Music, Emotion and the Brain

I think we are still in the infancy phase of understanding the brain and how it functions in relationship to music. In some respects it is simply a matter of correctly conceiving the problem. Is music the child of language, or is music the precursor? It will be a while before this is understood. Might it be more fruitful to explore "which came first: the music or the musical brain."

Scientific American Mind has an interesting article in the July/August issue called "Why Music Moves Us" by Karen Schrock. The article is full of speculation about the connection between emotion and music without any real conclusion. But what is interesting is the studies that point to remarkable consistency across cultures when it comes to which qualities of music connect to which emotions.

Some sentences of interest:

"In the late 1990s neuroscientist Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues at the University of Montreal found that Western listeners universally agreed on whether a song using Western tonal elements is happy, sad, scary or peaceful."

"This past April neuroscientist Tom Fritz [...] exposed members of the Mafa ethnic group in Cameroon who had never heard Western music to excerpts of classical piano music. The researchers found that the adults who listened to the excerpts consistently identified them as happy, sad or scary just as Western listeners would."

Similar results were found with autistic children. Infants are more interested in music than in speech. Could it be that music describes to us, abstracts for us the physical characteristics our bodies feel during these emotions?

I've always been of the opinion that music is the beginning of abstraction.

Musicophelia

Musicophelia by Oliver Sacks is a physician's perspective on music and the brain, organized by his experience of departures from the normal. We may better understand our more average selves by understanding those of us whose minds are not like us.

He makes an excellent case for the primacy of music in human evolution. Music is the glue of the human community, giving us the evolutionary advantage of groups. Other species do not experience music which fills a large part of our brains.

I like a book where one can generalize from specific cases.

There is a story of a man with no memory at all, a man who when he closes his eyes and opens them again has forgotten all of his life before. In spite of this he could still play the piano and organ and conduct. Someone would need to bring him to the rehearsal and set the correct score on the stand.

This story reminded me of a conclusion I made about driving a car early in my experience of it. My subconscious was an excellent driver. I could day dream away and it would carefully signal, stop at stop signs and lights, avoid other cars, even shift gears all on its own. There was only one thing it couldn't do--remember where we were going. I could get myself home without thinking, but any new destination required attention. I ended up in some strange places. I digress.

Sacks tells how the ears reclaim parts of the brain unused by the blind.

He describes the therapeutic effect of music on those with Parkinsons.

He has described people dreaming about music, including an anecdote about Berlioz composing a symphony in a dream, as I once recall doing. Mine was remarkable, perhaps somewhere between Tchaikovsky and Brahms, but disappeared when I awoke.

For many the favorite story is of the man who became a musician after being struck by lightning.

It gives perhaps a better idea of how musical we are than more technical brain mapping writing. In many ways we are music.

The section on music and emotion is perhaps a bit cursory. Whole books have been written on this subject alone, and it probably has not yet been adequately described. He describes an emotionless man who nevertheless sang Irish songs with emotion. I think I would have described him as performing the Irish songs in the appropriate style. The music and the phrasing are one. If you have learned a song with a certain style, then that style is one with the music, and when you performed it, it would sound emotional. Only classical musicians with their brains chained to pages of written notes, notes entirely devoid of emotion, could imagine the two things to be separate. A full description of the relationship between emotion and music has not yet been written.

He needs to incorporate the idea of phrasing into his conceptual framework to carefully distinguish it from emotion. The musician phrases. The listener feels. Of course, the musician is a listener to himself.
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Brain Overdose

Brain science is one of the more fascinating areas of current scientific research, and This is Your Brain on Music is an interesting window into current work. I was interested to read about the role of personal taste--if you love the music you are hearing, more of your brain becomes active.

I think that if one is purporting to study "music," more cultures are necessary. How about testing a few Indonesians? Or have societies not exposed to the commercial product disappeared from the earth? I read today in The Economist that the music industry is in free fall with no bottom in sight, so perhaps this state of affairs is about to change.

I agree completely with his general attitude that it is departure from expectations that produce the most sublime expression. Did I not say so here (one of my favorite postings)? However, a fully quantized (completely rhythmically regularized) midi file--the state of most midi files you will find on line--is not completely unmusical. Some may even imagine midi files are inherently this way. Rhythmical variation doesn't explain as much as Levitin wishes it did.

