Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus

Reference:

World Science Festival (2010) Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus http://worldsciencefestival.com/videos/notes_neurons_in_search_of_the_common_chorus?/video/notes-neurons-full#idc-container

Summary:

This video of a talk from the 2010 World Science Festival asks whether our experience of music is “hard-wired or culturally determined”. The discussion is led by neuroscientists Jamshed Barucha, Daniel Levitin and Lawrence Parsons and musician Bobby McFerrin.

The talk begins with a general look at the parts of the brain which are involved in interacting with music. Across cultures, humans respond to music using the same parts of their brains, but the way in which our brains categorize what we hear varies based upon what types of music they have been exposed to. The panellists also briefly discuss the basic building blocks of music: rhythm, pitch and timbre. These elements appear in the music of all cultures. Daniel Levitin points out that certain intervals in music are near universal. The octave and fifth are apparent in the music of almost every studied culture including ancient Greece and Indonesian gamelan music. These are followed by the fourth and the third. Scales are typically constructed when the octave is divided into further intervals, whether equally spaced or unequal. Different cultures fill in the octave using various intervals but these four basic are often present.

Jamshed Barucha describes the patterns of recognition our brains create (synapses) in response to repeated exposure to musical scales. After forming these connections, the brain causes us to expect that the music we hear will fit into one of these categories. Even if only a few pitches are played, our brains automatically fill in the gaps, assigning a scale to the music so that we can understand it. In Western music, these scale categories include the major, minor and blues scales. A listener in India might expect a scale (or raga) featured in Indian classical music, such as the Bhairavi scale. In his research , Barucha asked participants from Western backgrounds to first listen to musical phrases using Indian scales and then to sing what they felt might be a natural conclusion to the phrase they have heard. At first, the Western singers completed the Indian phrase excerpts using only notes from Western scales. However, by the end of the study, a few were able to learn and use more of the Indian scale tones in their own singing. While our initial reception of new music is culturally pre-determined, our brains are capable of recognizing new scales and learning to use them.

Next, Bobby McFerrin performs an interactive piece where he engages the audience in singing a pentatonic scale. By setting up certain expectations, he is able to “train” the audience and then essentially play them like he would an instrument. McFerrin claims that no matter where he is performing, every audience is able to easily pick up the scale and participate.

Finally, Lawrence Parsons conducts an experiment on McFerrin and two volunteers from the audience. He plays excerpts from four contrasting pieces of music: Delirious by Prince, Traumerei by Strauss, Threnody by Penderecki and finally a sample of Sichuan opera. As the participants listen, a computer collects their skin conductance level. Levels were higher when the participant recognized the song, as well as when the music caused negative emotion, particularly stress and annoyance. Parsons concluded that the immediate response to a piece of music is affected by cultural exposure and familiarity with the particular piece or genre. Unfamiliar music tends to have a negative effect.

Reflections:

Barucha’s study on the response of Western musicians to non-Western scales was interesting to me because it demonstrated the brain’s ability to make new connections. Despite limited exposure to the classical music of India, the Western singers were eventually able to adopt more of the Indian musical conventions. As a Western musician from a non-Western background, this is particularly relevant to me as the music I perform is not the music I grew up listening to. Yet while my brain created synapses in response to my culture’s music at a young age, it has also been able to recognize the conventions of dominant Western music over time and increased exposure.

I was also intrigued by the responses of neuroscientist Lawrence Parsons during the live study he conducted on stage. The three participants were Bobby McFerrin, a Caucasian male non-musician named Forest and a South East Asian female amateur pianist. Interestingly, after the participants listened to the excerpt from a Sichuan opera, he asked the woman whether the music meant to her, whether she recognized it, whether she knew what it meant. To me, these questions seemed tinged with his expectation of her as a listener from a certain culture. While I am only speculating, it appeared that as he was studying expectation in music, Parsons approached his research participants with some expectation as well.

Finally, I leave you with a video clip from the panel discussion. The universality of music was debated in this talk and will continue to be debated as we seek to study the music outside our Western walls. While our cultural experience affects much of how our brains respond to music, Bobby McFerrin’s interactive performance is certainly convincing as to the universality of music.

