Neuroscience of Music
Music fascinates us because it doesn't work in our brains as we expect it to.
It can trigger emotions, activate memories sometimes thought of as long forgotten, change our experience of something, and help us heal.
And just like so much of this first season, Music allows us to connect with one another in ways that words often can't.
It's why during the pandemic we took to playing instruments on balconies and duetted sea shanties on TikTok.
Music brings people together.
In our second-to-last episode of the season, both Laine and I (Cherys) dive into the almost unforetold answer of "What really is Music?" We look at how music is a genuinely whole-brain experience for both the maker and the enjoyer. References mostly cover findings from Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin and writer Robert Jourdain, whose books you'll see referenced below
TIMESTAMPS
0:55 - Announcement
3:19 - The Neuroscience of Being Human (the new official title for Season One)
5:21 - How do we experience sound?
17:23 - What is music?
24:30 - Musical terms defined
31:37 - Music & The Brain
47:40 - Memory
53:22 - Movement & Emotion
56:34 - Why do we have music? There are theories.
1:09:00 - What do we do about it?
References
This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin
Music, The Brain, and Ecstacy by Robert Jourdain
Papatzikis, "Mitigating the Impact of the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic on Neuroscience and Music Research Protocols in Clinical Populations"
Trimble and Hesdorffer, "Music and The Brain: The Neuroscience of Music and Musical Appreciation"
Wang and Agius, "The Neuroscience of Music; A Review and Summary"
General Outline of Episode
“Philosophers ask whether a falling tree makes a sound when no one is present to hear it. Now one? A tree crashes in the ears of crickets and snakes and owls and hedgehogs and bats and Bobcats. But it crashes differently for each, for the philosophers have a point sound as opposed to vibration is something that the mind does. “ - Jordain Xiv
Zatorre states “Music performance is a natural human activity, present in all societies, and also one of the most complex and demanding cognitive challenges that the human mind can undertake” Shentong Wang & Mark Agius in THE NEUROSCIENCE OF MUSIC; A REVIEW AND SUMMARY state “ music is a trait which is very clearly bound up with human expression, and so, indeed with the very essence of being human.” Music fascinates us- because it doesn’t work in our brain like we expect it to - it can trigger emotions easily, activate memories sometimes thought of as long forgotten, change our overall state of experience, help us heal
This is the neuroscience of Music
What is it?
First what is hearing:
Evolution:
Its argued that our hearing evolved slower than our other senses- specifically in humans.
Animals have a much more attuned sense of hearing than we do - specifically to hear for the types of predators they might encounter.
Our touch and vision developed faster as did taste and smell.
We went for survival with big brains - and hearing has become more evolved through our need of empathy and living in groups - specifically its evolved to hear the human voice
Robert Jordain states “For us sound is self-evident, completely inevitable. But for most of nature's countless billions of years, sound is something much less than it is to us”
Also to talk about evolution of hearing sound - we have to talk about what is sound.
What is sound:
To simplify it - its molecules moving - its vibrations -
Jordain: “A molecule vibrates at 20 times a second for the lowest pitch we can hear, a frequency of 20 cycles per sound, and up to 20,000 times a second for the highest.”
But to humans - its information - its what the brain extracts from the experience of these molecules moving across the ear drum -
Levitin - “keys on the left of the piano keyboard strings that vibrate at a higher rate. The vibration of these strings displace air molecules, and cause them to vibrate at the same rate with the same frequency at the string… The only information that our brains get about the pitch of the sound comes from that wiggling in and out of our eardrum, our inner ear and our brain have to analyze the motion of the eardrum in order to figure out what vibrations out there in the world caused the eardrum to move that way. “ He goes on to clarify in a vacuum of space - there is no sound, which makes you rethink Star Wars a little.
Eardrum:
a membrane stretched across tissue and bone. Imagine beer pong - stretch a sock over one of the cups - have everyone throws pong balls at it- and that cup has to identify how many people, where they are, how hard they thew if they are moving, and more - simply by how the sock is moving.
