Why does live music make us emotional?

Music can make us feel lots of different types of emotion

From happiness and joy to sadness and even fear, music has the ability to make us feel lots of different types of things.

While many people love hearing music in all its different forms, have you ever been at a concert or live music event and felt emotions you haven't when listening to recorded tracks?

While it's common knowledge music has the ability to move us, new research suggests the reason live music often has a bigger impact on us be down to science.

The report, from researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, suggests live music stimulates the parts of our brain linked to feelings more strongly and consistently compared to recorded music.

As part of the study, two professional pianists were given 12 music pieces to play, with each one lasting just 30 seconds.

The music covered four different themes, two of which were more positive and pleasant and two which were more unpleasant and negative.

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Even the pieces that had the same themes were played slightly differently, which led to 12 different tunes in total.

Each of the pieces was played to 27 different participants who were all non-musicians.

They had two modes of listening to the songs during the experiment - "live" and "recorded" conditions.

The music pieces were exactly the same, but they were played once as a pre-recorded track and again live.

The pieces were played in a random order, and those listening weren't told beforehand which ones were live and which tunes were pre-recorded.

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The people listening to the music had their brain activity monitored at the same time. For the live songs, the pianists were told to change how loudly they played and also how quickly they played depending on what each participant's brain activity looked like, to affect the listener's emotions even more.

Those carrying out the study found the live performances of both the more positive and the more negative pieces led to increased activity in the part of the brain believed to link sound to certain emotions.

In comparison, the pre-recorded songs caused less activity in this part of the brain.

"The findings show that live music intensifies our emotional response, probably due to its free-flowing, dynamic nature," Sascha Frühholz, who is one of the study's authors, told the New Scientist.

"If you go to a live concert, you're not alone," said Frühholz. "This intensified emotional experience is also a social experience."

The researchers say they want to do the experiment again, this time with a much larger audience in a concert-style environment.