Music makes us feel powerful especially if the bass is strong: study

Most people have a favourite list of songs they use to motivate themselves before a sports game or during a workout, but is there any science behind this idea?

According to new research it turns out there is – music truly does make us feel powerful, but not all songs have the same effect.

Researchers found some music empowers you to do great things, and levels of bass are a key factor in its effectiveness.

“When watching major sports events, my coauthors and I frequently noticed athletes with their earphones on while entering the stadium and in the locker room,” says Dr Dennis Hsu of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois.

“The ways these athletes immerse themselves in the music – some with their eyes steely shut and some gently nodded along the beats – seem as if the music is mentally preparing and toughening them up for the competition about to occur.”

These observations got Dr Hsu and his colleagues curious as to whether music can truly transform the psychological state of the listener.

The research, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, first pre-tested 31 pieces of music from several genres, such as sports music, hip-hop, and reggae, to see how powerful participants felt listening to 30-second clips.

From this pre-test, they identified the highest power and lowest power songs.

Songs rated as powerful included Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and 2 Unlimited’s ‘Get Ready for This,’ while songs rated lower in power included songs such as Fatboy Slim’s ‘Because We Can’ and Baha Men’s ‘Who Let the Dogs Out.’

The researchers found that the high-power music evoked a sense of power subconsciously and also generated three consequences of power – the ability to see the ‘bigger picture’, perceived control in social events and the desire to move first in competitive interactions.

Importantly, the researchers also ruled out lyrics as the cause of the effects, separately asking people to rate how powerful the lyrics made them feel.

“Because participants did not report increased powerful feelings after reading the lyrics, we can rule out the semantic priming effect of lyrics in the selected songs,” Dr Hsu explains.

Dr Hsu’s team also conducted separate experiments to look at one structural component of music that might explain the music-power effect: bass levels.

“We chose to manipulate bass levels in music because existing literature suggests that bass sound and voice are associated with dominance,” Dr Hsu says.

They also observed that bass sound and voice are frequently utilised in popular culture to project perceptions of dominance and confidence.

In the bass experiments, the researchers asked participants to listen to novel instrumental music pieces in which bass levels were digitally varied.

In one experiment, they surveyed participants about their self-reported feelings of power, and in another, they asked them to perform a word-completion task designed to test implicit, or unconscious, feelings of power.

They found that those who listened to the heavy-bass music reported more feelings of power and generated more power-related words in the implicit task than those listening to the low-bass music.

The effects of the bass levels support one possible explanation for why music makes people feel more powerful: the ‘contagion hypothesis’.

The idea is that when people hear specific music components that express a sense of power, they mimic these feelings internally.

However, the researchers also say a ‘conditioning hypothesis’ could account for some of the results.

This suggests that certain pieces of music might trigger powerful experiences because these experiences are often paired with that particular music.

For example, music used frequently at sports events may elicit powerful feelings because of the association with power, rewards, and winning – for example, Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ is often played to celebrate victory.

Dr Hsu and colleagues plan to further study other potential mechanisms through which music can induce power.

They are also interested in exploring whether empowering music can lead to more desirable outcomes in contexts such as negotiations, employee performance, job interviews, marketing campaigns and social perceptions.