Transcript Dia 1 - European triode festival

Your brain on music
Review by Arjen Verhoeff
European Triode Festival 2008, the Netherlands
December 5th, 2008
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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?’
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Some structure in the review
• Why brains on music
• How the Brain is organised
• How the Mind interprets
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Why brains on music
• When you know how it works you can better enjoy
• listening to music (or not…)
• Nurture of nature?
• Cultural
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Music and the interaction
between brain and body
Good for
your hearth
Effect on
intelligence
More
creative
Myth busters
on the effect of
low frequencies
Brain waves
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Brain, Mind or Culture?
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Sources for analysis
• Biography
• Modelling
• Oliver Sacks
• Levitin
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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
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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 such
as Grammy and Billboard.
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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?
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Organisation of the brain, sideview (front in left)
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Organisation of the brain, innerview (2)
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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
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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?
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How the Mind interacts with the Brain
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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
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The mind machine
Grouping principles like:
• Anticipation
• Foottapping
• Catogorise and memorise music
• Learn to play music
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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
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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
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Foottapping with Buddy Holly (4/4 time in a bar):
CAPS = downbeat, bold = your foot hits the floor
THAT’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
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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
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Normally a word on every downbeat, but (line 2, 4):
[pick up]
[line 1]
[line 2]
[line 3]
[line 4]
Well you
GAVE me all your lovin’ and your
(REST) tur-tle dovin’ (rest)
ALL your hugs and kisses and your
(REST) money too
Holly is not giving what you would expect: tension
- Out of sync, in sync
- Violation of expectation by delaying words
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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)?
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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
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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