WHY BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY FEELS SO GOOD?

GLOSSARY

F

Frisson: The ‘chills’ response - a physiological response to music resulting in a shiver down the spine, goosebumps, and/or your hairs standing on end.

H

Hook: a hook is a musical idea, often a short riff, passage, or phrase, that is used in popular music to make a song appealing and to “catch the ear of the listener”.

M

Music Therapy: a fascinating field, where people use music in therapeutic ways, such as to help emotional development or to help people communicate.

P

Perception: is the process of your brain analysing those neural signals coming from the sense organs, f. ex. the ears, which turns them from a bunch of electricity into something that you experience as f. ex. sounds (including musical sounds).

Psychiatrist: is a medical doctor who has specialised in treating mental illness.

Physiological responses: this means that your body has physically changed after something happened. Examples might include your heart beating faster, your palms getting sweaty, your breathing getting shallower, your hands shaking, your whole body jumping in the air.

Physiology: the scientific study of bodies and their function (e.g., hearts, nerves, lungs, etc etc).

S

Sensation: is the process of converting a physical signal (for example, a vibration of the air) into a neural signal (neurons sending electrochemical impulses to each other).

Your task

Familiarise yourself with the terms and concepts in the glossary. You may want to refer back to it as we work through the course. You can download this glossary as a pdf or just refer back to this step. I have also explained the terms and concept, as we come to them, in the course work.

Are there any terms or concepts that surprised you?

Frisson - the French word for shudder used in English to describe that sensation of a thrill that combines chills and excitement.

Music has many uses, but one of the very important things about music in everyday life is that we use it to help us feel emotion. When we sing with others we can feel something similar to the emotions that they feel, at the same time. This makes us feel connected (DeNora, 2000). Think about another group of strangers singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in a restaurant; sometimes we just can’t help ourselves and join in even when we don’t know them.

In 1974, two psychologists, Dutton and Aron, did a very clever experiment that said some very interesting things about the way that emotions work. They set up their experiment not in a laboratory but in Capilano Suspension Bridge Park, which is a popular tourist attraction in Vancouver, Canada. There's two bridges in this park. One is a sturdy, paved bridge, the kind that you walk over without even thinking about it. The other is a suspension bridge that's high off the ground, and it wobbles, a lot. And in the middle of each of these two bridges, an attractive woman approached straight men as they were walking past on the bridge and asked them to do a quick survey.

Lots of men did the survey and then took an information sheet about the experiment that had a phone number to call if you wanted further information. However, the experimenters actually weren't really interested in the survey and what men said on the survey. What they were really interested in was how many men would call that number to try and ask out the attractive woman. And what they discovered was really fascinating. Men were much more likely to call that number if they'd been asked to do the survey on the scary, wobbly bridge rather than the sturdy, paved bridge. And what these results, and other experiments of this nature, show is that people can misinterpret the physical symptoms of emotions.

For example, if you're a straight male in Vancouver in 1974 and your heart races, it might be because you're in the middle of a scary, wobbly bridge. Or, it might be because you've just seen an attractive woman. Chances are that you prefer to think it was because of the attractive woman. No one wants to think of themselves as being scared of a silly bridge. And this says something important about emotion. Emotion is half about the physiological reactions you have and half about what you think about how you interpret them. And in the following steps we'll further explore what this means for the way that emotion works and the way that music exploits this.

What happens to how we react to music, if someone changes our brain chemistry?

When you watched the Capilano Suspension Bridge experiment video, you might have been a little confused if you expected this to be all about music. Sure, you might be thinking, the lesson of the experiment is that there is a cognitive component to emotion, plus a physiological component. But what does this have to do with music? And where does the brain fit into all of this?

Ultimately, if you have a thought, or if the hairs stood up on the back of your neck, that happened partially because your brain has been doing its thing. There is a network of neurons running through your whole system, not just the brain, allowing your brain to control your body.

Basically, the sadness you feel when you hear a sad song is still the same sadness you feel when you feel sad because of a personal tragedy, your brain’s workings have led to particular physiological and cognitive responses in both cases.

Changing brain chemistry

In 1980, a psychologist called Avram Goldstein did a fascinating experiment where he dosed students with naloxone and had them listen to music. The drug naloxone is a medication used to block the effects of opiates such as morphine or heroin, and which is sometimes used as part of drug rehabilitation treatments, or in the immediate aftermath of an overdose. Specifically, naloxone effectively blocks the release of a brain chemical called dopamine that would ordinarily be released when people take opiates, and which plays a role in the brain’s reward system. As a result, people who take naloxone simply don’t feel the rush they would ordinarily feel when taking opiates (which flood the brain with dopamine).

Goldstein administered a dose of naloxone to undergraduate students, and had them listen to music of their own choice. Goldstein found that the undergraduates who had been dosed with naloxone, on average, felt less goosebumps, and other bodily sensations, when they listened to their favourite music compared to students who’d been dosed with just salty water.

What this shows is that if you disrupt the chemical pathways in the brain that lead to the sensation of intense emotions (such as an opiate high), you also disrupt the chemical pathways that lead to the sensation of musical emotions. The emotions in music are very similar to the emotions you feel in everyday life when something happens that causes you to react.

Your task

You might remember the film ‘Lucy’, starring Scarlett Johansson, which was based on the premise that you only use 10% of the brain. Have a look around the web and see whether you can find any information about whether this claim that we only use 10% of our brain is true or false. What did you find? Use the comments link to discuss it with all of us.