The most emotionally expressive musicians in any genre are the ones that sell. According to Levitin, expertise in anything requires 10k hours of practice. I liked it that he points out that music schools don't cover emotional expression. It is vital for an aspiring performer to get through his 10k hours as quickly and meaningfully as possible. You can't just add expression on later. Try to find a teacher who wants expression because it is in the individual lessons that true music is made.

Levitin is trying to have fun and doesn't try to be a textbook. He gives you the idea of it but not the true understanding. If you're not wanting to work too hard, this may be the book for you. I am not the target audience.

Toward the end he talks about how many times rock stars get laid, another of his 10k figures. I don't need to know this.

Rock

This is great.




I think one of the problems I am having with This is Your Brain on Music is the fact that his musical world is so different from mine. He is almost always talking about the commercial product and calling that music. It's a world in which Kelly Clarkson is insulted because her producer asked her to record something already recorded by someone else.

In the classical world the performers have to redo pieces that have already been done hundreds of times before and still make them sound fresh. It is a world in which the abstract concept of the written notes is valued infinitely more than the specific performance. It's a different point of view.

Test Results

I tried my experiment suggested here to look for something with no assigned category. I was driving along Arden Way happily categorizing everything when I came upon a group of useless green columns. ?? My mind immediately set to work processing the surroundings and quickly came up with: commercial art objects. That's all I've been able to find so far that caused even a split second hesitation in the constant process of classifying everything.

Computers don't do this. They successfully categorize precisely those things you tell them to and not one damn other thing. Believe me, I know.

The Brain and I

I am up to chapter 5 and I am starting to get interested in This is your Brain on Music by D. Levitin. For me he's most interesting when he's talking about something besides music. Oh well.

According to him, my theory about what a melody is is constructivist. Cool! I'm happy to be a constructivist.

I have long thought that philosophy and psychology were bullshit occupations, and am happy to see the new empirical approaches he describes. If you can't test it, you don't know it.

I recall long ago reading a book called Philosophy in a New Key by Susanne Langer that I liked a lot. It led me to think that the mind is always specifically looking for categories. This may even be its primary activity.

Art is often trying to contradict or alter this. Whistler painted a picture of his mother that isn't called "Whistler's Mother"--it's officially called "Arrangement in Gray and Black." You and I are seeing his mother sitting in a chair facing left. We mostly register the colors much later. Whistler is doing a color study. His mind is also categorizing, but the categories are completely different.

The mind basically doesn't want anything left uncategorized. If it hears a row of notes, it will try to form them into a familiar melody, no matter how unlikely the formation may seem. My theory is consistent with Levitin's narrative of the empirical results. The idea that nothing is left uncategorized is missing here, as near as I can understand it. He just talks about putting things into categories or leaving them out. Langer talked about meaning rather than categories, but the idea is the same--the primary function is to assign meaning to everything. Please note that this is the opposite of a computer which always looks for an exact match.

Test this out: look around you and try to find something that no meaning has been assigned to, that doesn't fall into any category. Then try it on sounds.

Using this theory, we can define a game as a non-serious occupation. The mind wishes to categorize everything as serious or a game. Which one are you? This blog is a game with a semi-serious surface. The game definition must include the awareness that the mind wishes for nothing to remain uncategorized.

Now we're getting somewhere.

P.S. As usual, I am free associating. If you want to know what he says, you will have to read it yourself.
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Brain stuff

What I am looking for in This is your brain on music is something that makes me think. In my last entry I wrote that a melody is just a series of ratios and rhythms. It is significant that the brain, as opposed to machines, focuses its attention on the differences between the notes rather than the notes themselves. It may be this feature that makes music possible. I'm going to propose the possibility that the ratio between notes passes into long term memory while the specific pitch does not.

He writes briefly about musical illusions. I think music is an evolutionary accident, and that music itself is an illusion.

The author says he is more interested in mind than in brain. He should have called his book This is your mind on music.

This is your Brain

After owning it for months, I have finally started to read This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I notice that it has come out in paperback already.

There are a few annoying things about this book. For one, basic concepts of music like meter and rhythm are explained ad nauseum, explanations that I generally don't need, while the scientific ideas are thrown out often entirely without explanation. "This is in your hippocampus." [Not a quote.] That sort of thing. There are virtually no illustrations except a completely unnecessary picture of a piano keyboard. There are no scientific illustrations. What a hippocampus might be we are not to know. I have to conclude that he is writing for scientists and not musicians.

