Music changes our perception of touch
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig have discovered that we perceive touch differently depending on what music is being played at the time.
"We have observed that the more beguiling the music we hear, the more seductive we experience touch," explains study leader Tom Fritz. The neuroscientists came to this conclusion with the help of incognito touch. They had study participants stretch their forearm through a curtain and stroke it behind it with a precisely controlled movement using a brush robot. At the same time, the participants listened to various pieces of music, which they then rated themselves on a scale ranging from "not sexy at all" to "extremely sexy".
The interesting thing is that even when the test subjects learned before the experiment that they were not being stroked by a real person but by a robot, the music influenced how sexy the touch was perceived. This robot, an automatically controlled brush, was designed to control the length and intensity of the touch. At the same time, its use also showed that the observed so-called transfer effects of music on touch must be based on very basic mechanisms - and not on the idea of being touched by a person of a certain gender and attractiveness level listening to the same seductive music.
One possible explanation could be that the emotional expression of individual musical sounds follows the same dynamic as that of a touch. A sad sound is therefore processed in a similar way to a sad touch in terms of its rhythm, and an aggressive sound in the same way as an aggressive touch. Accordingly, we access areas of the brain that are responsible for both touch and movement in order to process music more precisely.
Such transfer effects, in which sensory perceptions change depending on the music we are listening to, have also been observed in other areas. For example, the louder the music we are listening to, the richer and brighter the colors we choose.