Brain Compatible Music Teaching by Susan Kenney

General Music Today

23(1) 24 –26 © 2009 MENC: The National Association for Music Education

http://gmt.sagepub.com

Summary

Kenney begins her article with an example of a primary music classroom. The teacher is demonstrating the new song by rote and students are echoing each line as she sings it. Afterwards she introduces a game based on the song and explains the rules. The students play the game while she reminds them to use their light singing voice.

The author cites the book Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain, which believes that fragmenting content is the biggest mistake schools make. When we teach bits and pieces of a song the meaningful connections in the brain are interrupted. The brain is able to process parts and wholes simultaneously and in our attempts to simplify the learning process we are not allowing the brain to extract patterns on its own.

Towards the end of the article we revisit the primary music classroom. This time the teacher simply starts into the game with no explanation of the new song. The children watch her actions as they join in the game, correcting their own mistakes while making an attempt to understand. Through repetition, the children gain enough confidence to sing along. They become conscious of their own voice as well as the voices of others and the collective quality and accuracy improves.

Even though each child grasps the game, song, and social challenges at different times, it provides an opportunity for every child to find all of the patterns. This method of teaching allows the brain to problem solve as well as learn through bodily movement. The brain needs a great deal of input to detect patterns as well as time to interpret them, so the repetition of the game is key for understanding. If an understanding is not reached, then the emotional excitement from the experience will prepare the brain for further learning next time. During this process clear singing from students is not immediate and the teacher must be willing to wait and trust that the children will self-correct.

Reflection

In my own classroom I teach new primary songs by rote. I follow the “one phrase at a time” method where the students echo what I sing or play. This is usually the quickest way to achieve results and move on to the next learning expectation in the lesson. This was also how I was taught and what I thought was the easiest way to absorb information.

I think as teachers we identify “success” with product rather then process, and reading this article has caused me to re-evaluate my methods of rote instruction. Do I correct students too early rather then letting them figure it out on their own? Am I too concerned with teaching the “correct” way of singing instead of letting them explore different pathways? And ultimately, am I breaking down the song into phrases because I don’t think their brains handle the whole thing?

After this reading I started to incorporate whole song instruction into my pedagogy. At first students were confused, but it was interesting to see their faces as their brains tried to make sense of the patterns. They were no longer passive participants because now there was a puzzle for their brains to solve. I think this article is valuable for music educators because it asks us to think about how we teach music beyond reaching curriculum expectations. It asks us to incorporate brain development into our practice, which could benefit the student in a non-musical way.

The Role Of Music In Human Evolution

Reference:

Podcast of an interview with Daniel Levitin: http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/musicandthebrain/podcast_daniellevitin.html

Dr. Daniel Levitin is a scientist, musician, author, producer, sound designer, and recording engineer. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Oregon, and he completed post-doctoral studies at Stanford University Medical School in Neuroimaging, and at UC Berkeley in Cognitive Psychology. He is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience, and Music at McGill University. He is also the author of the best seller This Is Your Brain On Music (2006), and The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008).

Summary: Daniel Levitin on his book The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

Levitin’s book The World in six Songs explores how music has helped to define who we are as humans and how it can be classified within six categories: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion/ritual, and love. After an analysis of thousands of recordings and texts of music going back as far as six thousand years, what emerged were these six categories of music. It is not a book about the six most important songs of all time, but six kinds of music that our ancestors used to form social bounds, to comfort one another, to encapsulate knowledge, and to eventually create societies.

In this book, Levitin wanted to incorporate more science than in his previous one This Is Your Brain On Music. He believes that you cannot research an interesting issue from one academic perspective. This is the reason why he chose a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses neurochemistry, anthropology, musicology, and evolutionary biology. He is not promoting any new ideas, but he wants to synthesize hundreds of articles related to his subject in a framework that is easy to understand. The choice of six songs is basically a device to connect the different fields of study and lay out the information.

The core of Levitin’s research is directed towards the role of music in human evolution, from creating civilizations to particular changes in the brain of Homo sapiens, the lather giving rise to the desire to communicate, to represent things artistically, and to convey them emotionally rather than factually. In his opinion the role of music has been under appreciated when it comes to evolutionary biology.

One example of this comes from Darwin, where music served a kind of sexual signalling function, indicating the mental, emotional, and sexual fitness of a singer. For more than 10,000 years, music was almost always accompanied by dance. If you could sing and dance for hours, you were not neurologically impaired, therefore indicating a degree of physical and sexual fitness. Those of our ancestors that could convey this would be the best at attracting mates and reproducing themselves.