For another, virtually all the musical examples are from contemporary pop music. So he is writing for scientists with only a very primitive interest in music. Alternatively, he is a scientist with only a very primitive interest in music. Choose one.

Nevertheless, there are interesting things here. Why is it that when we hear two dissimilar instruments playing in unison that we don't have any trouble keeping them separate in our brains? Or two singers? Each tone produces a unique set of overtones which create the color that is that instrument. Theoretically, they should form a single composite sound. Why don't they?

He thinks this is primarily due to minute differences in onset. I would add differences in articulation--same thing. His examples are oboe and trombone, instruments which articulate differently.

I know that when I was in my synthesizer phase, I would frequently play the same melody on multiple tracks with different patches, but I think on a synthesizer they would blend into a single sound that could not be separated, provided the tracks were precise clones of one another, something easy to do on a synthesizer. A good way to get a track to separate is to leave it in its original human played raw condition while making all the other tracks rhythmically standardized. The track with imprecise rhythm will be heard as the melody.

See. This is interesting to think about. It completely validates what I was saying about phrasing. The imprecision is what draws us in.

Another subject he discusses is why one remembers the melody and not the specific pitches. This comes right after a discussion of ratios between pitches that make up the scale. Obviously, ones awareness is focused primarily on the ratios; one remembers the ratios of a melody and has virtually no memory of the precise pitches. A melody is a specific series of ratios and rhythms. Most people have no idea if they are singing a melody in the same key or another one except as they become aware of how a note feels in their voice when they sing it. I can't imagine what further explanation is required.

I'm going to write a lot more about this as I go along. This is due to my 10 minute attention span.

This review continues here, here, here, here and here.
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Ecstasy

Remember Music, the Brain and Ecstasy? One of the books it is based on is called Emotion and meaning in Music by Leonard B. Meyer, which tries to evaluate the roles of consistency, variety, anticipation and surprise in creating emotion in music. We were supposed to be set up by consistency and anticipation while variety and surprise created the emotion.

I've often wondered how this fits with ones real listening experience. It's quite true that replaying the same piece over and over eventually loses its charm. The Ecstasy book says this is due to the fact that our brains are geared to notice movement and change, that mere repetition soon recedes from our awareness.

Where the concept seems to fall apart is in the truly subtle performance. What explains the performance that grows in our awareness with each hearing? And what explains the ecstatic anticipation of a particular joyful climax? Pieces like the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde grow in our imaginations and are profoundly enhanced by our knowledge of where this particular phrase is going. It is a sign of a performers supreme mastery, for instance, if they are able to subtly delay the climax of a phrase. This is one of the greatest tools of the performer's trade.

In my own life I know that to have studied and performed a piece enhances my own awareness of a truly great performance. Knowledge is bliss.

Can a particular performance of a work be so subtle that you don't hear its beauty in the first hearing and in the tenth it continues to grow in your awareness? Of course.

End of brain

I have finally finished Robert Jourdain's Music, the Brain and Ecstasy. It's a complex but worthwhile book. I was disappointed by the ending where he promotes the progress myth. You know the one I mean--everything is improving over time, and soon we will reach nirvana. This is bosh.

The only progress experienced by humans is the one created by the application of the scientific method. One scientific proof builds on another, one invention builds on another, creating improvements in the way we live.

All music exists in the specific context of style. He talks about the trees of anticipation and completely misses the forest of style. It is the style of music that creates the anticipation. A body of people create a style. The composer then manipulates the elements of this style to create his composition. No style, no anticipation; no anticipation, no music.

Reviewing my blog entries on this book, I think you will be glad I have reached the end. I love stuff like this, but enough is enough.

Perspective

Jourdain argues so well in his brain book that we each have our own unique perspective on the music we hear that it causes me to doubt any one person's ability to describe and evaluate music for other listeners. Maybe it is all just a matter of taste. Which is in turn a matter of ones own early life experience.

But when faced with ugly melodies in a featureless musical landscape, a description which for my ears applies equally to Streetcar and Liaisons, what is one to think? In both cases the subject matter is ugly. Does an ugly plot justify ugly music?

I don't want the music to just be there creating an atmosphere, like so much elevator music. I want characteristics to emerge. I want something going on in the music that engages my attention. I want opera to be about music, not the other way round.

