University of California, Irvine



Summarized from the documentary“The Music Instinct: The Science of Song”Written and Directed by Elena MannesMusic echoes the rhythm of our heart, the rhythm of our breath, the rhythm of our gait as we walk or run. But why does music affect us emotionally the way it does? 1. At what stage in development does a human being become aware of rhythms?An unborn baby begins to hear between 17 and 19 weeks after conception. Before there is light to see, the infant lives in a world of heartbeats, rhythm and vibration. In hospitals, music’s connection to the body is used to steady the breathing of premature babies.2.What is the difference between music, as it has traditionally been understood, and random sound?As Physicist Brian Greene explains, all sound comes from vibrations in the air. What we hear is determined by the details of that vibration. A musical note has a vibration that is very regular; it repeats in an orderly pattern. But if you just slap your hands together, the vibration would be more chaotic; it would not have a regular rhythm to it. 3. How do we detect differences in the sound or pitch of musical notes?Every object, whether it is a bone in the human body or the Earth itself, has a natural set of frequencies at which it naturally vibrates by virtue of how it is constructed and what it is made of. Every object has the capacity to vibrate in some manner. We can write equations to predict how an object will vibrate under various conditions. But, it is the cochlea within the human inner ear that converts the vibrations into electrical impulses, which are sent to the auditory cortex of the brain; this is laid out in pitch order, much like a piano keyboard.4.How is it that vibrations in the air around us emotionally “move” or affect us? When someone says “That piece of music ‘touched’ me or ‘moved’ met, it is very literal. The sound enters our ear canal and moves the eardrum. Musical vibrations quite literally touch the hearer. Yet, once the vibrations cease, the music is gone. To hear the same music again, the sound must recreated. Music’s transitory nature gives our response special intensity.5.What are the physiological effects of music?Music is used to help regulate the heart rate of cardiac patients. Studies show that the body is a barometer of our emotional response. Scary music can trigger signs of a fight-or-flight response, increasing heart rate. This response happens without volition or control over it. There is no cognitive function that does not somehow relate to music. In regard to moods like happiness or sadness, there seems to be a metaphorical aspect to music. When we are happy we are peppy and move quickly. When we are sad, we move more slowly and or perhaps just sit without moving. Happy or sad songs mirror in their tempo the movements that come naturally to us in those moods.6.How long have humans played music?Ancient musical instruments have been discovered, dating from the Ice Age (35,000 years ago): bone flutes made from swans, hollow bones of birds, and mammoth ivory. The fragments of these flutes were found in caves that would have echoed the sound of the flutes. Studying the holes in the oldest flute, scientists found the scale it played was not that different from modern flutes. 7.Are there musical universals across cultures?The octave is close to universal. But cultures use different scales and a different number of pitches within an octave. Yet, if you listen to lullabies, no matter what culture they are from, you have no problem recognizing that they are lullabies. They have falling pitch contours; they are quiet. They have a narrow pitch range, and they are extremely repetitive. But Western notions of harmony are not universal. There are musical traditions where a single musical line is what is important; notions of harmony are not what the tradition is about. Still, people who have never heard Western music before can identify songs that seem sad, happy or scary to them, which people in Western societies would interpret the same way.8.How does music’s structure affect us?As we listen to music, we have expectations based on what we have heard so far. When listening to the predictable beat of a march, the neurons in people’s brains often fire in time to the beat. If that rhythm changes, it disrupts both our expectations and the rhythm that our body has physically adjusted to. Such surprises can take the form of unexpected chord changes or a note that seems dissonant. This can wake us up, give us a thrill. African and Latin music use syncopation to play with rhythmic expectations. People enjoy it because the sense of unpredictability this produces is fun. This effect is produced by the fact that different parts of our brains react to the same music in different ways. The most primitive part of our brain, the cerebellum, locks into a regular rhythm, while the frontal lobe tries to predict what happens next—whether we are aware of it or not. We choose pieces of music with certain characteristics to make us feel a specific way. People can become quite good at knowing what pieces of music they need to hear to change their mood in particular ways. For example, people use music a great deal in transit. Perhaps this is to shut oneself off from people who are in too close a proximity, by creating a bubble around you. By relating to music, one can feel they are “in company” when alone.9. How does music affect our brains?Listening to pleasant music has been shown to be associated with release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for mood regulation, in the brain. This is intensified when someone feels a personal emotional connection to a piece. Music can also, physically, cause changes in the brain. “Neuroplasticity” refers to the ability of the brain to change itself. Thus, the brain of a musician is different. Some areas of the cortex are thicker in people with musical training. The areas that show the greatest change are in the auditory part of the brain and in the motor part of the brain. Also the corpus callosum, which links the right and left sides of the brain, is larger in musicians. The corpus callosum is particularly enlarged in those instrumentalists who started their musical training early. The corpus callosum enables both sides of the brain coordinate movements, such as of the hands and of fingers. We know that people who are musically trained have improved auditory abilities. Blind individuals also have greater acuity in hearing than the average person. There are many blind musicians. One reason why they become so skilled may be that they are able to call upon areas of the brain that would normally be handling vision but can be co-opted to help them develop a more sensitive ear. 10.Can music change the brains of adult non-musicians?Neurologist Oliver Sacks tells remarkable stories of changes in adult brains associated with music. For example, a surgeon with no prior interest in music was hit by lightening and developed a passion for piano music, taking lessons and eventually composing classical music. He heard one impressive piece in a dream; he was able to remember and play it. Archeologist Steven Mithen decided to see if a year of intensive exposure to music could change his brain, the brain of a non-musician. He asked neuroscientist Lawrence Parsons to scan his brain before and after he took a year of singing lessons. After the lessons, there was more blood flow to parts of the brain associated with musical cognition.11.Can musical training help children to improve in other skills?There is evidence that learning to play an instrument in childhood can confer some