TeledyN

Here's my shot: at a theory, a brief synopsis of the book I am likely to never have the time to write, set forth here devoid of my references but please do trust that I do have them, dutifully noted in my delicio.us/teledyn account and often fragmentally mused in my blog and my twitter feed :)

why do we have a brain for music?

this question is the root question, and the question is backwards: what we call music is so because of our brain, or more exactly, because of who and what we are, and it is not just the brain. For example, the diatonic scale, Dale Purves finds, is intrinsic to human speech formants, rhythm is intrinsic to the identification of sounds (patterns of neurons do a drum-sequence of firings, not taking the whole wave, merely sampling features and producing a neural pattern that can then be associated to the experience) and people will dance when the music fits the available rhythms of which their limbs can swing. Rhythmic language can also evoke movement and delight.

why is music emotionally evocative

Ornette Coleman remarked that if someone was talking to him in Russian, he could likely still understand if the speaker was happy, sad, angry or whatever. Purves (I think it was) also finds that the interval choices in happy speech tends to major, sad speech to minor, so again, the relation is the other way around, our emotions change our speech patterns and our music, being an 'abstracted' speech mimics this feature so as to communicate or induce emotion.

why do we dance?

my case here is not so strong: other animals dance but only so organized when it is a ritual, and indeed we do dance very elaborately for rituals and much of our dancehall motion of all genres could be put down to combining the ritual with the body-rhythm, but that does not explain why a polka makes people (young and old) clap. However I think that the clapping phenomenon may be part of it: by mirroring the rhythms heard and observed, we amplify the effect of the rhythms; see recent research on behavioral contagion in humans, it could be we seek to maximize the induction effects of the musical impulse in ourselves by synchronous behaviours to the pulse, like how a gentle wind can twist a massive bridge by applying only that little bit of resonant energy. Since vision, sound and haptic sense are all just touchstone inputs to the pre-frontal self-experience image, the brain polling all channels to build its world model, thus sound, lights, motion or clapping are equivalent inputs to "rock one's world" and the effect, now mirrored locally internal to the local person, is contagious to other nearby humans, and voila, you have a dance happening. It is like pushing someone on a swing, if you push them at just the right moment and with just the right gradient of accelleration, you get a great deal more swing for your effort; I have seen fiddlers do this slyly on a dancefloor, seizing a moment in the music to virtually catapult people into a dance.

why is music structured the way it is?

First of all, from the above we see music is structured to fit the organism. Whales have their music because of who they are, we have ours because of who we are, dogs, dolphins, cicadas etc. [In addition] Jazz-Fusion drummer Steve Smith (from Frank Gambale's band) believes it [also] reduces to the ability of the brain to abstract from complex information and distill to fundamental information, of which the fundamental numbers become 2 and 3; Steve points out that the essential characteristic of 'good' rhythm in most world musics is the interplay between a 2-beat and a 3-beat polyrhythm, what Jazz calls 'swing'. Similarly in poetry we see rhythms of two and three used in contrasts, and in melodic phrases we tend to see twos and threes strung together with co-parts woven in as unison, half/double or third/triple time.

why do we reward musicianship?

Buddha asked "Given right thinking, does right behaviour follow?" and yes, I am paraphrasing. Many musicians believe their music, when played just right, is theraputic, that it can invoke some sort of spiritual or even a literally physical 'healing'. Hospitals find music in the rooms speeds recovery, but not all music. The military loves music because the lockstep of the march induces good following; big record companies are also very fond of this Pied Piper effect. I think it is an extension of the spontaneous hand-clap, a leveraging of our social-animal instinct, in a move to maximize the musical effect that then begets a contagion. In sociological studies of children in orchestras they find the working together to make a synchronous grand sound brings the players together outside of the orchestra as well, a social harmony follows. Clearly there is evolutionary value in such phenomena (and profits for EMI and Sony!) so those musicians who are able to hit those vocal-formant scales and 2:3 rhythm engines would be very valuable indeed!

 

Thanks to a challenge put out by Mark Changizi, a challenge to overcome what he phrases as four hurdles for any comprehensive definition of just what this thing called 'music' might be, my entry to the discussion follows his, and mine, however impromptu and ill thought out, begins thus, with questions and answers, so far as it goes, to follow below it; it was the most trouble I could conceive of getting myself into on a storm-cloud wilderness Friday night.

the astutely scientific reader, such as Mark ;) will notice that I hadn't actually stated my hypothesis directly, and called out on this, Mark wondered if I was proposing that music was an extension of language. My answer is a hedge-bet yes and no: Music is not a singular thing but the intersection of melody, rhythm of beat and the flow of dynamics (ie large and small scale punctuations) as well as a social phenomenon and a restorative salve and many other things as well.  What I propose is that the reason we find music so blended into such a wide variety of neurocognitive correlates is because the actual 'music' happens <i>inside</i> the brain, coordinated and shared through outside media of sound, colour, motion and other information-transfer waves, but that it is the synthesis of these <i>as polled and re-assembled by the personal-I consciousness</i> where the music happens, and the reason specific inputs trigger these spectacular effects has more to do with the structure of the human (super)organism, the total; structure, the frame, the perceptual apparatus, the neurocognitive mechanisms, what we select as 'musical' is preselected by the form of our being:

Sounds which have been culturally selected as seeming musical to the human organism are collectively called 'Music' That's about the best I can put it. For example, a musician left in the presence of any resonating chamber will invariably start playing with it, testing it against their human apparatus if you will, trying this and that the way Slonimsky said we should try his thesaurus of scales so as to decide for ourselves which were and which were not musical in nature. (ie, naturally musical) And I realize my definition excludes a great deal of what is sold as music ;) but that's ok, a great deal of what is sold as medicine or even dare I say sold as 'food' is in fact not really very much at all!

My point being that it is the human apparatus, the frame of the body, the chambers of the sinuses and the structure of the throat and the respiratory system and the structure of the brain and the neurocognitive sensory systems which have by their nature pre-selected which external events we would consider to be music and which would be noise. That strange microwave-derived scale that uses tripling of the frequencies as the primary unit of the scale instead of the octave's doubling, it is numerically every bit as valid as the Pythagorean theory of music as deriving from vibrating strings, yet there is not a single one of the readers of this article who prefer that scale, and precious few who know of it. So clearly it isn't enough to be numerically harmonic.

However, taking Dale Purves for example, if instead the diatonic scale preference found universally as the at-minimum pentatonic scale, when adjusted for the aberations from our mechanically convenient equal tempered scale predicts which tones would be most common, and which intervals would be more harmonious to a higher degree of accuracy than does the mathematical ratios of Harry Partch (another who, among the readers, is unlikely a hands-down favourite) All of this suggests the human is a priori to the music, that we have selected from the spectrum of sound and kept only that which appealed to our nature.

 

For 500 years, the Zen garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto has enigmatically captivated our gaze. In a new paper published in Nature, Neuroscience may explain why: Tour guides bringing visitors to the 'best' spot to view the garden stop exactly where the symmetry lines converge.

Curiously reminiscent of other studies on entoptic effects in shamanic and prehistoric art. There's also a resonance with both these ideas to the directional harmonics at work in our biology. We may be one in the Spirit, but we are one in the Body too.

Submitted by mrG on Thu, 2002-09-26 10:08