New scientist music edition

Subject: New scientist music edition
From: Mo the caller
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 07:27 AM

Just had an email from New Scientist about a special edition on music

Unfortuneatly most of the articles seem to be subscirption only.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Grab
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 09:23 AM

The "Last Word" last week had a question: "Why are all songs written in 4/4?" As damn-fool questions go, that's one. :-) I can't decide whether to put an answer together for that, or whether I'd be wasting my time.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Amos
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 10:08 AM

Just send him an impromptu recording of the Tennessee Waltz and ask his opinion.


Or Take Five.


A

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: TheSnail
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 11:04 AM

In the "Illusion of Music" article it says -

Perhaps the ultimate illusion in music, however, is the illusion of structure and form. There is nothing in a sequence of notes themselves that creates the rich emotional associations we have with music, nothing about a scale, a chord or a chord sequence that intrinsically causes us to expect a resolution.

which I find a bit alarming. It suggests that there is no difference between a piece of music and a random string of notes.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 01:01 PM

Maybe it's that recognition that we all come to that the emotional effect of music cannot be uncovered by an analysis of the dots?

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 04:23 PM

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 04:31 PM

"There is nothing" = "I'm completely at a loss to understand this".

Because there pretty clearly is something about the notes etc that brings about these responses.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 04:32 PM

This is really exceptionally bad.

I've never been a regular reader of 'New Scientist' but generally get the gist.

What the fuck is:

"Lady Madonna (it's actually the Beatles singing into their cupped hands)"

It's Ronnie Scott playing a solo...

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 05:26 PM

Right on, McGrath!

from the article: Is our love of music special, or do other animals take similar pleasure in a beautiful melody?

Well, if the authors were like me and had played piano while the cat curled up on the bench and listened, they wouldn't have to ask.

Tuesday I was playing recorder at a new friend's house. Her cat came into the room and rubbed against my legs. My friend said that that cat loved all high music and came in whenever anybody played recorder or flute. I doubt if she mistook me for a bird - different size, different scents, no feathers. I conclude that the cat takes pleasure in music.

For you non-cat people, when a cat rubs against your legs, it is leaving its scent on you as a signal to other cats that 'this person belongs to me.'

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,Helen
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 06:42 PM

Mo, the magazine is currently available for sale. You might be able to find it.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: TheSnail
Date: 22 Feb 08 - 07:14 PM

McGrath of Harlow

"There is nothing" = "I'm completely at a loss to understand this".

Because there pretty clearly is something about the notes etc that brings about these responses.

I agree. In the next paragraph he goes on to say "Our brains learn a kind of musical grammar that is specific to the music of our culture, just as we learn to speak the language of our culture". In other words, there is nothing intrinsic in a collection of notes that causes a specific emotional response any more than there is anything intrinsic in the sound of a word that holds its meaning; it's all learnt. I'm not convinced.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Les in Chorlton
Date: 23 Feb 08 - 10:42 AM

Minor key associated with sadness, sometimes?

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Rowan
Date: 23 Feb 08 - 08:44 PM

I haven't yet seen the article so I can't address its argument(s) directly but, from the tenor of the posts above, Snail's, McGrath's and Les' particularly, I feel a couple of observations might be relevant.

1 I have been in a couple of situations where particular tunes (and/or modes) elicited a particular response and, after some empirical observations, it seemed that response was predictable. I used to run a school camp facility and one of the regular events was a weeklong camp for a particular group of "moderately retarded" (the "official" definition, not mine) adolescents. My concertina was a complete novelty for these people and aroused the usual range of interest, from "complete irrrelevance" to "fascination" that you'd get anywhere amongst "normal" people. Except for one lad, who had Down's Syndrome.* He ignored the concertina with one exception; whenever I played Stenka Rasin it seemed his soul would rise from his bowels into impassioned song. No other tune I played had any effect at all and it didn't matter whether I was singing along or not. His song bore no relationship to pitch, melody, rhythm to any part of Stenka Rasin that I could determine but, the instant I stopped playing, he would stop singing.

A similar event involved a senior academic, who would probably feel insulted that I could associate him with someone with Down's Syndrome. We were camped in western Queensland doing an archaeological survey and, at night I'd play tunes and songs with the assembled volunteers. So long as the songs and tunes were in major scales the academic was accepting of them, although he wouldn't join in. As soon as I started playing in minor scales he would instruct us to stop, sometimes quite rudely; he was the boss, so we did.

2 There is a lot of research into aspects of music therapy and its effectiveness on people with various emotional and intellectual difficulties; I gather that those who compose music (on a range of "instruments' far wider than most traditionalists would be familiar with) in tandem with the individual's presentation would be able to extend Snail's, McGrath's and Les' lines of argument.

