The Dark Side of Music: How Music Can Affect Us in Ways We Don’t Expect

When considering the subject of music and its effect on a person’s emotions, the focus will, often, turn toward all the positive influences music has had on a person. Perhaps music is what got them through their last break up, or they will be completely lost without their jam session in the car on their way home from work. Maybe the conversation will turn to the well-studied and fascinating benefits of music therapy on developmentally disabled children. Sometimes the conversation will veer toward how this hypothetical person can’t stand to listen to a certain genre of music, a particular song, an annoying jingle on tv, or how they think that, say, Gangster Rap is destroying our youth. Opinions are opinions, but rarely are these ideas given much more than a second thought as to how and why they come about. The truths of music’s influences aren’t easy to guess. Although many researchers prefer to focus on the positive beneficial qualities of music, it is clear that music has an unlikely dark side that has the ability to manipulate emotions in unexpected and sometimes disturbing ways.

Perhaps the most controversial of those ideas pertains to the seemingly negative influences of Rap, Heavy Metal, Punk, and related styles of purportedly “deviant” music. Many studies have been conducted to find a link between deviant music and aggressive behavior, but more recent studies from the past two decades seemed to indicate that more refined research must be done on the subject. A popular and well-accepted way to measure aggression in test subjects since 1999 has been a test dubbed the Hot Sauce Paradigm (or HSP) wherein experimenters provide the subject with a glass of water (generally after the aggression-inducing stimuli or control has already been administered), warn the subject that the glass will be given to another subject- who coincidentally hates spicy food- to drink, and that the subject may add as much hot sauce as they would like after being left alone in a room for privacy. The catch is that the concoction is instead weighed to determine how much was added, and no one ends up drinking it. According to Lieberman, Solomon, Greenberg, and McGregor (1999) who developed this method, “Our goal was to provide an opportunity for people to engage in a behavior that could cause direct and unambiguous physical harm to another individual, while minimizing ethical concerns stemming from actual physical discomfort endured by participants during the procedure.”

Using the HSP method, Mast and McAndrew (2011) determined that, when testing a group of male college students split up into a group that was exposed to heavy metal music with violent lyrics, a group exposed to heavy metal music nonviolent lyrics, and a control group that did not listen to music at all, “The group exposed to the violent lyrics added significantly more hot sauce to the water than either of the other two groups…” indicating that the lyrics themselves were the catalyst for aggressive behavior rather than the genre of music itself (Violent Lyrics in Heavy Metal, 2011). Triplett (2016) sought to replicate this same study using other tests for aggression in place of the HSP method and with a larger and more varied group of participants that he split evenly among the three groups mentioned in the previous experiment in addition to a group exposed to calm music with violent lyrics and a group exposed to calm music with nonviolent lyrics. The results were unexpected. “…the present study failed to find either a main effect of lyrical content or an interaction between lyrical content and background music on individuals’ levels of aggressive behavior…. These results appear to contradict the conceptual models and empirical findings of previous research” (p. 28). While the hunt for the link between music and aggression remained inconclusive, Triplett’s study confirmed, “the results did support the belief that music can influence an individual’s affective state… Affective state plays a substantial role in a variety of critical cognitive and behavioral processes, including judgment, cognitive processing, and perception” (p. 30). This indicates that, while deviant music may have outward connotations to negative subject matter, its influence is not enough to activate affective motivational intensity, i.e., the willingness to act upon emotional arousal.

So, if specific genres aren’t to blame, how, then, can music negatively affect people? The human tendency to seek emotional regulation through music is a good place to start. Evidence has shown that, at times, one’s brain can become fixated- or ruminate- on negative music that matches one’s level of emotional discord. According to Carlson, et al. (2015), “Rumination… involves repetitive cognitive focus on the negative aspect of a situation, without attempts to alter the perception of the situation, and has been associated with the increased risk of depression and anxiety” (p. 2). When a person is going through a hard time, they have a choice as to whether they choose to ruminate or distract themselves through music. The research goes on to conclude that using music as a means of diversion from negative thoughts activates parts of the brain associated with effective emotional regulation and is therefore a more useful coping strategy, whereas rumination can cause long-term harm (p. 10).

