“Our brains are able to manipulate patterns of sound far more complex than those of the brain of any other animal can manage.… As our brains encode these relations, the sensations of sound arise.”
“It is not a waltz’s notes, but rather relations between the notes, that make a body want to dance. It’s these relations that are music, not the atmospheric vibrations of that jiggle out of musical instruments.”
Outer ear (pinnae) detects only high-frequency sounds, making music a bit “sweeter”
Ossicles (inner ear bones) remnants from early jaws that boost middle frequencies; they also have muscles that contract to protect against loud sounds
When speaking or singing we hear ourselves twice: from lips to pinnae and through head to inner ear; explains uncanny valley of own recording
Some animals have earlids
Middle and inner ears encased in hardest bone in body, petrous temporal bone
Inner ear “a labyrinth of chambers and canals lined by membranes”; are “the concert halls of our nervous systems, where music fans out to an eager audience of thousands of neurons.”
Inner ear coiled three and a half times for compactness: cochlea, Latin for snail
Humans localize sounds by comparing intensity in each ear and turning head accordingly
Auditory processing in the brain stem; localized and shapes sounds to help us identify individual notes
Resonant frequency: point at which object naturally pitches back and forth
Sound wave is amplified when the wave’s pulses match the object’s resonant frequencies
A above middle C reference tone: pre-tuning fork in Handel’s day, A was 420 cycles/sec but now 440
“Auditory cortex is active during the short-term memories in which aspects of auditory percepts are prolonged.”
Brain 3rd most energy consumptive organ after heart and kidneys
Melody “a unique invention in sound, a clever machine that tilts and turns the levers of our minds to produce a quintessential sensation. As is true of so many clever inventions, the workings of a great melody are inexplicably simple yet not at all obvious.”
“A great melody is magic — magic for its sheer power, and magic because somehow a brain has unearthed it from amidst zillions of possible bad melodies.”
Brain’s “perpetual categorization” allows for interpreting or sounds rather than processing every raw sound
Octave equivalence: the one universal in scale design; the octaves double the frequency but keep the same note, allowing for musical possibilities and harmony
“Music brings order to sound, and any underlying factors that contribute to disorder place music at a disadvantage.”
Many kinds of scales, but not all succeed; Roman numerals vs Arabic numerals; balance between simplicity and possibility
Contour is central to our experience of melody, using concepts of Gestalt psychology:
- Law of Completeness: our minds prefer complete patterns
- Law of Good Continuation: mind will automatically unite two lines along same trajectory
Textbook rules for melody can point out bad ones but can’t predict good ones
re: inspiration, imagery is a memory process, and memory is a categorization process: “New categories arise naturally as the brain is challenged by new and larger perceptions.”
“Older conceptions crumble to accommodate new and more powerful ones. The connections between memories are altered, the basis for new kinds of imagery is formed, and new ideas arise.”
“Original music arises naturally from minds exercised in it, and not from some muse inhabiting a fortunate few.”
“The phonograph has made us lazy, made us fat with other people’s music-making, and perhaps worst of all, made us perfectionists about performance.”
“The more we are surrounded by music, the less we participate.”
Latter half of 19th century became age of “virtuoso as composer as hero as sex symbol”
Concerts more like boisterous rock shows until 19th century
In 1877 Edison invents wax cylinder, then 1897 Victor and Columbia market gramophone discs that could be mass produced
“Edison had done for music what Gutenberg had done for words, creating mass audiences for musical ideas. His invention would completely alter our relationship with music.”
“We live in an age of widespread musical obesity.”
“We listen to music for the experience of its meaning, for what it ‘says’ to us.”
Expert listeners use anticipations derived from prior experience, bringing “an extensive library of musical ideas to its listening.”
In contrast to language, our bodies contain no obvious specializations for music; “few people generate musical expressions in the way that everyone constantly generates sentences”
Programmatic music: written to represent something happening in the world; images or events (“anger” or “sneaking” music, e.g. The Pink Panther theme)
Ecstasy begins with the flux and fulfillment of anticipations
“The experience of music is an entirely artificial one, its qualities almost unknown in daily life apart from special moments when things come together just right. It is this perfectibility that makes music art.”
Stravinsky: “The uninitiated imagine that one must await inspiration in order to create. That is a mistake. … That force is only brought into action by an effort, and that effort is work. … The musical sense cannot be acquired or developed without exercise. In music as in everything else, inactivity leads gradually to the paralysis, to the atrophying of faculties.”
Music helps Parkinson’s patients overcome symptoms temporarily by transporting brain to higher integration level
“Music establishes flow in the brain, at once enlivening and coordinating the brain’s activities, bringing its anticipations into step.”
Music “lifts us from our frozen mental habits and makes our minds move in ways they ordinarily cannot.”
Early human music used to strengthen social bonds and settle conflicts; “somehow music embodies emotion”
“Discrepancy theory” of emotion has it as a reaction to unexpected experience; nervous system on lookout for most important activities to respond to
Emotions arise when experience falls short of anticipation
Attraction to “intellectual”/orderly music “seems to reside in the elegance of its patterns. We admire it as pure structure.”
“When trains of anticipation go consistently well, we register the pleasure of well-being. … Only in a handful of activities, including music and the arts, do our minds partake of experience that is so perfectly organized that every anticipation is roundly satisfied, filling us with intense pleasure.”
“The ‘meaning’ we feel is not in the music as such, but in our own responses to the world, responses that we carry about with us always. Music serves to perfect those responses, to make them beautiful.”
Music is “artificial world of perfect proportions and exceedingly deep relations, embodied in sound”
Brain orders a disorderly world, so music is “carefully ordered experience”
Beauty: “the experience of unsullied order persisting simultaneously at every perceptual level”
In music’s “perfect world”, brain can perceive deeper and larger experience than everyday existence allows
How music can be transcendent: “For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we really are, and that the world is more than it seems.”