Effects of music on physiological arousal: explorations into tempo and genre

Two experiments explore the validity of conceptualizing musical beats as auditory structural features and the potential for increases in tempo to lead to greater sympathetic arousal, measured using skin conductance. In the first experiment, fast- and slow-paced rock and classical music excerpts were compared to silence. As expected, skin conductance response (SCR) frequency was greater during music processing than during silence. Skin conductance level (SCL) data showed that fast-paced music elicits greater acti-vation than slow-paced music. Genre significantly interacted with tempo in SCR frequency, with faster tempo increasing activation for classical music and decreasing it for rock music. A second experiment was conducted to explore the possibility that the pre-sumed familiarity of the genre led to this interaction. Although fur-ther evidence was found for conceptualizingmusical beat onsets as auditory structure, the familiarity explanation was not supported. Music communicates many different types of messages through the combina-tion of sound and lyrics (Sellnow & Sellnow, 2001). For example, music can be used to exchange political information (e.g., Frith, 1981; Stewart, Smith, & Denton, 1989). Music can also establish and portray a self- or group