I am glad, I didn’t participate in this study

Listening to good music is extremely pleasant. It relaxes us and gets us into a good mood. Even if we are listening to depressed songs like REM’s “Everybody Hurts”, most people still feel better afterwards. But what happens when you are forced to listen to music you dislike? Personally, I am glad I didn’t participate in a study that examined this.

The researchers conducting the study asked volunteers who clearly didn’t know what they signed up for to nominate three songs they really didn’t like. In my case, the one below would definitely do it for me. A screeching fiddle and a grown man yodelling will always make me cringe. And yes, feel free to link to your most hated music in the comments below. Let’s turn this into a collection of the worst music the world has to offer.

Once the volunteers had chosen their most disliked songs, they could also choose songs that they were neutral about from a long list of songs. Then came the hard part. The volunteers had to listen to three disliked songs and three neutral songs while being wired up to a series of monitors measuring their heart and respiratory rate, their skin conduction levels (i.e. how much they sweat), their body temperature and the movement in several facial muscles. While they were listening to the songs, they were also constantly asked to press a button indicating if they felt pleasant or unpleasant (how you can feel pleasant while listening to bad music is beyond me, but there you go).

Physiological response to disliked music

Source: Merrill et al. (2023)

The charts below show changes in these body functions during the experiment. It is immediately clear that when we are forced to listen to music we dislike, our heart rate increases, our body temperature rises, and we start to sweat more. The activation of several facial muscles also shows that people were actively grimacing and showing signs of disgust. Being forced to listen to bad music is stressful and we shouldn’t be surprised that the CIA used loud music as a form of torture to disorient detainees in Guantanamo.

This brings me to the point of this post: Stop listening to bad music! Life is too short to waste it on bad music. If somebody forces you to listen to some truly horrible music (like my parents did in our car while driving long distances) you are as far as I am concerned fully within your right to refer them to the police for intolerable cruelty. That’ll teach’em.