How music changes our perception of touch.
Music hits. Until recently, this was only meant in a figurative way, now it can also be taken literally. Scientists have found that touch is experienced differently depending on the music being played. The sexier we perceive the music we listen to, the more sensual we experience contact when we think we are touched by another person.
Music affects our perception of touch
Music is widespread in every culture on Earth. It can evoke a positive sense of group and can be substantial to help people live in larger groups than other primates. How this happens is still not fully known. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig seem to have discovered an important part of the statement: music affects our perception of touch.
Tom Fritz“We've observed that the sexier we perceive music, the sexier we feel.”
Music transfers to touch
The neurological scientists have achieved these new insights using a clever experimental setup in which a robot admits incognito touches: participants in the study placed their forearm through a curtain where it was caressed by a controlled robotic movement. At the same time, they listened to music pieces, which they later evaluated on a scale from not at all sexy to extremely sexy. In 1 of their experiments involving a human assistant, they found that the sexiness of music is transferred to the touch experience. Here the participants thought they were touched by a person, but in reality they were touched by a robot. Interestingly, when participants knew in advance that they would be caressed by a robot rather than by a person, the music still had the same effect on the feeling of touch. A robot's auto-controlled brush didn't just ensure that the duration and intensity of the contact was always the same. It could additionally show that the perceived transfer effects of music to touch are based on very basic mechanisms rather than by the imagination of a person to be touched by a person of a particular sex or attractiveness moving to the same music. listens.
