5.3: Music and Sonic Persuasion

"Music evokes emotion, and emotion can bring with it memory… it brings back the feeling of life when nothing else can.” - British Neurologist Oliver Sacks

Most of us hear music shortly after we are born, usually in the form of lullabies. We hear music during the most momentous occasions in our lives, from weddings to graduations to funerals. Music brings people closer together and helps us form communities (Rosas). Music emanates from our alarms in the morning, fills our cars, gives us chills, and makes us cry (Changizi). “Music has been culturally selected to sound like an emotionally expressive human” (Changizi).

Music induces emotions in listeners (Juslin and Västfjäll 562). “Positive emotions dominate musical experiences. Pleasurable music may lead to the release of neurotransmitters associated with reward, such as dopamine. Listening to music is an easy way to alter mood or relieve stress. People use music in their everyday lives to regulate, enhance, and diminish undesirable emotional states (e.g., stress, fatigue)” (Heshmat). In addition, listening to pleasurable music alters the time-processing areas of our brain, making us less aware of the passage of time (Droit-Volet, et al. 417).

Music and emotions are strongly related to memory. Dr. Oliver Sacks stated that “musical emotions and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared” (Kakutani). Part of the reason for the durable power of music appears to be that “listening to music engages many parts of the brain, triggering connections and creating associations” (Hashmet).

Music affects more than mood and memory; music affects behavior. Hashmet notes that music creates strong tendencies to move with the music; people will find themselves swaying, tapping their feet, snapping their fingers, and even dancing. Our heart rate will speed up or slow down to become one with the music. In addition, listeners will mirror their emotions to the music, smiling and cheering with happy music or feeling sad to sad music.

"Drummer John Otto of Limp Bizkit in 2006" by Childishknack is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Music affects consumer behavior. One study (North, et al. 271) exposed customers in a supermarket drinks section to either French music or German music. The results showed that French wine outsold German wine when French music was played, whereas German wine outsold French wine when German music was played. Background music affects shoppers’ moods (Hashmet). Classical music influenced shoppers to purchase more expensive wines than Top 40 music (Arendi and Kim 336). Slower tempo music resulted in a slower shopping pace in the store and increased sales volume (Milliman 89-90). Thus, music is an important consideration for most retailers; they spend billions of dollars on music systems, music providers and royalty fees (Allan 34).

Sonic Persuasion

“One could always look away, but as sound theorists know, one can never close one’s ears.” -Stephen Connor

Somewhat akin to music is the concept of sonic persuasion, or persuasion through sounds. Sonic persuasion includes paralinguistic cues, which are related to speech (volume, pauses, intonation, accents, etc.) as well as sounds in general. Greg Goodale asserts in his book, Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age that “a pause, or an intonation, or even a noise can make a forceful argument” (3). Why? Because “the plethora of platitudes reaching our ears during the day would be unbearable if we encountered them in print. And so it is that whatever is human, personal, or intimate seems favored by auditory communication” (Cantril and Allport).

Goodale recounts one of the most famous instances of sound persuasion:

“Orson Welles’ [1938] broadcast of War of the Worlds during the Columbia Broadcasting System’s Mercury Theater was intended to manipulate. Listeners were frightened by sound effects that producers and actors employed to portray an alien attack on the United States. Actors sounded like panicked reporters or government officials (one actor adopted the cadence of FDR’s Fireside Chats), while Welles’ staff put on all the sonic tricks they could muster to imitate sonic expectations about an alien attack. The audience’s panic is enlightening.” (Goodale 3)

Although Welles’ radio production of War of the Worlds is remembered because “it so perfectly captures our unease with the media's power over our lives” (Pooley and Socolow) and because of the ensuing controversy over how widespread the resulting panic actually was, the broadcast is also a phenomenal example of early sonic persuasion. Would the “breaking news” format of the broadcast have been convincing without the sounds of panic and war machines, punctuated by what people believed to be voices of authority and “alarming-sounding on-the-scene reports” (Campbell 28)?

Michel Chion points out in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen that, because individuals who are able to hear cannot NOT hear, “sound more than image has the ability to saturate and short-circuit perception” (34). Think about how iconic the following sounds have become: crickets chirping; the whistle of a bomb falling; the ringing of a bell; the clickety-clack of a locomotive; the sounds of laughing and applause. These sounds elicit associations and emotions for listeners. “Voices and noises produce meaning beyond words uttered and recorded, particularly when they are broadcast to millions of listeners. Noises like the ticking of a clock, the dulcet tones of the deep-voiced announcer, and the moaning of the air-raid siren make persuasive arguments to us” (Goodale 4).

Psychology of Radio includes several early studies that analyzed auditory processing effects in radio listeners. Listeners were made more comfortable laughing along with a radio comedy if they heard the sound of others laughing. Arguments were judged to be more convincing if they were spoken slowly. “Recognition is a mental function definitely favored when the material to be recognized is heard rather than read” (Cantril and Allport). In other words, we recognize sounds more readily than text.

Although research has been done on voice characteristics such as speed of speech, accent, and tone, very few studies have been done upon the persuasive effects of sound effects, and yet, radio, television, videos and even speakers — particularly comedians – frequently use them. Sounds and sound effects appear to inject a “real-world” element to the listener’s experience that in turn affects their perceptions. And, like music, certain sounds appear to affect a listener’s mood and emotional state.

Collins and Dockwray examined how the spatial positioning of sound effects can significantly influence an audience by placing the audience in a particular subjective perspective. Such things as microphone distance, volume, reverberation, and sound mixing were examined. They looked at how sounds are used in public service announcements, which frequently rely upon emotional, and in particular, fear appeals. They analyzed how sounds are used to emphasize key themes in a message and how they are used to draw audience focus, demonstrating how volume, reverb and the manipulation of sounds are used to “place listeners intimately within the scene” (55). They posit that sound proxemics create underlying messages that “work on an emotional level that may not be obvious in the visual or verbal message” (56). “In particular, because we are rarely taught a language with which to unpack auditory aspects of communication, it is especially important to understand how audio can be used as a rhetorical device to persuade audiences” (56).