In fact, the past few decades of work in the cognitive sciences of music have demonstrated with increasing persuasiveness that the human capacity for music is not cordoned off from the rest of the mind. On the contrary, music perception is deeply interwoven with other perceptual systems, making music less a matter of notes, the province of theorists and professional musicians, and more a matter of fundamental human experience.
Brain imaging produces a particularly clear picture of this interconnectedness. When people listen to music, no single ‘music centre’ lights up. Instead, a widely distributed network activates, including areas devoted to vision, motor control, emotion, speech, memory and planning. Far from revealing an isolated, music-specific area, the most sophisticated technology we have available to peer inside the brain suggests that listening to music calls on a broad range of faculties, testifying to how deeply its perception is interwoven with other aspects of human experience. Beyond just what we hear, what we see, what we expect, how we move, and the sum of our life experiences all contribute to how we experience music.
Why seeing live performance is so important:
Music, it seems, is a highly multimodal phenomenon. The movements that produce the sound contribute essentially, not just peripherally, to our experience of it – and the visual input can sometimes outweigh the influence of the sound itself.
Visual information can convey not only information about a performance’s emotional content, but also about its basic structural characteristics. Work by the psychologists Bill Thompson at Macquarie University in Sydney and Frank Russo at Ryerson University in Toronto showed that people could judge the size of an interval being sung even when they couldn’t hear it – merely by watching facial expressions and head movements. When video of a person singing a longer interval was crossed with audio from a shorter one, people actually heard the interval as longer. Similarly, when Michael Schutz and Scott Lipscomb, then both at Northwestern University in Illinois, crossed video of a percussionist playing a long note with audio from a short note, people actually heard the note’s duration as longer.
But we have to be primed to experience the music:
In 2007, a reporter from the Washington Post had an idea for a social experiment: what would happen if this world-renowned violinist [Joshua Bell] performed incognito in the city’s subway? Surely the exquisiteness of his sound would lure morning commuters out of their morning routine and into a rhapsodic listening experience.
Instead, across the 35 minutes that he performed the music of Bach, only seven people stopped for any length of time. Passers-by left a total of $32 and, after the last note sounded, there was no applause – only the continued rustle of people hurrying to their trains.... it could suggest that the immense power of Bell’s violin-playing does not lie exclusively in the sounds that he’s producing. Without overt or covert signalling that prepared them to have a significant aesthetic experience, listeners did not activate the filters necessary to absorb the aspects of his sound that, in other circumstances, might lead to rhapsodic experiences. Even musicianship of the highest level is susceptible to these framing effects. The sound just isn’t enough.
Dance to the music:
Neuroimaging has revealed that passive music-listening can activate the motor system. This intertwining of music and movement is a deep and widespread phenomenon, prevalent in cultures throughout the world. Infants’ first musical experiences often involve being rocked as they’re sung to. The interconnection means not only that what we hear can influence how we move, but also that how we move can influence what we hear.
To investigate this influence, the psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel Trainor at McMaster University in Ontario bounced babies either every two or every three beats while listening to an ambiguous musical excerpt that was capable of being understood as characterised by perceived accents every two or three beats. During this exposure phase, babies were hearing the same music, but some of them were being moved in a duple pattern (every two beats, or a march) and some of them were being moved in a triple pattern (every three beats, or a waltz). In a later test phase, babies were presented with versions of the excerpt featuring added accents every two or every three beats, translating the emphasis from the kinaesthetic to the auditory domain. They listened longer to the version that matched the bouncing pattern to which they had been exposed – babies who had been bounced every two beats preferred the version with a clear auditory duple meter, and babies who had been bounced every three beats preferred the version with the triple meter.
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