The other example that he cites talks about the oxytocin hormone. This hormone has been known to cause a feeling of trust among people and it is usually released when having an orgasm. From a natural selection point of view, it is ideal to release it during copulation because the male feels bounded to the woman, therefore he does not flee and he stays to help raise the child. The only other time that the oxytocin hormone is released is when people sing together. Levitin suggests that singing must have been important in the evolutionary process to form social bounds and creating societies. When you look at other primate living groups, they seldom have more than eighteen or twenty male members, because rivalry and competition is too fierce. Yet humans have had living groups in the ten thousands for the longest time. He agrees with Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, that vocal grooming or singing together, has helped humans to ease these kinds of social tensions.

In the end, he talks openly about certain flaws of his book. When reading the book, one can feel overwhelmed by the amount of scientific data from all the different fields of study. A couple of reviewers that were musicians did not understand the evolutionary arguments, and found these arguments to be incomprehensive or dissatisfying. By contrast, the scientists who read the book liked the evolutionary explanations, but disliked the musical part. In the end, Levitin says that what really matters is the feeling that you learned something after reading it.

Reflections on the interview:

The choice of subject for Levitin’s book, The World In Six Songs, is quite interesting since there has not been that many research done on the role of music in evolution. In my opinion, it is explained by the act of music making, which relies on precise brain activity. The brain is a ‘newer’ and a more complex area of study, which is why it is harder to link music to the evolution process.

In the interview, he does not really explain how the six categories of music are useful or complementary to his research on the role of music in human evolution. The connection between the two seems unclear. On one hand, we understand how the multidisciplinary approach helps us view the ideas through different perspectives. On the other hand, because the book encompasses so many fields of study, the ideas and the author’s intentions can sometimes be hard to understand in this flux of diverse information.

Levitin comes across as a credible and well-spoken scientist and musician. He obviously possesses an extensive knowledge of his field and his ideas are rational and well researched. It certainly gives the listener the impulse of reading the book.

Reflections on the subject: the role of music in human evolution

Reference: The Musical Mind (2000) by Daniel J. Levitin

http://levitinlab.com/levitinlab/articles/2000-Levitin-Cerebrum.pdf

In his article The Musical Mind (2000), Levitin also talks about the purpose of music in evolution. He raises the questions: Is it an evolutionary accident ‘piggy-backing’ on language, as stated by Steven Pinker from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Or does it promote social bonding among members of a culture, as stated by himself in his book? In my opinion, I cannot see how music would be an accident of evolution. If so, why would it not have disappeared through thousands of years? Why would it be so present in human societies at all periods?

In one of his collaborations with Ursula Bellugi, Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, Levitin has found that people with Williams syndrome are unusually social, and in spite of many cognitive deficiencies, they have relatively normal musical skills. By contrast, people with Asperger autism are generally unsocial and unmusical. David Huron, the Head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory in the School of Music at Ohio State University, argues that this proves to be evidence for a genetic component that influences both musicality and sociability.

Even if the evidence is not yet strong enough to support music as an evolutionary adaptation, Huron believes that the idea is plausible. He enumerates three specific aspects of music. First, complex evolutionary adaptations occur over many millennia, and music making is one of the oldest human activity. Second, evolution expresses itself through genes, and musical experience influences and is modified by natural biochemical substances in the body. Third, specialized behaviors that evolved are typically associated with neuroanatomical sites, which music is, as seen in Bellugi and Levitin’s study.

I believe that with the fast development of neurological science and the mapping of the human genome, it will become much easier to pin point the precise genes involved in music making. I think that the solution to the role of music in human evolution lies in science. Once we unlock the mysteries of the brain by identifying all the genes and proteins involved in musical experience, we will find strong evidence of the essential role of music within human evolution. However, it is easier said than done!

Music, Emotion, and Prediction: What it Means for New Music

Source: Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music that Makes Them Weep?

Retrieved: September 24, 2011, from Podcast with Professor David Huron http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/musicandthebrain/podcast_huron.html

Summary:

David Huron is Professor of Music and head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory in the School of Music at Ohio State University. He is also affiliated with OSU’s Center for Cognitive Science, and is the author of Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Host Steven Mencher interviewed Professor Huron after he gave a lecture on his work at the Library of Congress, for the Library's Music and the Brain event.