Adolescence

It says here in the brain book that we form our tastes by 12 or 13 years of age and ever after love only the same kinds of music. Wow! As a young person I loved Judy Garland, so I suppose ever after I have been looking for someone who could sell a song like Judy. Liking Cecilia Bartoli, the modern singer most able to sell a song, only seems logical. 

But virtually all I know of classical music came later, some of it much later. I loved the "Erbarme dich" from Bach's Saint Matthew Passion from the time that I sang it in college. Janet Baker's recording is definitely the one to hear. When I bought a synthesizer, I created a setting for it using muted strings that was powerful and heart rending, my best achievement in that medium.  

There is a very deep place in my heart for Brahms' Requiem. I can sing along through the entire piece. Robert Shaw's recordings of this are fine but do not approach his live performance with the San Francisco Symphony in the early 80's, a performance that featured Kathleen Battle singing "Wir hab' nun Trauerigkeit." Awesome. I used to have a tape of it, but it was stolen from my car. 

And how does this explain my taste for the organ music of Olivier Messiaen? Or Glenn Gould's Bach? Or Gorecky's Third Symphony? I would never have listened to bluegrass as a young person, so why am I listening to it now? I admit Kelly Clarkson is definitely a throwback to early soft rock. That fits. And a passionate love for Die Fledermaus and Der Rosenkavalier fits a childhood that included J. Strauss' "Tales from the Vienna Woods." 

But the recording I love best of Cecilia's is the Rossini "Heroines" album. What from my early teens would have prepared me to appreciate this stunning work? Perhaps it does all make sense. Does a deep love of Janet Baker's performance of Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" fit this picture?" Does she sell Mahler like Judy? Perhaps. The musical tastes of my youth were sketchy at best. Music has been a gift of my adult life. I continue to discover new things to love, like Rolando Villazon's French album. He has recently signed a long term contract with Deutsche Grammophon.

The brain and singing

This book, Robert Jourdain's Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, has a gaping omission: there is nothing at all on singing. He goes on and on about hands in performance, but what about singing? How does that work?

Meter war

Robert Jourdain in his book Music, the Brain and Ecstasy at the end of the chapter on rhythm proposes a meter war. He sees ranks forming on each side with one group favoring regular meters with interest focused on harmony, while the other group leaves the harmony simple and emphasizes the meter.

The first group is represented by classical music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The obsession with tonality and its developmental implications made meter a not particularly significant feature.

The second group is represented by American pop of various genres. They bring along a lot of heavy equipment to help them emphasize the meter. Rhythmic elements predominate, especially in rock and roll and disco where an emphasized meter is virtually everything.

In the sixties were a group called the Swingle Singers who did Bach with a jazz style drum track. This was very workable and fun, and I recall buying their records. I also recall doing it myself on my synthesizer, producing a rather silly version of Bach’s “Sehet Jesu” from the St. Matthew Passion. The idea was to marry both worlds.

I guess I see these things as elements of style. One style—or more appropriately, sequence of styles—arose in civilized Europe where music served primarily to support authoritarian political regimes, while the other—also forming itself into a series—arose in America and emphasized informality and egalitarianism.

I guess I see a culture war. One is formal and intellectual, treasured and tax supported. The other is informal and left entirely to the forces of capitalism. It’s even railed against and blamed for all manner of moral degradation. One is seeping away into the past along with the culture it reflected, more valued with each successive loss of viability. The other thrives while hardly valued.

Theory explains the how of music, but does not explain the why.

What’s wrong with modern music

The book about music and the brain is spending a lot of pages to get at some basic ideas. The movement of perception from right brain (feeling) to left brain (idea) in professional musicians is huge.

There are three things
1. The natural characteristics of sound—what is usually called acoustics
2. The natural characteristics of us, how we hear, how we perceive the sounds we hear, how we organize them in our brains, all things designed to support survival, not entertainment
3. The building up of expectation over time—learning

Education is a kind of fourth thing, but this fourth thing has only to do with the process of composition, not the cultural idea of music. Basically the problem is that our composers know too much. They are carefully trained to know all about serialism and every other cute trick someone has dreamed up over the centuries. To curtail this conversation to its shortest possible length, they know a very great deal more than they have any actual use for.

