Negative Speech Essay: Does Music Affect Emotions

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Music cannot directly cure diseases such as cancer, but it can remarkably relieve the aches and pains that affect the patient 's. In discussions of music, one controversial issue has been whether or not music can actually affect our mood, feelings and actions. On one hand, researchers argue that the music you listen to will affect your output on life. On the other hand, some researchers believe music does not affect mood or action. However, others that are in between believe music can only affect your mood to a certain point, before causing you to act out. My own view on the subject is that music will affect your output with your mood and actions, due to the fact that music paints a picture in your mind. Music has such an important impact in …show more content…

The human brain, through evolution, has developed reasoning tactics that cause us to think thoroughly before we act. Researchers say music is powerful- but just not powerful enough to cause people to act out in certain scenarios, such as fights and killings. I refute this argument by simply stating that music does have a powerful effect on people, all the time, almost anywhere. For example, if music can give us a boost while working out in the gym, or influence our first date, then it can also have the power to affect our choices when we are in a bad mood, possible more than enough to even commit a crime. "Because music is at the center of the formation of cultural identity for marginalized youth, it 's very powerful," Professor Williams explains. "So now you have kids growing up listening to the music and feeling that the music is expressing who they are as young, African-American males. This is bigger than participating in a gang. It is the core of your value system."(Guarino 1). In Oklahoma, a teen named James Edwards killed an Australian baseball player out of what he claims was boredom, after listening to Chief Keef 's drill music. Today, more teens and young adults are listening to extremely violent music, causing them to forget what is reality and what is fiction. This false sense of reality is giving kids a boosted ego, giving themselves a higher popularity …show more content…

According to studies, there is a certain area in the brain called the superior temporal gyrus, which plays a key role in the type of music a person likes to listen to. For example, if a person has been listening to classical music their whole life, the temporal gyrus will be accustomed to that genre, and so the classical music will impact the brain and mood positively. So it is implied that a person with an unstable or unsteady taste in music will have a lesser feeling of euphoria or other symptoms explained earlier. While listening to your familiar favorite music, you may be more happier and uplifted, rather than negative and sluggish listening to someone else’s, which you are unfamiliar with (Levitin). The same study also reveals that listening to music that you like can in turn help you make positive decisions. When a listener was asked to listen to a song, their neural activity reflected how much money they would prefer to spend on the song. The amount of neural activity present in the brain while hearing the song is directly proportional to how much money the listener would be willing to spend to buy the song. The neural activity was scanned and was able to predict the outcome based on the amount of activity in the mesolimbic striatum. The more activity, the higher the

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