* Apologies if Down's Syndrome is not the correct term; it was the one used at the time.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: The Vulgar Boatman
Date: 24 Feb 08 - 03:40 AM

Rowan, don't apologise - you have to move like greased weasel droppings to keep up with changes in that terminology. The broader heading was "learning difficulties" last time I was involved. Following on from McGrath's last post, I suspect that our brains do indeed assimilate a musical grammar, but to judge by the multi ethnic groups I've done therapeutic work with it must be pretty damn broad, immensely subtle and just a few thousand years old. Specific isn't a word that comes readily to mind, and I suspect the author of falling into the trap of wanting human endeavour to be tidy. I must get sight of the article before further comment though.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 24 Feb 08 - 08:01 PM

It generally seems to be accepted now that human beings are wired up to use language in certain ways, and that thee are common linguistic elements in all the languages we speak, for all the obvious differences.

I would be very surprised if the same isn't true of music. I suspect that as human beings and pre-human beings, we have been singing and making music of some sort longer than we have been talking.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Nerd
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 12:15 AM

Hmmm..do they mention the famous "Neanderthal bone flute" of a few years ago? The analysis I read suggested that the flute was essentially diatonic--if it was, indeed, a flute. If this is the case, it argues that--at least in the case of that scale--either there is something hard-wired into us that makes it sound "right." Or at least that there is a remarkable instance of cultural continuity between us and early hominids!

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: pavane
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 03:55 AM

Surely Neanderthal was not an 'early hominid'. A very recent cousin instead.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 06:26 AM

Rowan

Snail's, McGrath's and Les' lines of argument.

I don't really have a line of argument. The trouble is neither does Daniel Levitin, the author of the article; he just makes a bald statement with little justification. I feel in my heart that he is wrong. The article is an extract from Levitin's book This is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession so maybe he says more there.

By the way, wasn't the melody to Stenka Rasin borrowed by a certain Austalian popular music combo for their greatest hit? Bizarrely, it made it from there into the repertoire of Scan Tester, anglo-concertina player of Sussex, UK. That will get the musicologists going in a few hundred years time.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,TheSnail
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 06:29 AM

Dammit! Someone stole my cookie.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,clockwatcher
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 07:44 AM

Don't forget rhythm. A melody or 'sequence of notes' isn't just the name of the notes it's the stated or implied rhythm too, and rhythm is very emotional.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,clockwatcher
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 07:45 AM

Whatever culture you're from.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Marje
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 10:59 AM

There's also something very important going on at a physiological level when we experience music, apart from just hearing it. I have a super photo of my grandson, then aged about 15 months, leaning on the cello his father is playing. The child has stretched out his body and arms against the cello, and his head is turned to one side, eyes closed, with a beatific smile. As soon as he could crawl, he would follow the sound of the cello, clamber up against it and embrace like this, to feel the music with his body.

I'm not prepared to believe that random notes would have had the same effect, or yet that the child was culturally conditioned to respond to the music. I'm sure it's hard-wired into us to feel these physical responses. It's one of the many satisfactions that singers and instrumentalists get from their music.

Marje

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,The Mole Catcher's unplugged Apprentice
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 11:22 AM

speaking of music and science reminded me of Ray Davies, and his song Dedicated Follower of Fashion, which science appears to have discovered 3 years ago.....

One law rules dedicated followers of fashion

Charlotte (they seek her here, they seek her there.......)

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Saro
Date: 26 Feb 08 - 04:00 AM

There is a book on the subject by Deryck Cooke, called The Language of Music (OUP 1959), which looks at the way in which composrers creat emotion, and how people repond emotionally to different musical phrases. Be warned though, all the examples are from classical music.
Saro

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: pavane
Date: 26 Feb 08 - 04:10 AM

Research has indicated that babies can hear sounds when still in the womb. Therefore they will have been exposed to music and cultural influences even before birth.

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: GUEST,Jonny Sunshine
Date: 26 Feb 08 - 02:58 PM

Yes, the first sounds my kids heard before they born were mandolins and harmonicas. At least they learned to like them by the time they were born..

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: Rowan
Date: 26 Feb 08 - 04:12 PM

G'day all,
For your delectation I've done a 'quick and dirty' summary of some main points with relevant quotes, just so we're all talking about what's in the articles. I think 'catters would find the whole set interesting and I didn't see anything I'd choke on over a beer.

