by Daniel Gordon
As a longtime musician, it is natural to wonder why it is that listening to music sparks strong responses in people; it seems to have the ability to kindle emotion like few other mediums of expression. On Thursday, February 20, 2008, Professor Jamshed Bharucha of Tufts University came to Vassar College to give a lecture. His work tries to answer this question and others. While Bharucha covered many topics in his Vassar presentation, one worth focusing on is the subconscious knowledge of music. According to Bharucha, the vast majority of one’s musical knowledge is subconscious. This type of knowledge is known as implicit memory, meaning that it is encoded as procedural information rather than declarative information. Even those who consider themselves musically inept have a large amount of implicit musical information. Just to recognize a tune, a large quantity of this information had to be acquired over one’s lifetime. An example of this is the brains response to modulations or key changes in a piece of music. Peaks in electrical activity in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain are recorded during key changes in a piece of music.
One of the main variables in one’s implicit knowledge of music is the differences in the culture in which one is raised. The ability to recognize musical aspects of a tune depends on the culture which a person is exposed to. For example, a person musically conditioned to Western music will be better able to recognize a tune in a Western structure, which is usually within the framework of a seven-note major or minor scale. According to some of Bharucha’s current research, response to a musical structure of a different culture is very different than that of one’s own. In this case, the recognition of familiar Western simple melodies was compared to the recognition of simple melodies based off the Indian rag Bhairav. Regardless of which melody the subject was listening to, the subject was always quicker to identify notes that fell outside a typical Western musical structure rather than the Indian structure. This experiment is a piece of the large picture of understanding the implicit knowledge of music.
When you discussed the affects of culture on a person’s ability to perceive certain outliers within a musical structure, it made me wonder what the effects of society are on a person’s music choice. A person’s individual taste is nearly impossible to measure as a variable for music selection by itself, because the individual’s taste is inherently influenced by society, and therefore not pure. The question then becomes is a person persuaded to like a certain style of music or a certain song because it is popular within their society and amongst their friends, or does the individual listen to a societal authority on the subject, such as a critic, to determine their music taste? Dr. Robert Cialdini’s Principles of persuasion (http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2008/02/tipping_points_and_the_psychol.html) states that for matters such as music taste, people look to their peers for a “consensus” on what music is enjoyable, rather than what experts think. Thus, when it comes to taste in subjective arts, we look to our friends with similar likes and dislikes for guidance.
Comment by Zachary Wasser — March 5, 2008 @ 9:13 pm
As a musician of classical Western music, I’ve developed quite a decent ear for and sense of harmonic progression and tonal relations in various pieces regardless of their quality. However, I’ve always wondered if non-musical people could have a sense for harmonic progressions like what I’ve developed from my studies. Strangely (or at least thought to be strange at first) I’ve found that people who claimt to be “tone-deaf” have a better sense of tonal relations than what they think. The sort of “implicit musical knowledge” mentioned above.
In fact, the following article
http://olfac.univ-lyon1.fr/unite/equipe-02/tillmann/download/NCPW6.pdf
deals with more information regarding Bharucha’s studies in music cognition. Even though Western music is based on a “highly structured system of regularities,” even those who listen to music can develop a very accurate comprehension of musical relations even though they are not musicians.
Comment by Morgan Mako — March 6, 2008 @ 12:06 am
Upon reading this post, I became curious about additional variables that could effect emotional reactions to music. I began thinking about the different reactions to music among my friends, and the most obvious variable that jumped to mind is sex differences – there seems to often be a division in music taste between my male and female friends. The difference in reactions to music between males and females was examined in a study performed at Institute of Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Zurich, Switzerland, by Urs. M. Nater et. al. (doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2006.05.011 ).
In this study, 53 subjects (26 men, 27 women) were presented with musical stimuli and measured for psychological and electrophysiological reactions.
The results demonstrated significant differences between men and women only with regard to electrophysiological variables. Specifically, women demonstrated heightened reactions to unpleasant musical stimuli in comparison to men. This finding is consistent with previous emotional studies which have demonstrated that women are generally more sensitive to aversive stimuli than are men.
Comment by Sarah Cohen — March 6, 2008 @ 5:02 pm
There is another way in which culture, or more specifically the language spoken, may influence implicit music knowledge. Scientists have found that musicians who speak a tonal language are more likely to have absolute, or perfect pitch, than those who speak a non-tonal language. For those who started training between the ages of 4 and 5, 60% of the Mandarin-speaking musicians were found to have perfect pitch, compared to the 14% of English speakers tested. For subjects who started training between the ages of 7 and 8, the percentages having absolute pitch were reduced from 60% to 55% and 14% to 6%. For those who started after age 8, the percentages were even lower- 42% for the Mandarin-speaking group and 0% for the English-speaking group. The results suggest that the type of language spoken and age of musical training may be important factors in whether or not one develops absolute pitch.
Reference: Scientific American
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000AF8AE-D1DD-118F-91DD83414B7F0000
Comment by Keri Peacock — March 7, 2008 @ 10:45 am
A recent study by Dr. Elizabeth Margulis of the University of Arkansas confirms Dr. Bharucha’s statements that the heightened sense of musical recognition is likely to be the result of past experiences. Margulis’s study , described in the University of California Student Newspaper by Linda Nevin (20008), sought to identify if musical ability was the result of genetics or experience. Flutists and violinists were played a piece of violin and flute music and their brain changes were mapped by MRI. Margulis showed that listening to the music of a musician’s own instrument caused higher levels of left-brain activity, primarily in Broca’s area, than listening to other music. These results suggest that this heightened brain activity is due to familiarity rather than a predisposition for a particular type of music. Therefore the more a musician practices the stronger the connections in that particular neural network becomes. These results explain why we can quickly recognize songs of our favorite type of music. For example, my grandmother, who can easily distinguish her favorite lyric-less, smooth jazz within a few notes, asserts that every rap song sounds exactly the same. This would likely make a great deal of sense to Margulis, as Grandma’s lack of experience listening to rap has resulted in weak connections within her “rap neural network” and fully explains her inability to differentiate songs.
Reference
Nevin, L (2008, March 7). Your Brain on Music. The UCSF Student Newspaper
[Editor's note: You can also read about this research on-line, here.]
Comment by Ben Crawford — March 7, 2008 @ 7:45 pm
I actually attended Professor Bharucha’s lecture because I found the title to be very intriguing. Something that really caught my attention during the lecture that was not mentioned here was his talk about the pitch of someone’s voice when they are sad or happy; when someone says “i am angry” (I’m not sure of the example he used) when they are sad rather than when they are angry, the pitch used is lower, and we have come to recognize it as negative.
Comment by Frida Garcia — March 9, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
Just today I was thinking the same thing, the difference in the pitch of ones voice when we are saying something that has a strong feeling attached to it, for example; when we say to some one we love something like “I miss you” the pitch used is soft and mellow than when we say it to some one that’s not so dear to us.
No se si lo allas notado en mi, pero yo si lo note en ti…
Comment by Daniel Ramirez — September 9, 2009 @ 6:12 pm