This Is Your Brain On Music

Understanding a Human Obsession

Daniel J. Levitin

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857895141
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Ever wondered why you can identify your favourite song from hearing only the first two notes? Or why you can't get that annoying jingle out of your head? Daniel Levitin's breathtaking - and wholly accessible - book, now published as an ebook, explains why.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive explanation of how humans experience music and to unravel the mystery of our perennial love affair with it. Using musical examples from Bach to the Beatles, Levitin reveals the role of music in human evolution, shows how our musical preferences begin to form even before we are born and explains why music can offer such an emotional experience.

Music is an obsession at the heart of human nature, even more fundamental to our species than language. In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothing less than a new way to understand it, and its role in human life.

1. What Is Music?

From Pitch to Timbre

What is music? To many, “music” can only mean the great masters—Beethoven, Debussy, and Mozart. To others, “music” is Busta Rhymes, Dr. Dre, and Moby. To one of my saxophone teachers at Berklee College of Music—and to legions of “traditional jazz” aficionados—anything made before 1940 or after 1960 isn’t really music at all. I had friends when I was a kid in the sixties who used to come over to my house to listen to the Monkees because their parents forbade them to listen to anything but classical music, and others whose parents would only let them listen to and sing religious hymns, in both cases fearing the “dangerous rhythms” of rock and roll. When Bob Dylan dared to play an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, people walked out and many of those who stayed, booed. The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God. The church also banned the musical interval of an augmented fourth, the distance between C and F-sharp and also known as a tritone (the interval in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story when Tony sings the name “Maria”). This interval was considered so dissonant that it must have been the work of Lucifer, and so the church named it Diabolus in musica. It was pitch that had the medieval church in an uproar. And it was timbre that got Dylan booed. It was the latent African rhythms in rock that frightened white suburban parents, perhaps fearful that the beat would induce a permanent, mindaltering trance in their innocent children. What are rhythm, pitch, and timbre—are they merely ways of describing different mechanical aspects of a song, or do they have a deeper, neurological basis? Are all of these elements necessary?

The music of avant-garde composers such as Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer stretches the bounds of what most of us think music is. Going beyond the use of melody and harmony, and even beyond the use of instruments, these composers use recordings of found objects in the world such as jackhammers, trains, and waterfalls. They edit the recordings, play with their pitch, and ultimately combine them into an organized collage of sound with the same type of emotional trajectory—the same tension and release—as traditional music. Composers in this tradition are like the painters who stepped outside of the boundaries of representational and realistic art—the cubists, the Dadaists, many of the modern painters from Picasso to Kandinsky to Mondrian.

What do the music of Bach, Depeche Mode, and John Cage fundamentally have in common? On the most basic level, what distinguishes Busta Rhymes’s “What’s It Gonna Be?!” or Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata from, say, the collection of sounds you’d hear standing in the middle of Times Square, or those you’d hear deep in a rainforest? As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”

This book drives at a neuropsychological perspective on how music affects our brains, our minds, our thoughts, and our spirit. But first, it is helpful to examine what music is made of. What are the fundamental building blocks of music? And how, when organized, do they give rise to music? The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation. Our brains organize these fundamental perceptual attributes into higherlevel concepts—just as a painter arranges lines into forms—and these include meter, harmony, and melody. When we listen to music, we are actually perceiving multiple attributes or “dimensions.”

Before getting to the brain basis of all this, I’d like to take this chapter to define the musical terms and quickly review some basic ideas in music theory, and illustrate them with musical examples. (Musicians may want to skip or skim this chapter.) First here is a brief summary of the main terms.

~ Pitch is a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale. It provides the answer to the question “What note is that?” (“It’s a C-sharp.”) I’ll define frequency and musical scale below. (When a trumpet player blows in his instrument and makes a single sound, he makes what most of us call a note, and what scientists call a tone. The two terms, tone and note refer to the same entity in the abstract, but we reserve the word tone for what you hear, and the word note for what you see written on a musical score.) In the nursery rhymes “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Are You Sleeping?” pitch is the only thing that varies in the first seven notes—the rhythm stays the same. This demonstrates the power—and fundamentality—of pitch in defining a melody or song.