New Scientist 23 Feb 08 No. 2644 p.28
Cover Story: The Roots of Music.
Four associated articles;
Natural rhythm: Are we the only species that truly appreciates music? (Christine Kenneally), p.29
Critiques tests that showed monkeys (tamarins and marmosets) did not discriminate between melodious tunes and discordant (to us) sounds, suggesting "only humans have a natural, or innate, inclination to engage with music". It was thought that 'melody pattern recognition' (we recognise a simple and familiar tune from the note patterns irrespective of their absolute pitch) was unique to humans but rhesus monkeys can transpose "simple childhood songs" (eg Happy Birthday) by whole octaves. Monkeys, like many humans, have trouble even recognising "weak" tunes, let alone transposing them. Carp can distinguish between baroque and John Lee Hooker and Java sparrows not only distinguish between Bach and Schoenberg but can apply what they've learned about these styles to distinguish between Vivaldi and Elliott Carter; they prefer to listen to the "prettier, more harmonious excerpts" than to silence. Songbirds and humpbacked whales apply sets of notes into phrases and larger themes and rearrange these as humans do; the longest recorded whale cycle lasted 21 hours. ["Shades of Old Icelandic ballad sagas", is my comment.]

Endorphins are involved in reinforcement for songbirds, humans and bonobos; after music sessions by the latter (Kanzi on drums and Panbanisha on keyboard) with their keepers, the bonobos "look different for days afterwards".

Hard-wired for sound: What makes some notes harmonious when others sound hideous? (Mick Hamer) p.33
Plays around with the effects of scales, both 'traditional' and logarithmic, as used by Robert Schneider, guitarist of The Apples in Stereo. "In Schneider's log scale, successive notes are closer and closer together and the number of individual tones per octave increases almost exponentially in successive octaves." Argues that the way listeners perceive music depends partly on what they are used to, but we "learn" octave intervals in most cultures because intervals of one or two octaves activate a characteristic set of neurones in the auditory thalamus; thus both 'nature' and nurture' are involved in 'hearing "music"'.

It's just an illusion: Music is partly a trick of the brain. Don't believe everything you hear. (Daniel Levitin) p.34
Describes the mental events whereby the vibrations of the eardrum are processed to produce "sounds", by which the "brain extracts basic, low-level features from the music, using specialised neural networks that decompose the signal into information about pitch, timbre, spatial location, loudness, reverberant environment, tone durations and the onset times for different notes (and for different components of tones)." The predictive ability of the brain uses cues to insert information absent from the original signal and this gives rise to various illusions mimicked by sound engineers. "Recorded music allows us to experience sensory perceptions that we never have in the real world."

"Our ability to make sense of music depends on experience and on neural structures that learn and can modify themselves with each new song or piece of music we hear, and with each new listen to music we are already familiar with. Our brains learn a kind of musical grammar that is specific to the music of our culture just as we learn to speak the language of our culture. This becomes the basis for our understanding of music, and ultimately the basis for what we like in music, what music moves us and how it moves us.

"Top five musical illusions" presented with descriptions; the one already alluded to (by Guest) in the thread reads, in full; "In Lady Madonna, the Beatles sing into their cupped hands during an instrumental break and we could swear there are saxophones playing. This perception is based on the unusual timbre they achieve, coupled with our expectation that saxophones should be playing in a song of this genre. (This is not to be confused with the actual saxophone solo that occurs in the song.)"

Describes amusia or "note deafness" whereby the individual (rare, at 4% of the population) is completely unable to detect pitch changes in melodies. Discusses possible genetic inheritability of this and other sensory features.
"Have you got amusia? Test yourself at http://www.delosis.com/listening/home.html"

The diva within: Music can literally change the way you think. (Steven Mithen) p.39
Unable since childhood to carry a pitch or a rhythm, Steven wrote a book called "The singing Neanderthals". Persuaded by his research that "musicality is deeply embedded in the human genome, with far more ancient evolutionary roots than spoken language", a chance meeting with Larry Parsons, who had used functional MRI to "identify which areas of the brain are recruited when we engage with music" suggested a collaboration in an experiment looking at how learning music might affect the human brain. Using a functional MRI scanner Steven was to be "tested on eight technical exercises, covering various musical tasks such as sustaining a pitch, singing scales and in rhythm. [He] would also learn two songs: A Gaelic Blessing by John Rutter and Lascia ch'io piangia by Handel."

After a couple of basic lessons the first MRI scan of the tests was taken and then, for a year Steven studied music and singing. Although he found the experience trying, he "did actually begin to enjoy some aspects of the venture, especially Lascia ch'io piangia. On a few occasions when singing with my wife we both experienced fleeting feelings of emotional intimacy as our voices blended into one — but then I would stumble and the moment would be lost."

After a year he repeated the same tests in the MRI scanner. His brain scans showed the changes wrought in various parts of the brain by the year's learning.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: New scientist music edition
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 26 Feb 08 - 04:28 PM

the first sounds my kids heard before they born were mandolins and harmonicas. At least they learned to like them by the time they were born.. But it might have worked the other way...
......................

Carp can distinguish between baroque and John Lee Hooker I imagine fish might be likely to be drawn to Hooker but find him rather uncomfortable.