To alleviate boredom , the next most popular response, came a very distant second. That music does, indeed, elicit emotions rather than merely expressing an emotion that the listener recognises has been shown more directly by Carol Krumhansl, a psychologist at Cornell University. The ways these bodily functions change in response to particular emotions are well known. Sadness leads to a slower pulse, raised blood pressure, a decrease in the skin s conductivity and a drop in body temperature. Fear produces increased pulse rates.
Happiness causes faster breathing.
So, by playing pieces ranging from Mussorgsky s Night on the Bare Mountain to Vivaldi s Spring to her wired-up subjects, Dr Krumhansl was able to test musical conventions about which emotions are associated with which musical structures. Most of the conventions survived. Music with a rapid tempo, and written in a major key, correlated precisely with the induction of happiness. To get even closer to what is happening, Robert Zatorre and Anne Blood, who also work at McGill, have pursued the emotional effects of music into the middle of the brain, using PET scanning. They attacked the problem directly by composing a series of new melodies featuring explicitly consonant and dissonant patterns of notes, and playing them to a series of volunteers who had agreed to be scanned.