Jordain your “brain extracts basic low level features from music, using specialized neural networks that decompose the signal about information pitch timber or spatial location loudness reverberant environment tone duration and onset times from different notes.”
The outer part of the ear is helping simply to amplify or funnel and our ear is mostly attuned to the top octave of a piano’s keyboard which are also the same frequencies most helpful for perceiving speech- though if you remember from Episode 4 - the neuroscience of safety - this changes if we feel unsafe and our brain will filter out more sounds of speech and filter in more sounds of the environment
Additionally interested we can also hear straight through our head to the inner ear- when we speak we hear through both our ears and straight through the bone in our head - we hear ourselves twice- and bone conduction sounds louder - hence why how I sound to myself right now and how I will sound listening to this podcast will always be different - because the latter I’m only hearing myself once
Inner ear- 3 narrow chambers curled in a snail shape called the cochlea connected to teh Organ of Corti where it connects to the nervous system
Now the brain has to understand and simplify noise - part of this is removing sounds associated with the human body - filter out some of your own voice, your heartbeat, the sound of your eyelashes moving, etc. - then it tries to take in everything else and make sense of it
A lot of the way we do this is through anticipation - our brain takes in other information and it helps it anticipate the sound it will likely hear - for example the visual of a person hitting a fork to a wine glass - but even more we anticipate sound through other sound - for example - we do anticipation to music we’ve never even heard before - this is done through grouping and memory.
Why? Infinite amount of things we could pay attention to and finite amount of what we are able to pay attention to - - we have a finite amount of neurological resources - so the brain must be strategic -
So sound is what our brain is making sense of in terms of air molecules - and it will geneeralize - it takes from experience and memory and then comes up with an answer. Hence what we hear in terms of a tree falling is not the same as what a raccoon might hear - both because we are attuned for different noises and because hearing happens in the brain
Levitin: “Sound waves, molecules of air vibrating at various frequencies, do not themselves have pitch. There motion and oscillations can be measured, but it takes a human or an animal brain to map them to the internal quality we call pitch.”
We perceive color in a similar way, and it was Isaac Newton who first realized this. Newton, of course, is known as the discoverer of the theory of gravity, and the inventor, along with Levis of calculus. Like Einstein, Newton was a very poor student. Newton was the first to point out that light is colorless, and the consequently color has to occur inside our brain. He wrote the waves themselves are not colored period since his time we have learned that light waves are characterized by different frequencies of oscillation, and when they impinge on the retina of the observer, they set up a chain of neurochemical events the end product of which is an internal mental image we call color. The essential point here is what we perceive as color is not made-up of color. Although an apple may appear read it atoms are not themselves red.
What is music
Lots of things will be hard to conceptualize!!
Composer Edgard Varese famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”
The science of music is still very new, and ultimately there are still MANY unanswered questions. In a way, "What is music" is one of them.
What is the difference between a musical and a non-musical sound, between a musical sound and noise?
At first, it seems easy to distinguish, but that line gets easy to blur.
"Physically, musical sounds are always produced by periodic vibrations, noises by non-periodic vibrations."
But musical sounds can be combined to make noise, just as a single, distinct noise can be interpreted as a musical sound.
Cars going off the road hear a loud hum when they drive over the rivets in the concrete, but space out those rivets and change their depth, and you're driving over a musical road.
Hit a piece of wood and it just sounds like a clink, but put different-sized pieces of wood in a line next to each other and you have a xylophone.
Listen to any percussion instrument on its own and it sounds like noise. (Thinking of when I'd practice playing the crash symbols lol)
Listen to any 5th grader trying to learn violin and it sounds like noise.
The biggest difference comes down to whether or not the sound you're hearing is agreeable to you.
It paints the picture of a parent or adult yelling up the stairs telling the kid to "turn that noise down" when they're headbanging to heavy metal or constantly jumping and fistpumping to EDM.
