December 5th, 2008ETF081 Your brain on music Review by Arjen Verhoeff European Triode Festival 2008,...

December 5th, 2008 ETF08 1

Your brain on music

Review by Arjen Verhoeff

European Triode Festival 2008, the Netherlands


How to do a review?

‘Her sustained appoggiatura was flawed by an inability to

complete the roulade’

Or preferably:

‘Was the music performed in a way that moved the audience?’


Some structure in the review

• Why brains on music

• How the Brain is organised

• How the Mind interprets


Why brains on music

• When you know how it works you can better enjoy

• listening to music (or not…)

• Nurture of nature?

• Cultural


Good for your hearth

Myth busterson the effect oflow frequencies

Music and the interaction between brain and body

Effect on intelligence

More creative

Brain waves


Brain, Mind or Culture?


Sources for analysis

• Biography

• Modelling

• Oliver Sacks

• Levitin


Oliver Sacks: Tales of Music and the Brain

• Conductor Clive Wearing: lost memory but not musical memory• Salimah. Her shy personality was changed after she suffered a

seizure. She suddenly had the desire to listen to music all the time

• Woody Geist. He suffers from Alzheimers disease, but he still performs in an a cappella singing group

• Leon Fleisher is a classical piano player who performed with one hand for many years because of a condition called dystonia which affected his right hand

• Kids with Williams Syndrome have difficulty paying attention, but they often possess a love for music


About Levitin

Daniel J. Levitin runs the Levitin Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, where he holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communications. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he was a record producer with gold records to his credit and professional musician. He has published extensively in scientific journals and music trade magazines suchas Grammy and Billboard.


Basics of music• Pitch: psychological construct of a frequency and it’s relative

position in a musical scale• Rhythm: refers to duration of a series of notes and their grouping• Tempo: speed or pace of a musical piece• Contour: overall shape of a melody• Timbre: a consequence of overtones to distinguish instruments• Loudness: psychological construct related to produced energy • Reverberation: perception of distance to a source

How are these elements organised in our brain?


Organisation of the brain, sideview (front in left)


Organisation of the brain, innerview (2)


Ten different parts of the brain

• Motor Cortex: movement, foottapping, dancing, playing music

• Cerebellum: movement, etc, and emotional reactions to music

• Sensory Cortex: tactile feedback from an instrument

• Auditory Cortex: first stages of listening to sound, analysis overtones

• Prefrontal Cortex: creation, violation and satisfaction of expectations

• Visual Cortex: reading music, looking at performer’s movements

• Corpus Gallosum: connects left and right hemispheres

• Hippocampus: memory for music, musical experiences and context

• Nucleus Accumbens, Amygdala : Emotional reactions to music


The brain and music

• Why do we like the music we like?

• Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?

• Are our musical preferences shaped before birth? • How do we develop new tastes in music?

• What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brains response to music?


How the Mind interacts with the Brain


Higher order mechanisms of interpretation

• Meter: information from rhythm and loudness

• Key: hierarchy between tones in a musical piece

• Melody: main theme

• Harmony: relationship between pitches of different tones


The mind machine

Grouping principles like:

• Anticipation

• Foottapping

• Catogorise and memorise music

• Learn to play music


Expectations are based on repetition

• Chord progression, Style, Musical era = repetition

• We recognise what we have heard before

• We stay interested in specific musical pieces because it keeps surprising in relation to what we expect

Beethoven, Ninth Symphony (or in words: ‘Come and sing a

song of joy for peace a gloria gloria): main thema = scale


Anticipation of expectations in chords and rhythm

Chords

• Donald Fagan, Kamakiriad: first one chord instead of blues progression

• Beatles, Yesterday: main melodic phrase seven measures, instead of four

• Arita Franklin, Chain of Fools: all in one chord

• Schonberg: deprivation of expectation (on root or resolution to ‘home’)

Rhythm

• CCR, Looking out my back door: unexpected ending at full tempo

• Stevie Ray Vaughan, Pride and Joy: music stops, singer continues

• The Police: reggae and rock


Foottapping with Buddy Holly (4/4 time in a bar):

CAPS = downbeat, bold = your foot hits the floorTHAT’ll be the day (rest) when

YOU say good-bye-yes;

THAT’ll be the day (rest) when

YOU make me cry-hi; you

SAY you gonna leave (rest) you

KNOW it’s a lie ‘cause

THAT’ll be the day-ay

AY when I die


YOU say good-bye-yes;

• Foottap occurs in the middle of a beat

• First say begins before you put your foot down

• At yes this repeats

• Syncopation: a note anticipates a beat. The note is played earlier than the beat calls for

• Violate expectations with anticipation


Normally a word on every downbeat, but (line 2, 4):

[pick up] Well you

[line 1] GAVE me all your lovin’ and your

[line 2] (REST) tur-tle dovin’ (rest)

[line 3] ALL your hugs and kisses and your

[line 4] (REST) money too

Holly is not giving what you would expect: tension

- Out of sync, in sync

- Violation of expectation by delaying words


Musical memory

• We can instantly name a color just by looking at it; why can’t we name a pitch just by listening?

• Most of us can identify sounds as we identify colors. Not by pitch, but by timbre: a car horn, your mother in law, a guitar

• We can remember ‘our pitch’ quite well (Happy birthday)

• Why do only a few people have an absolute pitch (they can name pitch as if it were colors)?


Next book of Levitin

THE WORLD IN SIX SONGS

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

The reviewer has no affiliation to the author whatsoever

What the review did learn me:

Music is about the interplay between recognition and surprise

Who does not hear the music, get the impression the dancers are mad, internet proverb

Thank you for your attention

December 5th, 2008ETF081 Your brain on music Review by Arjen Verhoeff European Triode Festival 2008,...

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