another way is to learn a concept while listening to a song. This way, if you remember the song, you can remember the concept as your brain had made an association between the two when you were studying before.

Visualizing Pictures

Metal music can help you visualize and while this may not help in every subject, you can listen to a song and imagine a scene that includes the concept. This can be used for pictorial representations in your book. Embed them in your brain along with your songs and you’ll be able to retrieve the image when you listen to the music.  While this may not work for everyone and might be a cause of distraction to many, you can try and see if this method can work for you. Do not go to an exam with blind faith, as it might not work for you. 

Metal music may not be as bad and negative as it has been termed for all this while. It can be of huge benefit to students while dealing with stress, emotions and demotivation and even provide some innovative ways of memorizing. So try it out and see if it works for you. 

Author Bio:

Paul Calderon works for a website as the lead blogger, article writer and editor and heads its lifestyle, politics and business sections. He’s also a part-time academic writer and is known for delivering winning essays in the same niches. In his free time, he loves watching live sports, reading novels and walking his dogs.

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Metal Music Research: Primary Sources

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What are Primary Sources?

Primary sources  are firsthand documents or items related to the subject you are studying. In heavy metal studies, primary sources can include interviews, newspaper accounts, autobiographies, fanzines (fan-made magazines), ephemera (like flyers, posters, ticket stubs), or even the music itself, depending on the angle of research. After you have done background research (see  Home ) and explored some  Scholarly Sources , your research should include at least some analysis of primary sources. 

A note on research with magazines : While PHSC subscribes to many databases, few include specialized popular music magazines, with the notable exception of  Rolling Stone .  Most magazines, some of which are profiled below, are not available for free online browsing (ie, behind a paywall). Often however, the websites will feature searchable archives. For specific articles from the history of rock journalism, visit the database  Rock's Back Pages . Full text results require a subscription, which PHSC does  not  currently have. However, the database is still useful as a finding aid, and the full-text may be available via Interlibrary Loan. Check with your librarian for more information. 

SEND BACK MY STAMPS! Metal History Through Fanzines

"SEND BACK MY STAMPS! is a site dedicated to reproducing interviews and ephemera from Fanzines produced in the early days of the (heavy/death/thrash/black etc.) metal underground. This era was notable for its pre-internet production of DIY media, that followed the punk tradition born out of the 80s, and gave life and communication to a disparate, global fan base within the then nascent thrash/death/black/grind underground." - from the website

Archive.org

The Internet Archive is a great place to find older band websites, magazines, podcasts, and all manner of ephemera related to heavy metal. Try searches for "heavy metal" and "metal magazine" and have fun exploring!

UCLA LSC Heavy Metal Archive

"The Collection of Heavy Metal Music Material (Collection 2269) is a group of books, documentary films, sound recordings, magazines, and archival material which includes biographies and autobiographies of members of Kiss, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Twisted Sister, lamb of god, Anthrax, and others" - from the website 

NOTE: Collection is not digitized, but a finding aid is available.

The Smoking Gun - Backstage

A unique collection of backstage riders, presented to promoters by every touring act, which detail specifications on stage design, sound systems, lighting, as well as an artist's wish list--from travel and billing to dressing room accommodations and meals. A fascinating look behind the scenes of touring life. 

Autobiographies

Autobiographies  are works written about a particular person by the person themself. These sources can be excellent ways to learn the stories of metal artists in their own words. 

Periodicals are some of the best primary sources to use for heavy metal music research.  Newspapers   may contain accounts of performances, interviews, discussions with fans, or descriptions of important events related to heavy metal music history. Below are links to a few of the best databases to search for newspaper articles.

Access world news from NewsBank provides full-text information and perspectives from over 600 U.S. and over 500 international sources, each with its own distinctive focus offering diverse viewpoints on local, regional and world issues. Each newspaper or wire service provides unique coverage of local and regional news, including specific information about local companies, politics, sports, industries, cultural activities, and the people in the community.

With unmatched U.S. news content from local, regional, and national sources, this resource is the largest of its kind. Its diverse source types include printed and online newspapers, blogs, journals, newswires, broadcast transcripts and videos. Explore a specific issue or event through the detailed coverage provided by local reporting or compare a wide variety of viewpoints from across the country on topics such as politics, business, health, sports, cultural activities and people.

Nexis Uni features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790.