In his laboratory of cognitive and systematic musicology, Professor Huron and his research team seek to answer questions relating to emotion and music from the perspective of evolutionary psychology and brain science. Examples of these questions are “how does music evoke emotion?”, “how do people learn music?”, and “how do people of different cultures experience music differently?” Many of the questions that Professor Huron seeks to answer are not new, but traditionally research on these questions was done from a historical or hermeneutical standpoint. Cognitive Musicology uses knowledge about the brain and psychology to seek out a different understanding of these long-standing questions/problems.

In the interview, Professor Huron spoke about some issues that he investigates in his book Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. He discusses the element of surprise, and how it plays such an important role in our experience and appreciation of music. Prediction is an ancient and essential survival tool, and when it comes to sound and the auditory world it is one of the brain’s major preoccupations, according to Huron. When people have heard common musical constructs repeatedly, like for example a major scale, they come to expect those constructs when listening to music. When there is deviation from the standard construct, the brain is immediately aware of it. Huron’s research shows that when listening to music, peoples’ brains are constantly predicting what will happen next, as if this skill of predicting, probably originally used to locate a predator and determine what it will do next, has spilled over in our minds to the esoteric and symbolic world of music. Huron commented that research also shows this may be why people are less drawn to and appreciative of new music, and that although we tend to value novelty highly in our lives and in society, it may not be as important as we thought when it comes to listening to and enjoying music.

Another question that Huron has investigated is why we enjoy listening to music that makes us sad. He remarked that sad music gives people a false psychic pain. A part of the brain has been fooled into thinking that something sad has happened, and it experiences and empathizes with this sadness. But the more conscious cognitive part of the brain knows that everything is alright, and this causes a cathartic experience that his team has been chronicling. Part of the mystery of music is that music is composed of abstract sounds not meant to represent or resemble any of the sounds we encounter in our everyday lives, and yet still these sounds are able to evoke such intense emotional experiences. Huron believes that this comes from thousands of years of listening to sound to try and infer affective states from the environment. Humans are such social animals, and we look to sounds to indicate to us the emotional states of others. This skill has transferred over to abstract sounds as well.

At the close of the interview, Professor Huron spoke about how wide reaching his research is. Although he focuses on tackling specifically musical questions, he uses knowledge from many fields to answer his questions (such as psychology, brain science, anthropology, biology, etc.), and many of the principles and understandings that develop from his research apply to other areas of human life. For example, researchers at San Francisco University’s medical school were interested in the idea of expectation and gratification from Huron’s book, and saw applications of this principle in the study of obesity. Since Huron’s research draws on learning from so many fields, it is not surprising that his findings are useful to so many knowledge seekers.

Reflection:

One of the string quartets that my group has been carrying in our repertoire for the last few years is Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. It is one of the most devilishly difficult pieces in the whole string quartet repertory, both for the performer from a technical perspective, and for the audience from a listening perspective. I remember my first encounter of the piece. Before I worked on my individual part I got a copy of the score and sat down with a recording so that I could follow along on paper as I listened. The piece is about 25 minutes long but for this first hearing it seemed like hours to me, and I remember when the music finally stopped I didn’t even know that the piece had finished. I had to check the track on my CD player, the score had been completely useless to me as a guide to help me follow along and I was utterly confused.

Many performances later, it has come to be one of my all-time favourite works, and occupies a very special and important place in my heart. I will often choose to listen to this over string quartet greatest hits like works by Beethoven or Schubert. Familiarity has helped me to appreciate the piece more, just as Professor Huron argued.

It has also become for me one of the most emotionally powerful pieces that I have ever heard. Although I can’t say that I understand it fully in the theoretical sense (I would be hard pressed to identify the chords I am playing in even the most straight forward movements), I feel I do understand it in some deeper way, in an emotional sense. I often try to quantify why it moves me so, I wonder if it is because Berg’s musical gestures are so inherently emotionally potent that although the chords may be foreign there is still emotion being conveyed in other ways. There are moments in the piece that I find utterly terrifying, or pleasant and sweet, or deeply heartbreaking, so much so that after performing it I tend to be emotionally spent. When planning programs with Berg’s Lyric Suite I always try to get organize it such that the Berg is last on the program, because I cannot imagine listening to a Dvorak quartet after experiencing such all encompassing sadness at the end of the sixth and final movement, largo desolato.

