Have you ever wondered why people love music so much. In “The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal” by VN Salimpoor a lot of information on pleasure from music is provided. The paper starts with background information on the topic and what is going to be researched, which was the relationship between emotional arousal/pleasure and music, or in other words “why is music pleasurable”, which was the first sentence of the introduction to this paper. Experiments took place to find answers to this question. Participants listened to music while emotional arousal was observed. In other words participants emotions were recorded while they were listening to the music. These were recorded through measurements of sweat, temperature, heart rate, blood volume change and respiration rate. Participants measured their pleasure levels with ratings of “neutral”, “low pleasure” and “high pleasure”. The experiment ended up showing that music does evoke emotional arousal, which usually leads to pleasurable feelings.
The author of “The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal” is by VN Salimpoor who studied at McGill University, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Music Media and Technology and the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research. This research article was published October 16, 2009 to find a scientific answer to the question “why is music pleasurable?” . Her audience are people who are also studying like her. We know this by the language she uses throughout her paper, but also the the graphs and data recordings she uses. For example, in the text it states “More specifically, emotional arousal is physiologically marked by increased activity of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, without voluntary control.” This kind of language suggests that her audience are people who are studying similar topics, because most people wouldn’t know what some of those terms mean without some kind of study beforehand. To persuade her audience Salimpoor uses credibility, experiments, and facts. She already is a credible person for the amount of studying she has done but she also references other credible sources like other professors, other studies. The data recordings are very detailed and wouldn’t be able to be read by someone who has never seen it before or learned how to. Salimpoor uses experiments to find answers to her question and these experiments are specific and precise. This can build a sense of trust in her readers. She definitely has a love for neuroscience and how music affects the brain because of her vast studying on the topic . The genre is educational because the reader will learn why music is so pleasurable to humans with the scientific findings that were found after experiments and research. The tone is neutral or informative, this makes the reader trust the paper more because the neutral tone doesn’t suggest any bias especially because it is a research article, no opinion is present. This article helps me answer my question because it provides different kinds of answers to my questions compared to my last source, so now I can answer my question in a different way with the more information that I have from the article. The article actually wasn’t only put together by Salimpoor, but also by other researchers with credible backgrounds, and many references are cited.
In “The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal” by VN Salimpoor in the introduction it states, “Yet music has been present in every known human culture as far back as history dates. Although there are various theories as to why music may have developed (for a review see [1]), the intense degree of pleasure associated with listening to music remains a mystery.” This quote introduces readers to the fact that music is something that has been around for almost as long as us humans have, and it introduces the “mystery” that they are trying to solve. Something I found very interesting about this quote is that they mention how old music is but are using advanced technology to understand it better. Music has been around for so long but its effects on us humans is so complex that advanced technology is needed to really break down how it is pleasurable to us. Also, this quote does a great job of encapsulating my main question, why is music so compelling?
Alex, you’re off to an excellent start here. A couple of things: I do think your summary could benefit from a bit of general information. Basically, give an overview to a person that has never read the article before!
The rhetorical analysis could use a couple of things. I don’t really need you to hypothesize about how long the writer has been thinking about this (that’s really hard to figure out, right?) I feel like maybe you said that because you didn’t know exactly what else to say– but you can tell us what about the text lets you know that she has a love for music? Is it her care with language? (show us an example sentence!) What KIND of article is it? Because you haven’t done the bibliographic entry (don’t forget it in the final draft) I can’t tell, but knowing what kind of article it is will tell us a lot about whether her audience is other neuroscientists or not.
What I’m getting at is, you can eliminate a lot of the word “probably” from your rhetorical analysis by looking for cold, hard clues in the text. We’ll be talking about this more in class on Tuesday. And if you have more questions, you can talk to me about it!