The most successful composers of the past took the idiom they were born into and manipulated it to their own ends. Wagner took the new ideas of modulation he was hearing all around him and organized them into a seething, writhing morass. Bach took the tricks of the fugue invented by others and carried these to new heights of expression and complexity. Both of these very different composers are just writing variations on the compositional style common to their own era. It is item 3, the building up of expectation over time, that makes this all possible. They owe a huge debt to those who preceded them, because it is they who created the context of expectation. A Bach that appears out of thin air is completely useless as well as completely impossible.

These modern composers with amazing skills are lacking one essential feature: a context of expectation. We never know what to expect. I know that Messiaen had a whole theory of composition that he based his pieces on. I don’t need to know what this is to realize that his theories allow him to build up a context of expectation for me the listener. My brain knows what he’s doing without understanding his theories and is able to derive pleasure from it.

Gross generalization number one: theories of composition are for composers. In the precise second that the listener needs to know about them, the sounds in question have ceased to be music. Our brains make up their own solutions, and do not require the assistance of theoreticians.

The music of today lacks an overriding cultural style. Our music is absolutely all over the place, so society is not being particularly helpful to people wanting to write music.

I’m going to put in a little Vivaldi, some Brubeck, here and there a little tango. You actually hear composers saying things like this. Spend a lot more of your time concentrating on the context of expectation you are creating for the listener and lots less on impressing us with how much you know and how well you write.

Which reminds me of my Imbrie story. There is a composer named Andrew Imbrie, and when I was in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus we were assigned to sing one of his pieces. Every week, sometimes two or three times a week, we would come and take out his piece, and every rehearsal there would not be three notes that sounded familiar. It was always a new piece each time we rehearsed it, and this went on for weeks. He seemed completely successful at eliminating expectation and probably would not understand if I told him this was a bad thing.

Create in me an expectation. Society is not providing you with a context, so that means you have to create one. The context and the expectation are one. Help me anticipate where you are going, because it is my anticipation that creates the music.

Gross generalization number two: it is the listener and the process of listening that makes it music. Not you.

In Doctor Tischler's history classes we were taught that tonality was the invention of the Italian composer Archangelo Corelli. Up until then strong harmonic direction existed mainly only at the cadence points and in between things went in pretty much any direction. Tonality meant that this sense of harmonic pull permeated the entire composition. This was a powerful concept that then swept the musical world and became the primary interest of composers for 200 years.

The attraction of tonality is that it provides a context for anticipation. We love the sensation of being pulled along. Pop still includes this feature, but the fascination of tonality to the exclusion of virtually all else is gone. Serious composers today seem offended by the idea that someone would easily organize their materials into understandable structures. Confusion seems to be the objective.

Many of the most attractive composers now belong to the school called minimalism. They have decided to pare it all down and try again. Maybe too much complexity is just boring. Glass is the most extreme, but Pärt is definitely a minimalist. So is Górecki. Less is definitely more.

Footnote: Corelli created the reality of tonality, not the theory--that came much later.

Professional brain

Now here is something interesting in Music, the Brain....--he says that for the average person melodic perception is in the right brain, but for professional musicians it shifts to the left. That means it goes from feeling to thinking. What I've been urging is to resist the drift all the way to left brain music and try to remember that the audience is still hearing on the right. Upgrade your intellectual / professional perceptions while retaining your emotional ones. The best music satisfies both.

I knew there would be good stuff here.

Reverberation

I am continuing to read the book about the brain and music. His description of the effects of reverb reminded me of a concert in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

I am very familiar with Fauré's Requiem, but was completely unprepared for the transformation it underwent with the long reverberation of Grace Cathedral. Now Gabriel Fauré worked as an organist in cathedrals in Paris and must have known exactly what would happen. He knew that the tones dying away from the previous chord would increase the beauty of the succeeding chord. How would you know this if you didn't experience it first hand?

With Bach this doesn't happen. The reverberation just obscures the counterpoint.

Musical Brain

I have just discovered the greatest book--Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, How Music Captures our Imagination by Robert Jourdain. This is exactly the book I wanted. He's going to explain everything. You see, it all has to do with our brains.

I always read everything about the brain. I stole the March National Geographic from my doctor's office because it has a long article about the brain. The only musical thing that interested them was absolute pitch, apparently a learned facility much more common in the orient.

Jourdain goes through everything very quickly but tries to cover every conceivable topic. I'll let you know what he has to say.