Welcome back to Scoring for Films, to a new episode of "What Lies Beneath" and above all to a new guest. A super guest because here we only have super guests. In this case, another brain that's not fleeing. Alice Chirico. Thank you so much. Alice Chirico is specialized in the brain itself.

She will tell us how all the things she has studied and developed during her professional and academic life can coincide with music. Fresh off an important award like the Tecnovisionarie 2025. Which part of the brain do you focus on? So, I work with a part of the brain that usually isn't considered brain because it actually refers to our heart, which powers our entire emotional apparatus, and we often think it is even secondary compared to our central nervous system, our head. But they're tightly linked. And, you know, all these things have a lot to do with music.

I don't know how much they intersect intentionally, but certainly involuntarily, by necessity. Because if we talk about emotions, if we talk about transmitting something from one person to another, I believe you can reveal some... We're thirsty for secrets because you're here to explain the secrets behind emotions. Also because then we'll need to transform those secrets into something written on the musical staff... A bit of responsibility!... As a psychologist and scientist, what I can say is you never stop understanding and learning something about the world of emotions.

But from what you know until today, what have you concluded? I've concluded how complex it is to define simply what an emotion actually is. There are many different definitions. We can rely on one key starting point that is quite transversal: an emotion must begin with a stimulus. And when we deal with a complex stimulus— a trigger like music—the story becomes even more fascinating. One thing is to walk down the street and find a snake that looks like a stick, notice it, have to react—the classic fight/flight responses we all know well—but emotions are much more; especially when dealing with a stimulus like a sound-musical one, which doesn't activate us like a snake might— indeed...

Gassman used to say that music blackmails you with feelings. Do you agree? Absolutely. I was captured and transferred at first unconsciously into the world of research exactly thanks to music. It was my first love ever and it was the reason why I chose to do research, following bands around Northern Italy to try to understand how certain emotions and experiences that these bands lived could marry their creative performance. What kinds of bands?

Varied... From jazz, to metal, to pop... I can picture you at a metal concert... I'd fit right in, to tell you the truth. Vito just conducted for Rhapsody Of Fire two concerts with the Milan Symphony and so it’s fresh from a solid, hard, pure experience. Chapeau!

Maybe you were drawn into the game of because it’s an endless chain where once you enter you can't exit because it's a maze... What strikes me is this viewpoint of yours which doesn't concern the genesis of simple emotions, but something that encloses a set, that emotion that leads you to say... It’s onomatopoeic... Yes, we’re talking about Awe. The fact that it’s onomatopoeic tells us a lot about the very nature of this emotion. What kind of emotion is it?

It’s an emotion, as you said before, complex, not one we could assimilate to joy or sadness which still are fundamental in our lives. It’s an emotion composed of many different small emotions. If I understood correctly, while joy and sadness have, on average at that moment, a triggering cause, this one has multiple triggers? Even the simplest basic emotions – like joy and sadness – can have different triggers, so it’s not just a snake, but also being suddenly questioned can trigger fear. The real difference is that some of these more basic emotions are contained within this more complex emotion. Many answers can be found here: “The Deep Wonder,” which I read, devoured – me too – we even learned to read specifically for the occasion.

And it’s the Italian approximate translation of the term Awe. Because actually, there isn’t a proper word for it. Alice, among other things, leads the Experience Lab at the Catholic University in Milan, where we have lots of fun studying these things that once were a bit New Age, and now apparently there’s huge hype about them... From the positive era to the more individualist, spiritualist era, rationality... It’s a cycle that continues, and now we’re clearly in this wave of a great search for spirituality. Why is there a mirror here?

Can I tell the truth? I'll say it: she didn’t choose it, the publisher did! Guys, I had chosen another cover... that looked up at an infinite sky with balloons. The publisher said: nice choice... but we’re doing what I say...

But I must say, all things considered, it is quite evocative in the end... I thought there was some deep meaning! I can make one up for you, if you want! You see, since the book talks also about evoking emotions and awe also through music, I thought it was a symbolic connection with music or artistic expressiveness which is a mirror of the self... But it definitely is! So art is like a mirror through which man sees the reality that surrounds him understood at a higher level and with some pleasant or unpleasant side effects which are also emotions.

Beautiful explanation! She'll put that in the preface of her next book! But actually yes, emotions are truly our mirror, and with music we become more and more aware of it; there’s a huge debate about these topics within the field of the psychology of music. We ask whether music is truly capable of evoking authentic emotions or if each of us is simply able to recognize in musical material patterns, typical configurations that are repeated and which – through learning or habit – we associate with certain types of emotions. So where does the truth lie? Taking an extreme position in a delicate field like this seems like quite a leap to me.

Some believe it’s possible to evoke feelings through music, but only if the music is not purely instrumental; others believe exactly the opposite. So it’s really a very lively debate around this topic. I have an existential doubt: if this sense of awe can somehow be related to music, does it require - to be perceived— some cultural substrate or some kind of specific preparation, musical or otherwise? Or is it something that transcends time and cultures? If we were to take a very classical standpoint, we couldn’t think of this emotion’s universality starting from music. We would need the possibility to build expectations based on something that comes before.

So that implies a learning process. The fact that we’re used to expecting that after X there’s always Y. But if we were to take a completely different perspective, we’d have to test it. We’d have to see if in different cultures— which has been done with other emotions— we find almost identical emotional responses in people educated in listening to Western music and in those who have never heard Western music. If we found in both groups the emotion of awetriggered by a piece that had been recognized as capable of eliciting that emotion, then we could really speak of universality. You said “a piece that has been recognized as capable of generating that response”...