Of course, programming this piece has always been a problem. Even in Europe, the land where the music of Berg and his predecessors originated, presenters we worked with were reluctant to put the piece on a program because they fear it will scare away audiences. People have argued that it is too foreign to the ears of even the more devoted music lovers. Because the piece is so dear to me, I continue to champion it as one of our repertoire staples, but in doing so I have had to think a great deal about the familiarity and how that influences our appreciation of music. After performing the piece maybe 20 or 30 times now it has become a part of my musical language, but I have to constantly remind myself how I felt upon that first listening, how utterly baffled I was, and how the emotion I now feel every time I hear it was completely absent on the first hearing. I need to see where the audience is coming from.

But then it begs the questions: why would I subject anyone to that baffling experience? What is in it for concert-goers? What can I offer to audiences if I am to perform this piece? I must have answers if I am to convince people to hear it for the first time.

One of the things that I have considered in searching for an answer is the art of performance. For those who are not familiar with the music of the Second Viennese School, listening to Berg might be like hearing a poem read in a different language. The words are not recognizable, but is there not more to the experience of a performance? Is learned musical syntax the only way of communicating emotion, or is there also gesture? Stage presence? Tone quality? These are all tools that professional performers are taught, or should be taught, to develop. If I read a poem in a foreign language with no emotional articulation in my voice, completely monotone, the audience would be very justified should they fall asleep. But if I read a poem in a foreign language and impart onto the words all the emotion and meaning that they carry to me in the tone of my voice and in my gestures, then perhaps the audience will have a different experience? They may not understand what has happened, but perhaps they will think ‘I’m not sure why but I feel that I have experienced something sad’. I have certainly experienced this feeling after hearing a great first performance of a new piece. Perhaps a powerful performance such as this would encourage listeners to experience the poem again, or to investigate the grammar of the language or the meaning of some of the words.

So I question, what can David Huron’s research mean to the performer, and how do elements of performing impact his findings? If we play the music as though it has no meaning to us, can we really expect it to have meaning to listeners?

Inner Sparks: Improvisation and the Brain

Source:
Anstead, Alicia. (2011). Inner Sparks. Scientific American 304, 84-87. Retrieved September 19, 2011, from Nature Journals Online

<http://www.nature.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/scientificamerican/journal/v304/n5/full/scientificamerican0511-84.html>

Summary:
Charles J. Limb, hearing specialist and surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and Allen R. Braun, neurologist at National Institutes of Health, wanted to find out what goes on in the brain when musicians improvise, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of human creativity. They conducted a study on highly skilled jazz musicians, who had to play on a non-magnetic MIDI keyboard on their laps while lying inside an fMRI machine. (A system of mirrors let the musicians see their hands without looking down.)

The researchers found that improvisation generally involves the whole brain. But, interestingly, Limb pointed out that an activity shift occurs in the prefrontal cortex; the lateral prefrontal region, which represents a broad area of the prefrontal cortex and is involved in conscious self-monitoring and self-inhibition, shuts down, while the medial prefrontal region, which is associated with self-expression, turns on.

This, Limb explained, is what expert musicians do, while amateur musicians cannot. He believed that if he could understand what actually changes in the brain to decrease conscious self-monitoring, then he might be able to figure out what gives rise to expert improvisation. This, in turn, may carry implications for teaching improvisation in the classroom.

Reflection:
As a classical musician, I have never improvised on stage. Nevertheless, I feel that I can still relate to the findings of this study. This is because I believe that, regardless of whether the music is improvised or not, the best performances are always characterized by a certain spontaneity that captures the listener’s attention. In other words, it does not matter whether the music one hears was composed two hundred years ago, or it is “being composed” at that moment; when this spontaneity is present, one always gets the sense of the music unfolding in the present moment. I think this is where the magic of musical creativity in performance lies.

Unlike in jazz, however, spontaneity in the performance of Western art music comes from a thorough understanding (and accurate memory) of the score. This means that, paradoxically, classical musicians must practice a great deal before they can afford the luxury of being spontaneous on stage; creativity comes at a high price. Furthermore, they are expected to deliver a highly polished performance that also engages the listener, to be faithful to the composer’s intentions, yet also to demonstrate their artistic integrity in their interpretation. It is obviously not easy to accomplish all of this. I believe this is why some aspiring young classical musicians find themselves in the state of mind of conscious self-inhibition that is unfavourable to self-expression. They become too aware of the weight of hundreds of years of tradition on their shoulders and start doubting if they are “good enough”.

