Why Does Music Make Us Emotional?

I'm John legend, chief music officer at Headspace and I'm hosting a new series about the different ways that music can improve our lives. (classical violin) When was the last time a piece of music brought you to tears? Or made you feel so joyful you wanted to break into dance? Scientists have found music can be mapped to over 13 different feelings, but how and why does it make us feel so much? John and I dove in to the emotionality of music. Now we all intuitively know that music can actually catalyze and trigger emotions in all of us. So we actually went about measuring John's emotional response to three different conditions, measured by both galvanic skin conductance, his respiratory rate, and his heart rate variability. We're actually able to measure how emotional John was getting listening to one of his favorite and most sentimental songs. The first was a relatively boring and benign fish video with elevator music in the background. Nothing like watching a screensaver. Nothing like it. Pretty much no response there. But we also tested John's emotional response to his "All Of Me" music video, which showcases images, of course, from his wedding and of him and his wife. We also tested his response to a very sentimental song by Nina Simone. I'm so curious to see if I have emotions. You do in fact have lots of emotions. Aw. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so I want to show you a couple of different plots. I'm going to start off with the boring fish video. So what we're looking at here, we're looking at that galvanic skin response right here at the top and at the bottom. So what do you see here? You see a couple of little peaks in the beginning, and then what do you see after? Flatline Nada. You're, in the beginning- I'm dead Slightly you think that the fish are cute. That's what I'm seeing here. So this is really, we're just seeing novelty. So now let's go into how you responded to watching your own "All Of Me" video. We see a lot more? Uh huh. We see a lot more action. We see many different peaks, but what I found interesting in this data set, and maybe you can describe what was going on with you while you were watching the video, is that there were different peaks at different time points. Mm-hmm = So it looked like there were some lows, some troughs but definitely different peaks, but throughout the song something would trigger you and then you'd get the emotional arousal again. It really brought back some amazing memories to watch the video. We got married that week and it was such a fun video to shoot. For me to watch it, really did give me good feelings. Nostalgia Yes. Those are real memories. Nostalgia, absolutely. Look at what we're looking at here. So is this the Nina Simone song? This is the Nina Simone song. Okay. Yeah. You see emotional activity...