Jimi Hendrix Sounds Like An Animal Distress Call

The reason that dissonant music may evoke such strong emotions in people is because they strongly mimic animal distress calls, according to scientists from UCLA.

Psychedelic music like Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix has an unusual jarring quality to it, and apparently harbors similar sonic qualities as distress calls.

"Music that shares aural characteristics with the vocalizations of distressed animals captures human attention and is uniquely arousing," said Daniel Blumstein, one of the study's authors and chair of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Blumstein conducted a series of experiments with Peter Kaye, a composer of film and television scores, and Greg Bryant, an assistant professor of communication studies at UCLA who specializes in research on vocal communication and evolutionary psychology and is also a musician and recording engineer.

Together, they composed 10-second long pieces of music and played them to study participants. Some of the pieces were like plain, elevator music, while others broke into jarring, dissonance after a few seconds. Participants were then asked to rate their emotions after each composition.

Compositions with distortion in them were rated as more exciting by the subjects.

"This study helps explain why the distortion of rock 'n' roll gets people excited: It brings out the animal in us," said Bryant.

"Composers have intuitive knowledge of what sounds scary without knowing why," Bryant said. "What they usually don't realize is that they're exploiting our evolved predispositions to get excited and have negative emotions when hearing certain sounds."

Blumstein has conducted previous research into animal distress calls and the emotional manipulation of film scores. By looking at 102 films, he was able to pick out trends in different genres.

In the recent study, the scientists also found out that the evocative effects of distortion were cancelled if they were paired with timid imagery.

"The video eliminated how exciting the distorted-sounding music seemed, but it didn't trump the emotional content of the music," Bryant said.