cognitive advantages. Neurologist Gottfried Schlaug found that, in addition to motor skills and auditory skills, there might be other skills—such as visual-spatial skills, vocabulary skills, or math skills—that improve as a result of musical training. He has shown that children around 10 years old, who have had musical training, do improve in those skills. A study in Germany showed that children with vocal musical training had a better comprehension of both musical and linguistic syntax (grammar) that children without musical training. This indicates that musical training affects performance in other cognitive domains. Music, along with other kinds of activity, also has an impact on brain anatomy. It also appears to train attentional networks in the brain—not uniquely—but it does do it.12.Can music help adults with neurological maladies like Parkinson’s Disease?Brain imaging shows a strong connection between the auditory and motor regions of the brain. This may be why music helps Parkinson’s patients. When adults and children hear music they tend to rhythmically move or dance. Music seems to engage the motor system in a way that other modalities do not. People who have a motor disorder, as with Parkinson’s patients, can be helped to walk by a rhythm track. There are also implications for aging. Even people who have dementia and have lost language still respond to music. Even deeply demented people will recognize old songs from their youth and be delighted by them. One study showed long- and short-term memory improvement in patients receiving music therapy. Music is also being used to help stroke patients. Sometimes music improves movement. Sometimes music helps stroke patients who struggle with language and speech. Melodic Intonation Therapy has helped people who could not speak after a stroke to begin to say simple sentences. Some stroke patients who cannot speak can still do music. 13. What evolutionary advantages might music have provided for our ancient ancestors?Steven Mithen theorizes that musicality comes before language, as a capacity for rhythm and variations in pitch. These abilities develop in infants long before language. Music may have evolved before language did as a means to facilitate culture-building. It is rule-based, determining how the participants are going to come together in a lawful fashion, which is a foundation of society. Perhaps we are built to like music, so that we associate something we need, such as culture-building, with reward. How can we respond so emotionally and so intuitively to music if it is not something that is buried deeply in our biology? The first musical instrument we had was the human body. Discovery of part of a Neanderthal’s vocal tract provided evidence that their vocal tract was highly developed. It showed that Neanderthals were probably able to make a wide a range of vocalizations as we could. They would probably have sounded different, more nasal due to their larger noses, but they could have produced a fantastic array of sounds, like modern man. Some scientists have discovered that Neanderthals had language and that was what the vocal tract was for. But the evidence we have of their behavior and the artifact they were making, there is no evidence that they developed advanced tools of the sort that would have required language. Nor is there evidence they developed symbols: paintings, carvings, figurative art. So, if they weren’t using language, what were they using their highly-developed vocal tracts for? Perhaps it was being used for singing, for making music.They could have evolved a sophisticated form of communication, based not on words but on holistic phrases. There were musical phrases, but they did not break down into separate little meanings like words do. The phrase just had a complete meaning in itself. This means of communication may not just been used by Neanderthals, but by the direct ancestors of home sapiens in Africa. So, it is from this ancient communication system that that our modern capacity for music and for language evolved. There was probably lots of movement in it as well: gesture, body posture, merging into dance. In many cultures, people could not imagine why anyone would just want to sit and listen to music. Their expectation would be of a multisensory experience including movement, the feel of the music on your skin. Music is not normally separated from dance. There are many cultures that do not have separate words for music and movement. If we look back tens of thousands of years, it could be that music and the brain co-evolved. One thing that humans can do is to synchronize their movements to the rhythm of music. Can other species do so?Bird vocalizations are routinely referred to as “song.” Humpback whales have highly complex vocalizations that have also been likened to “song.” Are they? Perhaps various species have evolved their own adaptations that build on the phenomena of vibration in objects producing sound. String theory in physics is a way of describing the constituents of matter that says that, inside of all particles, is a tiny string that vibrates, sort of like the string on a violin. The equations that physicists use to describe the vibrations of these little, tiny strings at the heart of matter are very close in structure to the equations that we would use to describe the motion of a string on a violin. In a sense, what the physicists are saying is that, if string theory is correct, at the heart of matter is music. The Big Bang created waves and cosmic microwave radiation. They vibrate at different frequencies: vibrations in air, akin to sound waves; the ones that are vibrating twice as fast, those are the overtones. We see that cosmic harmonics, cosmic music as the universe was oscillating from effects that took place in the beginning. If you wee there, you wouldn’t be able to hear it. The vibrations are at too low a frequency for the human ear. But, if we transpose them higher, we can hear the sounds of the universe. Even Black Holes have pitches. One sounded B flat, but it is 57 octaves below any B flat that we could hear. In a way, it is totally remarkable, the way a single idea that can move us in a concert hall is at work in the cosmos. It is all a matter of the same underlying phenomenon—vibration—and vibration is so apparent in the universe that you see the unifying thread. So, if music is somehow in the world, is it also in us? Has it always been in us because we need it, simply for itself? The human genome is crowded. We only have about 22,000 or 23,000 genes and that is not a lot to do all that they have to do. The vast majority of our genes are doing housekeeping functions. If something is in there, it is there for a reason. If music has been in thee for as long as we think it has, it must be serving some evolutionary function. Otherwise the genome would have kicked it out. So, “why music?” is the question. Could our need for music be based on group cohesion and music’s ability to align people’s brain states? Music serves to synchronize out brain states. Music can cause barriers to drop so that people feel a sort of unity. People get a sense of something larger than themselves going on. You have neurotransmitters moving through your brain affecting your mood. In the space around you, there are other people with whom you have a feeling of unity. There is this neural firing that is completely synchronized. Everyone else seems to be feeling the same thing. You feel part of a larger whole. Music connects us to ourselves and to others. Music can create a community of strangers. ................
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