About 30 minutes into every workout I do, something weird happens.
I always exercise with music, and after running for about half an hour the songs I'm listening to sound different than normal. It's the same song playing, but the tempo feels like it has slowed down.
So you may have noticed this strange phenomenon long ago. Why did some songs sound slower after exercising?
My only thought: “This can’t be the music. It must be my brain.”
Turns out, it probably was! One explanation for this could be heightened arousal in reaction to the action, but let's say this sort of time warp is more likely to be because of the close connection between moving the body and making sense of information.
"It seems that as exercise intensity increases, the human organism prefers a higher tempo," says Dr. Costas Karageorghis, a sports psychologist at Brunel University London. People who listen to music when they exercise, need faster, more stimulating music when working out at high intensity. This is particularly true when you're working above the anaerobic threshold — when lactic acid builds up in the body at a faster rate than it can be removed. "For some, this need for more stimulation may translate to a perception that the music tempo is decreasing," he said.
"This phenomenon that I just described could be analogous to the sensation of driving on a highway at 90 mph and listening to classical songs. These quickly become irritating because they are incongruent with the exhilaration of high-speed driving and the heightened level of awareness demanded by the task."
Another possibility is that your movement rate is increasing as you work harder, but the music doesn't speed up in line with that rate. This can lead to a shift from the synchronous to the asynchronous application of music, meaning the shift from hearing music with a steady beat to music that doesn't give the illusion of the same clear pace.
Another reason can be attributed to the speed of reference with which the Human Brain compares the speed. Those who are used to listening to soft and slow songs tend to think with melodic and rhythmic references while those who enjoy fast upbeat scales think the other way. The actual song might be composed at a certain tempo. Interpretations and reproduction of the same music can vary from person to person. The brain tries to find a correlation between the already listened song to what's being heard now. This is how the brain learns tunes and lyrics.
When I first started listening to bands such as Anand Bhaskar Collective, Agam, Paradigm Shift, and the Local train, the tempo of their songs seemed incredibly fast to me. Now that time has passed, the tempo (while not slow) seems “normal” to me. If you put on Anand Bhaskar Collective’s “Kaanha” to someone who has only listened to classical sonatas or bands like ‘Yellow Diary’ or ‘Twin Strings’ for the most part, then ABC’s songs would seem incredibly fast to them.
But after a few months on a steady diet of indie rock, thrash, punk, etc., the tempo of these songs would begin to normalize to their listening ears. That’s the key to finding and listening to good music - it’s not just hearing, but it’s also feeling. A great song can instantly bring you back to the point in time when you first heard it. Tempo can be different for every listener if they feel the music instead of just listening to it.
In any case, this is just another reminder of how intricate and complex – and just downright fascinating! – our brains’ responses to music in conjunction with other activities of life can be.
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