Cross disciplinary study of music and the brain is a relatively new and long overdue pursuit, and I’ve written here before about authors Robert Jourdain, Daniel Levitin and Oliver Sacks, whose books gave me my first insights into this amazing realm. So I was fortunate to spent last Thursday at a day-long “Music and the Brain” symposium at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences back in my hometown of Durham, NC. Some major figures in the field offered a range of ideas, concepts and research that might not have held together under one easy takeaway but that certainly glimpsed how rich and mutually informing brain science and music theory are. Study one and you get insight about the other. Summaries, thoughts and a dancing cockatoo after the jump.
Music seems to be the human brain’s attempt to give itself something to do that really suits its skill set, because listening and playing engage the brain so abundantly. Yet we know that the basic principles of harmony were there waiting in nature to be discovered. And we know that it took humans millennia to discover those rules and then centuries to refine them. Then, for hard to fathom reasons, development of music exploded exponentially in a century of unprecedented social and technological change. Something huge and mysterious is going on here, and I expect that, hooked by the music/brain universe, I’ll be burrowing into these questions for the rest of my life.
I couldn't possibly summarize all of the speakers, but here are some things I took away. Harvard’s Mark Jude Tramo said he wants to “heal the schism” between art and neuroscience, because the premise of so much brain research has been to isolate and localize quanta of processing, so experiments involve laser dots in boxes or colored flash cards instead of response to actual music. He’s a little more gonzo and real world, like a quick experiment he oversaw in which newborns seemed to experience less trauma (measured in terms of heart rate acceleration) when having blood drawn from their heels when soothing music was playing. For us adults, he talked about music as a cocktail of the generation, violation and satisfaction of expectations. And he offered some nice ways to think about the layers of cognition that goes into hearing sound and assembling it into what we interpret as music.
Elizabeth Marvin from the University of Rochester offered some insights into absolute pitch, the ability to name a note being played without references or to sing any note at will. She suggested that there’s some strong natural inclination toward AP in many people, but it generally only manifests itself if it’s cultivated very young and specifically through ear training. And some people just get the gift. Blind musicians and Chinese music students have the highest rates of perfect pitch among the groups she mentioned.
Laurel Trainor from McMaster University talked about her theory that music basically came from human movement. We create rhythm by walking, working, breathing, etc. Other animals use rhythm to communicate. And, most interesting to me, was the fact that from the time we’re babies, we stimulate our own vestibular system to set up rhythms in our bodies. It’s why we bob our head at rock concerts. I’m not sure if she talked about this, but it seems more than coincidence to me that that system, which gives our bodies balance and the sense of motion through space, sits right next to our ears. I’d love to ask if that offers any advantage to our brains in assembling rhythmic information and harmonic information into a musical whole.
Dale Purves from Duke showed some remarkable data to support his thesis that a lot of our inherent notions about harmony (like minor equals melancholy) comes from speech. It’s easiest to point HERE to an NPR story about his most famous insight.
And I really enjoyed David Huron’s talk about why we experience such sharp and manifest emotions listening to music, including laughter, weeping, awe and frisson (goosebumps, electricity). The Ohio State professor was an amiable storyteller who offered the idea that composers and musicians can manipulate the clashes that ensue when our outer and inner brains experience conflicting evidence. Our reflexive, autonomic, reptilian brain might experience alarm, and it fires first. Our more ruminative, strategic and cognitive brain in the outer shell moves more slowly, and when it catches up and tells us there’s no cause for alarm, a cascade of emotions follows. He spoke of contrastive affect, in which feeling is heightened by context and conflict. All in all, very interesting and quite funny.
This is huge stuff, and I’m in my own kind of awe toward the people who are choosing this route in neuroscience, even though there might be more immediate rewards working for drug companies. But with what these scientists had to say at Duke, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that one day we’ll coax people back to mental health with individually tailored music in departments of pharmaco-musicology.
Oh, and we also learned that cockatoos can keep a darn good beat.
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