A quote from Carlyle: "See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it."
The conclusion made in this book: the popular distinction between sound and music is singularly vague. Helmholtz's distinction, however, is always literally true: Periodic vibrations, whatever the source of sound, whatever the instrument used, always yield musical notes. They are smooth and agreeable to the ear, while on the other hand noises, or non-periodic vibrations, produce on the tympanic membrane a kind of jolting sensation, - a sensation of irregularly recurring shocks. A noise thus affects the auditory nerve painfully, just as a flickering light gives rise to a painful sensation in the nerves of sight.
Define a few specific terms:
PITCH (from Levitin): purely a psychological construct, related to both the the actual frequency of a particular tone and it’s relative position on the musical scale (what note is that?)
Frequency is determined by the speed at which molecules vibrate in your brain. (measured in cycles per second) The slower their movement, the lower the frequency.
We use the changes in frequency to determine what pitch (or note) we hear. But this is where things get tough to comprehend…
It’s just like how we interpret color. The atoms that make up that object don’t hold color in them, it’s determined by the changing frequencies of oscillation when they impinge on the retina.
The same thing goes for oscillating vibrations of the molecules in our ears and in our brain.
Melody = defined by the pattern or relation of successive pitches across time
Note names repeat because of a perceptual phenomenon that corresponds to the doubling and halving of frequencies.
RHYTHM: refers to the duration of a series of notes, and to the way that they group together into units - ABCDEF (G = twice the duration) HIJK (LMNO = half the duration)
METER is refers to the way in which tones and rhythms are grouped across time and is determined by strong vs weak beats (for example, a waltz organizes tones into groups of three, large step on the strong beats, small steps on the weak beats)
TEMPO = pace of the piece of music (How we use the tempo for STAYING ALIVE during CPR)
Brains need to break up objects to have an easier time understanding them - rhythm helps with this - sequence of rhythm helps create a middle or end to group information - helps not overwhelm the brain
Levithin “Plato saw that although our bodies are much like those of animals we exhibit far more rhythmic activity and exert far greater control over rhythm and all that we do. He observed that rhythm comes from the mind and not from the body.”
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Why and How?
Music and The Brain
“Much of the brain’s computational power comes from the enormous possibility of interconnection and much more of it comes from the fact that brains are parallel processing machines rather than serial processors. A serial processor is like an assembly line handling each piece of information as it comes down the mental conveyor belt performing some operation on that piece of information and then sending it down the line for the next operation. Computers work like this. Ask a computer to download a song from a website, tell you the weather in Boise, and save a file you've been working on and we'll do all of it one at a time it does things so fast that it seems like it's doing all of them at the same time in parallel but it is not. Brains on the other hand can work on many things at once overlapping and in parallel. Our auditory system processes sound in this way”.
When we left off the sound was in the cochlea from here it moves into the neural circulatory where it is broken down
First to the cochlear nucleus which branches out - focusing on concerns of where something is coming from and what the sound frequency is - the brain will start to map music - how often tones arrive, how loud, how often - what difference comes from the left or right ear?
Sound travels to the Primary Auditory Cortex - which is in your temporal lobe. This is right in the middle of your brain - right at about the top of your cheekbones - in your brain this is right below the limbic system - hand model of your brain - the top of your thumb
primary auditory cortex respond to most specific frequencies of sounds
This is because of evolution -
Step back into evolution - we decided to have big brains which means that we consume so much more energy. Our brain consumes 22% of charloic intake! Our brains our three times the size of our closest animal cousins - when we did this it means we need to find more food - at least 10% more than the average mammal of our size.
Expanding our brain had to have survival benefits or we didn’t do it.
Thus through evolution, we decided what we could hear and what we couldn’t.
This brings us to the brain’s lateralizing functions. In other words - distinct regions of the brain are responsible for specific things.
