I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine

by Daniel J. Levitin

Additional evidence for this hierarchy comes in the kinds of errors that musicians make. Performance mistakes almost always occur at the stitching points, not in between them where the sequence is well established. Also common is to miss a note by only a semitone—a finger slip—rather than by a large interval—and these finger slips also suggest that the motor hierarchy is intact. Musical mistakes almost always preserve the tempo and meter of a piece—I’ve never heard a musician, in the middle of a difficult passage, suddenly substitute a flurry of wrong notes at twice the tempo the piece was in, or substitute 3/4 time in the middle of a 4/4 metered piece. There are parallels to this in language: speech errors tend to preserve the grammatical class, and something of the semantic relation. Nouns get substituted for nouns, verbs for verbs, and so forth. So instead of saying “after three blocks, take a left turn at the lamppost” we might say “after three blocks, take a left turn at the fire hydrant.”