I have a degree in music psychology – what next?

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We have entered the busy interview season for the 2012-13 Music, Mind and Brain (MMB) MSc students at Goldsmiths.  Applications are coming in from all over the world and I very much enjoy speaking to potential new students. As part of the interviews each candidate is given time to ask questions and I have noticed that one seems to come up more regularly than the others;

What might I do with my career after the course is over?

This blog will summarise my answer to that question. The MMB MSc has been running for a few years now so we are building up a good idea of where our graduates chose to go with their careers. I am basing my summary largely on this information.

So, if you have a Masters in music psychology, what next?

1)      Academia – the first and most common career path. Many of our students have chosen to continue their studies with a PhD and have found places in the best labs in the world, some returning to or staying in their home country and some moving on to try a completely new location. There are a growing number of PhD studentships in music psychology, and there are certainly far more around now than when I was first looking 5 years ago!

Possession of a PhD is still an essential qualification if you wish to become a university lecturer, at least in the UK. Being a lecturer was always my ambition so I knew from early on that I had to complete a PhD; and, in the end, I loved it! Fortunately music psychology is becoming more and more recognised as an interesting and valuable specialism for a lecturer in psychology or music.

2)      Private Industry – a Masters in music psychology will train you in many areas that are very valuable to companies from a variety of industries. You will develop good writing practices, skills in research and planning (including experimental design), knowledge of statistical analysis, and interpersonal and organisational skills. These are traits that are highly prized in industries such as media, research, marketing (where the effects of music is of growing interest), finance and human resources.

3)      Education – the MMB course covers many aspects of developmental psychology and students can chose to investigate aspects of musical or general education as part of their final thesis projects. In general, a music psychology Masters degree will also give you skills for your CV that are important for a career in education, and having the degree will make you a good candidate for a short conversion course if you wish to pursue a teaching qualification.

Of course many of our students wish to continue, or begin, a career in teaching music. A music psychology degree will give you greater knowledge about the cognitive mechanisms that influence learning and development as a musician and is, therefore, extremely helpful for any music teacher. I once worked as a music teacher for the government and know that such a qualification is regarded very highly in this field.

4)      Health and Therapy – some of our students are interested in pursuing music therapy or a health related career where they can involve music in their work (e.g. physiotherapists can use music to help people regain motility). A Masters in music psychology will not qualify you as a music therapist – you would need to do an accredited course in music therapy to gain the practical skills for this occupation. But a Masters will give you a wealth of knowledge about the cognitive effects of music on the brain and behaviour, which lie behind the beneficial effects of music therapy. For this reason we have taught qualified music therapists on our course, and their presence always provides a great contribution to the group.

5)       Music – I have already discussed music education in section 2, but there is of course a wider music industry which comprises a vast array of careers from performance, through to engineering, production, marketing, and management (artists and events). Our masters is particularly well suited in this regard, being London based, as we often include music events (including performances by our own students) in our social calendar. A Masters in music psychology will provide skills and knowledge that are relevant to all these careers and through their final thesis a student can work with music companies, conservatoires and/or performers, all of which can provide useful avenues for a future career.

That is a quick summary of the main career fields into which our previous students have migrated. My experience so far is largely confined to the Masters course at Goldsmiths so if anyone would like to add a career experience following completion of a music psychology course elsewhere then please feel free to leave a comment below for other readers.

My final career advice is always, wherever possible, to follow your passion: If you have an idea then pursue it. Even if things don’t work out exactly as you planned in a practical sense (e.g. I never wanted to live in London when I was younger!), you will certainly enjoy the journey.

Emotional reponses to music: The influence of lyrics

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The ability to recognise basic emotions in music, such as happiness and sadness, is a universal skill that does not always depend on previous exposure to the musical style (Fritz et al. 2009). There is growing recognition of the variety of emotional states that music can express (Zentner et al – see my previous blog on complex musical emotions) and the speed at which we can correctly identify these states (as quick as 500ms!)

We know that the structures within music help to communicate happiness and sadness:

Sad music = soft dynamics, legato articulation, soft tempo and minor mode

Happy music = staccato articulation, louder intensities and major mode

A new article seeks to tackle the next logical question for music emotion studies – is there an additional influence of lyrics?

Bob Dylan

Most studies that present music in order to measure resulting perceptual, cognitive or affective responses stick to using instrumental works. The main justification for doing this is to avoid any confounding influences of activating the language system. This is a completely reasonable argument if your aim is to isolate the cognitive or neural processing of music. But it leaves us unable to draw conclusions about a large proportion of the world’s music – vocal music (e.g. pop, rock and folk music).

A new study by Elvira Brattico and her colleagues in Finland and Germany has looked at fMRI brain activation when people listen to happy and sad music with and without lyrics. They opted to move on from the typical use of western classical music and to use a range of music genres and timbres, as selected by 15 participants who had a wide range of musical training.

Participants selected 16 eighteen second excerpts of music: 4 sad and 4 happy that they liked and that they didn’t like.  They listened to them while in a 3T fMRI scanner and rated them again for liking and emotion (happy or sad?)

RESULTS

1) Acoustic analysis: The authors analysed low level acoustic features of the music itself to determine if there were any patters that marked a piece as happy or sad. They focused on the attack slope and the spectral centroid (i.e. timbre, brightness) as well as tempo and mode. They found:

Happy music with lyrics: Faster attack than happy music without lyrics and all sad music. It also had the brightest timbres compared to all other categories.

Happy music: Brighter timbres and faster tempos compared to sad music. It was also more frequently in the major mode.

Music with lyrics: Brighter timbres than music without lyrics.

2) fMRI analysis

Sad music with lyrics: Unique activation in several brain areas that were not active when lyrics were absent, including parahippocampal gyrus, amgydala, medial and inferior frontal gyri (including Broca’s area) and the auditory cortex  

Happy music with lyrics: Auditory regions alone

Happy music without lyrics: Limbic system and inferior frontal gyrus

CONCLUSION

There were few acoustic differences between music with and without lyrics. There were far larger acoustic differences between happy and sad music. The authors concluded that any differential affects driven by the presence of lyrics in the scanner would be as a result of the semantic impact of the words rather than their acoustic features.

  • Lyrics are crucial for defining sadness in music. The presence of lyrics in sad music was associated with brain activations that have previously been reported in response to music chills (see previous blog), judgments of beauty, demanding speech tasks and the human “mirror neuron” system.
  • By comparison, acoustic features are key to defining happiness in music. Instrumental happy music triggered more strong activations in the emotion-related limbic regions, in comparison to lyrical music.

Happy music was also associated with more left hemisphere activity, whether or not it contained lyrics. The authors explain this finding as being due to the acoustic features of happy music, including the faster attack and brighter timbres. There is growing evidence to support the theory (Zatorre et al. 2002) that the left hemisphere is not so much language dominant but dominant for sounds that contain fast specto-temporal transitions (including language but also happy music)

There were many other specific findings within the paper but that summary gives you a flavour of the major results and their interpretations. Overall, the paper gives insight into the effects of lyrics on the neural processing of human emotion in a range of musical styles and opens the door for a greater understanding of the potential effect of song, not just instrumental music, on our minds.