Exercise enhances our enjoyment of music, possibly through increased arousal

A study published in the journal music psychology tested whether exercise influences the way people experience music. The researchers found that participants rated unfamiliar music as more enjoyable after running for 12 minutes on a treadmill, regardless of music style.

Previous research has shown that listening to music while exercising improves performance. But the author of the study Michael J Hove and his team wondered if this relationship could go both ways. Does exercise affect listening to music?

“I became interested in how exercise changes the experience of listening to music because of what would happen to me after playing hockey: Music would sound amazing to me after a hockey game; after I got home, I would often sit in my car and listen to the end of the song,” said Hove, an associate professor at Fitchburg State University. “I couldn’t turn it off. As a psychologist who studies music, she was aware of the extensive literature on how listening to music can improve exercise performance, but there was hardly any research looking in the opposite direction (how exercise affects listening to music).”

Physical activity has well-known therapeutic effects. For example, research studies have found that exercise can increase mood, arousal, and levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is part of the brain’s reward system. It should be noted that these three factors are also involved in musical pleasure. With this evidence in mind, Hove and his team proposed that exercise can enhance a person’s enjoyment of music, possibly through mood, arousal, or dopamine concentrations.

A sample of 20 college students between the ages of 19 and 25 participated in one study. The experiment involved two one-hour lab sessions conducted one week apart: an exercise session and a control session. During both sessions, participants listened to 48 clips of unfamiliar songs from various genres (eg, rock, indie, electronic) and rated their enjoyment of each clip and their level of arousal (on a scale of “quiet” to “very cool”). excited”).

On the day of the exercise, participants listened to and rated half of the song snippets before running on a treadmill for 12 minutes. After the exercise, they listened to and rated the remaining song fragments. The procedure was similar on the control day, except that participants rated song excerpts before and after listening to a podcast (control task). The participants also rated their feelings and emotions before and after the exercise and control tasks and took a test that measured their blink rates as an indicator of dopamine function. Students listened to each song twice, and the order of the songs was balanced between exercise and control days.

The researchers averaged each student’s musical enjoyment ratings on the songs and tested whether these averages changed from pretest to posttest (before and after the exercise or control task). They found that students’ music enjoyment ratings increased significantly after exercising, but did not increase after listening to the podcast. This was true regardless of the energy of the song, suggesting that exercise improved their enjoyment of music, whether the song was upbeat or soft.

The participants showed a greater increase in positive mood and a greater increase in arousal after exercise compared to listening to the podcast. And although change in mood was not linked to change in music enjoyment on either the exercise day or the podcast day, change in arousal was significantly related to changes in music enjoyment. music on both days.

In other words, students who rated themselves as more “excited” after the exercise or listening to the podcast tended to perceive the music as more enjoyable. As the study authors noted, these findings are in line with evidence suggesting that arousal plays a role in how people experience and enjoy music.

“We measured several factors that could potentially be related to changes in musical enjoyment, and the factor that showed the clearest link to greater musical enjoyment was increased arousal,” Hove told PsyPost.

Interestingly, exercise was not found to influence the participants’ dopamine function, as measured by their blink rates. Changes in music enjoyment were positively associated with blink rates, but the relationship was not statistically significant. The authors said future studies with larger samples and a more direct measure of dopamine could shed more light on dopamine’s potential role in the relationship between exercise and music enjoyment.

The overall findings suggest that exercise increases the pleasure of music, not by improving mood, but by increasing arousal. Since listening to music and exercising are two treatments for depression, Hove and colleagues suggest that combining the two practices may provide optimal benefits. “While music and exercise are not going to supplant established treatments such as psychotherapy or pharmacology,” the researchers wrote in their study, “they do provide a free, accessible, and non-invasive way to increase pleasure. Side effects can include stress reduction, improved cognition, health and happiness.”

The study, “Physical exercise increases perceived musical pleasure: modulatory functions of arousal, mood or dopamine?”, was written by Michael J. Hove, Steven A. Martinez and Samantha R. Shorrock.