"Kerrang! is a British weekly magazine devoted to rock and metal music, currently published by Wasted Talent. It was first published on 6 June 1981 as a one-off supplement in the Sounds newspaper." - From Wikipedia

Metal Forces

"Launched in the UK during the summer of 1983,  Metal Forces  quickly established itself internationally as one of the most influential publications in the promotion of heavy metal and hard rock. Totally independent, the ground-breaking magazine championed the early careers of artists like Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, Megadeth, Pantera and Sepultura – bands who at the time were virtually ignored by the mainstream rock press – and although  Metal Forces  was never a thrash publication per se, its coverage of the genre was unrivalled during the 1980s." - From the website

Metal Hammer

"Metal Hammer (sometimes written MetalHammer) is a monthly heavy metal and rock music magazine, published in the United Kingdom by Future and in several other countries by different publishers. Metal Hammer articles feature both mainstream bands and more unusual acts from the whole spectrum of heavy metal music." - from Wikipedia

Rolling Stone

"Rolling Stone is an American monthly magazine that focuses on popular culture... It was first known for its coverage of rock music and for political reporting by Hunter S. Thompson." - from Wikipedia

Full text available 08/09/1990 - present in Academic Search Complete

"Decibel  Magazine is the world’s foremost heavy metal authority. Based in Philadelphia, PA, we have never deviated from our original mission of exploring the past, present and future of extreme music. Since our debut issue (October 2004),  Decibel  has exhibited an insatiable curiosity for all things heavy, covering both the underground and mainstream with painstaking obsession and irreverent humor." - From the website

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• Last Updated: Jan 5, 2024 4:15 PM
• URL: https://libguides.phsc.edu/metalmusicresearch

Pilot Study: The Differential Response to Classical and Heavy Metal Music in Intensive Care Unit Patients under Sedo-Analgesia

Affiliations.

• 1 Clinical Neurophysiology, Hospital Universitario La Princesa, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
• 2 Biomedical Research Institute, Hospital Universitario La Princesa, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
• 3 Intensive Care Unit, Hospital Universitario de La Princesa, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
• PMID: 36992596
• DOI: 10.31083/j.jin2202030

Background: Music is considered a valuable method for stimulating patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) by enhancing their awareness and arousal. Although biographical music and auditory relative stimulation has been shown, responses to other types of music has not yet been addressed. The purpose of this study was to assess the brain responses in critically ill patients under sedo-analgesia to music that is highly different in features.

Methods: We measured the individual responses to three types of music: classical (ClassM, Mozart), dodecaphonic (DodecM, Schönberg), and heavy metal (HeavyM, Volbeat) in six critically ill patients (one male, five female, all between 53 and 82 years old) with primary brain pathology under sedo-analgesia. We analyzed the changes in each patient's electroencephalogram (EEG) band composition (delta, 1-4 Hz, theta 4-8 Hz, alpha 8-13 Hz, and beta 13-30 Hz) and synchronization throughout the scalp.

Results: In spite of the heterogeneity in the responses, ClassM did not change the basal activity, although there was a tendency toward a decrease in brain activity. DodecM increased the alpha and beta bands from the right hemisphere. However, HeavyM increased the delta and theta bands from the frontal lobes and the alpha and beta bands from most of the scalp. No significant changes in synchronization were observed.

Conclusions: Different types of music induce heterogeneous responses in the brain, suggesting that music interventions could affect the brain state of patients. HeavyM induced the greatest changes in brain responses, whereas ClassM showed a tendency to reduce brain activity. The result of this study opens the possibility of using different types of music as tools during the rehabilitation process.

Keywords: Mozart's effect; classical music; disorders of consciousness; dodecaphonic music; fast Fourier transform; heavy metal music; quantified EEG; synchronization.

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.

• Acoustic Stimulation / methods
• Aged, 80 and over
• Auditory Perception / physiology
• Critical Illness
• Electroencephalography / methods
• Intensive Care Units
• Middle Aged
• Pilot Projects

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• BJPsych Int
• v.14(2); 2017 May

Music and the brain: the neuroscience of music and musical appreciation

Michael trimble.

1 Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK, email ku.ca.lcu.noi@elbmirtm

Dale Hesdorffer

2 Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and Department of Epidemilogy, Columbia University, New York City, USA

Through music we can learn much about our human origins and the human brain. Music is a potential method of therapy and a means of accessing and stimulating specific cerebral circuits. There is also an association between musical creativity and psychopathology. This paper provides a brief review.