For example, we are one-hand dominant - because we could do complex movements with our hands that other mammals could not but we needed greater complexity - lateralization allowed the brain to specify one side more - this is uniquely human - one hand needed to be more dexterous and there is only so much gray matter in the brain to spealize -
Also for lateralization - The auditory cortex processes input from both hears but the left and the right brain specialize in different parts of what it is hearing.
Jordain “100 million fiber bridge between the two hemispheres the corpus callosum allows for the two halves of the brain to share the results of their divisive labor.” with the right brain focusing on relation of sounds where as left targets the rhythm of sound.
Also specifically your left brain is hearing your right ear and vice versa.
Melody - which is a complex thing for the brain to make sense of because we have to understand the contour (what is this) and the prevailing harmony (what?) Right brain identifies tones and left is doing an analysis of the harmony as well as finding the rhythm
Start to see how music is expanding in the brain because its only going to get bigger
Professional musician’s brains will also change due to music and specializing - for example favoring more of the left brain rather than the right - likely due to a need for a greater complexity in understanding what they are hearing
Because the left determines rhythm most often the right hand can only handle creating complex rhymes and the left hand will always create simple rhythms to support it - this is often found even in left hand dominant individuals
Left - we often talk about language - left is thought of for language - well like most things to understand them we are simplifying them a bit - lets simplify
To understand the verbal meaning of something is to understand intonation. Not just what you are saying but how you are saying it. Everything you say has two meanings - the words you are speaking and what you are trying to convey. The left gets the former, the right the latter.
Music is often thought of more in the right, often because where language is thought of as expressing the world outside, music is thought of as communicating what is inside. It is also thought of as the language of emotions.
Understanding through anticipating
Recent research has proven something very interesting - when we are imagining doing something the same part of our brain fires as though we are actually doing it
Your visual cortex fires when you imagine the things you’ve seen before
Jourdain “when you look at something your eyes perform a rapid large unconscious Series A fixations to gather the information the brain needs to grasp chair. This series of fixations it's highly selective. Once the brain is gathered enough information to suspect is encountered a chair it only looks for characteristics specific to chairs. This is to say that the brain perceives by anticipation. It formulates perceived hypotheses then conforms them and confirms them. In the view of many cognitive psychologists imagery arises from the unfolding of anticipatory schemas in the absence of an actual perceived object”
Our brain finds pleasure in anticipating and being right in that anticipation - one of the many reasons we find music pleasurable
Memory through categories:
Jordain “Anyone who's ever gone shopping for house paint has been through the agonizing experience of selecting from colors from sheets of sampled squares, each of them slightly different in hue and intensity. You can easily discern the squares differently. But if asked to put aside the samples and then if I identify a specific color you would probably come up with no better description than beige. It's not that you can't remember the names of these pages in the sample sheet you can't remember the variations of color among themselves. Your brain can perceive the differences but can't categorize them. This means your brain can't reliably remember individual cues even if only for a few seconds”
To understand and make sense of music we divide pitches into an octave and octaves into notes - within multiple frequencies we will still judge them as a similar note - specifically on pitch or not.
Categorization is at the heart of how we understand things - think of the difference between an SUV and a car and a motorcycle - yet the brain knows those are all motorized vehicles - it sometimes gets us into trouble because we will oversimply things into a categories such as all roses are bad if that one stung you or all people from another race are bad. But we do categorize things all the time -
Jordain: “A brain understands the word by reducing perceptions to categories and it recalls past experiences by reconstructing it from categorical memory. So categorization is not merely a shortcut that we take to simplify music. Categorization is the heart of nearly all of our mental activity and hence all of our musical activity.” Music isn’t just the vibrating molecules on our ears - it’s our brain making sense of that, that makes it music.
