Music - it's all in your mind

I just finished the relatively new and somewhat awkwardly titled This Is Your Brain on Music by Dan Levitin, a record producer and musician who was so interested in how people perceive sound that he got a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and became one of a mere handful of scientists in the world who closely study music and the brain. He was the subject of a massive profile in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago, and the book seems to have been well received. My reactions were mixed.

On one hand, Levitin added to my overall sense of the subject and offered some snappy anecdotes. And he’s an enthusiastic communicator with sincere passion for his material. But I found the book poorly edited, with problems at the structural and sentence-by-sentence level. If I didn’t already know about music theory and the harmonic series, I think I would have been confused by a lot of the first few chapters, and clearly this is supposed to be a read for ordinary folks, so that seemed a demerit. Also, he gets off on weak evidentiary footing by asserting in the opening pages that “Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.” He’s trying to indicate what a powerful force music is in our lives and our culture, and that’s not incorrect, but his facts, at least insofar as drugs are concerned, flat wrong. I’m kind of guessing he’s wrong about sex spending too, but I’ve got no data. (And if you buy Justin Timberlake music, do you get counted by both industries?)

But let me dwell on the upsides, because I came away really impressed by Levitin’s commitment to his subject and some of his savvy experiments.

He shows how extraordinary our memory is by way of music. When people off the street sing their favorite pop songs a capella and without any pitch or tempo prompting, purely out of their heads, they come remarkably close to the tempo and key of the familiar record. While scarcely any of those people would have absolute pitch or be able to hum an A note, their brains remember the harmonic center of the songs.

Levitin also points out how sensitive we are to timbre, the distinct texture of a sound or mix of sounds. When a researcher played mere fragments of a second of a favorite recording, subjects could recognize them. Why is ridiculously remarkable? Because you’ve got to realize how little data your brain is being given to call up the song. No tempo, because you can’t hear a beat on either side. No melodic information because you can’t hear tones on either side of the single note. Just the texture of the recording – a soundprint that’s utterly unique, but one that has a corresponding trace in the brain, worn in like a groove from repeated and attentive listening. A sound comes along that matches that particular pattern of neurons exchanging energy, that fits in that groove, and voila, you just remember. That just messes me up.

Levitin helps make the case for early childhood music education because it literally helps wire the brain for a complex array of cognition later on. Moreover, people will have a far greater grasp and enjoyment of music as adults if they learn something about it as a kid. “Even just a small exposure to music lessons as a child creates neural circuits for music processing that are enhanced and more efficient than for those who lack training,” he writes. I’ve always believed this intuitively, and here is physical evidence.

Then there’s just a lot of cool stuff to know: Newborns can recognize and in general prefer music they only heard in utero. The experiments that found this out are pretty brilliant. Also we learn that babies live in a world of psychedelic synesthesia for their first few months on earth while their brains wire up the firewalls that let it distinguish between kinds of sensory input – smell, hearing, taste, touch. Before that it’s all just blurred together, a feeling you can simulate with certain chemical compounds. If I ever used smiley emoticons, I might use one here.

But there are some big questions that this book doesn’t help illuminate, and I would have wished for more. Here’s a cop out from pate 226. He says something very important for a music brain researcher to say. “There doesn’t seem to be a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music, but most people have formed their tastes by the age of eighteen or twenty.” Then he says “Why this is so is not clear.” What a jerk. He sets up one of the most maddening questions in all of life as far as I’m concerned, and then punts. He does say that people are generally less open to new experiences in middle age and on, but again, not why. Has nobody studied the differences in musical cognition between 45 year olds who listen to nothing but their Eagles and Jackson Browne records and their peers who went to 25 different kinds of concerts last year? In general, the chapter about musical tastes was a disappointment.

Levitin does a fine job surveying evidence that we’re genetically predisposed to making and loving music, that it’s one of our special gifts as a species. He takes apart a few infamous scientists who have called music “auditory cheesecake,” a good-for-nothing vestigial accident of evolution. I hate that point of view and am glad to have evidence to refute it. I also really liked Chapter 7 called “What Makes A Musician?” He starts with the very astute observation that there’s an unnecessary “chasm” between musical practitioners and regular people who like music in our country. People feel uniquely and peculiarly discouraged by good musicians to do it themselves and accept their own best. He tells stories of unnecessary discouragement of himself and others, which are not hard to find. He emphasizes that we’re all musical experts really because we all have the same design in our brain and music lights up our brains in very similar ways. Of course some people don’t want to have their brain lit up, but that’s another subject.

If you want your brain lit up about music as well as by music, I’d recommend the book that’s featured on this blog – Music, The Brain and Ecstasy by Robert Jourdain. It may be time for me to read that again.

Comments

[Rizzrazz]

Regarding Levitin's endorsement of early childhood music education:
As an early childhood music specialist, I appreciate any endorsement of starting children early in music. However, if these classes teach "about" music, this is analagous to teaching the alphabet to babies to help them understand their native tongue. Not good. Speak to them instead. To teach music in the early years (including the prenatal months), sing and move and listen to a wide variety of music. That's not teaching "about" music. That's teaching music!

[praisembeka]

Read about more colored music experiences in the book,"Blue Cats and chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthets Color their Worlds"--the first book by a synesthete about synesthesia--it's not easy to get now--but it's out there:
http://www.bluecats.info

Praise