Marsha’s Reviews > This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession > Status Update

This is part of the reason why so many people can't listen to Wagner. Due to his pernicious anti-Semitism, the sheer vulgarity of his mind, and his music's association with the Nazi regime, some people don't feel safe listening to his music. Wagner has always disturbed me profoundly, and not just his music, but also the idea of listening to it.

Effective music--groove--involves subtle violations of timing. Just as the rat has an emotional response to a violation of the rhythm of the branch hitting his house, we have an emotional response to the violation of timing in music that is groove. The rat, with no context for the timing violation, experiences it as fear.

The EEG is exquisitely sensitive to the timing of neural firings, and can detect activity with a resolution of one thousandth of a second (one millisecond). But it has some limitations. EEG is not able to distinguish whether the neural activity is releasing excitatory, inhibitory, or modulatory neurotransmitters, the chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine that influence the behavior of other neurons.

On "Straight Up" there is so much going on, it is difficult ot describe it in words. The drums play a complex, irregular pattern with beats as fast as sixteenth notes, but not continuously--the "air" between drum hits imparts a sound typical of funk and hip-hop music. The bass plays a similarly complex and syncopated melodic line that sometimes coincides with and sometimes fills in the holes of the drum part.