Connect and collaborate

Let’s think about the information we learned in the last couple of steps.

In Activity 2 we’ve talked about

• the way that music connects us,
• the two-part nature of emotion, and
• the role of the brain in all of this

using examples like

• Goldstein’s naloxone experiment (where people didn’t have as many bodily responses to music), and
• the Capilano Suspension Bridge experiment (where people experienced ‘misattribution of arousal’, mistaking why they were feeling their heart race).

This is all very useful background knowledge to have when it comes to having an understanding of how a song like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ makes us feel good. We should first understand how feeling good works.

Your task

So here we want to see that you’ve got a good basic understanding of these principles of emotion. Use the discussion link below to talk about how you feel you’re going with the concepts. Additionally,

• Can you think of a time when you had thought you were feeling one emotion, but instead you realised that you were misinterpreting your bodily feelings (e.g., you thought you were panicking, but instead, you’d just had too much caffeine.) I had just that after an all-night of cramming and overdosing on Red Bull and Monster a few years ago - I had tachycardia and was feeling very cold, thinking at first it was psychological...
• The experiment with the naloxone is a bit creepy in a way. It’d be strange to not have your usual reaction to music simply because of a chemical. Can you think of other examples when you haven’t had the usual emotional reaction to music that you would ordinarily have? Perhaps if you were really tired, or in the wrong mood for the song. If so, explain that example to the other learners.

Music’s journey through the brain?

Music doesn’t just exist. We perceive music because we turn vibrations of the air into conscious experience. So how does that happen?

At a very basic level, the music that we hear, whether through headphones or through loudspeakers at a concert, is made up of vibrations of the air. This is all a loudspeaker (or a piano) does: it makes the air vibrate (Thompson, 2015).

We’re descended from animals who found it useful to know when the air vibrated around them, as it might usefully let you know that there is a snarling carnivore, let's say a sabertooth or a pack of direwolves, nearby trying to eat you.

Converting vibrations of the air to music

So when you listen to music, something very basic has to happen: you need to convert vibrations of the air into something that makes sense. Is that air vibration because of a lion? Or is it just the gong at the end of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?

There are two parts to this conversion: sensation and perception. For psychologists, sensation is the process of converting a physical signal (for example, a vibration of the air) into a neural signal (neurons sending electrochemical impulses to each other).

This is, fundamentally, what your ear does: it channels and amplifies sounds into a snail-shaped organ in the ear called the ‘cochlea’.

Different ‘hair cells’ of the cochlea detect higher or lower-pitched sounds (e.g., Freddie Mercury’s falsetto vs John Deacon’s bass guitar), and this detection triggers an electrical signal that gets sent to the brain. If you experience a ringing sound in your head after a concert, part of the reason for it is because of damage to hair cells in the cochlea (Wilson, 1980); because it’s easier to damage the parts of the cochlea that detect higher-pitched noises. This is why tinnitus (a constant ringing in the ears that some people experience) is often high-pitched.

Perceiving

In contrast to sensation, perception is the process of your brain analysing those neural signals coming from the ear, which turns them from a bunch of electricity into something that you experience as sounds (including musical sounds).

Your brain is made up of billions of neurons, which send electrochemical signals to each other, and which are organised within the brain in particular ways. Research suggests that large parts of a part of your brain called the ‘temporal lobes of the cortex’ which are physically just behind the ears, are devoted to analysing different parts of sounds as they come in. 

One part of the temporal cortex analyses the difference between different vowels in speech, while another part analyses the difference between rhythms in music.

If your temporal cortex becomes damaged, for example if you are in a car accident and something hits your head, you may find that you experience ‘amusia’ (Peretz, Champod, & Hyde, 2003), a condition where people find it difficult to tell the difference between different musical notes.

For instance, someone with amusia might find that musical sounds of different pitches all sound the same; one person with amusia has said that the (quite beautiful and relaxing) piano music of the composer Frédéric Chopin sounds to her like a lot of plates smashing.

Comparing new music to old

Essentially, for music to make sense to us, our brain has to constantly compare the notes and sounds we hear to notes and sounds we’ve previously heard.

In the previous step we talked about the distinction between sensation (what the ear does to convert air vibrations into neural signals) and perception (what the brain does with those neural signals to make them make sense), but we mostly focused on sensation. This step of the course will focus on perception and how the brain makes sense of the sounds that come in through the ears.

Recognising the relationships between new sounds and old sounds

The perception of music is often about recognising the relationships between new sounds and old sounds. At a very basic level, music is time-based. In a way time is the x-axis of music and, without time, everything in music would be smooshed together at once and wouldn’t sound very good.

So when you listen to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ you are comparing the note you’re hearing at any one moment with the note you have just heard. But musical comparisons can also be more long-term. You can recognise a recording you’ve heard years ago, or recognise the song even if you don’t know the recording.

For example, even if you haven’t heard the Muppets’ particular version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, or El Reno Renardo's 'Te das Queen', you can probably predict a lot of what will happen in the song because it’s still ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and you know ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. And to predict this, you have to have some sort of previous knowledge of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

One important thing your mind does to perceive music is not just recognition of particular songs, but specific patterns of notes being related to other notes in certain ways. Your mind can hear an aspect of music - say, a Bb major chord followed by a G minor chord - and very quickly analyse it to find out:

• how common that musical feature is,
• what other musical features it’s likely to be heard near, and
• in what music contexts you’re more likely to hear that chord.

