"How does this make you feel?" asked Brandi House, a user researcher while talking to a group of developers. She proceeded to play multiple tracks of music, ranging from ambient to percussive, and asked the panel to choose words to describe it and rate their emotional state. These results took center stage during a panel at this year's GDC.

What emerged were generally similar terms like aggressive, triumphant, and serene. There was a kind of synchronicity amongst the focus group (even though the words were chosen from a list). This, in and of itself, isn't that interesting, but when Brandi showed the group these songs blended together, and then mixed with gameplay footage, interesting patterns arose from the data.

How does this make you feel?

"Numbers are scary to me," says Halo's composer Marty O'Donnell, "because they can mean I'm wrong." O'Donnell has created moving scores for many games, so he tends to rely on his instincts rather than focus group-style numbers. Originally reluctant to look at stats when it came to his art, he stated his endeavors "work because my gut tells me it's going to work," but conceded, "but numbers confirm it."Each piece of music was analyzed down to what the researchers called an "emotional fingerprint," which was a chart of the most common words associated with it. From there it was played over a video clip with its own emotional fingerprint. No matter how crazy the combination of music and footage clashed, 92% of the time viewing them together elicited the same feeling as the music, rather than the feelings derived from the often starkly different clip.The remaining 8% of the time, the disparity between the clips was "too disastrous for the human brain to accept." One example on display was a mash-up of Gears of War combat with a light-hearted flute medley –- it just didn't work.But the reason that so many different styles and emotions can blend into a successful medley is because "your brain wants it to make sense." For the same reason that people can find connections between Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz, unrelated musical styles can work together in the same way. House states that "people tend to make order out of chaos." And due to this natural ability, music generally takes precedence on the emotional front over visuals."Music is the single most powerful tool to enhance the emotional journey of our players," states O'Donnell. And even if there's some statistical proof that music can forcefully draw out certain emotions, House, the woman behind the numbers clarifies that "there's still black magic, creativity, and using your gut" when it comes to composing something beautiful.

Peter writes for IGN's Xbox 360 team. You can follow him on Twitter and MyIGN