Does music sound better in the dark?

Listening in the dark stops your brain doing what it naturally wants to do, interact with your other senses, and focuses your attention on just the one sense. So you can hear a richness that you would otherwise not pick up on.

bbc.co.uk - 6 ways to improve your enjoyment of music - BBC

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Of course technology – see below – can improve your listening experience, but if you’re prepared for a bit of mental graft you can get more out of your favourites songs with a bit of effort. “You can absolutely train yourself to hear more,” says Crum. “Attention is one very important feature. Musicians are exceptional at modulating their attention, it’s like a spotlight, they can zoom in on one element which causes an accentuation and hyper-sensitivity of certain elements in that scene causing their other senses to fade into the background. A very refined attentional control allows them to zoom in and out of what they’re experiencing. It’s a big part of ear training in most musical conservatories.”

If you want to develop similar skills yourself you have to focus.

“Your brain wants to re-organise information and it’s hard to override the natural organisation it wants to make of information from the world around it, but attention is a very powerful tool,” says Crum. “If you are tracking single elements in a complex piece that can be very powerful, and it can help you consciously modulate your attention from a micro to a macro level. For a genre like EDM that could be very powerful experience. I’m actually a big advocate of listening to the same thing over and over because familiarity enables you to modulate, so you can use that music as a training ground.” “Take a track like Money, it has all these elements that don’t start out as a sequence and you don’t start grouping them together until they go faster and faster and then form rhythmical structures. You can try to track one of these elements by focusing on it. Then if you drop your attention and listen to the track holistically, then try to focus again. It would be really hard to hear that single element if you haven’t focused on it from the start, but if we have a cue in our brain for what we’re looking for then our sensitivity is greatly heightened. In my mind, that’s the kind of thing you want to try to train if you want to hear more. You can find these elements in so much music now, so you can have a much richer interaction with the sounds you’re listening to.”

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What is the happiest musical mode?

Overall, the results are best explained by familiarity: Ionian (major mode), the most common mode in both classical and popular music, is the happiest, and happiness declines with increasing distance from Ionian.

online.ucpress.edu - Emotional Connotations of Diatonic Modes | Music Perception

In this experiment, participants (nonmusicians) heard pairs of melodies and had to judge which of the two melodies was happier. Each pair consisted of a single melody presented in two different diatonic modes (Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, or Phrygian) with a constant tonic of C; all pairs of modes were used. The results suggest that modes imply increasing happiness as scale-degrees are raised, with the exception of Lydian, which is less happy than Ionian. Overall, the results are best explained by familiarity: Ionian (major mode), the most common mode in both classical and popular music, is the happiest, and happiness declines with increasing distance from Ionian. However, familiarity does not entirely explain our results. Familiarity predicts that Mixolydian would be happier than Lydian (since they are equally similar to Ionian, and Mixolydian is much more common in popular music); but for almost half of our participants, the reverse was true. This suggests that the “sharpness” of a mode also affects its perceived happiness, either due to pitch height or to the position of the scale relative to the tonic on the “line of fifths”; we favor the latter explanation.

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