Memory:
The frontal lobe does short-term memory
Long-term memory is more in the hippocampus (the brain’s filing cabinet)
That being said no specific place where memory is stored
Jourdain: “It's been understood for a long time that there is no such thing as the grandmother cell a single neuron that stows your collections of grandma. This is because the brain remembers things through categorizing them not by filing away some sort of true to life snapshot. Whatever the brain encounters with this light or sound or smell or sensation it dissects for deepest relations and thus in this network of relations the brain retains. Later when the brain recollects something it evokes these relations to generate a memory. This means these memories are not so much as retrieved it's recreated. Individual memories are processed, not things. Much detail is last in this mechanism and research shows that memory is imprecise and unreliable…. Grandma is both everywhere and nowhere. The brain works through such diffuse abstract hierarchies as almost everything it does”
This is important because its also how we learn and expand - categories can be more flexible than a ridge-specific
With music this matters - for example in jazz - we can remember the basics of a song, but because we are categorizing the information we can expand our categories and play - creating something new and unique even if we are playing a song that has been heard 100 times
Jordain: “This disparity in memory skills leads us to another important distinction between types of memory semantic and episodic. Semantic memory is concerned with the inherent nature of phenomenon with meaning episodic memory with actual instances of its occurrence with episodes. Knowing that frogs are slimy is an example of somatic memory remembering the time someone put a frog in your bed is an example of an episodic memory. Similarly, memories of the many ways in which drugs are used in rock music is somatic, the memory of exactly how it drums were used in particular songs with a Rolling Stone is episodic.”
Making music in the brain -
Jordain: where in the brain is nor knowledge of how to play apiece stored? The answer is clear it's stored everywhere and nowhere
Our brain has two tracks - one that take in body movement and one that sends it out. So one track in your brain says squeeze your left and and one track takes in how hard you are squeezing - the two communicate and adjust as needed.
Making music requires this complexity and more.
For one - at high extremes, we have a harder time correcting perfectly and doing so fast enough for the results we would like.
To preform we are also using our visual system to understand and separate the black and white on a page to make sense of what we are supposed to perform, remember what those notes are, how to create them, and then articulate that to the body of press down hard, not too hard, not to soft, listening for if we have come up, what others are playing, listening for what we need (and we’ve just discussed how complex that is) and adjust.
So much of the brain is firing during performance - intertwined with so many other parts of the brain all simultaneously.
While feeling and expressing the emotion of the music but not getting distracted by the emotion of fear that comes from fight or flight that can so often occur.
Oh and like take someone like Lizzo and there’s often a ton of dancing while singing and playing a flute. Makes all that work that much more impressive, yes?
Music and movement -
the purpose of the brain is to moveTop of the spine is the beginning of the brain - which is the cerebellum (tiny brain)
Cerebellum - imporant in balance- if you hold out an arm your cerebellum adjust so you don’t lean or fall over
Making music requires movement - requires coordinated rhyme - this requires the cerebellum and brainstem in addition to the higher cognitive systems we’ve covered earlier
The cerebellum is also involved in emotion. This would account for why it became so activated when people listen to music they liked, and why music impacts us in such a powerful way
Why would we have this?
Steven Pinkler has argued that music is an evolutionary accident - we didn’t evolve to like icecream - more throughout our evolution liking fats and sugars helped keep us alive when food was hard to come by - thus we evolved to like ice-cream
Specifically to quote “survival and sexual selection pressure created a language in a communication system that we learned how to exploit for musical purposes”.
Music has been found throughout our human evolution and in every culture and in every part of the world
Darwin believes it developed through mating rituals and much like we don’t need ice cream any more, we can eat without nutritional value and we can have sex without procreation
Thinking back to Darwin in school we are taught that it is about ‘survival of the fittest’ but that is an overgeneralization - the fittest have the strongest likelihood to survive, yes, but in genes what is more important is that evolution is the survival of the genes thought to be important enough that someone would procreate with them
When we reproduce ½ our genes get pass onward. If we don’t reproduce, our specific genes can die off.
