Many people often associate sounds with particular emotions based on the context in which the sound was heard. For example, listening to a song previously played on your wedding day may bring about feelings of joy, while the same song first listened to by someone during a bad breakup may create the opposite feelings of sadness.
When we hear someone talking while crying, for example, it can be difficult to not also experience the accompanying feelings of sadness. Why do you like it? Presumably because it evokes a positive emotional experience, and, taking that even further, it most likely evokes some powerful visual images of the natural surroundings in which the sounds are heard.
Case in point, try listening to the sounds of waves crashing and NOT visualizing yourself relaxing at the beach. Sounds can activate emotionally powerful memories, both good and bad. The sounds of rain can evoke memories of a relaxing day spent at home, while the sound of thunder may induce memories connected with combat experience, as seen in post-traumatic stress disorder. Music has been defined as the universal language, which makes sense the more you give it some thought.
Music is, after all, only a random arrangement of sounds, and is satisfying only because the brain imposes order to the sounds and interprets the order in a certain way. It is, in fact, your expectations about the rhythm and melody of the music that activate an emotional response. Regardless of your particular responses to various sounds, what is certain is that your emotions are directly involved.
With hearing loss, you not only lose the ability to hear certain sounds, you also lose the emotional impact associated with the sounds you can either no longer hear or can no longer hear properly.
The truth is that hearing is more vital to our lives—and to our emotional lives—than we most likely realize. Even though we primarily navigate our way through the world using our eyes, it seems our ears are constantly picking up information from our surroundings that unconsciously alters how we feel about a space. Though they emit no sound, you can hear an empty room.
You can find out if it has low ceilings and where its walls are just by the way sound reflects off these surfaces. Think of the echoing noise the click of a heel makes on a marble floor as opposed to the muffled padding from someone walking on thick carpet. Even quiet sounds can be carried long distances in an indoor space like the whispering gallery at St Paul's Cathedral Credit: Alamy. We have probably all been in a building that sounds wrong. Dingy offices where noise rattles uncomfortably between the floor and the ceiling, old houses where the creaks and groans of ageing floorboards carry hauntingly from room to room, train stations where public announcements reverberate until they are indecipherable.
While it may be hard to put a finger on why, these places can feel instinctively uncomfortable to us. Now, there is growing recognition that buildings not only need to be designed to be functional and aesthetically pleasing, but acoustically satisfying as well — leading some architects and engineers to rethink how spaces are shaped and the materials they are made from. Scientific research suggests they are wise to do so. Noisy work and home settings have been proven to annoy people , and noise annoyance itself has been linked to depression and anxiety.
Furthermore, issues concentrating in the workplace due to office noise and intermittent noise has been found to significantly reduce human performance. For instance, studies show that living in crowded housing can cause a feeling of helplessness. Rooms with loftier ceilings encourage more abstract thought as people feel more free in such airy spaces.
Built nearly 1, years ago, its domed interior and marble floors and walls can elevate human chants into ethereal sounds that seem to emanate from the depths of the ocean and create a feeling of exaltation in the listener.
The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, alters the sound produced inside its walls so profoundly that it is capable of 'conjuring up the divine' Credit: Getty Images.
If the acoustics of space tuned to amplify just a single tone can affect us so profoundly, what effect might a room that amplifies many have on our consciousness? Shea Michael Trahan, an architect at Trapolin-Peer, is using cymatics — the way surfaces vibrate — and three dimensional printing technology to answer this question.
According to researchers, listening to sounds such as music and noise has a significant effect on our moods and emotions because of brain dopamine regulation — a neurotransmitter strongly involved in emotional behaviour and mood regulation. However, the differences in dopamine receptors may drive the differences between individuals, the researchers said.
The study revealed that a functional variation in dopamine D2 receptor DRD2 gene modulates the impact of music as opposed to noise on mood states and emotion-related prefrontal and striatal brain activity. They underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI during performance of an implicit emotion-processing task while listening to music or noise.
The results showed that in participants with DRD2GG receptors the mood improved after music exposure, whereas in GT partipants mood deteriorated after noise exposure. Moreover, the music, as opposed to noise environment, decreased the striatal activity of GT subjects as well as the prefrontal activity of GG subjects while processing emotional faces. These findings suggest that genetic variability of dopamine receptors affects sound environment modulations of mood and emotion processing, the researchers suggested.
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