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Cognitive control in metal music appreciation 95 ENJOY THE VIOLENCE:IS APPRECIATION FOR EXTREME MUSIC THE RESULT OF COGNITIVE CONTROL OVER THE THREAT RESPONSE SYSTEM? ROSALIE OLLIVIER,LOUISE GOUPIL,MARCO LIUNI,& view of musical expression construes it as in many ways JEAN-JULIEN AUCOUTURIER continuous with natural languages (Patel, 2010). Musi- IRCAM/CNRS/Sorbonne Universite´, Paris, France cal emotions are studied as communicative signals that are encoded in sound by a performer, then decoded by TRADITIONAL NEUROBIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF the listening audience (Juslin & Laukka, 2003), for musical emotions explain well why extreme music such whom hearing music as expressive involves registering as punk, hardcore, or metal—whose vocal and instru- its resemblance with the bodily or vocal expressions of mental characteristics share much similarity with mental states (Juslin & Va¨stfja¨ll, 2008). For instance, acoustic threat signals—should evoke unpleasant feel- joyful music is often associated with fast pace and ani- ings for a large proportion of listeners. Why it doesn’t mated pitch contours (as is happy speech), melancholic for metal music fans, however, is controversial: metal music with slower and flatter melodic lines and dark fans may differ from non-fans in how they process timbres (as is sad speech), and exciting music with high threat signals at the sub-cortical level, showing deacti- intensity and high levels of distortion and roughness (as vated responses that differ from controls. Alternatively, may be an angry shout) (Blumstein, Bryant, & Kaye, appreciation for metal may depend on the inhibition by 2012; Escoffier, Zhong, Schirmer, & Qui, 2013; Ilie & cortical circuits of a normal low-order response to audi- Thompson, 2006; Juslin & Laukka, 2003). tory threat. In a series of three experiments, we show Seeing musical expression as a culturally evolved phe- here that, at a sensory level, metal fans actually react nomenon based on a biologically evolved signaling sys- equally negatively, equally fast, and even more accu- tem (Bryant, 2013) explains much of people’s typical rately to cues of auditory threat in vocal and instrumen- affective responses to music. Just like vocalizations, tal contexts than non-fans; conversely, we tested the music that signals happiness or affiliation may be hypothesis that cognitive load reduced fans’ apprecia- appraised positively or lead to positive contagion (Miu tion of metal to the level experienced by non-fans, but & Baltes, 2012); sad music may elicit empathy, and found only limited support that it was the case. Never- make people sad or moved (Vuoskoski & Eerola, theless, taken together, these results are not compatible 2017). Similarly, humans—and many non-human ani- with the idea that extreme music lovers do so because of mals—produce harsh, rough, and nonlinear sounds a different sensory response to threat, and highlight when alarmed (Anikin, Bååth, & Persson, 2018). In a potential contribution of controlled cognitive pro- ecological situations, such sounds trigger stereotypical cesses in their aesthetic experience. fear and avoidance behaviors (e.g., in conditioning para- digms; Den, Graham, Newall, & Richardson, 2015), are Received: February 28, 2018, accepted July 26, 2019. strongly prioritized in sensory processing (Asutay & Va¨stfja¨ll, 2017), and evoke activity in areas linked to the Key words: music, emotion, metal, threat, cognitive brain’s threat response system (Arnal, Flinker, Kleinsch- load midt, Giraud, & Poeppel, 2015). It is therefore no sur- prise that ‘‘extreme’’ music such as punk, hardcore, or some metal (Abbey & Helb, 2014; Weinstein, 2000), UR CAPACITY TO PERCEIVE EMOTIONS IN whose vocal and instrumental characteristics share music has been the subject of impassioned psy- much acoustic similarity with threat signals, should O chology and neuroscience research in the past evoke feelings of anger, tension, and fear for non-fans two decades (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Juslin & Va¨stfja¨ll, of this music (Blumstein et al., 2012; Rea, MacDonald, 2008). While music was once believed to have a ‘‘language & Carnes, 2010; Thompson, Geeves, & Olsen, 2018), of emotions’’ of its own, separate from our species’ other impair their capacity to cope with simultaneous external expressive capacities (McAlpin, 1925), today’s dominant stress (Labbe´ et al., 2007), and trigger reactions of Music Perception, VOLUME 37, ISSUE 2, PP. 95–110, ISSN 0730-7829, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8312. © 2019 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS’S REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE, HTTPS://WWW.UCPRESS.EDU/JOURNALS/REPRINTS-PERMISSIONS.DOI:https://doi.org/10.1525/MP.2019.37.2.95 96 Rosalie Ollivier, Louise Goupil, Marco Liuni, & Jean-Julien Aucouturier avoidance and a desire to stop listening (Bryson, 1996; circuits may be activated by subliminally presented Thompson et al., 2018). Decoding extreme music as an threatening visual stimuli and generate behavioral or auditory signal of danger or threat, these non-fan lis- autonomic threat response patterns even in the absence teners (as one respondent quoted in Thompson et al., of subjective fear (Diano, Celeghin, Bagnis, & Tamietto, 2018) literally, ‘‘ ...cannot understand how anyone 2017; Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001; finds this music pleasant to listen to.’’ Whalen et al., 2004); on the other hand, bilateral dam- Some listeners1 obviously do, though. Extreme music, age to the amygdala may interfere with bodily responses and most notably metal music, is a thriving global mar- to threats, while preserving the conscious experience of ket and subculture, with strongly engaged communities fear (Feinstein et al., 2013; for a discussion, see Fanselow of fans (Brown, Spracklen, Kahn-Harris, & Scott, 2016). & Pennington, 2018). In sum, autonomic, behavioral, Despite long-lived stereotypes that listeners who engage and primitive responses to threat stimuli appear to be with metal music do so because of a psycho-socially neither necessary nor sufficient for the conscious expe- dysfunctional attitude to violence and aggression (Bod- rience of fear to emerge. ner & Bensimon, 2015; Stack, Gundlach, & Reeves, 1994; The existence of two populations—metal fans and Sun, Zhang, Duan, Du, & Calhoun, 2017), it is now well- non-fans—that respond to identical cues of auditory established that listeners with high preference for metal threat with radically different emotional experience music do not revel in the strongly negative feelings this (pleasure/approach, or fear/avoidance) provides a com- music usually induces in non-metal fans. Rather, metal pelling ecological situation in which to study how first- music fans report that the music leads them to experi- order and high-order processes interact to create ence a wide range of positive emotions including joy, emotional states of consciousness. On the one hand, it power and peace (Thompson et al., 2018) and no is possible that metal fans differ from non-fans in how increase of subjective anger (Gowensmith & Bloom, they process threat signals at the first-order/subcortical 1997). In fact, following an anger-induction paradim, level. Just like clinical populations with specific phobias Sharman and Dingle (2015) report that listening to 10 or social anxiety show increased amygdala reactivity to minutes of violent metal music relaxed metal music fans their trigger stimuli (e.g., pictures of spiders or fearful just as effectively as sitting in silence. It therefore appears faces) even when presented outside of conscious aware- that metal music fans do not process the threat-signaling ness (McCrory et al., 2013; Siegel et al., 2017), metal fans features of violent music to the same outcome as non- may show deactivated responses to the cues of auditory metal fans. It is not that they enjoy the threat; rather, they threat constitutive of that musical genre, possibly as the do not experience threat at all. result of positive conditioning (see e.g., Blair & Shimp, The interaction between first-order and higher-order 1992). If present, such first-order, bottom-up differences processing may provide some insight on why this may between fans and non-fans would not only predict a dif- be the case. While traditional, neurobiological views of ferent late-stage read-out of the activity of the threat emotions link the emergence of emotional feelings— circuit (i.e., experiencing fear or not), but also different such as that of experiencing fear—to the operation of autonomic and behavioral responses to auditory rough- innately programmed, primarily subcortical brain sys- ness even beyond the realm of music (e.g., fans not tems, such as those centered on the amygdala (Pank- reacting to angry voices as fast/as negatively as non- sepp, 2004), more recent cognitive frameworks tend to fans). On the other hand, it is also possible that the fans’ separate the activation of such circuits from that of appreciation for metal music reflects a higher-order higher-order cortical networks that use inputs from inhibition by cortical circuits of an otherwise normal, subcortical circuits to assemble the emotional experi- low-order response to auditory threat. In support of ence (LeDoux & Brown, 2017; LeDoux & Pine, 2016). such a dissociation, Gowensmith and Bloom (1997) In short, while first-order threat responses may contrib- found that while metal fans listening to metal music ute to higher-order feeling of fear, they do not unequiv- reported feeling less angry than non-fans, both fans and ocally constitute it: on the one hand, defensive survival non-fans reported similar levels of physiological arousal in response to metal music, suggesting that lower-order circuits reacted similarly in both groups. Similarly, in the 1 It should be noted that the parent genre of metal music includes visual modality, Sun, Lu, Williams, and Thompson a great variety of subgenres, which may differ in their use of the type (2019) recently reported that extreme music fans exhib- of cues studied in this work (e.g., a lot of vocal roughness in the death or black metal subgenres, and none in prog metal).