Music: Biological Rational PDF

Music Music Music What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy to making music? – What’s the use in feeling sad if no one has died? (Mistaken) Suggestions – Music bonds the social group, coordinates action, enhances ritual, releases tension – This just passes the question along Why do rh...

Music Music Music What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy to making music? – What’s the use in feeling sad if no one has died? (Mistaken) Suggestions – Music bonds the social group, coordinates action, enhances ritual, releases tension – This just passes the question along Why do rhythmic sounds bond the group or dissipate tension, etc.? Biologically speaking, music is useless* – Shows no signs of design for attaining goals such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology – “A cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.” Why is Music? If music confers no survival advantage, where does it come from and why does it work? Why is music? What is Music? The Lay of the Land There are billions of ways to divide the increments from one A to the next A (an octave above) – Pretty much every culture uses the same 12 notes This is not a scale, just the available 12 notes – i.e. 12 consecutive white and black keys on a piano – Traditional Chinese and American Folk Typically employ 5 notes selected from these 12 available – Western Classical Music Uses 7 of the 12 available (the eighth note of the Western scale is the octave) The Lay of the Land Arnold Schoenberg created a “democratic” a-tonal system in which all 12 notes were equal – Most people call music using this system dissonant, difficult, and abrasive The Lay of the Land The sonic range that matters and interests us the most is identical to the range of sounds we ourselves produce – Our brains and ears have evolved to catch subtle nuances mainly within that range We hear less, often nothing at all, outside of it. – We can’t hear what bats hear, or the subharmonic sound that whales use Music falls into the range of what we can hear The Lay of the Land Periodic sounds – Sounds that repeat regularly are Indicative of living things – Could be something to be wary of – Could be a friend More interesting to us – Could be a source of food or water – These parameters narrow down toward an area of sounds similar to what we call music The Lay of the Land Bowling et al. (2010) – Surmised that it would seem natural that human speech influenced The evolution of the human auditory system The part of the brain that processes those audio signals – Co-evolution of Our vocalizations Our ability to perceive their nuances and subtleties … and our musical preferences – If this is true, then there should be a biological rational for musical scales Biological Rational for Musical Scales Bowling et al. (2010) – Recorded ten- to twenty-second sentences by 600 speakers Included English and other languages – Then broke these sentences into 100,000-sound segments Digitally eliminated all elements of speech that are unique to various cultures – Leaving only the sounds that are common to us all Stripped away all S sounds, percussive sounds from P’s, and clicks from K’s – This left only vowel sounds made with vocal cords – Goal was to be left only with universal notes and tones Biological Rational for Musical Scales Bowling et al. (2010) – All utterances were of “proto-singing” The vocal melodies embedded in talking The notes we sing when we talk – Found that the loudest and most prominent notes fell along the 12 notes of the chromatic scale – In speech (and in normal singing) notes are further modified by our tongues and palates to produce particular harmonics and overtones – These additional pitches fell in line with what we think of as pleasing “musical” harmonies Biological Rational for Musical Scales Bowling et al. (2010) – “Seventy percent… were bang on musical intervals” – All the major harmonic intervals were represented Octaves, fifths, fourths, major thirds, and a major sixth – “There’s a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech.” – “That’s the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than [the ratios of] Pythagoras. The reason doesn’t have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.” Listen to How Musical This All Is… Biological Rational for Musical Scales What other information might be represented in speech vowels? Biological Rational for Musical Scales Gill and Purves (2009) – Found that Happy (excited) speech vowels fall within major scales Sad (subdued) speech vowels fall within minor scales – Speech vowels as a signal of emotional content We have evolved the ability to – Encode emotional information within our speech – What about the ability to decode emotional information within others’ speech??????????????????? Biological Rational for Musical Scales Pinker Music – “I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties…” – “… a standard piece tickles them all at once, but we can see the ingredients in various kinds of not-quite-music that leave one or more of them out.” Music 1. Language – We can put words to music We wince when a lyricist gets lazy – This suggests that music borrows some of its mental machinery from language Music and language work in similar ways – The metrical structure of strong and weak beats – The intonation contour of rising and falling pitch – The hierarchical grouping of phrases within phrases – These parallels may account for The gut feelings that a musical piece conveys a complex message The emphasis of some portions while others are whispered to the side The making of assertion by introducing topics and commenting on them Music 2. Auditory Scene Analysis – The ear receives many jumbled frequencies at once The brain must segregate the streams of sound that come from different sources – E.g. voice in a noisy room, animal in a chirpy forest – One of the brain’s tricks to identify soundmakers is to pay attention to harmonic relations Components that stand in harmonic relations are grouped together and perceived as a single tone rather than separate tones – Harmonic relations (a component at one frequency, another at twice that frequency, and another at 3 times that frequency) Simultaneous sounds in harmonic relation are probably the overtones of a single sound coming from one soundmaker in the world This is a good guess for the brain to make because many resonators emit sounds of many harmonic overtones – i.e. plucked strings, struck hollow bodies, calling animals, etc. Music 3. Emotional calls – Melodies might evoke strong emotions because their skeletons resemble templates of our species’ emotional calls Whimpering, whining, crying, weeping, moaning, growling, cooing, laughing, yelping, baying, cheering. – These all have acoustic signatures When people try to describe passages of music, they use these calls as metaphors – Ersatz emotion is a common goal of art an recreation Music 4. Habitat Selection – Visual scenery can signal safe, unsafe, or changing habitats. E.g. distant views, greenery, gathering clouds, sunsets – Features of the auditory world may also signal safe, unsafe, or changing habitats E.g. thunder, wind, rushing water, birdsong, growls, footsteps, heartbeats, snapping twigs – These all have emotional effects presumably because they are thrown off by attention-worthy events in the world – Some of the stripped-down figures and rhythms at the heart of a melody are simplified templates of evocative environmental sounds “Tone painting” – when composers intentionally try to evoke environmental sounds like thunder or birdsong in melody Music 5. Motor Control – Music may be a concentrated dose of motor rhythms to pleasure Rhythm is the universal component of music – In some idioms it is the primary or only component There are strong hints that music taps into the system of motor control – People dance, nod, shake, swing, stride, clap, and snap to music Many other repetitive actions also have an optimal rhythm – E.g. walking, running, chopping, scraping, and digging Muscle control also embraces – Sequences of tension and release – Actions carried out with urgency, enthusiasm, or lassitude – Erect or slumping body postures that reflect confidence, submission or depression Music 6. Something else – Something that explains how the whole is more than the sum of the parts – Something that explains why other activities don’t have the same effect Perhaps a resonance in the brain between neurons firing in synchrony with a soundwave and a natural oscillation in the emotion circuits? An unused counterpart in the right hemisphere of the speech areas in the left? Some kind of coupling that came along as an accident of the way that auditory, emotional, language, and motor circuits are packed together in the brain?