The Resonant Human: The Science of How

Tempo Affects Us
June 19, 2014 by Blake Madden

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Image courtesy of Flickr user Derek Gavey.

Youre walking along, enjoying some of your favorite music on a pair of headphones, when all
of a sudden you realize youre re-enacting Survivors Eye of the Tiger video, stepping in time
to the music like someone on a mission: Left foot in sync with a bass drum, right foot with the
snare, or vice versa.

Depending on your disposition, you might feel emboldened or embarrassed. If its the latter, take
heart. There may be biological reasons why your steps fit so well with the songs tempo. As a
human, you may not be able to help yourself.

The Human Frequency

Human beings can distinguish a range of tempos from around 40 to 300 beats per minute. When
the pulse slows below 40 bpm, we may not be able to identify or recall a discernible pattern.
When it goes faster than 300 bpm, repetitions start to blur into a continuous tone.

In between 40 and 300 bpm, theres a lot of real estate for us to play around in. The history of
popular music, however, suggests that we mostly enjoy a relatively narrow range of tempos.
In 2011, students at Brazils Federal University of Minas Gerais mined tempo data from the
Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, the Billboard 200 album chart, and the Million Song Dataset for
a tempo visualization project. They found that from the 1940s until our current decade, the
average tempo of our most popular songs fluctuated no more than 5 bpm, hovering between 117
bpm to 122 bpm.

Two graduate students from Rutgers University obtained similar results when analyzing popular
music tempo data provided by The Echo Nestthe same musical intelligence company that
provides the data for the Million Song Dataset.\

Looks like most songs linger right around that optimal figure of 119.80 BPM, Shaun Ellis and
Tom Engelhardt wrote of their collected data. Also, hits between 1976 and 1984 displayed
rather mono-rhythmic qualities, with few year averages drifting above or below the golden
mark.

Dirk Moelants, a musicologist and assistant at the department of musicology at The University of
Ghent, argues that a preferred tempo around 120 bpm is a part of our biology. His 2002 paper
for the 7th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, titled Preferred Tempo
Reconsidered, challenged psychologist Paul Fraisses previous conclusion that preferred tempo
was somewhere in the range of 100 bpm.

The results of several isolated experiments that asked participants to tap fingers, walk, or applaud
at their own tempo, showed participants moving naturally at a tempo of around 120 bpm (or a
500ms delay in between pulses).

A 2005 paper by Hamish G. MacDougall and Steven T. Moorefor the Journal of Applied
Physiology, titled Marching to the beat of the same drummer: the spontaneous tempo of human
locomotion, took Moelants research a step further, monitoring a group of human subjects and
their motions not just in the lab, but also in the course of a typical 10-hour day.

Twenty subjects were given baseball caps with attached activity monitors in order to record the
tempo of their linear head movements during athletic activities such as running and cycling, and
mostly-static activities such as working on a computer or riding a bus.

Here we show a highly tuned resonant frequency of human locomotion at 2 Hz [about 120 bpm]
with no evidence of correlation with gender, age, height, weight, or body mass index,
MacDougall and Moore wrote. We speculate that this spontaneous tempo of locomotion
represents some form of central resonant frequency of human movement.

Tempo and Emotion

Slow music, generally, makes us feel sad. Fast music tends to make us happier, unless it is in a
minor mode or rhythmically fragmented, in which case it can inspire fear.

These concepts are generally accepted these days, but until psychologist Kate Hevner Mueller
began conducting experiments in the 1930s, we had no real proof of just how profound this effect
is. Mueller asked her participants to express their emotions regarding different pieces of music in
which only one defining characteristicsuch as pitch, mode, or tempohad changed. She
concluded that tempo influenced our emotions more than any other characteristic.

Over 60 years later, Lise Gagnon and Isabelle Peretz of the University of Montreal performed
similar experiments, isolating and changing individual musical characteristics and reached the
same conclusion: The results confirm that both mode and tempo determine happy-sad
judgments in isolation, with the tempo being more salient, even when tempo salience was
adjusted.

Emotional response to changing tempos may explain why we dont always prefer our preferred
tempo: Human emotions range all over the map. If the constant, 120 bpm average of charting
pop hits represents our platonic ideal of natural balance, then tempos far above or below that
range represent the rest of the roller-coaster ride we call life.

The angst and nihilism of The Buzzcocks Boredom slashes through our ears at around 180
bpm. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five paint the tension of inner-city life in The
Messageone of hip-hops first bonafide hitsat around 100 bpm. Bette Midler regularly
inspires waterworks with her 60 bpm ode to an overshadowed friend, The Wind Beneath My
Wings. 120bpm is our safe place, and the further we get from it tempo-wise, the more volatile
we become.

Whats Your Tempo?

In the 1970s, Georgi Lozanov developed the teaching method now known as Suggestopedia,
claiming it could help children learn foreign languages three to five times faster than average.

A central conceit of Suggestopedia is the use of music in the classroom, particularly Baroque
music played at a largo tempo of about 60 bpm, which he claimed aided memory retention.
Playing music at or below the tempo of a healthy resting human heart, so the theory goes, relaxes
children, thereby improving their ability to learn.

Some have debated the science behind Lozanovs claims, but UNESCO (The United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) found no fault in his results. In 1978, their
report on Suggestopedia declared: There is consensus that Suggestopedia is a generally superior
teaching method for many subjects and for many types of students, compared with traditional
methods.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Paco Vila

For improving physical performance, Dr. Costas Karageorghis of Englands Brunel University
suggests music with tempos of 120 bpm to 140 bpm during exercise, when our hearts beat in a
similar range.

In the 2006 paper he co-authored with Peter C. Terry, Psychophysical Effects of Music in Sport
and Exercise: An Update on Theory, Research and Application, Karageorghis found that 400m
runners recorded faster times when their movements were synchronized with music.

Non-athletes exercising in sync to music benefit just as much, Karageorghis adds in an interview
for Welsh sprinter Colin Jacksons Raise Your Game website:

[Music] can reduce our perception of effort by as much as 10%. So, for example, a 66 minute
cycle can feel like a 60 minute cycle with music. By syncing with music faster than our
preferred tempo, we can basically trick our bodies into working harder for longer.

Scientists are still uncertain as to which part or parts of the brain control musical activitylet
alone where our perception of tempo occurs and why our bodies prefer certain tempos to others.

A romantic yet unconfirmed notion revolves around our heartbeats: 60 bpm 80 bpm in
relatively healthy adults, or exactly half of the range of tempos we naturally exhibit during basic
locomotion and exercise. Perhaps we are twice as fast to act on instinct as we are to act with
what is truly in our heart.

At least now we know exactly what it means to say music has a good beat to dance to.

Blake Madden is a musician and author who lives in Seattle.

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Tags: audiology, beat making, Blake Madden, BPM, Tempo, tempo science
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