So when you hear that Bb major chord in the first verse of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, as Freddie Mercury sings ‘mama’, followed by the G minor chord as he sings ‘killed a man’, your mind has analysed it. Whether or not you’ve heard the song before, your brain now has a set of expectations about what is likely to happen next.

This knowledge is why you can hear a film score while watching a film and know something about what you’re meant to be feeling about events on the screen.

Part of the reason why the Imperial March theme (of Star Wars fame) sounds ominous is because part of our brains are comparing it to other music we’ve heard previously and various bits of the music are like other things you’ve heard that denote feelings and situations like fear, anxiety, and power.

If you grew up hearing a very different style of music to the average Westerner, you are likely to have a whole different set of expectations about music to Westerners, because it’s all about what you’ve heard over your life.

If you are generally more used to Western music, have a listen to a Bollywood musical tune like ‘Hum Jab Simat Ke’ from the popular 1965 film Waqt. Without looking at the video the music accompanies, can you get a sense of the emotions and situations the song is meant to represent? If you listen to the music a second time, watching the video this time, does it change what you think the song is about? And if you are more familiar with Bollywood music, what do you think the song is about?

We like to think that music is the universal language, but unfortunately, it’s not quite true.

We might be able to get the general gist of what music from another culture means, but without experience of the statistics of that music, in terms of what notes typically come after what other notes, we are unlikely to intuitively understand the subtleties of what emotions the composers and singers of the song are trying to portray.

What all of this means, in sum, is that a major ingredient of the way we react to music is our musical expectations, based on a lifetime of listening.

Your task

Have a think about your previous familiarity with the kinds of music represented by the three audios suggested in this step above (the Muppets/El Reno Renardo, the Star Wars Imperial March theme, and ‘Hum Jab Simat Ke’). How often have you heard music like that previously? How might that familiarity with the music affect your reactions to that music? 

In the previous step of this course, we learned how the brain compares what you've just heard with what you come to expect in your decades of listening to music. And this might have come as something of a surprise to you. You may have thought, really? I don't know anything about music, let alone about the statistical frequencies of different notes. And the answer to that is that this all happens below the level of conscious awareness. The brain does a lot of things that we're just not aware of because being aware of them would just get in the way. And so we are mostly just aware of a resulting feeling or a thought coming into your mind from seemingly nowhere.

Skip to 0 minutes and 42 secondsIn music, a bunch of the processing which occurs is unconscious. And so while you might not personally know what these chords are-- [PLAYS JAZZY CHORDS] your brain has been analysing them. It's come across that sequence of chords before. And so when it hears it again, it compares the context. And the end result for you is probably a feeling of jazziness. And that's because this is just simply a very common set of chords in jazz. [PLAYS THE SAME CHORDS] One very common musical theme that you may or may not consciously notice is the truck driver key change. This is where, at the end of the song, they play the same refrain again but in a slightly higher key.

Skip to 1 minute and 30 secondsIt's sort of like the truck driver shifting from third to fourth gear. It's very easy to do. (SINGING) "How I wonder what you are / (ONE OCTAVE HIGHER) Twinkle twinkle little star." It's an effective trick that pop musicians use all the time. In some songs like "I Just Called To Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder or "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys, while Beyoncé does it four times at the end of "Love On Top" just to show you that she can. It's such a common cliché that there's websites complaining about it. So you might not have heard of the truck driver key change before.

But your brain has probably recognised it hundreds of times in your life and it's probably interpreted it as being a rise in the amount of excitement in the song, even if it is "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."

Though you think you may know nothing about music, there’s a part of your mind which you’re not consciously aware of, which does. Part of your perceptual systems are actively focused on comparing patterns of notes you’re listening to with patterns of notes you’ve heard previously.

In the video above, I talked about how this part of your mind has been processing what it has heard for decades, and about how this processing is not conscious. Most of the time, they’re feeling it, and that feeling is partially based on our unconscious knowledge of how music usually goes.

Consolidating your knowledge

Let’s take a moment to consolidate what we have learned and to explore further our reactions to music.

The last few steps have been a lot to take in, with

• explanations of how the brain works,
• how air vibrations get turned into sounds we hear, and
• an explanation of how expectations in the brain work.

Use this discussion to gather your thoughts and try to put it all together.

Your task

For this discussion I would like you to see if you can identify ways in which different people’s experiences with music might lead to them having different reactions to the same piece of music. What are some reasons why one person might love ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and another might not like it as much? (For example, it’s probably harder to love ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ if all music sounds to you like plates crashing, as it does for people with amusia.)

Base your posts on the knowledge you have gained in the last few steps of the course about:

• brain function,
• the workings of musical expectations, and
• about how sound works.

Additionally, feel free to discuss how you’ve reacted to some of the information in this activity, and which bits have confused you.

Our goal this week was to introduce you to music psychology, the psychology of emotions, and the neuroscience of music. How did we go?

Music psychology is a big field, because psychology is an enormous field, and the various ways that we interact with music are spattered across the field of psychology. In this course so far, you’ve only learned a few things about music psychology, but you’ve nonetheless been exposed to a whole bunch of information about how psychologists try to establish knowledge and how they approach music. In other words how psychologists think.

Our learners come from all walks of life, each with their own unique experiences of music.

For some of you, this course opens up an opportunity to think differently about music and emotions while for others, it will be a confirmation of what you already know.

