Use the brain: complementary methods to analyse the effects of motivational music

Music-related interventions have been extensively used in the field of sport and exercise as a strategy to ameliorate the effects of fatigue-related symptoms and enhance exercise performance (for review, see Karageorghis and Priest, 2012a,b). Recent evidence indicates that music regulates brain activity (Bishop et al., 2014) with consequent effects on psychophysiological responses and work output (Terry et al., 2012). In order to define whether a piece of music is motivational or oudeterous (i.e., motivationally neutral) psychological instruments such as the Brunel Music Rating inventory-3 (BMRI-3; Karageorghis and Terry, 2011) have been developed on the premise that the musical components define the motivational qualities of music. Kartigeorghis et al (2006) suggested that musical components such as rhythm and melody have considerable influence upon psychophysiological responses that occur during exercise. In such application, the exerciser rates the magnitude by which the elements of music influence the physical task. Each piece of music receives a score based on the exerciser's/athlete's opinion; thus, the score is used as an index of how motivational a piece of music is (e.g., Hutchinson and Karageroghis, 2013). Despite the influence of the elements of music on bodily responses that occur during exercise, moderate-to-high intensity bouts of physical activity are theorized to force attentional focus to associative thoughts, meaning that subcomponents of the auditory stimulus are naturally dismissed (see the Attenuation Theory, Treism an 1964; see Gabana et al., 2015, for a practical example).