Is Music Universal?

In a graphics class, myself and two other students were tasked with creating an interactive material data display, adding an augmented reality component later on. We felt that two things that are fundamentally human are music and emotion. For our project, we wanted to expose people to the same music and see whether they would react similarly or differently towards it. Our display had a few different components. We purchased a whiteboard (so that the display would be magnetic) and created a graphic which was divided horizontally into three different songs, and vertically into before listening to the song, during listening to the song, and after listening to the song. We created colour-coded magnets so that users could graph their emotions before, during, and after listening to the song, and so that this data was impermanent and the board could be reset multiple times. The magnets were kept on a structural fixture next to the board which happened to be magnetic. The link to the song clips were listed at the top of the display, and users were directed to record down their emotions before listening, while listening (on top of a graphical representation of the sound waves) and after listening to the songs. We wanted to see if the songs had an emotional impact on those who stopped to listen. We included a song with English lyrics, an instrumental song, and a song with Portuguese Lyrics. The English song was quite volatile, the instrumental quite neutral, and the Portuguese song quite uplifting (at least to our group members) and we wanted to see what effect these would have on a larger population. To our surprise, we had a high level of engagement with the display, and we even had to go back a few times to record our data and then ‘reset’ the board so that new users could participate. We were able to analyze the data from the board as well as the data from the website where we posted the song clips. From the website, we were able to see that people were more likely to interact with the display in pairs. Similarly, the magnets on the display seemed to be placed in clusters as well, from which we concluded that people felt more comfortable or inclined to interact with friends. The second aspect of the project was to add an augmented reality component, which we achieved through using the HP reveal app. The AR component served to show users metrics from the totality of the data collected, so they could see how others had reacted before them. Because the board was constantly being reset, users couldn’t see the bigger picture, but the AR component solved this issue. From the data analysis we were able to conclude the emotions evoked by the songs and the power behind music to alter mood. We found that the first song created increased anger and anxiety, the second song evoked increased sadness, and the third song improved mood and overall happiness.