~ Rhythm refers to the durations of a series of notes, and to the way that they group together into units. For example, in the “Alphabet Song” (the same as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”) the first six notes of the song are all equal in duration as we sing the names of the letters A B C D E F and then we hold the letter G for twice the duration. Then we’re back to the standard duration for H I J K, and then the following four letters are sung with half the duration, or twice as fast per letter: L M N O and then ending on a held P (leading generations of schoolchildren to spend several early months believing that there was a letter in the English alphabet called ellemmenno). In the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann,” the first seven notes are all sung on the same pitch, with only the rhythm varying. In fact, the seven notes after that are all sung on the same pitch as well (in the melody), as guest vocalist Dean Torrence (of Jan & Dean) is joined by other voices singing other notes (harmony). The Beatles have several songs in which pitch is held constant and only rhythm varies across several notes: the first four notes of “Come Together”; the six notes of “Hard Day’s Night” following the lyric “It’s been a”; the first six notes of “Something.”

~ Tempo refers to the overall speed or pace of the piece. If you were tapping your foot, dancing, or marching to the piece, it’s how fast or slow these regular movements would be.

~ Contour describes the overall shape of a melody, taking into account only the pattern of “up” and “down” (whether a note goes up or down, not the amount by which it goes up or down).

~ Timbre (rhymes with amber) distinguishes one instrument from another—say, trumpet from piano—when both are playing the same written note. It is a kind of tonal color that is produced in part by overtones from the instrument’s vibrations (more on that later). It also describes the way that a single instrument can change sound as it moves across its range—say the warm sound of a trumpet low in its range versus the piercing sound of that same trumpet playing its highest note.

~ Loudness is a purely psychological construct that relates (nonlinearly and in poorly understood ways) to how much energy an instrument creates—how much air it displaces—and what an acoustician would call the amplitude of a tone.

~ Reverberation refers to the perception of how distant the source is from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is in; often referred to as “echo” by laypeople, it is the quality that distinguishes the spaciousness of singing in a large concert hall from the sound of singing in your shower. It has an underappreciated role in communicating emotion and creating an overall pleasing sound.

Psychophysicists—scientists who study the ways that the brain interacts with the physical world—have shown that these attributes are separable. Each can be varied without altering the others, allowing the scientific study of one at a time. I can change the pitches in a song without changing the rhythm, and I can play a song on a different instrument (changing the timbre) without changing the duration or pitches of the notes. The difference between music and a random or disordered set of sounds has to do with the way these fundamental attributes combine, and the relations that form between them. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they give rise to higher-order concepts such as meter, key, melody, and harmony.

~ Meter is created by our brains by extracting information from rhythm and loudness cues, and refers to the way in which tones are grouped with one another across time. A waltz meter organizes tones into groups of three, a march into groups of two or four.

~ Key has to do with a hierarchy of importance that exists between tones in a musical piece; this hierarchy does not exist in-the-world, it exists only in our minds, as a function of our experiences with a musical style and musical idioms, and mental schemas that all of us develop for understanding music.

~ Melody is the main theme of a musical piece, the part you sing along with, the succession of tones that are most salient in your mind. The notion of melody is different across genres. In rock music, there is typically a melody for the verses and a melody for the chorus, and verses are distinguished by a change in lyrics and sometimes by a change in instrumentation. In classical music, the melody is a starting point for the composer to create variations on that theme, which may be used throughout the entire piece in different forms.

~ Harmony has to do with relationships between the pitches of different tones, and with tonal contexts that these pitches set up that ultimately lead to expectations for what will come next in a musical piece—expectations that a skillful composer can either meet or violate for artistic and expressive purposes. Harmony can mean simply a parallel melody to the primary one (as when two singers harmonize) or it can refer to a chord progression—the clusters of notes that form a context and background on which the melody rests.

I’ll be elaborating on all of these as we go along.

The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the importance of relationships between elements, also exists in visual art and dance. The fundamental elements of visual perception include color (which itself can be decomposed into the three dimensions of hue, saturation, and lightness), brightness, location, texture, and shape. But a painting is more than these—it is not just a line here and another there, or a spot of red in one part of the picture and a patch of blue in another. What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas. Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow (the way in which your eye is drawn across the canvas) are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes. Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integrality, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process. And as in visual art, music plays on not just what notes are sounded, but which ones are not. Miles Davis famously described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of a canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects. In Miles’s case, he described the most important part of his solos as the empty space between notes, the “air” that he placed between one note and the next. Knowing precisely when to hit the next note, and allowing the listener time to anticipate it, is a hallmark of Davis’s genius. This is particularly apparent in his album Kind of Blue.

