Science and Music

"Science and Music." Nature 453-454, (2008)

Editorial— Bountiful noise
01. Schoenberg's composition deliberately defied all the prevailing standards of music. It was, in his own words, "devoid of architecture or construction, just an uninterrupted changing of colours, rhythms, and moods". But it did have an expressive purpose, he insisted: "The music seeks to express all that swells in us subconsciously like a dream."
02. What matters is that its true bounties are recognized, and then explored and analysed. That applies not only to noise-like music, but also to nature.

Essay 1— Facing the music
01. Arnold Schoenberg was right when he cautioned: "One day the children's children of our psychologists will have deciphered the language of music."
02. The early sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius ranked it as the least of his three classes of 'music', and agreed with Pythagoras that music should ideally be studied while "setting aside the judgement of the ears".
03. Even musicians are uncertain of what kind of art it is they are engaged in, and what, if anything, can be said about it.
04. Anthropologists have often struggled to understand how or to what extent cultures apply intellectual and aesthetic judgements.
05. Then you find that the original problem has evaporated: in this atomistic view, 'life' or 'music' ceases to be visible at all.
06. As nearly all natural sounds are harmonically complex, the brain attributes related tones to a single sound source, combining them into a single auditory object. This is one of the 'Gestalt principles' the brain uses to decode sounds.
07. Cognitive studies on infants and primates offer some evidence that the brain recognizes the octave, and possibly the fifth as 'special'. Indeed, these intervals feature in nearly all musical cultures that use scales.
08. Hermann von Helmholtz first did the maths in the nineteenth century and showed that sensory dissonance dips at the intervals corresponding to the Western scale, suggesting that physics does play a part in determining this scale.
09. This finding suggests that affective and cognitive processing of music might involve different neural pathways.
10. One says that the emotional content is inherent in musical cues; The other says that it is all about how the music unfolds in time.
11. Perhaps there will always be some fundamental limitation in connecting how our brains work with what we do with them.

Essay 2— The evolution of music
01. Music's perceptual basis could derive from general-purpose auditory mechanisms, its syntactic components could be co-opted from language, and its effect on our emotions could be driven by the acoustic similarity of music to other sounds of greater biological relevance, such as speech or animal vocalizations.
02. Babies notice when the notes of a melody are reordered, but not when they are shifted to a different pitch range. Infants, like adults, are sensitive to the relationships between notes, which is preserved in transposition, but altered by reordering. Infants also tend to be captivated by music relative to many other stimuli.
03. Lullabies seem to qualify as a rare universal — nearly every culture has a genre of music geared towards infants, and there is considerable consistency in how they sound, generally being slow, repetitive and featuring descending pitch contours.
04. Examining functional overlap with other domains can provide insight. Language is generally the most popular candidate; both faculties combine discrete elements (notes/phonemes) into complex structures according to rules.
05. Similarities between human and nonhuman animals can thus indicate that a trait did not evolve for music.
06. Animals, unlike adult and infant humans, have difficulty recognizing melodies that have been shifted up or down in pitch, for instance.

Essay 3— Lost in music
01. The casual listener hears a wealth of variety; the musicologist detects a rapidly spreading monoculture — albeit expressed in many forms.
02. Well, suppose that we find a musical behaviour present in all the world's cultures. This could reveal some universal in human behaviour. But if all the world's musics are influenced by a single dominant culture, universals become uninterpretable.
03. Emotionally, music and language seem to share a single code: a pitch contour that sounds sad when spoken will also sound sad played on an instrument3. Yet other research suggests that the neural mechanisms involved in rhythm are unrelated to language.
04. The objective organization of sounds is only loosely related to how minds interpret those sounds.
05. When we observe an objective pattern in the music of some culture, we cannot assume that the pattern has any significance for culturally knowledgeable listeners.
06. Variance is the lifeblood of empirical research. Without variability, data tell us little.
07. Comparable cross-cultural experiments in sound are rare. In fact, few of the most basic musical concepts proposed by scholars have been tested in non-Western cultures.
08. Regrettably, most cognitive scientists are ill-equipped to do remote field work, and few ethnomusicologists know how to do an experiment.
09. In the long span of music research, we live at a unique but fleeting moment.