It's been a terrific start to the course. Good work, everyone. It's been really fascinating reading your comments and seeing the differences in how people relate to music. Our aims this week, were to introduce you to the psychology of music, how expectations work, and really to get you thinking about emotions from a psychological angle. The example of the study with the Capilano Suspension Bridge should have helped you understand some basic principles about how our expectations influence our emotion. Additionally, you should now have a basic understanding of some of the core principles of music psychology, about how the brain processes music without our conscious awareness. 

Next week we'll draw these together and talk about specific songs, including "Bohemian Rhapsody." 

The week in review

Let’s recap and look forwards to what’s ahead when we meet again.

Thanks for joining us this week and I’m happy you’ve made it this far into the course. I hope you have enjoyed exploring the psychology and neuroscience backgrounds to

• how we turn air vibrations into sounds we perceive,
• what’s going on behind the scenes when we experience the emotions

Next week, we’re going to combine these insights into an understanding of how it all comes together when we have emotional reactions, like goosebumps, when we listen to music, and why some music might make us laugh.

**********************************************************************

Welcome back to the final week of the course. We’re so pleased you could join us as we continue our journey to understanding why Bohemian Rhapsody makes you feel so good.

In week 1, we discussed:

• the psychology of emotion and the psychology of music relatively separately.
• the pathways by which music enters your mind - the processes of sensation and perception
• the pathways by which we come to experience an emotion, noting the role of both physiological experience, goosebumps, and cognitive appraisal of that experience.

As a result, you’re probably wondering how these things go together.

The answer is fairly simple: to some extent, our emotions are not only physiological and cognitive but they’re also very much about the events that occur to us. We not only feel emotions, but we feel emotions about things.

This week, we will discuss how the physiological and cognitive come together in interpreting events. For example, a new section in a piece of music.

We will now move on to exploring how those ‘statistical expectations’ play a role in how we interpret the feelings we get from music.

We hope you're ready for another big week of thought-provoking ideas about how music makes us feel emotions. So last week, we discussed the psychology of emotions. We learned that emotions have both physiological component-- a quickening heartbeat, goosebumps, for example-- and how they have a psychological component, the way that we interpret these physiological symptoms. Additionally, we discussed how we have statistical expectations about how music usually goes based on all our decades of listening to music. Basically, the psychology of emotions and our musical expectations come together in explaining quite a lot of why a song like "Bohemian Rhapsody" makes us feel emotions.

And that is what we'll discuss this week, the specific ways in which our statistical expectations play a role in interpreting the physiological symptoms we get from music. So let's get started on week 2 and find out the details.

Music and emotion

Our emotions are not only physiological and cognitive but they’re also very much about the events that occur to us. We not only feel emotions, but we feel emotions about things.

This is where the cognitive appraisal previously mentioned comes in. We feel different things about an event depending on whether we expected it or not, and on the context of that event.

Surprise!

So, for example, you might walk into a dark-ish building when, suddenly, a bunch of people jump out at you and make a lot of noise. It might turn out that it’s a surprise birthday party for you. Or perhaps you genuinely don’t know these people and are about to get robbed or injured, or worse. In any case, it’s a surprise you weren’t expecting.

The point here is that your emotional reaction will be different depending,

• firstly, on what you expected to happen, and
• secondly based on what appears to be happening.

Perhaps you might have to pretend to be surprised, or you might turn that genuine surprise into a laugh or excitement… or you might try and flee the building.

Chemical Reward

You may have previously heard of the neurochemical dopamine, which I mentioned earlier as the brain chemical that floods the brain when people take opiates.

Modern scientific research suggests that dopamine’s main purpose is as a ‘reward’ chemical. Specifically, it rewards us when we make predictions that turn out to be true, and it rewards us more the more unlikely the true prediction (which is why gambling can be addictive).

David Huron in the excellent book ‘Sweet Anticipation: Music And The Psychology Of Expectation’ argues that, if music we’ve never heard before makes us feel emotion, it’s because it’s hijacking the machinery of reward in the brain. Whenever we listen to music, we are listening to hear what will happen next, and we are comparing what happens with what we would expect to happen based on the thousands and thousands of hours of listening to music we’ve done across our lives.

Songs make us feel different emotions at different times (and different songs make us feel different emotions entirely), partly because they interact with the machinery of reward in the brain in different ways.

For Bohemian Rhapsody, the verses towards the start of the song, ‘Mama, just killed a man…’ , give us a very different feel to the rock’n’roll section towards the end of the song (the bit that goes ‘so you think you can stone me and spit in my eye…’.) Part of this is simply that the rock’n’roll bit is louder and faster, and we have a physiological response to that. But part of it is also that the rock’n’roll section plays with our musical expectations in entirely different ways. As a result, we get that hit of dopamine, that makes us feel good, in a different way.

Your task

Consider the material presented here, and have a think about the following questions:

How does the ‘Mama, just killed a man’ section of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ make you feel, personally, compared to the ‘so you think you can stone me and spit in my eye’ section?

What were the emotions you felt? Do you think others would have the same reactions as you? Could you understand if they felt differently?

To help you with this task look up an audio of the song again. You will find the two relevant sections at

• 59 seconds (Mama) and at
• 4 minutes and 20 seconds (Spit in my eye)

What have we learned so far?

How much of an understanding of the relationship between music and emotion do you feel you have?

