Meditation music. The universal value of music

That music is a universal language, capable of reaching everyone beyond linguistic, social or cultural barriers, is well known. But its universal value has also been scientifically proven by a recent research from Barkeley University, California. The goal of the research was to create a catalog of emotions capable of enclosing all the emotional responses that are generated when we listen to music. The curious experiment took place as follows: 2500 people of different ages and cultures were interviewed, sampled in the United States and China. The request made to the participants was to listen to some music and associate them with emotions. The selected songs have been thousands, chosen among rock, folk, jazz, classical, popular and heavy metal.
The answer was that in all participants the emotions that emerged in relation to each listening were very similar and it was possible to catalogue 13 universally perceived emotions: fun, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, fantasy, triumph, anxiety, fear, annoyance, rebellion, energy.
The results obtained led to the creation of an interactive map where the music samples are catalogued taking into account the 13 voices of the emotional experience self-reported and evoked by the music heard. Each emotion has been associated with a letter and each letter corresponds to a musical track, finally, the shades of color of the letters reveal songs to which listening different emotions have mixed with each other.
What researchers have set themselves as a future goal is to use these results for a therapeutic use of music (imagine fields such as music therapy or psychological therapies that aim to arouse certain emotions in patients), but also a more playful use, such as streaming platforms that could treasure these results to pack playlists more and more responsive to the wishes of their users.
The interactive map has been made available to everyone through a special site where visitors can move their cursors to listen to any of the thousands of fragments of music and discover, among other things, whether their emotional reactions correspond to those of the participants in the research. Each of us can then participate in the experiment and verify the actual correctness of the results achieved.
Once you connect to the site, hover the nouse over the colored letters will give you more information about cataloging the pieces, while a double click will reveal the source (where available). And for those who don’t agree, you can also drag and drop letters to rearrange the map. Ready to get started? Here is the link: music interactive map