New model for understanding music

[nabraxas]

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2011/s3295235.htm

Transcript:

ELEANOR HALL: Researchers at the University of Melbourne have found a way to describe how the human brain understands music.

The research provides insight into why people like different kinds of music and why different musical scales are popular in different cultures.

As Liz Hobday explains, it's all about how our memory works for sound.

LIZ HOBDAY: The new model explains why some people like listening to this…

(Classical music plays)

…and others to this.

(Hard rock music plays)

Researcher Neil McLachlan from the University of Melbourne says for many years it was thought that whether a sound was pleasant to listen to was due to the interplay of sound waves.

But his research has shown it's really all about what we're familiar with.

NEIL MCLACHLAN: That flies in the face of over 100 years of psychophysics - the study of the auditory system - which has been arguing that pitch is based on the harmonic relationships of the overtones of the sounds.

LIZ HOBDAY: He says the human brain is more receptive to sounds that are familiar because it has a memory of similar sounds to compare them to.

NEIL MCLACHLAN: And that really explains the cocktail party effect, where you can hear your name across a crowded room, because you've got a really good template for your name.

LIZ HOBDAY: He says when the human brain can identify a noise and compare it to familiar sounds it can then identify the pitch of the noise and its other qualities.

If a sound is unfamiliar this process of finding the pitch is more difficult and we experience the sound as unpleasant.

Neil McLachlan has worked with players of the Indonesian gamelan, an instrument that's rich in harmonics, to show the importance of our memory in recognising pitch.

NEIL MCLACHLAN: This first sound - (plays piano note) - recognisable piano.

The next sound - (plays gamelan).

For a gamelan player from Indonesia, they would have said that they were the same pitch.

But many western people would be completely confused by that inharmonic timbre - or that strange timbre - of the gong and say it was a much higher pitch.

What that tells us is that the auditory system uses its long-term memory for the timbre to extract pitch.

LIZ HOBDAY: Similar experiments conducted in the 1920s were simply ignored by scientists, Neil McLachlan believes, because of a notion of European superiority.

NEIL MCLACHLAN: The idea that harmony is based on a physical property of the sound was very popular, you could say, in Europe because it meant that European tonal music was correct. It had a physical basis for it.

And it also meant that there was a genetic basis to musical aesthetics, that Europeans were clearly smarter than people from other cultures because they could hear the harmony and dissonance that was physically present in the waveform.

LIZ HOBDAY: In his latest research Neil McLachlan has tested pitch recognition on people with various levels of musical training.

NEIL MCLACHLAN: Non-musicians simply reported all chords as having the same level of dissonance.

So they weren't even discriminating. They weren't in any way listening to it in a way that we would consider musical.

So if you haven't learnt to play a musical instrument or sing, you simply don't hear western harmony.

LIZ HOBDAY: He says the new model for auditory perception means there's some hope for those who've be told they have a tin ear.

NEIL MCLACHLAN: So finally we can put all that to bed now, and we can really understand that perception of music is all about acculturation and learning.

No-one's born talented and there's no such thing as divine inspiration by composers. It's all about the level of acculturation we have in a particular culture.

LIZ HOBDAY: The latest research by Neil McLachlan and his colleagues is being prepared for publication in the journal Psychological Review.

[bogfrog]

trippy! somewhat explains all those shocking singers who audition for idol thinking that they are the bomb-diggity

[dollarjuice]

Wow I'd have never guessed that long term memory played a role in your perception of sounds. Very interesting...

[paradox]

hmmm.. i've heard those ideas a great deal before.. perhaps this is the firt time those ideas have been conclusively varified in this way? but from a lot that i've read this has been fairly well understood (if not empirically varified) for some time now..

[Seldom]

there's as many theories of music and the brain as their is people studying it, which is f ing heaps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Your_Brain_On_Music etc

i get to study things like this, i love it. my interpretation would be memory is always stored and revived in simultaneous specialised distributed patterns of on and off cell firing, complex repetitions with the rule that cells that fire together wire together, meaning repeating a pattern increases dendritic weight between distributed on and off firing cells that make up the pattern, with each presentation of the stimulus (song) the brain becomes slightly more trained or specialized for enterpreting that particular stimulus, so familiar songs are these complex repetitions of whatever activation patterns a person has developed and stored, which means then listening to music is a skill, inseparable from memories recall function, one that is performed by most people automatically and in an informal way, so people like music which is similar to things they've heard because the real dendritic connections forged by prior influence of music on the accumulations of variously wired and weighted patterns of on and off, activates resources developed for interpretation of music that physically goes through (variously) predictable observable repetitions, activating and reinforcing the weight of connections each to demonstrable degrees, most when you listen to music which activates similar patterns developed through whatever music has made you develop them. that's not anywhere near the full story of coarse, but i dig stuff like this

Edited August 18, 2011 by bulls on parade

[chnt]

makes a lot of sense considering popular music trends and popular culture..

[Thelema]

hmmm what I'd like to know is why I find classical indian music so "archetypal" and powerfully psychotropic, even from the first moment I heard it, with no prior possible template.

[paradox]

pehaps you answered your own question in saying it's "archetypal".. ?

i find the same thing by the way.. if you don't already know, please check out Lakshminarayanan Shankar! the most profound genius of the violin i have ever heard!

[CβL]

Most asian music is fond of the augmented second interval, and it's the "archetypal" asian sound. Indian music (from what little I've read) isn't far away from Western tonal music at all. My memory says that most of their ragas fit neatly over Western scales.

On the other hand, some instruments in pan-Asia are much more delineated, and make use of tiny intervals that Western instruments just cannot play. The smallest interval a Western instrument can play (barring Violins and such continuous instruments) is the ratio 2^(1/12). While many Asian instruments can do 2^(1/18) or 2^(1/24).

Lastly, comparing classical and rock is like comparing bread and toast - rock is just the slightly charred remains of classical.