There was a lot of information in that last step, about surprise and chemical reward, and it builds on a bunch of previous steps discussing emotion, the brain, and the body.

Soon, in this course, we’re going to apply all of this information to musical examples and discuss how they work. So this is a good point, in particular, to take a step back and have a think about how it all fits together.

Playing with what happens

Funny music can be a really good illustration of how musical expectations work.

You probably didn’t imagine when you signed up for the course that it would involve listening to comedy music. However, we have physiological reactions to comedy such as laughing or smiling. Comedy is often based around violating your expectations as you think a comedian will do one thing, but instead they do another. As a result, funny music provides a good window into explaining some of what’s going on in music in general, without having to get too deep into music theory. It’s about a physiological reaction to the violation of expectations.

As you’ll have heard when you listened, Weird Al Yankovic sings the first few lines of the song 'Bohemian Polka' fairly straight. It almost sounds like a normal cover of the song. But, you probably know who Weird Al is, and you definitely know I was just discussing funny music. You probably know that something weird is going to happen to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ before too long.

After all, Weird Al, and parody, and music-based comedy in general, is meant to be fun. But ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ isn’t quite meant to be fun in the same way. After all Freddie Mercury is singing a cry from the heart here and so, as you listen to the Weird Al version, there’s a paradox. You both expect it to continue to be ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, because you’re used to how the song goes, but you also expect Weird Al to turn it into something a bit more Weird Al. Remember that these expectations are usually unconscious at some level, based in your brain’s processing of musical information rather than your conscious experience.

After Weird Al sings ‘no escape from reality’… there it is. A drum comes in, and suddenly, Freddie Mercury’s dignified cry from the heart is turned into a polka. Whether or not you’ve heard polka before it’s transparently a much sillier, somewhat old-timey, style of music than what Queen usually do. It’s fun in a way that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is not meant to be fun. You knew something like this would probably happen to the song. You no doubt have an emotional reaction to it, one way or another.

This emotional reaction, David Huron argues, is based on the same principles of prediction, expectation and reward that underlie our reactions when other events happen in our lives, whether that’s our football team scoring a try or goal, or being told we’re losing our job, or getting a surprise birthday party.

Your task

When you heard the ‘polka’ come in on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, how did you react? Can you explain how that reaction might have been based on the unconscious predictions you had about the song? What are your favourite bits of funny music? Can you explain, in terms of expectations, why you might have found those funny? 

Playing with when things happen

One of the things about music, in almost any style, is that we have expectations about different sections of the song happening in a certain order.

In almost every pop song, the expectation is that, before too long, there’ll be a refrain section of the song, the bit when the lead singer tends to repeat the title of the song, both tune and lyrics.

In contrast, in classical music, there are different expectations about what will follow; for example, there’s the ‘sonata form’, in which musically there is an introduction, an exposition, a development, a recapitulation, and a coda.

The Drop

In the last few years, there’s been a craze in dance music about ‘the drop’. Dance music DJs and producers will deliberately leave the bass sound out of the mix, in order to build up anticipation for when the bass will ‘drop,’ meaning it will finally be heard in the song.

The reason that dance music producers do this is because the crowd are expecting the drop, but don’t know when exactly it will happen. So when it does finally happen, it will give a crowd (or at least one that knows about these expectations in dance music) an enjoyable rush of dopamine.

The video 'When Will the Bass Drop?' by the comedy group The Lonely Island and featuring Lil Jon illustrates the expectations behind the power of ‘the drop’ in dance music quite graphically (a warning that it does so in a way that some might find vulgar, with literal exploding heads etc).

The ‘drop’ in a dance music piece is a very obvious example of the role anticipation and expectation play in the way we emotionally respond to music (the ways that it feels good). The Lonely Island make this even more obvious by the way they exploit the bass dropping for comedic purposes.

But it’s also a really good illustration of something that happens all the time when we listen to music:

• we have expectations about when things will happen in music, and
• we’re listening to music by composers who understand our expectations and play with them, cater to them, and exploit them.

It also explains why a genre of music you like doesn’t become boring. We know unconsciously what is meant to happen, but we don’t know exactly when it will happen.

Your task

Consider the following two questions:

Why do you think this amusing video parodying dance music is seen as funny by many people, considering what you’ve learned so far in Week 2 of the course?

What’s a part of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen that you really look forward to when you listen to it? How do you feel when you reach that part of the song?

The opera section - it makes me feel really viscerally excited and root for Freddie on his kind of moral trial before the judges of the Underworld (as I picture myself the scene).

How expectations create goosebumps

The music psychologist Jaak Panksepp did a fascinating series of experiments where he was interested in measuring the musical experience of ‘chills’: that bodily sensation where the hairs on your neck might stand up, and you might feel goosebumps.

Initially Panksepp asked students to bring in music they listened to that they thought might cause ‘chills’. However, in the course of his research he found that a particular song, ‘The Post War Dream’ by Pink Floyd, would often cause ‘chills’ even in listeners who didn’t know the song. So he did further research focusing more on that song, rather than the songs students brought in.

Have a listen to ‘The Post War Dream’ from The Final Cut. Try to listen to it in an otherwise quiet room, that’s not too warm, and give it your full attention.

Panksepp also found that there was a certain point in the song where people reliably felt ‘chills’: specifically, the point in the song when the drums and the louder guitars finally kick in.

Why the ‘chill’ response?