The Oversimplification comes in the distorted view that genes create a survival advantage. Darwin instead thought that music might impact sexual selection
Certainly we see some evidence of this - famous musicians often have sexual partners in the hundreds, far more so that the average individual
Jeffrey Miller also states that music and dance would have been “a sign of sexual fitness on two fronts. First anyone who could sing and dance was advertising to potential mates that stamina and overall health both physical and mental. Second anyone who has come to be an expert or accomplish in music and dance was advertising that they had enough food and sturdy enough shelter that they could afford to waste valuable time to develop a purely unnecessary skill”.
Another possibility is that music shows cognitive flexibility - this is valued in reproduction because it shows flexibility to survive. Studies have shown that human females at their most futile will desire a partner who is poor but an artist, rather than an individual who is wealthy but not creative.
David Herron of Ohio State “The key question for the evolutionary basis is what advantage might confer on an individuals who exhibit musical behaviors versus those who do not. If music is a nonadaptive pleasure seeking behavior the auditory cheesecake argument we would expect it not to last very long in the evolutionary time period” “if music was not an active the music lovers should be at some evolutionary or survival disadvantage. Second music shouldn't be around all that long”
But a very interesting part of this argument is to not think of music as how we listen to it now, but how it has been consumed throughout our evolution. We gravitate now, and in the last few hundred years or so of thinking of music as something only experts do. But if we go past that - that is not how music was consumed - in concerns, in music halls, but instead of listening - we as humans consumed it. We moved, we sang even if we couldn’t ‘sing’. Our cerebral response to music, this ‘polite listening’ is “counter to our evolutionary history. Children often show the reaction that is true to our nature.”
Music used to be something we did in tribes, as a whole and thus there also great arguments that music exists because of social bonding and cohesion. Which if you’ve listened to a few episodes, we focus on hear a lot - our brain evolved for us to exists in groups.
Levithin“Collective music may making may encourage social cohesion humans are social animals and music have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony and may have been an exercise for other social acts such as turn taking behaviors. Singing another ancient campfires might be a way to stay awake to ward off predators to develop social coordination and social cooperation within the group. Humans need social events to make society work band music is one of them.
What we are talking about it
Last episode - the brain works well when it communicates with itself
Recent brain scans found corpus callosum is 15% larger for adults who started to play the piano before age of 8
Jourdain “corpus callosum carries 100 million nerve fibers as 100 optic nerves. A 15% increase in its cross-section suggests a vast increase in information flow. The view of virtuosity is gross neurology and it's strong deterministic the better the wiring the better the playing.”
Pete Seeger the important thing is not is it good music what is the music good for?
Music is a mood enhancer - Lecithin “we listen to music for the experience of its meaning for what it says to us. Although some musicologists have denied that music can be meaningful few listeners would agree. Somehow music expresses things tells the story”
Why do we care?
Music is known across cultures, it’s enjoyed by most humans. As we discussed in episode two music helps create empathy with others. We discussed this with in regards to the Covid -19 pandemic - and music researchers have looked into this further - specifically looking at how music impacted our survival. Thinking back to the images we got of people singing together on the balconies when we couldn’t be close. Or even how we would stitch each other’s video’s allowing us to sing together across continents, across cultures. In New York, hospitals created music rooms to help impact trauma. Music is continuing to expand in the ways of which we know and understand treating trauma - and not just trauma but stroke, Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy and traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease
My own practice
To quote Papatzikis- music is at the heart of “improving the human condition” Taking care of ourselves and of the people we work with is and should be paramount in these difficult and extraordinary times we live in, hence a must for our research community, too.”
I think part of it is that we need to care because others aren’t
We often look at music as how does it benefit other things. Quick examples are we should care about music because it helps us learn better or heal better. But Levitin would argue that this is a bit offensive “because the implication was that music should not be studied in and of itself for its own right but only if people could do other better more important things. Think about how absurd up sound if we turned it inside out. If I claim that studying mathematics helped musical ability with policymakers start pumping money into math for that reason?”
Music is one of the first things to get cut and to keep it alive we try to come up with external benefits instead of caring about music for music sake
What do we do about it?