In another example of music’s negative implications on a person’s health, Thorley (2011) introduces the idea of the “passive listener.” The passive listener is a person that has no control over the music and/or background noise that is present around them especially regarding co-habiting a public space. Here, when a person has equipment that emits or causes a noise that is being imposed upon powerless bystanders such as an iPod or a handheld gaming device, if the noise is not adequately contained, the act is defined as violence. In response to having this uninvited noise invading their personal space, the passive listener can, potentially, also succumb to violence. “This is because the physiological and psychological changes in the body of the passive listener can produce feelings of aggression which could lead to expressions of violence” (p. 81). Ironically, these invasive noises can include those that are intended to be helpful such as white-noise machines and specifically tailored workplace music. Contributing to this stress-inducing violation of individual peace on the passive listener is their own lack of power over the situation, potential bad quality of sound via the speakers themselves, the volume and persistence of the offending sound, and environmental factors that may distort the sound. Any one of those can trigger a dramatic increase in stress levels, releasing typical hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline that ordinarily prepare the subject for a fight-or-flight response. Of course, whether a person has the motivational intensity to act upon this stress-response is up to the individual’s resilience and ability to cope among other factors of a person’s cumulative life experience.

The implications of this seemingly excessive stress response in humans are incredibly worrisome. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that music has been used as a vehicle of literal torture in a few high-profile cases such as its questionable use in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and when United States troops used “Van Halen’s “Panama” to drive out Panamanian president Manuel Noriega from his refuge at the Vatican embassy” under the order of George Bush senior (Locker, 2014). There is also evidence that similar tactics were used on inmates in Holocaust concentration camps as well. Naturally, these acts alone bring up a variety of ethical concerns including but not limited to failing to gain consent from the musicians themselves before making their music synonymous with heinous crimes against humanity, and thus perpetuating dangerous stereotypes that get in the way of productive research.

Now that this information- that musical torture is an effective interrogation and demoralizing tactic- is more commonly known, there are additional public concerns that a lack of foolproof legislation may result in unconventional abuses of music as a type of domestic and international protest—or even a means to control or “rehabilitate” the public. Hirsch (2011) details the history of noise ordinances which are now a common protection in the United States, although there are occasions where laws in local municipalities may have loopholes or may be insufficiently enforced. When describing the negative effects of the abuse of music and noise in public spaces, she states that it can “weaken an individual’s auditory system, sometimes resulting in noise-induced hearing loss. However, if a human is overloaded with sound, his or her system can begin to shut down in other ways as well. Though we rarely actively listen to every sound in our sonic environment, our auditory mechanism is continually processing and, over time, with perpetual over-stimulation, we may lose our hearing, be easily fatigued, or have trouble focusing” (p. 37). Interestingly, although negative physiological reactions due to volume are severe, the psychological impacts of forcing people to listen to music against their will is similar whether the music is intended to be rehabilitative or torturous. “Both [rehabilitation and torture] depend upon the eradication of control…. [imposed music] can be a violation of identity as an imperialistic display of someone else’s power” (p. 45).

There are many questions that yet remain about the dual nature of music’s influence on the human psyche, but it is plain to see that, despite this darker research gaining momentum in the past two decades, the societal standpoint on how we research music will still favor the lighter, positive impacts on people’s lives. To restate, this can become dangerous for the simple fact of abuse. Music is a powerful tool that can be used for personal gains or for political agendas, especially in the cases of psychological effects of war. When society ignores the ramifications of using a widely accepted bandage for deeply ingrained problems, it can flip that perceived notion of being “helpful” for a paradigm shift that ends in the reverse being true. Many of the sources integrated here had one or more calls for additional researchers to keep doing studies and refining the testing system because there is so much territory yet left to be discovered beyond the bias that keeps trying to oversimplify and place blame on cherry-picked genres. Once again, Hirsch (2011) delivers a nugget of wisdom by pointing out, “The growing record shows that the exploitation of music’s darker potential is not an aberration but rather commonplace…. Although unsettling for some, accepting music’s potential for negative ends… seems inevitable. This acceptance in a certain sense opens the field of music to exciting areas of inquiry” (p. 49).