Musical tempo on the brain

  Literature review

 Music is a source of entertainment and individuals can communicate effectively and express emotions. Entrainment to music is a highly complex activity, and this means that individuals need performance and coordination (Daly, 2014). Brain structures play a significant role in neural entrainment and this means that it is important to understand the function of the human brain. However, little is known about the neural mechanism or how the tempo of the beat induces emotions. The article by Darl et al (2014) sought to explore how musical tempo influence body movements and brain activity. In particular, the authors explore the phenomena of entrapment to music in the activity of neurons. The literature review finds that there is a correlation between the neural and tempo. An important point to note is that variations of tempo determine brain activity. For example, event-related desynchronization is associated with decreased brain activity whereas event-related synchronization is associated with increased brain activity (Daly, 2014).Tempo play a significant role in influencing emotions. After exploring how tempo evokes emotion in the brain, the authors find that tempo varies hence different emotions. For instance, a fast tempo is associated with positive emotions while a slow tempo is associated with negative emotions. Thus, tempo determines music-evoked emotion and that said, the musical tempo has different emotional states. On the same note, individuals' electroencephalogram tests show that the tempo of the music is associated with neural changes. For instance, a high tempo of the music has positive emotions and hence strong neural activities whereas a low music tempo has negative emotions hence a decrease in neural activities. Up to this point, the beat is the cornerstone of music since when listening to the music, individuals perceive the beat for optimal body movement. In general, the temporal structure determines the rhythms of the brain hence different emotional experiences. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reference

 Daly, I., Hallowell, J., Hwang, F., Kirke, A., Malik, A., Roesch, E., ... & Nasuto, S. J. (2014,

August). Changes in music tempo entrain movement related brain activity. In 2014 36th

Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and

Biology Society (pp. 4595-4598). IEEE.