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March 2 - April 4, 2021
in just the past two hundred years, our curiosity has revealed much of what Nature had kept hidden from us: the fabric of space-time, the constitution of matter, the many forms of energy, the origins of the universe, the nature of life itself with the discovery of DNA, and the completion of the mapping of the human genome just five years ago.
But one mystery has not been solved: the mystery of the human brain and how it gives rise to thoughts and feelings, hopes and desires, love, and the experience of beauty, not to mention dance, visual art, literature, and music.
What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work.
The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today’s truths become tomorrow’s disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d’art.
For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change.
For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey “truth for now”—to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new “truth,” because that is the way science advances.
Only relatively recently in our own culture, five hundred years or so ago, did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners.
Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left,
recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.
Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem.
What if I became so knowledgeable about music that I no longer took pleasure from it?
This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience—the field that is at the intersection of psychology and neurology.
As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”
The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation.
Pitch is a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale.
Rhythm refers to the durations of a series of notes, and to the way that they group together into units.
Tempo refers to the overall speed or pace of the piece.
Contour describes the overall shape of a melody, taking into account only the pattern of “up” and “down”
Timbre (rhymes with amber) distinguishes one instrument from another—say, trumpet from piano—when both are playing the same written note.
Loudness is a purely psychological construct that relates (nonlinearly and in poorly understood ways) to how much energy an instrument creates—how
Reverberation refers to the perception of how distant the source is from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is in; often referred to as “echo” by laypeople,
Meter is created by our brains by extracting information from rhythm and loudness cues, and refers to the way in which tones are grouped with one another across time.
Key has to do with a hierarchy of importance that exists between tones in a musical piece; this hierarchy does not exist in-the-world, it exists only in our minds,
Melody is the main theme of a musical piece, the part you sing along with, the succession of tones that are most salient in your mind.
Harmony has to do with relationships between the pitches of different tones, and with tonal contexts that these pitches set up that ultimately lead to expectations for what will come next in a musical piece—expectations that a skillful composer can either meet or violate for artistic and expressive purposes.
The word pitch refers to the mental representation an organism has of the fundamental frequency of a sound.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (The question was first posed by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.) Simply, no—sound
The lowest note on a standard piano vibrates with a frequency of 27.5 Hz.
Interestingly, this is about the same rate of motion that constitutes an important threshold in visual perception.
The basilar membrane of the inner ear contains hair cells that are frequency selective, firing only in response to a certain band of frequencies.
In this sense, the brain also contains a “map” of different pitches, and different areas of the brain respond to different pitches. Pitch is so important that the brain represents it directly;
A scale is just a subset of the theoretically infinite number of pitches, and every culture selects these based on historical tradition or somewhat arbitrarily.
When we double or halve a frequency, we end up with a note that sounds remarkably similar to the one we started out with. This relationship, a frequency ratio of 2:1 or 1:2, is called the octave.
An interval is the distance between two tones. The octave in Western music is subdivided into twelve (logarithmically) equally spaced tones. The intervallic distance between A and B (or between “do” and “re”) is called a whole step or a tone.
If there are twelve named notes within an octave, why are there only seven letters (or do-re-mi syllables)?
The white keys are named A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The notes between—the black keys—are the ones with compound names. The note between A and B is called either A-sharp or B-flat,
Our current system is called A440 because the note we call A that is in the middle of the piano keyboard has been fixed to have a frequency of 440 Hz.
There is one minor scale that, like the C major scale, uses only the white notes of the piano keyboard: the A minor scale.
A chord is simply a group of three or more notes played at the same time.
we hear the major chord as sounding happy and the minor chord as sounding sad, or reflective, or even exotic.
Timbre is a consequence of the overtones.
The pitches that we use in music—the scales—have remained essentially unchanged since the time of the Greeks, with the exception of the development—really a refinement—of the equal tempered scale during the time of Bach.
Without the attack, pianos and bells sounded remarkably unlike pianos and bells, and remarkably similar to one another.
The third dimension of timbre—flux—refers to how the sound changes after it has started playing.
Rhythm, meter, and tempo are related concepts that are often confused with one another. Briefly, rhythm refers to the lengths of notes, tempo refers to the pace of a piece of music (the rate at which you would tap your foot to it), and meter refers to when you tap your foot hard versus light, and how these hard and light taps group together to form larger units.
The neural basis for this striking accuracy is probably in the cerebellum, which is believed to contain a system of timekeepers for our daily lives and to synchronize to the music we are hearing.
Meter refers to the way in which the pulses or beats are grouped together. Generally when we’re tapping or clapping along with music, there are some beats that we feel more strongly than others.
musical interval of a “perfect fifth” is a relative concept—it can start on any note, and then by definition, notes that are either seven semitones higher or seven semitones lower in pitch are considered a perfect fifth away from the starting note.
A fundamental principle of cognitive neuroscience is that the brain provides the biological basis for any behaviors or thoughts that we experience, and so at some level there must be neural differentiation wherever there is behavioral differentiation.