Art history is the unfolding of subjectivity…. (T. Adorno)

An evolutionary perspective

There have been many attempts to identify behaviours which reliably distinguish our species, Homo sapiens , from our closest living cousins. Ascribed activities, from tool-making to having a theory of mind and empathy, have been rejected, as observations of anthropologists and ethnologists continue to emphasise similarities rather than differences placing us within the great chain of beings. There can be no doubt about the greater development of our cognitive attributes, linked closely with the evolutionary developments of our brain, in terms of both size and structure. Bipedalism, the use of fire, the development of effective working memory and our vocal language efficient communication have all emerged from these genetic–environmental adaptations over several million years (Pasternak, 2007 ).

Two features of our world which are universal and arguably have been a feature of an earlier evolutionary development are our ability to create and respond to music, and to dance to the beat of time.

Somewhere along the evolutionary way, our ancestors, with very limited language but with considerable emotional expression, began to articulate and gesticulate feelings: denotation before connotation. But, as the philosopher Susanne Langer noted, ‘The most highly developed type of such purely connotational semantic is music’ (Langer, 1951 , p. 93). In other words, meaning in music came to us before meaning given by words.

The mammalian middle ear developed from the jaw bones of earlier reptiles and carries sound at only specific frequencies. It is naturally attuned to the sound of the human voice, although has a range greater than that required for speech. Further, the frequency band which mothers use to sing to their babies, and so-called motherese or child-directed speech, with exaggerated intonation and rhythm, corresponds to that which composers have traditionally used in their melodies. In the same way that there is a limited sensitive period in which the infant can learn language and learn to respond to spoken language, there must be a similar phase of brain development for the incorporation of music.

One of the differences between the developed brains of Homo sapiens and those of the great apes is the increase in area allocated to processing auditory information. Thus, in other primates the size of the visual cortex correlates well with brain size, but in Homo sapiens it is smaller. In contrast, increases in size elsewhere in the human brain have occurred, notably in the temporal lobes, especially the dorsal area that relates to the auditory reception of speech. The expansion of primary and association auditory cortices and their connections, associated with the increased size of the cerebellum and areas of prefrontal and premotor cortex linked through basal ganglia structures, heralded a shift to an aesthetics based on sound, and to abilities to entrain to external rhythmic inputs. The first musical instrument used by our ancestors was the voice. The ear is always open and, unlike vision and the eyes or the gaze, sound cannot readily be averted. From the rhythmic beating within and with the mother’s body for the fetus and young infant, to the primitive drum-like beating of sticks on wood and hand clapping of our adolescent and adult proto-speaking ancestors, the growing infant is surrounded by and responds to rhythm. But, as Langer ( 1951 , p. 93) put it, ‘being more variable than the drum, voices soon made patterns and the long endearing melodies of primitive song became a part of communal celebration’. Some support for these ideas comes from the work of Mithen, who has argued that spoken language and music evolved from a proto-language, a musi-language which stemmed from primate calls and was used by the Neanderthals; it was emotional but without words as we know them (Mithen, 2005 ).

The suggestion is that our language of today emerged via a proto-language, driven by gesture, framed by musicality and performed by the flexibility which accrued with expanded anatomical developments, not only of the brain, but also of the coordination of our facial, pharyngeal and laryngeal muscles. Around the same time (with a precision of many thousands of years), the bicameral brain, although remaining bipartite, with the two cooperating cerebral hemispheres coordinating life for the individual in cohesion with the surrounding environment, became differently balanced with regard to the functions of the two sides: pointing and proposition (left) as opposed to urging and yearning (right) (Trimble, 2012 ).

The experience of music

A highly significant finding to emerge from the studies of the effects in the brain of listening to music is the emphasis on the importance of the right (non-dominant) hemisphere. Thus, lesions following cerebral damage lead to impairments of appreciation of pitch, timbre and rhythm (Stewart et al , 2006 ) and studies using brain imaging have shown that the right hemisphere is preferentially activated when listening to music in relation to the emotional experience, and that even imagining music activates areas on this side of the brain (Blood et al , 1999 ). This should not be taken to imply that there is a simple left–right dichotomy of functions in the human brain. However, it is the case that traditional neurology has to a large extent ignored the talents of the non-dominant hemisphere, much in favour of the dominant (normally left) hemisphere. In part this stems from an overemphasis on the role of the latter in propositional language and a lack of interest in the emotional intonations of speech (prosody) that give so much meaning to expression.