Essay 4— The neural roots of music
01. Some powerful compositions were written in the serial style, but few are played regularly today. Asked in 1999 why this might be, Boulez responded: "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener."
02. Music is conceived by our brains, played through our bodies, perceived through our sensory organs and then interpreted by our brains. Thus it is subject both to general constraints of our neural system and to specific constraints of our auditory processing capacities.
03. Experience also profoundly affects the neural connections formed.
04. Talking to people of all ages, we use falling pitches to express comfort; relatively flat, high pitches to express fear; and large bell-shaped pitch contours to express joy and surprise. Hearing music with an unfamiliar structure, listeners base their emotional reactions largely on such sound features.
05. Musical structures and styles vary enormously across cultures, and change as continually as languages, yet our biology constrains the possibilities.
06. Young infants can perceive complex rhythmic structure, but they lose this ability before they are a year old if not exposed to such rhythms.
07. Our capacity for processing rhythmic complexity is likely to underlie the comparative success of rhythmic experimentation over pitch experimentation in the twentieth century.
08. The frequency content of tones is also processed according to when neurons fire, and consonant and dissonant stimuli cause different types of firing patterns in auditory nerves.
09. Composers can choose to ignore the fundamental physiological power of the consonance–dissonance relation and the information-processing power of discrete pitch and unequal interval sizes in scales. But by doing so, they create music that demands more of the listener because it lacks some of the most powerful physiological organizing principles of our nervous system.
10. Scale and harmonic structures depend on learning. By contrast with sensory consonance and dissonance, there is more flexibility in how they are perceived.
11. For many listeners, this level of difficulty is not enjoyable. Equally, music that is too simple and predictable can be boring.
12. What has not changed recently is our evolutionary inheritance, the structure of our sensory organs, our basic encoding of information and our visceral responses to features of sound that unleash the emotional power of music in our lives.

Essay 5— Talk of the tone
01. What is universal across cultures is the use of a small and consistent set of pitches and intervals within the octave as a framework for performance and perception.
02. Music uses pitch to distinguish the notes and intervals of the scale; language largely uses timbre to distinguish phonemes.
03. However, recent research on non-Western rhythm perception shows that even this basic aspect of our interpretation of sound varies between cultures.
04. Again, whistled speech can convey original linguistic utterances even though to the uninitiated the sound patterns may seem more like music.
05. Yet they probably hold important clues to how the biological building-blocks of language and music can be fluidly and dynamically reconfigured, rather than being exclusively bound to one domain or the other from birth.
06. These findings bear on a wide range of debates, from the 'modularity' of linguistic mechanisms to the evolutionary origins of music.

Essay 6— Raising the roof
01. The downside of this localization is that, in effect, our hearing suppresses awareness of sound reflections. We notice early sound reflections but are often not conscious of their effects — such as making sound seem clearer than it would be otherwise.
02. The sound absorption by objects and building materials also had to be determined, and assessing the absorption by seating and audiences was (and still is) particularly difficult.
03. The current consensus is that there are five subjective dimensions for concert hall listening. These are clarity, or ability to hear musical detail; reverberance, or being able to hear reverberations; acoustic intimacy, which describes how involved we seem to be in the performance; envelopment, the extent to which we feel surrounded by sound, and loudness.
04. Perhaps such features will allow acoustics to be tailored to the music of different eras. The technology is there, less so the acceptance by musicians and hall managers.

Essay 7— Playing by numbers
01. This delicate balance — somewhere between the uniform ticking of a clock and the random pitter-patter of raindrops — is reminiscent of complex systems, in which an intermediate degree of internal organization maintains coherence, yet allows for rich dynamics and functional flexibility.
02. In 1955, social scientist Herbert Simon pointed out that Zipf's law can be quantitatively explained by assuming that the usage frequency of a word increases proportionally to its previous appearances — the more you use a word, the more you will use it.
03. Literary texts and musical compositions are created as organic entities, not series of isolated decisions. Nevertheless, the outcome is an ordered sequence of events conveying information: a message. As the message flows, a context emerges, favouring the appearance of some elements at the expense of others.
04. Happily, information theory provides other ways to analyse the organization of symbols in a sequence.
05. As a collection of symbols becomes larger and more sophisticated, each element's frequency decreases. When each symbol appears too few times to be statistically significant, a meaningful message becomes indistinguishable from a random sequence.
06. Indeed, how we integrate and elaborate sensory information into artistic experience may always be beyond quantitative description.

