Of the Body, By the Body, For the Body ?

– A sentiment after the second round of Music Colloquium

Mrs. Hsin-Ying Chen (陳心瑩) is graduated from "Hochschule für Musik 'Franz Liszt' Weimar" in Germany, and has a professional specialty on "Eugene Rabine's Pedagogy". I have attended her voice recital at the concert hall of Hsinchu City Cultural Affairs Bureau on September 18, 2008. Her voice was pretty colorful and penetrated, and I also admired her ability to switch between different registers almost immediately during her singing. So I was curious about her training and skill since then.

She came to our Music Colloquium to give us a lecture on October 7, 2008, telling us many mechanisms of our body, such as muscle, breathing, speaking, singing, resonance......etc. There was not so much fun to me since I had learned that on Physics course and Human Physiology course a few years ago. But after the knowledge teaching, she always led us to do some simple experiments, sometimes with partner, to test and feel our body. It was quite interesting which I had never tried, because we usually got the theory and did the animal or equipment experiment at classroom or laboratory. She really knew how to practice on human body by oneself. Maybe that's why she could control her voice so precisely.

Not only producing sound, but our body also receives the sound. Scientists study the mechanism of speaking and singing, and they study that of hearing as well. Learning the former can give us the know-how to control our body. Does learning the latter can change our experiences to feel our body ? Psychoacoustics has revealed several facts about our hearing. "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." [1] Moreover, human beings recognize sound loudness and pitch by logarithmic ways. So we use decibel (dB) to mark the sound pressure level, and the frequency distance between two neighboring keyboard on piano is larger in the higher register. Meanwhile, we feel the same sound pressure level as unlike loudness in different pitch range. There is a famous chart which is called "Equal-loudness Curves" to show this relationship. "Masking Effect" is important, too. Within the "Critical Band", a lot of aspects become undetectable by human body. It gives ways for technology to compress audio data. "Virtual Pitch", "Tartini Tone", and many other phenomena tell us the truth which we may not know or not understand behind the sound we make.

Additionally, neuroscience provides valuable discoveries. Neural connections are formed profoundly according to experience. "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." "Young infants can perceive complex rhythmic structure, but they lose this ability before they are a year old if not exposed to such rhythms." [3] There are more researches in such subjects applying to painting art. Semir Zeki's book "Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain" gives a typical case. He hopes "the book will constitute a modest contribution and a small step in laying the foundations of a neurology of aesthetics or neuro-esthetics, and thus for an understanding of the biological basis of aesthetic experience." [4]

Our biology ability and limitation constrain the possibilities of musical elements, structures, and styles. When Pierre Boulez was asked in 1999 that why most powerful compositions written in the serial style are little played regularly today, he responded: "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener." After all, we should come back to consider both how we construct and recognize. "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." [3] In another word, I would say one's body can be the owner, the maker, and the customer of music.

Science deals with truth while art is concerned with beauty. The former deals with the inevitable logic while the latter is concerned with the incidental craft. Provided there will comes the neuro-esthetics, can we verily solve the controversy ? Suppose music is of the body, by the body, and for the body, how about the spirit ? "Using cutting-edge research conducted at Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and many other prestigious universities and laboratories, The Intention Experiment reveals that the universe is connected by a vast quantum energy field. Thought generates its own palpable energy, which you can use to improve your life and, when harnessed together with an interconnected group, to change the world." [2] Albert Einstein has told us that mass and energy are interchangeable. Now we need to figure out the essence of body and spirit.

References
[1] Ball, Philip. "Facing the Music." Nature 453, (2008): 160-62.
[2] McTaggart, Lynne. The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
[3] Trainor, Laurel. "The Neural Roots of Music." Nature 453, (2008): 598-99.
[4] Zeki, Semir. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.