The link between music and emotion seems to have been accepted for all time. Plato considered that music played in different modes would arouse different emotions, and as a generality most of us would agree on the emotional significance of any particular piece of music, whether it be happy or sad; for example, major chords are perceived to be cheerful, minor ones sad. The tempo or movement in time is another component of this, slower music seeming less joyful than faster rhythms. This reminds us that even the word motion is a significant part of e motion , and that in the dance we are moving – as we are moved emotionally by music.

Until recently, musical theorists had largely concerned themselves with the grammar and syntax of music rather than with the affective experiences that arise in response to music. Music, if it does anything, arouses feelings and associated physiological responses, and these can now be measured. For the ordinary listener, however, there may be no necessary relationship of the emotion to the form and content of the musical work, since ‘the real stimulus is not the progressive unfolding of the musical structure but the subjective content of the listener’s mind’ (Langer, 1951 , p. 258). Such a phenomenological approach directly contradicts the empirical techniques of so much current neuroscience in this area, yet is of direct concern to psychiatry, and topics such as compositional creativity.

If it is a language, music is a language of feeling. Musical rhythms are life rhythms, and music with tensions, resolutions, crescendos and diminuendos, major and minor keys, delays and silent interludes, with a temporal unfolding of events, does not present us with a logical language, but, to quote Langer again, it ‘ reveals the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach’ (Langer, 1951 , p. 199, original emphasis).

This idea seems difficult for a philosophical mind to follow, namely that there can be knowledge without words. Indeed, the problem of describing a ‘language’ of feeling permeates the whole area of philosophy and neuroscience research, and highlights the relative futility of trying to classify our emotions – ‘Music is revealing, where words are obscuring’ (Langer, 1951 , p. 206).

Musical ability and psychiatric disorder

There is an extensive literature attesting to some associations between creativity and psychopathology (Trimble, 2007 ). The links seem to vary with different kinds of high achievement, and mood disorders are over-represented. Although samples of creative people have a significant excess of cyclothymia and bipolarity, florid manic–depressive illness is relatively uncommon. Biographies of famous musicians are of considerable interest in exploring brain–behaviour associations. Attempts to transform descriptions of people from biographies into specific DSM diagnoses cannot achieve high levels of validity and reliability, since lack of autobiographical materials and reliable contemporary medical accounts makes any diagnostic formulation necessarily tentative. However, with regard to classical composers within the Western canon, it must be of considerable significance that there are so many who seem to have suffered from affective disorders, the incidence of mood disorders ranging between 35% and 40% (Mula & Trimble, 2009 ). It is possible that similar associations occur in non-Western composers, although studies have not been published. In contrast, none seems to have had schizophrenia. These results have importance in understanding the structure and function of the human brain, and suggest avenues for therapeutic investigation which will vary with diagnosis.

Music therapy

Music provides and provokes a response, which is universal, ingrained into our evolutionary development, and leads to marked changes in emotions and movement. The anatomical associations noted above suggest that music must be viewed as one way to stimulate the brain. Music provides a non-invasive technique, which has attracted much interest but little empirical exploration to date. The therapeutic value of music can be in part explained by its cultural role in facilitating social learning and emotional well-being. However, a number of studies have shown that rhythmic entrainment of motor function can actively facilitate the recovery of movement in patients with stroke, Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy and traumatic brain injury (Thaut, 2005 ). Studies of people with memory disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, suggest that neuronal memory traces built through music are deeply ingrained and more resilient to neurodegenerative influences. Findings from individual randomised trials suggest that music therapy is accepted by people with depression and is associated with improvements in mood disorders (Maratos et al , 2008 ). Further, the potential applications of music therapy in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism spectrum disorders, albeit intuitive, have led to psychotherapeutic uses aimed at directly evoking emotions.

Evidence suggests that music can decrease seizure frequency, stop refractory status epilepticus and decrease electroencephalographic spike frequency in children with epilepsy in awake and sleep states. We know that many people with epilepsy have electroencephalographic abnormalities and, in some people, these can be ‘normalised’ by music. In addition to the need for trials of musical interventions in epilepsy, we should also consider whether the results of sonification of an electroencephalogram, which directly reflects the time course of cerebral rhythms, may be used to entrain ‘normal’ brain rhythms in people with seizure disorders. Alteration of the electroencephalogram via biofeedback of different components of sonified electroencephalography, or modulation of the musical input to a stimulus that affects the emotional state of the patient and hence cerebral and limbic activity and cerebral rhythms, are therapeutic possibilities which are currently being investigated (Bodner et al , 2012 ).