Two years ago, I still vividly remember playing Beethoven’s last piano sonata for a visiting music professor from Germany who had studied with Wilhelm Kempff (a pianist renowned for his interpretation of Beethoven) in a master class setting. Although I had practiced a lot, I got terribly nervous when I had to play and, consequently, made numerous mistakes. But the worst part was that I could not let the music pour forth from me the way I knew I could.

The next day, my teacher, who was also present at the master class, told me something that I have never forgotten. She taught me that, as a performer, one should never try to be “right” or “perfect”. Rather, one should strive, above all else, to be an artist. From years of experience, my teacher understood quite well the danger of self-inhibition and the crucial need to develop the power of self-expression in a creative endeavour. It was indeed interesting to read about a scientific study that confirms what experienced musicians already know.

The Brain and Synesthesia

Source: Wednesday is Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia

Retrieved from: podcast with Dr. Richard E. Cytowic, MD http://www.loc.gov/podcasts/musicandthebrain/index.html

Summary:  Synesthesia is an involuntary joined sensation that some people are born with. Two or more of their senses are coupled i.e. a voice is heard but is also seen, felt or tasted.  One in twenty-three people have some kind of synesthesia, the most common being that days of the week and months of the year are colored. One in ninety people perceive letters, numbers or written symbols as colored.
Dr. Richard E. Cytowic, Professor of Neurology at George Washington University has studied synesthesia for more than thirty years. He has witnessed a paradigm shift in neuroscience during that time that has made his work in synesthesia more widely accepted. Thirty years ago, brain theory said that the brain was organized into modules that didn’t work together i.e. visual module, language module, hearing module. This theory made synesthesia impossible, even denied. Now neuroscientists know that the brain is massively cross connected and in a synesthete’s brain, there is an increased activity in the wiring.
Synesthesia is prevelant among creative people. Cytowic discusses notable composers and performers who were synesthetes: Franz Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Eddie Van Halen. Itzhak Perlman, world renowned violinist for example, draws his bow over the G string he sees as forest green, and the A string as red. He has found synesthesia is common in blind people, Stevie Wonder case in point. Olivier Messiaen perceived sight and sound in a bi-directional manner which in his words “allowed music to write itself” like in his work The Orange Red Rocks from Canyon to the Stars. He used clusters of notes he perceived as colors. He saw three colors of chords: simple – red, green, blue; pairs – blue-violet, red-orange; overall color flecked or speckled with opalescent colors in them.
Synesthetes love color, and will describe what they see in exacting, minute detail. The theory is that the V4 area of brain, the color area, is not being stimulated optically but with other senses. That is one explanation as to why their sense of color is so precise and why they often see ugly, odd colors.

Cytowic is convinced that by understanding the perceptual condition of synesthesia, we’ll find the neurological basis for how the brain represents metaphor. He and other researchers are searching for the synesthesia gene, a gene they believe is for metaphor and creativity, a gene that hyperconnects disparate things.

Reflection: For nineteen years, one of my sons has played notes that he sees in color. On road trips he sees highway signs like rainbows. Last year, he felt some relief as he learned in a psychology course more about synesthesia and that he wasn’t weird after all. Other people saw the world this way too. One of the first things he did was to type out the alphabet the way he saw it. This was not without frustration, as synesthetes see precise colors, hues of yellow or orange, and the color palette he used wasn’t absolutely precise. But it was close enough to help me understand what goes on in his brain perceptually with letters and words. What has stood out to me over the years is his consistency in the patterns. He has always seen A as red whether he plays it on his violin, sees it on a road sign or in a book. I’ve never seen JR as weird, only fortunate – to be able to see the world in such a unique way opens him to creative possibilities that will enrich us all.

New Academic Year - Welcome New Bloggers

This year we are seeing greater interest at the University of Toronto in the development of a research centre that will focus strongly on music and health, as well as music and mind and brain. This blog is contributing to that growing interest. So I welcome you to read and comment, tell others about it, and to explore the intriguing area of how music functions in human existence.