According to physiological measures, the new music of Ava Luna activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Conversely, the music of Jo Passed elicits a response from the sympathetic nervous system, commonly associated with “fight or flight” behaviors.

All right, so the headline is a little goofy. It’s just a clickbait way of say that our lab is now collecting some cool physio data along with the usual cognitive measures! Don’t take what you see below as an attempt at Actual Science ™. It’s just a proof-of-concept. We’re testing to see if these two new lab devices show cross-apparatus agreement in their measures (I.e., arousal).

Myself and two undergrad students listened to two songs, “Moon 2” by Ava Luna and “MDM” by Jo Passed. These songs were chosen because (1) I like them, and (2) well, it’s mostly just the first point. Importantly, I had an a priori prediction that “Moon 2” would elicit feelings of relaxation, whereas “MDM”, with its distorted wiry guitars, would have the opposite effect. Participants (N=3) listened to these songs while wearing the NeuLog galvanic skin response (GSR) electrodes and while have their eyes tracked with a Gazepoint3 machine. There were no instructions other than “listen to the song and keep your eyes on fixation cue ahead.” Song order was randomized.

For the analysis, I divided each song into 9 bins, and given that the songs are roughly the same lengths, these bins represent a little less that 30s intervals. GSR is represented as the exact uM measurement at that interval, and the pupillary measure (diameter) was calculated as the average diameter in the second before and after that interval (I thought that might be less messy and avoid artifacts if a participant blinked). Finally, these scores were standardized within participant; the first interval acts as a “baseline”, centering on 0. This reduced some of the between-subject variability.

Here’s the data:

and

(error bars are standard deviations; you also know that this isn’t Official Data when I’m posting it in an Excel chart rather than R/ggPlot, etc.)

So: when participants listened to “Moon 2”, GSR decreased and the pupillary response showed a widening diameter over the song’s duration. If we weren’t being cautious in our claims, we could say that this song elicits a relaxation response on the human body. On the other hand, we see just the opposite with “MDM”, which elicited a constricting pupil size and heightened GSR. Again, if we wanted to make good inferences about these data, we would say that “MDM” sets folks on edge, preparing their bodies for some sort of action. There was decent negative correlation between these two device’s responses (r = -.66!), which is encouraging to see. Hopefully when we do Actual Science ™, it’ll be even stronger / more reliable.

Check out those band’s music here: Ava Luna / Jo Passed