To nonmusicians, terms such as diatonic, cadence, or even key and pitch can throw up an unnecessary barrier. Musicians and critics sometimes appear to live behind a veil of technical terms that can sound pretentious. How many times have you read a concert review in the newspaper and found you have no idea what the reviewer is saying? “Her sustained appoggiatura was flawed by an inability to complete the roulade.” Or, “I can’t believe they modulated to C-sharp minor! How ridiculous!” What we really want to know is whether the music was performed in a way that moved the audience. Whether the singer seemed to inhabit the character she was singing about. You might want the reviewer to compare tonight’s performance to that of a previous night or a different ensemble. We’re usually interested in the music, not the technical devices that were used. We wouldn’t stand for it if a restaurant reviewer started to speculate about the precise temperature at which the chef introduced the lemon juice in a hollandaise sauce, or if a film critic talked about the aperture of the lens that the cinematographer used; we shouldn’t stand for it in music either.

Moreover, those who study music—even musicologists and scientists—disagree about what is meant by some of these terms. We employ the term timbre, for example, to refer to the overall sound or tonal color of an instrument—that indescribable character that distinguishes a trumpet from a clarinet when they’re playing the same written note, or what distinguishes your voice from Brad Pitt’s if you’re saying the same words. But an inability to agree on a definition has caused the scientific community to take the unusual step of throwing up its hands and defining timbre by what it is not. (The official definition of the Acoustical Society of America is that timbre is everything about a sound that is not loudness or pitch. So much for scientific precision!)

What is pitch and where does it come from? This simple question has generated hundreds of scientific articles and thousands of experiments. Almost all of us, even without musical training, can tell if a singer is offkey; we might not be able to say whether she is sharp or flat, or by how much, but after the age of five, most humans have as well a refined ability to detect tones that are out of tune as to discriminate a question from an accusation (in English, a rising pitch indicates a question, a straight or slightly falling pitch indicates an accusation). This comes from an interaction between our exposure to music and the physics of sound. What we call pitch is related to the frequency or rate of vibration of a string, column of air, or other physical source. If a string is vibrating so that it moves back and forth sixty times in one second, we say that it has a frequency of sixty cycles per second. The unit of measurement, cycles per second, is often called Hertz (abbreviated Hz) after Heinrich Hertz, the German theoretical physicist who was the first to transmit radio waves (a dyed-in-the-wool theoretician, when asked what practical use radio waves might have, he reportedly shrugged, “None”). If you were to try to mimic the sound of a fire engine siren, your voice would sweep through different pitches, or frequencies (as the tension in your vocal folds changes), some “low” and some “high.”

Keys on the left of the piano keyboard strike longer, thicker strings that vibrate at a relatively slow rate. Keys to the right strike shorter, thinner strings that vibrate at a higher rate. The vibration of these strings displaces air molecules, and causes them to vibrate at the same rate—with the same frequency as the string. These vibrating air molecules are what reach our eardrum, and they cause our eardrum to wiggle in and out at the same frequency. The only information that our brains get about the pitch of 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. Although I said that air molecules vibrate, other molecules will too—we can hear music under water or in other fluids if the water (or other fluid) molecules are caused to vibrate. But in the vacuum of space, with no molecules to vibrate, there is no sound. (The next time you’re watching Star Trek and hear the roar of the engines in space, you’ll have some good Trekkie Trivia to share.)

By convention, when we press keys nearer to the left of the keyboard, we say that they are “low” pitch sounds, and ones near the right side of the keyboard are “high” pitch. That is, what we call “low” are those sounds that vibrate slowly, and are closer (in vibration frequency) to the sound of a large dog barking. What we call “high” are those sounds that vibrate rapidly, and are closer to what a small yip-yip dog might make. But even these terms high and low are culturally relative—the Greeks talked about sounds in the opposite way because the stringed instruments they built tended to be oriented vertically. Shorter strings or pipe organ tubes had their tops closer to the ground, so these were called the “low” notes (as in “low to the ground,”) and the longer strings and tubes—reaching up toward Zeus and Apollo—were called the “high” notes. Low and high—just like left and right—are effectively arbitrary terms that ultimately have to be memorized. Some writers have argued that “high” and “low” are intuitive labels, noting that what we call highpitched sounds come from birds (who are high up in trees or in the sky) and what we call low-pitched sounds often come from large, close-tothe-ground mammals such as bears or the low sounds of an earthquake. But this is not convincing, since low sounds also come from up high (think of thunder) and high sounds can come from down low (crickets and squirrels, leaves being crushed underfoot).

As a first definition of pitch, let’s say it is that quality that primarily distinguishes the sound that is associated with pressing one piano key versus another.

Pressing a piano key causes a hammer to strike one or more strings inside the piano. Striking a string displaces it, stretching it a bit, and its inherent resiliency causes it to return toward its original position. But it overshoots that original position, going too far in the opposite direction, and then attempts to return to its original position again, overshooting it again, and in this way it oscillates back and forth. Each oscillation covers less distance, and, in time, the stri...