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.

Training-induced Neuroplasticity in Young Children

Source: The Music and Neuroimaging Lab: “Training-induced Neuroplasticity in Young Children”
Retrieved from: http://www.musicianbrain.com/papers/Schlaug_CorpusCallosum_Children_Music_nyas_04842.pdf

Summary: Learning to play a musical instrument involves complex cognitive and bimanual motor skill acquisition, as well as sensory stimulation and this experience provides an ideal activity with which to investigate changes in the brain as a function of learning.
It is known that in music making, we engage simultaneously both hemispheres of the brain. Professional musicians who began their music training before the age of 7 exhibit a larger anterior corpus callosum (CC) than non-musicians, which suggests that plasticity due to music training may occur in the CC during early childhood. It is unknown, though, whether this enlarged CC area in musicians is due to training or if it is a pre-existing difference.
This article outlines a study that was conducted over a period of 29 months, involving 31 children, age 5-7, testing the hypothesis that “instrumental music training would cause an increase in the size of particular subareas of the CC known to have fibres that connect motor-related areas of both hemispheres.” The 31 children were divided in 3 groups based on their total weekly practice time: high-practicing, low-practicing, and controls. 18 children attended weekly half-hour lessons (11 learned piano, 7 learned string instruments), while the remaining 13 children served as a non-instrumental control – received no musical training.
Through the use of high-resolution T1-weighted MR, brain scans were taken both at the start of the study and at its conclusion. Total CC size, as well as subareas were measured.
Beside weekly lesson and practicing, children also completed a 4-finger fine motor-skill sequencing task at both time points.
The results of the study show that difference in the anterior midbody of the CC emerged after 29 months of music training in the high-practicing group; their motor-sequencing task results also improved. Low-practice and controls did not differ in the extent of change. This proves the hypothesis that intense musical experience/practice, not pre-existing differences, is the reason for large anterior CC area found in professional musicians.

Response: Undoubtedly the most important function of corpus callosum is to facilitate the process of inter-hemispheric communication. While the right hemisphere is responsible for creativity and intuition, the left side is responsible for analytical and rational thinking; without the corpus callosum to connect them, there would be no communication between the two hemispheres. It is interesting, but not uncharacteristic, I think, that playing a musical instrument would develop this part of the brain. A musician taps both into his creative and intuitional side, as well as analytical and rational thinking, when practicing or performing, inevitably emphasising the bond between the two hemispheres of the brain. I have always been amazed at the brain’s capability to shape itself at an early age and thus the importance of early childhood exposure to as many different disciplines as to optimize the development of the brain. When an area of the brain is not used, it eventually becomes unresponsive.

Brain is "Wired for Music"

Source: Newsweek. “Music on the Mind” by Sharon Begley. http://www.brams.umontreal.ca/plab/research/dossiers_vulgarisation/newsweek_musicmind/newsweek_musicmind.html?Story_ID=329414

Summary:
Psychologist Sandra Trehub has found that babies naturally detect changed in pitch, tempo, and melodic contours. She has also found that when the babies are played perfect fourths and perfect fifths,they smile, but express displeasure when played tritones. This had led Trehub to conclude that this is a biologically-based preference and "may explain the inclusion of perfect fifths and fourths in music across cultures and across centuries."

Evidence from PET scans and MRIs suggest the human brain is wired for music. It also seems music can enhance particular modalities of intelligence. Various experiments have shown higher test scores in math achieved by students in control groups who were given music lessons. This enhancement has been displayed only in math – other forms of intelligence were not enhanced.

The average person can remember and recognize large amounts of musical tunes, which is not usually true for memorizing and recognizing prose. This suggests the brain places preference over musical memory. When neurosurgeons stimulate the temporal lobes, patients have been known to hear music. Music can also trigger epileptic seizures which often begin in the temporal lobes. This is further explained by the following experiment:

"The brain's left and right hemispheres are connected by a big trunk line called the corpus callosum. When they compared the corpus callosum in 30 nonmusicians with the corpus callosum in 30 professional string and piano players, researchers. . . found striking differences. The front part of this thick cable of neurons is larger in musicians, especially if they began their training before the age of 7. The front of the corpus callosum connects the two sides of the prefrontal cortex. . . and the two sides of the premotor cortex…These connections are critical for coordinating fast, bi-manual movements such as those a pianist's hands execute in an allegro movement. The neural highway connecting the right and left brain may explain something else, too. The right brain is linked to emotion, the left to cognition. The greatest musicians, of course, are not only masters of technique but also adept at infusing their playing with emotion. Perhaps this is why."

Another experiment conducted comparison studies where non-musicians were taught a simple five-finger piano exercise which they practiced in the lab for 5 days, 2 hours per day. Another group mentally rehearsed this pattern for the same amount of time. In both these groups, the cortical map was changed, demonstrating the important of both mental and physical practice.

Reflection:

While some of the conclusions mentioned in this article have already been much discussed in the fields of music and science, it is encouraging to see that studies continue to be performed to uncover as much as is possible about the biological and neurological conditions for music in humans. The most striking experiment noted in this article is the one describing the importance of mental preparation. By merely rehearsing a musical pattern in one’s mind, non-musicians (who likely do not have much experience with such practice) were able to effect an equal mental change in their cortical maps, as did those who rehearsed physically on the piano. This emphasizes the importance of mental preparation for any musician. It is not enough to simply play a piece frequently – one must also have a thorough mental picture of the piece to ensure fluidity and precision during performances.

Wolfgang Makes a Bad Study Partner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Source: Studying with music: helping or hurting?  article available at http://www.dailyillini.com/node/46005

Summary:
This article comes from a student newspaper and addresses study habits related to music.  The reporter unpacks some common misconceptions about the Mozart Effect™ and why studying with classical music probably won't help you retain information. 

According to an interview the Gary Dell, who is a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, music interrupts the brain's ability to transfer memories from short-term storage to long-term storage.  The interruption is more pronounced when listening to music that one enjoys.  Where people misinterpret the Mozart Effect™ is assuming that since Mozart was a genius, some of that genius will rub off if you listen to his music while studying.  The reporter points out that the famous Rauscher study proved only a temporary improvement in spacial tasks and that any rousing music will probably have the same effect.

Reflection:
I picked this article for two reasons.  First, it's the end of term and it seemed like a pertinent topic.  Second, I've always been somewhat confused by people who say that classical music helps them study.  The article briefly ties together a couple of concepts that we have covered in class, namely the rehearsal process of transferring short-term memory to long-term memory and the Mozart Effect™. 

My personal experience with trying to study while listening to music is that I absolutely can't do it.  Judging by the comments in the article from Gary Dell I assume that those of you who study music students would agree with me.  If I have music on, I can't help but listen to it actively.  I listen for what instruments are playing, I notice when there is an interesting melody or harmonic shift, and I judge if the players are good or bad.  It's not possible for me to just ignore the music.  Likely the people who can listen to Mozart while studying are probably not the same people who are studying Mozart. 

If you still really want something to listen to while you study though, recent research by Jutras and Buffalo (2010) might have an answer for you.  They point out several studies have shown that rhythmic synchronization in gamma and theta frequencies can contribute to memory performance.   So, if you really want to ace your exams, listen to a binaural beats track that boosts gamma and theta waves.   Don't study with Wolfie.