David Huron argues that the ‘chill’ response (which is sometimes called ‘frisson’ in the literature) you might get from listening to the ‘The Post War Dream’ is caused by a musical stimulus that is

a) loud, and

b) a violation of expectation (a surprise, in other words).

If you listen to ‘The Post War Dream’ again, you can see why it might be a violation of expectation. You’ve been listening to the song for almost three minutes, and it’s been quite soft. Then, suddenly, the full rock’n’roll band instrumentation kicks in, and it’s both loud and surprising.

For David Huron, this unexpected loudness triggers an instantaneous, physiological ‘flight, fight, or freeze’ response. The hairs also stand up at the back of your neck when you’re faced with danger and have to make a split-second decision.

However, remember the Capilano Suspension Bridge from last week, which showed that emotions are made up of a combination of physiological and cognitive aspects? After experiencing this physiological ‘flight, fight, or freeze’ response, you then (unconsciously) cognitively appraise that response. You might think, It’s not really dangerous, it’s just the music moving me emotionally.

Your task

Use the comments link to let us know how you reacted to the bit where the drums and louder guitars kicked in. Did you feel ‘chills’? Why do you think you had that particular experience of chills, or not? (Apparently we’re more likely to get chills in a cooler room rather than a warmer one, for example.)

Time to reflect

Let’s take a moment to digest what we’ve learned about funny music and goosebumps.

In the last few steps, we’ve tried to explain a bunch of different music psychology principles using examples from music that might cause you to laugh or feel a chill down your spine. These examples are often fun and interesting ones, but it’s also important to see how well you understand what those examples are meant to illustrate.

Your task

A good way to work through the ideas is to discuss them so please use the discussion link to talk it through with other learners. Use the following framework.

• In your estimation, what were the main points that the examples from Weird Al, The Lonely Island, and Pink Floyd were meant to illustrate?
• Also, did reading the explanations before you listened to the music - or the academic context, perhaps - ruin the effect of the music for you? (Explaining jokes so often ruins the fun.) Why do you think that might have had an effect on how you reacted to the music?

The story of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Let’s give you a refresher on Bohemian Rhapsody and what was going on around the song in 1975 and 1991/1992 when it was a hit.

So here we get to the bit you might have been waiting for, Queen doing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

Different expectations based on when you hear a song

As we have seen, you have a bunch of expectations about music based on the other music you’ve heard, and these expectations matter a lot when it comes to how you react to new music.

However, you probably have different expectations about the song compared to someone in 1975 hearing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. That is before punk, hip-hop, electronic dance music, and The Lonely Island, after all. It is difficult for us, especially as fans of the song, to hear ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as it would have been heard in 1975. These days, we see the song as iconic but, when it first came out, it was still just another song on the radio that people were hearing for the first time.

History

Bohemian Rhapsody, in fact, almost wasn’t released as a single. It was a surprise to the record company that radio stations started playing it and that it was a big hit. Usually pop radio stations don’t like playing long songs, especially long songs with opera sections.

Nonetheless, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ still makes sense in terms of the other music going around in 1975. It wouldn’t have been a hit in 1975 if it didn’t work against the expectations of audiences back then. Rock bands doing piano ballads was quite popular in the early 1970s, thanks to everyone from The Beatles (with the likes of ‘Let It Be’) to Eric Carmen (‘All By Myself’) to Elton John (‘Candle In The Wind’ - the Norma Jean version). There are also some big vocal harmonies on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and that might have reminded 1970s listeners of bands like The Beach Boys, Crosby Stills & Nash, or The Eagles.

People who had heard of Queen before ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ knew them as a ‘glam rock’ band, and the rock and roll section of the song sounds a bit like the glam rock of, say, Slade, or David Bowie. Additionally, 1975 was a time when rock music fans were familiar with the idea of ‘progressive rock’ thanks to bands like Yes or Pink Floyd or Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. This was rock music that tried to incorporate ideas from classical music, and which often went to unexpected places. As a result, listeners might have been a bit more used to songs that didn’t follow the usual structure than they might be today.

So, for someone in 1975, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ made a certain amount of sense. Most of the sounds that the song is made of were relatively familiar to pop audiences at the time, and even the opera section was the kind of thing a band might have done at that point.

In 1991, when I first heard the song, it had just been re-released as a single in the wake of Freddie Mercury’s death, and it would soon become an iconic part of the movie Wayne’s World. As a result, the song made lots of sense to me as a pre-teen. I’d grown up with the Beatles, and Elton John was still very popular then (he had just had hits with a piano ballad called ‘Sacrifice’). The rock stuff reminded me of Guns ‘n’ Roses (incidentally, at the tribute concert after Freddie Mercury died, Axl Rose and Elton John actually did a duet on the song). Between Wayne’s World, and the music around me at the time, the song seemed pretty cool.

Your task

Way back in the beginning of this course you told us about when you first heard Bohemian Rhapsody. Have a think about the context in which you would have first heard the song.

If you didn’t already discuss this in 1.3, think about questions like, who were you when you first heard it? How did it compare to other music you had heard? How has your opinion of it changed over the years?

Please use the comments link to discuss the role of context in your liking of the song.

I first got to know Queen in my tweens - first disc was Sheer Heart Attack, the second A Night at the Opera. Then the jukebox musical We Will Rock You came to town and this song was the centrepiece thereof. I had already been raised on prog -Pink Floyd, Genesis- so songs without refrains and telling more of narrative lyrics were already my cup of tea. Also, Freddie had to struggle A LOT because mainstream radio would not publish a song without refrains, let alone one six minutes long, so that part on never-give-up attitude also played a significant role when I learned of that fact.

