Delivered at Casual Connect USA 2018. Engagement and retention, key factors in monetizing a mobile product, can be a nebulous moving target. In this talk, we will explore the neuropsychology of audio engagement, utilizing empirical research to understand how the brain processes and responds to music. Pleasure, anticipation and expectation, repetition and novelty will be examined as a means of leveraging audio towards maximizing profits.

1. The Neuropsychology of
Engagement:
An Audio Perspective
David Luis Ortega
Partner, Composer
Li & Ortega
www.LiOrtega.com

3. What is Neuropsychology?
• Psychological Observations on:
• Behavior and Cognition
• Neurological Observations on:
• The Brain and Nervous System

4. Why examine the Neuropsychology of
Engagement (and Retention)?
• Two primary channels of stimuli (e.g. Casual Game)
• Visual
• Auditory
• Apply a more data-driven, empirical approach to How the Brain
Processes Auditory information

5. Are General Analytics Sufficient?
• We are seeing specialized Audio Analytics emerge

6. BUT Don’t People just Turn the Sound Off?
73% Mobile Gamers (U.S.) Play with Sound ON
90% in China / Korea, 58% in U.K.
(2013)

7. Bad New First:
• BAD NEWS
• No specific research on Music and Engagement in Games

8. Good News:
•Apply the Research we have towards
•BEST STANDARDS AND PRACTICES

9. Assumption:
• Understand how the Brain Processes Music
• Attention
• Pleasure
• Leveraged in the overall execution of all aspects of the Music
• Increase in Engagement and Retention

10. Intuition and Experience
• Much of what we will discuss are what composers do intuitively
• Understand HOW and WHY we do it
• Become more conscious of the Mechanisms
• Apply it more Systematically

11. Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Processing
• Top Down — BRAIN IS ACTIVE FIRST!
Brain (cognition)
Emotion
Body

12. Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Processing
• Bottom-Up — BODY IS ACTIVE FIRST
Body GOOSEBUMPS!
Emotion
Brain (cognition)

13. The Brain processes music Bottom-Up
• Wealth of research on Music and Emotion
• Adults can reliably assign an emotion to music after just a few seconds
• By age 6, children can do this too
(Patel, 2008)

15. Judgements of (Western) Musical
Expressiveness
• Major Scales and Faster Tempos assigned more Positive Emotions
• Minor Scales and Slower Tempos assigned more Negative Emotions
• We don’t know Why although it could be related to
• PHYSICAL BEARING OR MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE IN DIFFERENT
EMOTIONAL STATES (Kivy, 1980, Davies, 1980, Damasio 2003)

16. Labeling an Emotion ≠ Experiencing the Emotion

17. Focus on Salient Components of Music that:
• Increase Attention
• Produce Strong and/or Positive Emotional Engagement

18. Familiarity
• The Brain LOVES Familiarity in Music
• Subjects prefer music they have heard before versus novel music
• Infant studies confirm that at age 1, subjects prefer music they have
heard in the womb (Lamont, 2001)

19. How does the Brain Respond to Familiarity?
• Self-Report
• fMRI and PET
• Reward Circuitry
(Pereira, Texeira, Figueredo, Xavier, Castro, Brattico, 2011)
(Salimpoor, Benovoy, Larcher, Dagher & Zatorre, 2011)

20. Dopamine
• Plays strong role in Reward-Motivated Behavior
• Increases in response to Food, Sex
• Connected to Addictive Behavior if reinforcement is sufficiently high

22. •Ventral Striatum Active and connected to Dopaminergic Pathways During:
•Experience of Familiarity in Music (Pereira, et. al. 2011)
•Peak Emotional Response to Music (Salimpoor, et. al. 2011)

23. Familiarity mediates the relationship between
Emotional Arousal and Pleasure
• Self-Report
• EDA (Electrodermal Activity, an objective measure of emotional
arousal)
• (van der Bosch, et al., 2013)

24. “ Intelligibility in music seems
impossible without repetition.
— Arnold Schoenberg, 1967

25. Repetition
• The Brain also loves Repetition! The Brain also loves Repetition!
• Broadly speaking, “Repetition” is the presence of same/similar musical
material within a piece of music
• Versus Familiarity, which compares different music tracks

26. Pleasure of Repetition
• PROCESS PLEASURE
• Unfolding of the repetitive musical surface
• CREATION PLEASURE
• Listener generates novel, changing experiences by connecting
different time points
(Garcia, 2005)

27. Musical Repetitions push processing
down from the more cognitive frontal
cortex and into the more motor,
automatic basal ganglia
(Margulis, 2014)
“

28. Hooks and Earworms
• How they work:
• A musical passage is repeated and encoded more robustly
• The listener executes the sequence imaginatively
• “Music, in these cases, can seem to play the person.”
(Margulis, 2014)

29. Anticipation (Huron, 2006)
• Biologically Rooted
• Necessary for Survival
• Heavily time-based
• Overlaps with Metric expectations of strong and weak beats
• Optimal Tempos of 85 - 120bpm with a mean of 106bpm
• Connected to Limbic system (again: dopaminergic pathways)

30. Sub-Genre: Casino Slots
• Players significantly overestimated their wins with sound ON
• Self-Report
• Heart-Rate Deceleration after a Win
(Dixon, et al. 2013)

31. Q & A
david@LiOrtega.com
www.LiOrtega.com