Obviously we're talking about statistics. Sure, absolutely. A study that says: out of 100 participants, 94... because there will always be someone who's completely resistant to this, as with a thousand other emotions. Absolutely yes. That’s a crucial point.

Each of us has different tendencies in experiencing certain emotions more than others. So, for example, it’s possible that I am more inclined to feel awe listening to metal music; something that might never happen, say, with someone else—it depends... And this really aligns with my personality traits and my musical preferences. So yes, you’re absolutely right. The point is: there’s no piece that triggers awe by simply pressing play... Exactly.

Ten out of ten people. It’s really extremely complicated. It’s a matter of probability. It’s a matter of probability, and that’s how emotions work. That’s how humans work, variability, the fact that there’s no consistency in responses, is actually a good thing. Because that way we can really understand the mechanisms.

So we are not able to give a single, definite answer about which sequence or combination or single triggering stimulus can generate awe. But can we find consistency in the activation mechanisms of emotions that are not complex but more isolated and simple? We could describe any emotion based on these two aspects. The first aspect is valence, meaning how pleasant or unpleasant it is. The other aspect is activation, called arousal. In music we find both and what has been shown to be strongest even from a cross-cultural point of view, in different cultures, is the dimension of arousal.

The ability to create, through music, a tension that also reflects on a psychophysiological level, even in people who belong to different cultures. Like: this piece activates you but it also activates a person who has never listened to Western music. You know, a film is a film, of course, and it doesn't claim to be a documentary. But what you were saying reminded me of the scene from "The Shawshank Redemption", in this maximum-security prison at one point a Mozart piece is played over the loudspeakers for men who, by the way, had never heard that genre before. And yet what that piece evokes in those men— without knowing the lyrics, without knowing what it was about— to me, that was something very close to awe... But it seems to me that you're a bit on the defensive, meaning that to play it safe you're confining yourself within the perimeter of what's measurable: activations...

As a scientist, yes. Yes, but we also like to take risks... ...on a symbolic level. OK. I’ve always seen in every literature that affective reactions are central, based on a consistency of stimulus and response... like the classic pleasure/displeasure reactions triggered by the interruption of an expected pattern; the game of frustration or fulfillment of what was anticipated gives rise to the mechanics and dynamics.

We do a kind of musical work that’s very focused on triggering in the mind scenarios that contain a multiplicity of meanings but also a multiplicity of visions, including emotional ones; it often happens that we play with students, having them listen to the music of a scene. Without seeing the scene they always come up with those same basic elements. For example: there are people in a house, or a father and daughter or there’s warmth, intimacy. There’s a multiplicity of images or emotional references that are constant. What is it that makes these scenes, these scenarios, reappear so consistently?... My very personal opinion is that there’s surely a good dose of learning, but on the other hand there's also something invisible, maybe even archetypal, which acts as an interpretive code for reality and for the musical sound stimulus.

To the point that probably these phenomena tied to synesthesia are probably simpler and more frequent than we imagine when we’re composing pieces that are meant to accompany scripts, stories, scenes from daily life or anything that is recognizable and others can relate to. Let me play devil’s advocate for a second: I could achieve that effect intentionally and quite easily if I were to replicate a piece by another composer for the same scene—maybe even a well-known piece, one that in the collective imagination is associated with that type of situation I’m trying to depict—and by changing a few things, the piece would not be recognizable but the sound structure could remain the same, and so in that case the listener would hear my piece, wouldn’t realize it’s derived from another piece that reflected that very same situation, and it would feel like a magic trick: there’s an effect but it’s a device, basically... There might also be something like that, something we simply draw from our more or less unconscious memory. We may consider first a macro level, We could the one tied more to the complete memory we may have of the original piece, and a microstructural level, of details, just like in any memory we have certain points we remember, especially if there’s a script—we remember certain key elements and if those elements are not distorted, then overall the script remains intact, so it’s as if we keep evoking with the same power as the original stimulus. Let’s start giving some tools, for example, to evoke the emotion of joy; what factors would you use to trigger this emotion? Well, if we think of joy as an emotion characterized by high arousal, so physiological activation, and a strongly positive valence, and considering what kinds of stimuli typically trigger it...

they are stimuli that surprise us... Think of a surprise birthday party, and which are also pleasant, I would try to reproduce that same musical pattern. So I would probably go for a major key, but I would also work a lot on the possibility of creating a positive and activating tension within the piece, and include moments of violated expectations—very few though... because you don’t want to ask for too much “work” from the listener, otherwise we leave the realm of joy; joy is not demanding, it’s not an emotion that requires deep elaboration, like awe, for instance, because it doesn't challenge us in the same way. So probably a piece of music of that kind should reflect a similar flow and require an elaboration that isn’t too complex, something accessible. How do we trigger it?

Through musical dynamism?.. Yes, probably not excessive, a few elements that can certainly generate a small surprise, but not too much, and then some comfort zone, maybe loops that repeat and are comforting, but inside which there’s maybe some tiny variation, because our brain loves variation, otherwise we might risk expanding the comfort zone too much for our listener, and everything flattens out. Those composers who are really capable of touching those raw nerves or those sensations we’ve kept hidden somewhere... not always do they do it consciously... So what is it then? Instinct, experience?...

A bit of luck?… A bit of randomness at the start, when we’re learning and proceeding through trial and error. And then, I would say, what we said at the beginning: on one side, music evokes genuine emotions. On the other side, we can learn to use composition to mimic things we’re familiar with and thus transfer them, reproduce them—almost like the prosody of our language, in how we communicate. It’s like another tool to communicate with others, primarily with ourselves to convince ourselves that something works because it generates in us those specific emotions—and then to make sure it works for others too, not just for us, but for those who have also grown up in our same context.