The Musician: An Emotional Radar

“Am I too sensitive to be in this world?” – Winona Ryder

For a musician, this question is uncomfortably familiar – I can admit, I’ve asked myself countless times. Yet, musicians are notoriously sensitive. This enhanced trait can even extend outwards, when they tap into the emotions of others in an unnerving way.

Honestly, that’s an abstract concept. However, researchers at the Northwestern university have provided biological evidence for a musicians’ enhanced perception of emotion. In our brains, a similar method is used to detect emotion in both music and speech. Since musicians have acute awareness of acoustics, do they also have heightened sensitivity to emotion in speech?

To find out, the scientists employed 30 men and women between the age of 19-35. Divided into musicians and non-musicians, participants watched a muted nature movie whilst listening through headphones to “an emotionally charged human vocal sound” – specifically, an infant’s unhappy cry.  

Electrodes were connected to their scalps: these detected the brainstem’s response, a region which responds to the emotional features of sound.

Layers of acoustic complexity constitute sound; more elaborate features, such as pitch deviations, mostly bring emotion into speech. The team found that musicians show enhanced response to the most complex features, whilst dismissing simpler acoustic features more than non-musicians.

In fact, this smaller response is explained by acoustic expertise – put simply, since musicians require less brain power to process simple acoustic features, they use their extra reserves to detect acoustic nuances.

So, it finally makes sense: Musicians have a sharpened detection for sounds which is not limited to musical sphere. In many ways, complex acoustic features are the heart of spoken word, providing depth and dimension to social interaction. The musical ear picks up subtle variation in pitch, dynamics and periodicity of speech, unlocking information about the emotions of others.

Such non-lexical expression of speech – referred to as “affective prosody” – traces back to the amygdala. This brain region is sensitive to emotions expressed by faces, smells, vocalisations and music, suggesting its role in conveying emotional information between members of the same species. In other words, the amygdala is activated by social signals of emotion.

But how does this relate to a musician’s sensitivity?

Well, try and picture this: the amygdala sits at the heart of emotion networks in the brain and is connected to several major computational nodes. When activated, its prime position enables modulation and regulation of systems which control physiological arousal and motoric expression, among many other things. This is synthesised into a subjective feeling which manifests itself as hypersensitivity in the musician. Thus, the amygdala orchestrates emotional sensitivity, acting as a potent emotional radar.

So, in answer to the existential question, “Am I too sensitive to be in this world?”- Yes and No. Perhaps musicians are highly sensitive. Regardless, this world would suffer without such emotionally intelligent beings.