Music is a universal language — at least that’s what Douglas Gentile, assistant professor of psychology, says. 

“But, not only is it universal, it’s also idiosyncratic,” Gentile said. “Humming Buddhist monks may all sound the same to an untrained ear, while there are classical pieces everyone can agree is happy or sad.”

Gentile has always had an interest in music and its way of communicating.

“Music is a language; it has an emotion within its core. The information about the music is in the piece already,” Gentile said. “Even if someone heard a piece of music for the first time, he/she can still identify the emotion being represented. One doesn’t need to learn the reactions; it is there already in the music and it could be there accidentally.”

“Throughout my research, I always gave the participants the option to say the piece has ‘no emotion,'” Gentile said. “This option, however, was rarely selected. It was clear that while music might mean something different from one person to another, emotion was always considered.”

To explore these findings, Gentile studied the reactions of 9-month-old babies to research the idea that emotion in music is not a learned response.

It is already known that babies can understand simple emotions by facial recognition and can assign sound to objects.

“If I were to beat a hammer and a triangle but only play the sound of the triangle, the baby would understand that it is the triangle making the noise, not the hammer,” Gentile said. “The baby would stare at the triangle longer than it would the hammer. You use whatever babies can do, and one thing they can do is look.”

“These babies are not old enough to have already learned cultural or idiosyncratic differences in interpreting music,” Gentile said. “This study shows that some pieces of music can communicate happiness or sadness.”

When the music changed from a happy piece to a sad piece, the babies perked up and noticed the difference. They looked longer aware of the change.

Gentile is currently studying how media, specifically music videos and video games, influence people.