Researchers from University of California, Los Angeles, found that the sudden, jarring changes in pitch and frequency of rock music play on the same emotional mechanisms as the signals which animals use to alert one another of danger.
"Music that shares aural characteristics with the vocalisations of distressed animals captures human attention and is uniquely arousing," study researcher Daniel Blumstein, of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
In 2010, Blumstein and his team of researchers captured media attention with a study of the soundtracks of 102 classic movies in four genres: adventure, drama, horror and war.
They determined that the soundtracks for each genre possessed characteristic emotion-manipulating techniques.
Scores for dramatic films, for example, had more abrupt shifts in frequency, both up and down. Horror films, on the other hand, had more screaming females and distorted sounds. The researchers were even able to detect recordings of animal screams in some scores.
For the new study, published in the scientific journal Biology Letters, Blumstein teamed up with Peter Kaye, a Santa Monica
