You may have just felt it this weekend in a club or right now with headphones on. When everything in a track is harmonious, natural and the tension slowly builds up as pleasure intensifies. When you know that something is about to happen and you even start to furiously crave it. And then it’s here, the ultimate satisfaction, the bass hits, it’s the drop.
“But with music, it’s quite curious. We’re not actually sure why we should elicit pleasure from music because we don’t need it to stay alive.”
We all know that feeling, but why is it so good? It is the question the Asutralian PhD Kiralee Musgrove tries to tackle in her thesis.
“Pleasure rewards us for doing evolutionarily good things, adaptive things, like eating food or having sex, we get pleasure from those things for a reason.” Kiralee explains.
“But with music, it’s quite curious. We’re not actually sure why we should elicit pleasure from music because we don’t need it to stay alive.”
According to Kiralee Musgrove’s theory, even if our brain processes music in a different way than other external stimulations, the desire we feel while listening still intensifies the same way of desires do. This mechanism could be compared to those found in drug addiction, eating disorders or obsessive compulsive disorder.
EDM as a research field
Kiralee Musgrove focuses her study on the relation between the drop anticipation and the pleasure we feel when it finally comes. Because of the conventional and predictable structure of EDM and the assumption that desire is greater when the drop is anticipated, Kiralee Musgrove decided to target EDM specifically.
She is still looking for participants to her study. If you live in Melbourne, are younger than 40, do not have any hearing issues and if your hears are ready to go through some EDM, it’s this way.