Music Humans Can't Even Hear Makes Us Dance More, Experiment Shows

When the dance floor is a wasteland, cranking the bass is one of the easiest ways to fill it.

The grooves that come from deep frequencies do not need to be audible according to a new study. Even if your ears don't hear the low frequencies, your body will still appreciate them.

Music connects with our brains on a deeper level. Some aspects are cultural and affect our behavior on a cortical level as they evoke memories of joy and heartbreak.

There is a part of music that goes beyond the usual channels and can affect our brain.

A thumping deep beat has advantages over high-pitched rhythms. Lower frequencies give us better timing of movement and are better at triggering our nerves.

We don't just hear frequencies with our ears, but we feel them beneath our skin, shake our bones, and move through our machinery to give us our sense of balance. It's a feeling that makes people move.

Music doesn't reproduce us, it doesn't feed us, and it doesn't shelter us, so why do humans like it and why do they move to it?

Being the socially complex animals we are, it's possible the mere tingle of a lush bass brings us together to swing our arms and legs madly on the dance floor.

The team wondered if there was something more to the arousing sensations we experience, something that doesn't require our attention.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers turned a live electronic music event into a laboratory experiment, plugging in a set of VLF speakers at a range on the verge of human hearing and turning them on and off. Motion-capture headbands were used to measure the attendees movements.

The normalized measures of head movement were compared with the captured normalized measures during the VLF activation.

Even though the sounds coming from the speakers were not audible to the dancers, the participants moved more when the speakers were on.

The participants felt the music's bass and enjoyed it, but didn't differentiate it from their usual music experience, according to a follow up questionnaire.

This was a real musical and dance experience for people at a real live show and the study had high ecological validity.

Since most music events don't blast their patrons with ridiculously low frequencies, the researchers were confident in concluding that the VLF didn't cause dancers to pay attention.

Even though they didn't know it, the inaudible beat shook the participants into a frenzy. It's not clear how they could stir the fluids in their ears or touch their skin like a lover.

The implicit actions of bass affect our behavior on a subcortical level.

People's experience of movement could be affected by low frequencies.

It will require looking at the effects of low frequencies on the brain mechanisms.

The study was published in a journal.