Music in the Brain
- Thread starter mauidan
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Very nice. Thanks for posting it Dan. The raw data they showed visually had no patterns in it. Interesting that they did find them however.
So then, if - as the research has been pointing towards for some time - the brain has been hard-wired to uniquely distinguish between music and other sounds (speech, pitch and frequency for instance) via discrete neural populations, this suggests that perhaps the assumption in according objectively-better measuring systems as therefore being superior at playing back music is potentially erroneous: Given the brain’s dedicated mechanisms for distinguishing one from another, objectively-better measuring systems may indeed be superior at playing back sound but not necessarily at playing back music.
Extrapolating this a little further, rather than postulating that if one expresses a preference for say, vinyl, tape, valves, etc (mechanisms that objectively measure less-well to their better-measuring counterparts), could this be not because of a preference for a sound that is inherently less-linear, but because the listener is distinguishing between more/less-linear sound (aesthetics) and music (artistry), and expressing a preference for the latter, in spite of the former?
At least, that’s a possibility worth thinking about, is it not?
http://news.mit.edu/2015/neural-population-music-brain-1216
853, there is a quote by Walt Whitman which might interest you concerning your hypothesis:
'All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments:
It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the women's chorus.
It is nearer and farther than they."
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No, the research is not related to fidelity. It is distinguishing music from noise. Pretty sure they did not use high-end audio for the research either. A clock radio likely does the same thing or we would not get enjoyment out of hearing a favorite tune through it.
Exactly.
By the way, the natural sciences and the humanities are strange bedfellows indeed and hence it always amuses me, when the former get " blown away " by something the latter have agreed upon for ages. (And it all stems from the same brain, don't it?
)
By the way, the natural sciences and the humanities are strange bedfellows indeed and hence it always amuses me, when the former get " blown away " by something the latter have agreed upon for ages. (And it all stems from the same brain, don't it?
)
Hi Amir, Hi Detlof,
Merry Christmas to you both.
Yes, you’re both correct - the research isn’t related to fidelity, but neither is it related to noise. It’s making a distinction between music and non-music.
“Noise” from a cognitive science point-of-view is either sound that does not generate clear sensations of pitch or duration or sound which is undesirable or disturbing to the listener (of which pink, white and brown noise fit both definitions).
However, in this case the sounds used were naturally occurring everyday sounds easily identifiable by the listener, not limited to different types of speech and music, inclduing footsteps, an engine starting and a phone ringing. Previous research (Zwicker & Fastl, 1990; Bisping, 1997; Edworthy, Hellier & Hards, 1995; et al), has determined a hierarchy for perception of sound, splitting it into pleasant or unpleasant, familiar or unfamiliar, and meaningful or meaningless. An engine starting, footsteps and a phone ringing are all sounds that would not only be familiar to the participants, but also contain meaning in a way pure noise would not. Music is also something we are familiar with and contains meaning, as is speech.
This most recent research, however, is the first of its kind to observe brain activity in which neural populations respond selectively to music in a way they do not to other sounds that are both familiar and contain meaning (i.e.; not noise) - those populations that responded selectively to music did not respond to speech and vice versa. In fact, of the six neural populations identified, each of them had different functions, suggesting that music processing is optimised specifically in the brain, rather than sharing neural networks dedicated to other functions.
My point is that we already know that timing and amplitude variation affect subjective judgements of expressivity and emotionality in music (Bhatara, Tirovolas, Duan, Levy & Levitin, 2011), so it’s clear we’re able to distinguish the art (the manner in which music is played) from aesthetics (the sound of that music as we perceive it). So, my supposition is it stands to reason that as the job of our systems is to play back both (it cannot do one without the other), we should be able to discern one from the other, in spite of any limitations imposed by playback mechanism.
In other words, what’s baby, and what’s bathwater. Seems reasonable, no?
Merry Christmas to you both.
Yes, you’re both correct - the research isn’t related to fidelity, but neither is it related to noise. It’s making a distinction between music and non-music.
“Noise” from a cognitive science point-of-view is either sound that does not generate clear sensations of pitch or duration or sound which is undesirable or disturbing to the listener (of which pink, white and brown noise fit both definitions).
However, in this case the sounds used were naturally occurring everyday sounds easily identifiable by the listener, not limited to different types of speech and music, inclduing footsteps, an engine starting and a phone ringing. Previous research (Zwicker & Fastl, 1990; Bisping, 1997; Edworthy, Hellier & Hards, 1995; et al), has determined a hierarchy for perception of sound, splitting it into pleasant or unpleasant, familiar or unfamiliar, and meaningful or meaningless. An engine starting, footsteps and a phone ringing are all sounds that would not only be familiar to the participants, but also contain meaning in a way pure noise would not. Music is also something we are familiar with and contains meaning, as is speech.
This most recent research, however, is the first of its kind to observe brain activity in which neural populations respond selectively to music in a way they do not to other sounds that are both familiar and contain meaning (i.e.; not noise) - those populations that responded selectively to music did not respond to speech and vice versa. In fact, of the six neural populations identified, each of them had different functions, suggesting that music processing is optimised specifically in the brain, rather than sharing neural networks dedicated to other functions.
My point is that we already know that timing and amplitude variation affect subjective judgements of expressivity and emotionality in music (Bhatara, Tirovolas, Duan, Levy & Levitin, 2011), so it’s clear we’re able to distinguish the art (the manner in which music is played) from aesthetics (the sound of that music as we perceive it). So, my supposition is it stands to reason that as the job of our systems is to play back both (it cannot do one without the other), we should be able to discern one from the other, in spite of any limitations imposed by playback mechanism.
In other words, what’s baby, and what’s bathwater. Seems reasonable, no?
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