This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

I Love Music and I Love Science—Why Would I Want to Mix the Two? I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it. —Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, p. xii

Great way to start, I feel a sort of tension between wanting to analyze music and enjoy my general ignorance of it. Apparently many others are in the same boat :).

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.

Many of us have a practical knowledge of things we like, and can communicate our preferences without possessing the technical knowledge of the true expert. I know that I prefer the chocolate cake at one restaurant I often go to, over the chocolate cake at my neighborhood coffee shop. But only a chef would be able to analyze the cake—to decompose the taste experience into its elements—by describing the differences in the kind of flour, or the shortening, or the type of chocolate used.

Yep!

As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”

If I put electrodes in your visual cortex (the part of the brain at the back of the head, concerned with seeing), and I then showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons that will cause my electrodes to turn red. But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precisely that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz—for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain!

Consider that at a very early age, babies are thought to be synesthetic, to be unable to differentiate the input from the different senses, and to experience life and the world as a sort of psychedelic union of everything sensory. Babies may see the number five as red, taste cheddar cheeses in D-flat, and smell roses in triangles.

Being a baby sounds even more wild and trippy.

(The research on the development of the first CT scanners, precursors to MRI, was performed by EMI, financed in large part from their profits on Beatles records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” might well have been titled “I Want to Scan Your Brain.”)

The barrier to being able to recall everything we might want to is not that it wasn’t “stored” in memory, then; rather, the problem is finding the right cue to access the memory and properly configure our neural circuits. The more we access a memory, the more active become the retrieval and recollection circuits, and the more facile we are with the cues necessary to get at the memory. In theory, if we only had the right cues, we could access any past experience.

Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations. These violations can occur in any domain—the domain of pitch, timbre, contour, rhythm, tempo, and so on—but occur they must. Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic. Too much organization may technically still be music, but it would be music that no one wants to listen to.

Music appears to mimic some of the features of language and to convey some of the same emotions that vocal communication does, but in a nonreferential, and nonspecific way. It also invokes some of the same neural regions that language does, but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward, and emotion.

Reminds me of the Name of the Wind quote about poets and musicians.

At a neural level, we need to be able to find a few landmarks in order to invoke a cognitive schema. If we hear a piece of radically new music enough times, some of that piece will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks.

Clear spots in the fog of war

I often advise new listeners to jazz to simply hum the main tune in their mind once the improvisation begins—this is what the improvisers themselves are often doing—and that enriches the experience considerably.

Makes sense, good tip

once in a while, we find a behavior or attribute in an organism that lacks any clear evolutionary basis; this occurs when evolutionary forces propagate an adaptation for a particular reason, and something else comes along for the ride, what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, borrowing the term from architecture.