Essay 8— Beyond the notes
01. But much of what performers do, and what listeners respond to, falls between the notes as musicologists construe them. This is where science comes in.
02. To understand music as performance, we must use scientific and humanities approaches in tandem.
03. In the early 1990s, Henkjan Honing and Peter Desain suggested that the shaping of both tempo and dynamics in classical music performance can be explained in terms of three main components: note-to-note shaping, the composer's 'pulse', and hierarchical phrase arching.
04. What is considered 'musical' has varied throughout history, as have practices of performance.
05. We found that, for this piece (Chopin's Mazurka Op.63 No.3)at least, both tempo and dynamic phrasing were present in the earliest recordings, but that they began to be closely coordinated with one another and with the composed phrasing only after the Second World War. Different performers achieved this coordination in various ways, but the effect was a streamlined style that was still expressive, albeit less personal and subjective than pre-war interpretations.
06. But a musical performance isn't a pot of paint. It is a human action carried out at a certain time and place, normally in the presence of others and marked by the contingencies of the occasion.
07. Remove the communication from music and it rapidly becomes as pointless as it would be to spend time in the virtual world Second Life if there were no real people behind the avatars and speech bubbles.
08. Performance, then, is more than the communication of structural information about musical works.
09. Here the interest lies in the pattern of discrepancies between the model and the performance. The focus is on the unique features, and the criterion of success is: how far the model guides the ear towards an awareness of these qualities, resulting in a process of engaged listening and critical interpretation. Used thus, deterministic models of performance expression do not undermine values of human creativity, but locate them more accurately.
10. Scientific measurement and cultural approaches to performance can be linked usefully. But this is a marriage of complementary approaches, rather than a convergence towards a unified discipline.

Essay 9— The ear of the beholder
01. If research is to provide a satisfying account of how music and mind interact, it must embrace the full variety of musical experiences and contexts.
02. If science is to demystify music and explain its power to affect us, it must investigate music as it is actually experienced.
03. The modern perplexity with music may be a symptom of the loss of this natural connection to making music.
04. But music cannot achieve a prescribed psychological outcome because it is impossible to understand or predict its effects without accounting for two other significant areas of influence. The first relates to the listener: his moods, memories, intentions, attitudes, choices and experiences. The second is the social context in which the music is experienced: who else is there, what is going on, and the social or personal significance of the event.
05. Experimental science often inadvertently promotes the vitamin model. Scientists who study music are not, as a body, skilled in musical performance or composition. Our relationship to music is, like much of society, generally that of an outsider looking in, a consumer rather than producer.
06. Music is a constantly evolving product of human culture, whose forms, functions and discourses are not fixed. It is what we decide to make it.
07. Its effects in these different contexts can be quite different.
08. On this issue, musicians and scientists often line up on opposite sides, with musicians seeing scientists as naive over-simplifiers, and scientists regarding musicians as defensive 'obscurantists'.
09. Our responses are hugely influenced by our attitudes to particular musical styles, and whether we approve of or identify with them. They are equally influenced by our sense of whether the music is appropriate to the situation.
10. Studies of encoding and memory reveal musical intelligence in people's recall errors: they tend to substitute a note or chord that serves a similar musical function. This shows that they have subconsciously internalized the rules of musical grammar. Other studies show that the ability to sing in tune can be dramatically improved by simple well-targeted feedback, suggesting that many abilities are already in place but are masked by the absence of one simple cognitive component.
11. Experiments also show that listeners can acquire a complex and fine-grained appreciation of the link between the choices they make about what to listen to and the resultant psychological outcomes.