Bohemian expectations

Now we will look at how the way the different sections of Bohemian Rhapsody are ordered, to explain just how Queen make different parts of the song feel really good.

Some of you may know all of this stuff I’m about to tell you about pop song structure already, but if you don’t following is an explanation of what’s going on in the average pop song.

Usually pop songs are divided into different sections:

• a repeating-tune verse or stanza (which usually has different lyrics every time),
• a repeating refrain (which usually is catchier and more repetitive than the verse, with the same tune and lyrics every time), and
• a middle 8 (which is a new section or interlude which goes somewhere different to the stanza and refrain sections in some way, in order to somewhat break up the repetition; I call it Zwischenspiel from the German for interlude).

We expect that, usually, a pop song to have a structure like this:

Intro - Stanza - Refrain - Stanza - Refrain - Middle 8/Bridge/Zwischenspiel - Refrain x3 - Outro

Listen to this popular song ‘Africa’ by Toto

If we look at the structure of ‘Africa’, it follows the classic pop song structure pretty straightforwardly:

• Intro (0:00-0:24): The bit with two synthesizers doing a ‘call and response’ - you hear a warm synth doing chords as a ‘call’, and then another synth that sounds a bit like steel drums which is a ‘response’.
• Verse Stanza 1 (0:25-1:09): ‘I hear the drums echoing tonight…’
• Refrain 1 (1:09-1:33): ‘It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you…’ - this is the bit of the song you hear the title of the song in, usually.
• Verse Stanza 2 (1:33-2:16): ‘The wild dogs cry out in the night…’
• Refrains 2 (2:16-2:41): ‘It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you…’ - refrain iterations in a pop song are usually repeats
• Middle 8/Bridge/Zwischenspiel (2:41-3:13): This is a new section that’s different to the verse: in the case of ‘Africa’, the new section is a synthesiser solo over the verse chords.
• Refrain 3 (3:13-3:59): This one is a little different to the previous iterations - in Refrain 1 and Refrain 2, Toto only sing the line ‘I bless the rains down in Africa’ once, but in this third iteration, they repeat it five times in a row.
• Outro (3:59-4:34): This repeats the intro, but fades out.

This is the kind of structure that most pop songs have, from The Beatles to Lady Gaga, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In contrast, in Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the structure is more like:

• Intro (0:00-1:00)
• Verse Stanza (1:00-2:00)
• Verse Stanza (2:00-2:41)
• Middle 8 Guitar Solo (2:41-3:08)
• Opera Section (3:08-4:12)
• Rock Section (4:12-5:16)
• Outro (5:16-6:00)

As I explained in the video, Queen set up your expectations by making you think you’ve gone through a couple of verses (lots of ballads have a long verse rather than a stanza verse and a refrain), and then a Zwischenspiel or middle 8.

This is a big part of the appeal of the song. It lulls you into a false sense of security that your expectations about a rock ballad will continue to be met. And then… opera! The opera section sets up a tension which is then resolved with the rock section going back to our expectations of them while still doing something new in the context of the song. It shows that the opera section was leading somewhere.

Is that everything?

Of course, the structure of the song isn’t the only reason why it might feel good to us. What’s in those different sections of the song matter a lot too. Queen are expertly playing with our expectations in other parts of the song, such as:

• the way they use chords,
• the way they use rhythms,
• the way the melody goes, and
• the interplay of arrangement i.e. where instruments come in and out and where it gets loud and soft.

However, in a two week course we cannot possibly cover all aspects of why this song feels good, particularly given our different backgrounds.

But the kinds of things that Queen do with the structure of the song to play with your expectations, they also do with other parts of the music, to different extents. And so the chords, the rhythms, and the sounds, all play a role in why the song makes you feel emotions. Of course.

Your task

Can you identify the structure of the different sections in another pop song you like, apart from Africa or Bohemian Rhapsody? And if so, can you see ways in which that structure contributes to the feeling you get from the song?

A big part of what makes Bohemian Rhapsody great is the very clever way that it plays with our expectations about what happens next in pop songs. So it starts with a lengthy introduction. 

(SINGING) Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Skip to 0 minutes and 22 secondsBefore the first verse then kicks in. 

(SINGING) Mama, just killed a man--

So this verse orients you after that slightly confusing introduction. However, instead of going to a refrain at the end of the verse stanza, like you'd expecting in the standard pop song, it simply repeats the verse again. 

(SINGING) Too late. My time has come.

And so this does sometimes happen in pop ballads, especially when they're building to a big powerful refrain. It's giving you a bit of a tease. You know what's going to happen, but it's not happening just yet. And this second verse builds magnificently. The drums get louder, and the loud guitars kick in about halfway through. And then as you're expecting the refrain to hit, there's a guitar solo, which is a bit of an anticlimax. And this guitar solo starts to feel like a middle 8 or interlude section. It's presence sort of means that you expect Bohemian Rhapsody is about to go back to a third stanza-verse, with Freddie singing more about his mama and killing a man.

And here's where Queen pull off a brilliant masterstroke. Instead of that third verse to the stanza tune, there's an opera section.

(SINGING) I see a little silhouette-o of a man. 