These data suggest that the effects and cost-effectiveness of music therapy in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders should be further explored. To date, most work has been done with Western-style compositions, and the well structured music of Mozart and Bach has been a popular basis for interventions. The following paper by Shantala Hegde notes the potential of other musical styles as therapy. Through music we learn much about our human origins and the human brain, and have a potential method of therapy by accessing and stimulating specific cerebral circuits.

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• Bodner, M., Turner, R. P., Schwacke, J., et al. (2012) Reduction of seizure occurrence from exposures to auditory stimulation in individuals with neurological handicaps: a randomized controlled trial . PLoS One , 7 , e45303. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Langer, S. K. (1951) Philosophy in a New Key . Harvard University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Maratos, A. S., Gold, C., Wang, X., et al. (2008) Music therapy for depression . Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews , ( 1 ), CD004517. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mithen, S. (2005) The Singing Neanderthals . Weidenfeld and Nicholson. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mula, M. & Trimble, M. R. (2009) Music and madness: neuropsychiatric aspects of music . Clinical Medicine , 9 , 83–86. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pasternak, C. (2007) What Makes Us Human . One World. [ Google Scholar ]
• Stewart, L., von Kriegstein, K. & Warren, J. D. (2006) Music and the brain: disorders of musical listening . Brain , 129 , 2533–2553. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thaut, M. H. (2005) The future of music in therapy and medicine . Annals of the New York Academy of Science , 1060 , 303–308. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
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• Trimble, M. R. (2012) Why Humans Like to Cry. Tragedy, Evolution and the Brain . Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]

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A professor worried no one would read an algae study. So she had it put to music

Dead fish washed ashore in a red tide in 2018 in Sanibel, Fla. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

Dead fish washed ashore in a red tide in 2018 in Sanibel, Fla.

An anthropology professor at the University of South Florida recently published a paper she knew barely anyone would read. At least, not outside her field.

The paper, co-authored with three other professors, had to do with the impact of algae blooms and depletion of coral reefs on the region's tourism industry. The work was glum, says Heather O'Leary . It involved tracking visitors' reactions to the environment on social media.

"Part of the data for months was just reading tweets: dead fish, dead fish, dead fish," she recalls. "We were really thinking every day about the Gulf of Mexico and the waters that surround us, especially in St. Pete as a peninsula, about those risks, and the risks to our coastal economy."

The Picture Show

Changing the climate of protest with aerial art.

But attending concerts at USF's School of Music inspired and gladdened her. So she reached out to its director of bands, Matthew McCutchen .

"I'm studying climate change and what's going down at the coral reefs," he remembers her saying. "And I've got all this data and I'd like to know if there's any way that we can turn it into music."

Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O'Leary says, in ways it simply does not on a spreadsheet.

Matthew McCutchen, Heather O'Leary and Hunter Pomeroy at the University of South Florida Symphonic Band & Wind Ensemble show at USF Concert Hall. Aiden Michael McKahan/University of South Florida hide caption

Matthew McCutchen, Heather O'Leary and Hunter Pomeroy at the University of South Florida Symphonic Band & Wind Ensemble show at USF Concert Hall.

"My students were really excited to start thinking about how the other students, the music students, heard patterns that we did not see in some of the repetitions," she says. With music, she added, "you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they're important."

In this case, she says, the patterns revealed the economic impact of pollution on coastal Florida communities. The complex challenge is a symptom of other, bigger problems. "The world is going to see more and more of these purportedly 'wicked problems,' the ones that take multiple people with different types of training and background to solve," O'Leary says.

Joe's Big Idea

Climate scientist tries arts to stir hearts regarding earth's fate.

The University of South Florida is excited about this composition . Other departments are getting involved, including communications, education and library science. Now, a group of faculty and students are working to bring together music and the environment in related projects, such as an augmented reality experience based on this composition. The group, which calls itself CRESCENDO (Communicating Research Expansively through Sonification and Community-Engaged Neuroaesthetic Data-literacy Opportunities) wants to spread awareness about the algae blooms, data literacy and democratizing science.

Edited for radio and the web by Rose Friedman. Produced for the web by Beth Novey. Produced for the radio by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento.

• science and music
• University of South Florida
• algae bloom