Northwestern Researchers Prove Bass Improves Sensations of Power in Listeners

What kind of music do you prefer to listen to while exercising or preparing for exercise? If you're like many athletes, you prefer tracks with higher bass levels, regardless of genre. Dennis Hsu and other researchers at Northwestern University noticed the behavior of athletes and their music before competition and did research to demonstrate that people feel more powerful when under the influence of bass.

Test subjects listened to either "high power" songs such as 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready" or "low power" tracks like the Baha Men's "Who Let The Dogs Out?" before being tested to measure how powerful that individual felt, or lack thereof, after listening to particular music. Some factors that indicate power include thought abstraction, illusion of control and the urge to perform first during competition. A separate test used totally original pieces of music to rule out the possibility that the test subject's ability to recognize the song, and researchers adjusted the bass level between listeners to demonstrate that higher bass did in fact lead to higher feelings of power.

One important factor that Hsu and crew worked to rule out was that lyrics impacted the power-inducing nature of music. For example, although Jay Z's voice may be full of swagger during the hook of "99 Problems," it's actually the huge bass drop following the refrain that gets listeners going.

Of course it's important to note that factors such as "illusion of control" and "thought abstraction" aren't necessarily good things. We'd be curious to get input from Hsu about whether feelings of power actually impact performance, and if it does, is it positive?

For now people, like Meghan Trainor, are all about that bass when it comes to competition.