music » The Thinking Meat Project

Evolving music

Being human Comments Off

Dec 102009

Human culture changes with time; if it didn’t, we’d all still be wearing those hairstyles that look so amusing when they appear in old yearbook photos, and the music of the 1980s would sound just like the music of the 1970s or the 1770s or…well, you get the picture. How much of a parallel there is between the process of cultural change and biological evolution is an open question.

An online experiment in the evolution of music aims to examine how cultural evolution works. A randomly generated parent generation consisting of two brief loops of sound was used to create 100 offspring, which people rate on a five-point scale from “I love it” to “I can’t stand it.” The most popular clips survive and are used to create the next generation (with some random mutations thrown in); the least popular clips vanish from the gene pool.

This CultureLab blog entry from New Scientist gives more details. For the next week or so, you can participate by listening to and rating clips. It’s a strangely compelling pursuit, like evaluating galaxies at Galaxy Zoo. Visit DarwinTunes to learn more, and click the participate link at the top to help shape the music.

Links between musical scales and speech

Being human 3 Responses »

Dec 042009

Music is surprisingly mysterious, for something so ubiquitous. For example, it’s not really clear why we generally associate major keys with happy moods and minor keys with more somber feelings. Also, we choose our scales somewhat arbitrarily out of a range of possibilities. Within a single octave, humans can discern about 240 different musical tones, but the ways we divide this complex tonal landscape are fairly uniform across not only western music but at least some other musical traditions, despite the multitude of other options.

A couple of papers from the lab of Dale Purves at Duke suggest that the answers to both questions are linked to the properties of human speech.

A paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America reports on research comparing the tonal qualities of excited and subdued speech and finds that the former contains more major intervals and the latter more minor intervals, which suggests a source for our identification of the emotional qualities of music in major and minor keys. Another paper in PLoS One shows that the musical intervals making up the most widely used scales are those that most closely resemble the harmonic structure of vowel sounds appearing in human speech.

These close links between the tonal qualities of music and speech suggest that one reason music is such a powerful influence on humans is that it uses whatever mental machinery evolved to pay attention to the utterances of other humans (or as the Purves lab web page puts it, “These findings are consistent with the idea that humans have a bias for conspecific vocalizations.”).

You can read an article from Science Daily about this work. The two papers are:

Major and Minor Music Compared to Excited and Subdued Speech, by D.L. Bowling, K. Gill, J.D. Choi, J. Prinz, D. Purves. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, December 2009.

A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales, by K. Gill and D. Purves.
PLoS One, 4(12): e8144. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008144, published December 3, 2009.

The musical brain (human and avian)

Animal behavior, Being human 2 Responses »

Aug 282009

The World Science Festival, held in New York earlier this summer, has produced a couple of enjoyable videos that illustrate the power of music.

Here, Bobby McFerrin illustrates how deeply embedded the pentatonic scale is in the human mind and harnesses an audience’s instinctive awareness of it to generate a bit of a capella music. His comment at the end about how audiences around the world seem to share this grasp of the pentatonic scale is particularly interesting.

But music reaches even further, occasionally binding disparate species. This video of a dancing cockatoo is a lot of fun, particularly the sight of a panel of distinguished neuroscientists getting up (or getting down) and dancing with the bird. One of the most touching parts of the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill was a quiet moment when Mark Bittner was playing the blues and a bird called Mingus bobbed his head along with the music. This is similar, but bigger.

If you have time to view the entire “Avian Einsteins” panel discussion about avian and human brains and the links between language and movement, I highly recommend it.

Another music-emotion connection

Psychology Comments Off

Mar 052009

It appears that musical training will do more than enhance your understanding and perception of music. In a study at Northwestern, musicians were better than non-musicians at detecting emotion in the sound of a baby’s cry. An examination of brain activity revealed that musician’s brains appear to be better able to focus on the more complicated part of the sound, which conveys the emotional meaning, while giving less attention to the simpler, less emotion-laden part. This article from PhysOrg.com gives some details. (The article, by Dana Strait et al., will appear in the European Journal of Neuroscience.) I remember hearing a relatively young Joshua Bell play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with what seemed to me an emotional depth and richness beyond his years; I wonder if his years of musical training had anything to do with his sensitivity to emotional nuance.

Link between music, emotions, and memory

Psychology Comments Off

Mar 032009

The next time a particularly memory-laden song from your teen years comes across your iPod playlist and you suddenly start remembering people and places from long ago, thank your medial pre-frontal cortex. A recent fMRI study at UC Davis indicates that this area links our autobiographical memories and our emotional response to the music associated with them. Because this area is one of the last to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease, the findings could explain why people with Alzheimer’s still recognize and respond to music even after other memories are gone. This press release from EurekAlert gives an overview; the complete article is also available online, at least at the moment. (The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories, Petr Janata. Cerebral Cortex, Advance Access published online Feb. 24, 2009)

Musical color

Being human, Psychology 1 Response »

Feb 162009

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of synesthesia, and in fact a little envious of those who experience this unusual blending of sensory modes. The first hour of Performance Today for February 16 explored musical/color synesthesia. A synesthesia page is available on the Performance Today web site, featuring interviews with composer (and synesthete) Michael Torke and neuroscientist (and music lover) Oliver Sacks and links to more information. And for the next week, you can listen to the show by following the link on this page.

Songs that call up memories

Psychology 2 Responses »

Jan 252009

A friend recently sent me a link to a Pandora station he had created and thought I might like. That got me started exploring Pandora (an Internet music service based on the results of the Music Genome Project), in particular creating stations based on music I remember from my teen years (the 1970s) and twenties (the 1980s). Music is one of the strongest triggers I know for memories of a particular time and place; I enjoy not only recalling my own memories associated with a particular song, but hearing the stories that people close to me share about songs they remember. For example, when I hear Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good,” I flash back to when I was 17 and I bought my first car (a 1974 Gremlin; this was in 1978) and regularly drove home from my job at a bank through hot summer evenings in Phoenix with the windows down (the car was not air conditioned) and various pop songs playing on the radio (55 Phoenix, KOY).

However, I recalled all those details (and more), as well as some of the emotions of that time period, without listening to the song. A recent study examined whether there’s a difference in the strength of recall if people hear the song, see the title or lyrics, or see the album cover. The hypothesis was that hearing the song would lead to stronger recall, and that’s certainly what I would have expected. In fact, in a study of 124 undergrads who were prompted to recall songs from five different periods of their pasts, it didn’t matter that much how they were reminded of the song. The memories came back about as strongly for any of the experimental conditions, as long as the subjects were familiar with it and had autobiographical memories associated with it. This story from Science Daily gives an overview. The paper itself goes into a good bit more detail about autobiographical memory and the finer points of the study: Using music to cue autobiographical memories of different lifetime periods, Elizabeth T. Cady, Richard Jackson Harris, and J. Bret Knappenberger. Psychology of Music, Vol. 36, No. 2, 157-177 (April 2008)

The power of music

Being human, Psychology Comments Off

Dec 192008

In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick, making fun of the effect that the skillful manipulation of musical instruments has on the emotions, says, “Is it not strange that sheeps’ guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?” Strange indeed, but it’s one of the more enjoyable things about being thinking meat. This article from the Economist summarizes evolutionary theories of why we are such a musical species, and touches (too briefly, but oh well) on scientific studies of how music tugs on our heartstrings.

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