Experts have come up with a useful comparison to explain what we do know: our ability to follow a series of notes and derive meaning from them is governed by the same neural mechanisms that make the pages of a flipbook look like a seamless animation.Ī given musical arrangement can contain multitudes of possible emotion-eliciting features. While lyrics are interpreted more consciously by your working memory-the same aspect of mind you might use when you’re reading a poem-the instrumental elements of a song are automatically decoded by the brain in more mysterious ways. But it’s the subtleties of composition that often prompt the most emotion. Anyone who’s been through a breakup or a loss knows how difficult and/or cathartic it can be to put on a Sad Playlist (we know you have one) and lose yourself in lyrical despair. Music, for example, has been shown to impact emotional well-being. There are some aspects of our individual soundscapes that we can control, regardless of where we live. Water sounds, meanwhile, seem to hold promise for urban planners and developers looking to mitigate the effects of noisy cities. A separate study from October found that seeing and hearing birds led to daylong increases in self-reported measures of well-being and positive moods, for both healthy participants and those with depression. Research on specific nature sounds, such as birdsong or water sounds, is nearly nonexistent, making it difficult to confirm how or if they’re independently valuable. Her team found that the forest sounds led to not only self-reported feelings of comfort, but also decreased heart rates and other physiological indicators of relaxation. In 2019, Song worked on a study that involved playing high-quality audio of forest and urban sounds for participants, paring down a Japanese riverbed and a Tokyo intersection into inputs for a single sense. “The gap between the natural setting and the highly urbanized and artificial setting is likely the root cause of the ‘stress state’ in modern people.” Most research on nature therapy suggests similar evolutionary reasons for our seemingly innate ability to be calmed by the outdoors. “Less than 0.01% of our history has been spent in modern surroundings,” she explained. Forest bathing involves all of the senses, and the auditory elements of the practice are key to its healing potential-as is the absence of more common modern noises that are far from neutral themselves.Ĭhorong Song, an assistant professor at South Korea’s Kongju National University, sees the clinical adaptation of forest bathing and nature therapy as a response to humans’ own self-segregation from the natural world. One is the practice of forest bathing, or spending mindful and sense-focused time in nature. Though many studies on these crowded urban soundscapes include the effects of often-associated air pollution and other factors, the general evidence that what we hear is hurting us is strong enough that a 2022 United Nations report listed noise pollution as a top environmental and health threat.Ĭertain ideas of auditory refuge from this constant cacophony have surged in popularity online and in research circles. Small-scale studies have traced traffic noise to worsened cancer outcomes and lower birth weights, and long-term noise exposure to male infertility. For example, many of us live today in urban areas where the sounds of traffic, airplanes, crowded sidewalks, industrial machinery, and more are amalgamated into a sound salad that has been negatively linked not only to measures of mental well-being, but to more corporeal health consequences as well. It also impacts the world within us: our emotional and physical well-being. The constancy with which we experience sound even when unaware gives it an outsize place in the stream of information we use to understand the world around us.
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