So that section, the crazy opera section. And this is completely unexpected in the course of a pop song. Pop songs just don't usually go to opera sections. And we no longer know what's going to happen next in the song. And this cleverly makes the opera section feel anxious. We really don't know what's going to happen next, and this builds up a feeling of tension. But of course, because Queen are at heart a rock band, they eventually resolve this tension after the end of that opera section but transforming from opera into what rock bands usually do, getting loud and fast and rocking.

And so when Mercury sings the lines-- 

(SINGING) So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye!?

Skip to 2 minutes and 18 secondsit's the first part of the song that finally feels like a refrain. And so when Queen finally sing this loud rock and roll refrain-style tune after four minutes of teasing, it really feels like release. So no wonder the section makes many people want to headbang, Wayne's World style. And so after this tension is released by that chorus, the song by nature sort of peters out, bringing us full circle to a section reminiscent of how the song originally started. 

(SINGING) Nothing really matters. Anyone can see. 

And there's way more to this masterpiece, of course. But this structure and the way the different sections work out plays a really big part in how we feel when we listen to the song.

What does it all mean?

In this course, there were a couple of big questions we set out to investigate.

• What is it that makes me love a song?
• Why do some songs feel like they are written just for me?

After studying this course you now have tools to answer those questions.

What is it that makes me love a song?

We’ve used Bohemian Rhapsody as the main example. What makes someone love a song is down to what makes us feel emotions in the first place, and that’s our physiological reactions to events, and the cognitive ways in which we interpret those physiological reactions.

Music is a whole big stream of events that we react to. One note in a song follows another, and these are events. Our reactions to music are very much based on our comparisons of these events with previous events, both within the song, and from our general sense of how music usually goes.

Why do some songs feel like they are written just for me?

We each have had a particular set of experiences with music over our decades of listening to music. We’ve heard more of this kind of music, or more of that kind of music, and have come to have expectations about that music, that others won’t.

If Bohemian Rhapsody feels like it’s written just for you, part of the reason for that is that you had come to have certain expectations about music and what different parts of music mean. The way that the events in Bohemian Rhapsody unfold really clicks with the intricacies of what your mind expects.

Of course there are other contributing factors, which we have not covered in this course due to lack of time, such as the lyrical themes that resonate with you because of who you are, or you have a fond memory of the song being a part of your life in some way. But that is for another day or for your own research.

The analysis conundrum

One of the odd things, perhaps, about this course, is that it is probably getting you to analyse things about music that you’ve never thought about before. People sometimes find this a bit unsettling. Sometimes coming to understand how something works might ruin it!

Personally, my experience is that this isn’t the case, at least for Bohemian Rhapsody! I’ve definitely analysed this song very carefully, and it still has mysteries and surprises that it will reveal to me over time.

Music, even a simple pop song, gets people’s interest for good reasons, and understanding what they are can often enrich your understanding of the song rather than ruin it. Often, an understanding of how hooks work can show exactly how clever a seemingly innocuous pop song like ‘Call Me Maybe’ by Carly Rae Jepsen might be. But your mileage may vary!

Your task

Tell us if learning all you’ve learned in this course changed how you hear Bohemian Rhapsody?

Putting learning into practice

Before we talk about putting what we’ve learned into practice, let’s recap what we’ve learned.

In week 1 we explored

• what psychology is, and where music psychology fits into that.
• some of the psychological and neuroscientific principles of emotion, via examples like the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge and naloxone, which demonstrates that there are both cognitive and physiological aspects to emotion.
• how vibrations of the air are converted into electrochemical signals zipping through the brain and how those signals are analysed (unconsciously), with reference to previous things we’ve heard, and become what we perceive as musical notes.

In week 2

• we started to analyse the way that the dance between our expectations and what turns out to happen is linked to the brain’s emotional circuitry, and discussed
• we discussed the way that comedy music and music that gives us goosebumps exploits these expectations we have, and how this links to emotional response (in terms of tension and release, for example).

Finally, we applied all of our new knowledge to Bohemian Rhapsody, discussing the way the sections of the song were structured, and how that structure leads us to have emotional responses to different parts of the song.

Putting it into practice

At some level this is a bit of an esoteric course. Understanding how Bohemian Rhapsody makes people feel isn’t necessarily going to get you a job (sadly). However, this course might still have taught you some useful things.

For instance, some of you might be musicians, and might be interested in changing how you write songs or how you arrange songs to take advantage of some of the principles discussed in this course (especially to do with tension and resolution)

As another example, some of you might be interested in psychology. Music psychology isn’t particularly special in terms of psychology. The way the mind processes music is similar to how it processes other meaningful events.

Additionally, this course should have given you a sense of how psychologists go about trying to find knowledge on something as seemingly ephemeral as the chills down your spine when the song gets to the good bit.

Your task

Talk about how you might apply some of the principles learnt in this course in your everyday practice and/ or life. For musicians, psychologists, and maybe even just the Bohemian Rhapsody fans...

So thanks again for joining us. We look forward to hearing your comments and feedback on the course. We hope it's been as rewarding for you as it has been for us and that you've come away with a new understanding of the music that you love.

Additionally, for those with a more musical focus, Elizabeth Margulis’s, ‘On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind’, looks at the intersection of music theory and music psychology, and is a much more in-depth treatment of the information in this course.

If you’re interested in a very detailed academic-level argument about the nature of music and expectation, David Huron’s, ‘Sweet Anticipation’, is what a lot of the information in this course is based on.

Finally there are a bunch of great resources at Victoria Williamson’s website, Music Psychology.