Jump to content
IndiaDivine.org

Rhythm, Melody, Life- Human Heart Warms to Music

Rate this topic


Guest guest

Recommended Posts

Comments?

Misty L. Trepke

http://www..com

 

Rhythm, melody, life - Human hearts have always warmed to the

rhythm of music

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/chi-

0309210072sep21,1,6049990.story

 

By Ronald Kotulak

Tribune science reporter

Published September 21, 2003

 

A popular melody reels around in the brain against our will. Music

sets the toe to tapping and the blood to racing. It marks our

happiest and most solemn occasions. It forges bonds. It reflects all

of our moods. We remember far more songs than we do speeches.

 

Music, it turns out, has more of a grip on our mind and body than we

realize. When couples smile at each other and murmur " They're

playing our song, " for instance, they may be repeating a universal

behavior that goes back to the dawn of humankind.

 

It is becoming more evident in scientific circles that music was an

early form of communication, especially for attracting sexual

partners, and that it may predate language.

 

No one knows for sure whether language or music came first, but

there is growing evidence, as well as debate, that music is as much

of a part of our genetic inheritance as language is.

 

How else can you explain observations such as music being an

integral component of every culture in the world, past and present;

that primitive musical instruments appeared long before any other

form of artistic expression; and that infants know rhythm and pitch

almost from the first time they hear music?

 

Some studies even suggest that children are born with perfect pitch

but lose it through disuse.

 

Unlike language, which has grown into an indispensable tool for

conveying knowledge and ideas, music may be a once-dominant capacity

that has become grossly underdeveloped.

 

Music is primal and more basic than language, say researchers, who

say there are many more musical similarities across cultures than

there are lingual similarities.

 

Almost everybody enjoys a beautiful melody. It takes root in the

brain, priming the imagination, arousing passions, sedating

anxieties and inspiring the body to move in rhythm. A person who is

born deaf and never has heard a note still can learn to dance by

feeling the vibrations music makes.

 

Much still unknown

 

But music really is a mystery, like sleep. Science does not know the

full biological purposes of either, although it is clear that a

person deprived of enough slumber will die.

 

A life without music may not kill, but it could warp a brain.

Researchers are finding that lullabies, which are similar throughout

the world, and the sing-song talk of mothers are essential for

bonding.

 

The dance between child and caregiver--eye tracking, laughter and

the imitation of sounds and movements--facilitates the sharing of

emotional states.

 

" It's very clear that if you don't have language abilities you're

going to have a very hard time functioning in society, whereas if

you have no musical abilities it might be awkward at times but

you're still going to do just fine, " said Petr Janata, a Dartmouth

College cognitive neuroscientist who is tracing music's paths

through the brain and how they differ from the paths taken by

language.

 

" People look at that and say language is clearly evolutionarily

important and music isn't, " he said. " I personally believe that if

you completely remove music from human cultures around the world it

would definitely have a devastating impact on society. "

 

Although language was thought to occur in the brain's logical left

hemisphere and music in the creative right hemisphere, Janata found

considerable overlap between the two hemispheres for both language

and music. Both work through the forefront of the brain, where

emotions and higher thinking reign.

 

" The overall picture that emerges is that music really engages the

whole brain, " Janata said. " Music has a certain degree of complexity

to it that makes it interesting to our brain. So our brains don't

get bored with it, they're always finding something interesting in

it. "

 

When some of the brain's musical circuits become blocked, as they

can because of brain damage caused by stroke or congenital defects,

music disappears in the first case and never appears in the second,

according to findings by Isabelle Peretz of the University of

Montreal.

 

" The evidence points to the existence of at least two distinct

processing modules: one for music and one for speech, " she

said. " Music works through different functions like emotions,

attachments and social cohesion. That's really the idea behind

music. "

 

Why does music exist?

 

Did music evolve to help us communicate? To express emotions? To

organize the brain for learning, as proponents of the " Mozart

effect " contend?

 

Albert Einstein said: " I often think in music. I live my daydreams

in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I get most joy in

life out of music. "

 

When the world's most famous scientist was asked whether music

influenced his research he said: " No. Both are nourished by the same

sort of longing, and they complement each other in the release they

offer. "

 

Music is mathematical. The ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras

discovered that the most pleasant sounds occur in exact proportions.

Notes are sound waves created by vibrations.

 

A vibration that is twice as high as another is an octave. Other

notes that are pleasant together are those whose vibrations are a

fifth or fourth higher. Music expressed mathematically is 1:2:3:4,

as Pythagoras said. Those often are the same proportions used in

designing beautiful buildings, which is why architecture has been

called " frozen music. "

 

Einstein may have hit the nail on the head as far as how music makes

a person feel, but to find out why, scientists need answers, and

they are beginning to search for them.

 

Charles Darwin thought that before early humans learned enough words

to say, " I love you, " they attracted mates with some form of music,

not unlike the way birds use song to get together. Elephants,

monkeys and many other animals sing songs with patterns that are

amazingly close to those of humans' songs. Whale songs have been

made into records.

 

How humans became musical is much debated. Theories range an

evolutionary hand-me-down from animals to an attribute that is

uniquely human to a fortunate accident of nature, a byproduct of

language that is not essential for survival.

 

Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dismisses

musicality as a frill, a bit of " auditory cheesecake " that may be

pleasant but has no survival purpose.

 

Most scientists disagree with that explanation, though, and say

music played an essential role in the development of the modern

human mind.

 

Inside the brain

 

Today's scientists use imaging technology to look inside the brain

when it processes music. They have developed sophisticated

techniques to learn how a fetus responds to music while in the womb

and how music exists as a distinct entity in the brains of stroke

victims who have lost their speech but still can sing.

 

" Just as the ability to understand spoken language emerges

effortlessly in infants, the ability to appreciate music likewise

requires no explicit training, " John Spiro, associate editor of

Nature Neuroscience, wrote in a recent issue focusing on the

emerging research in music.

 

" Music is fascinating to study, and may offer a unique window onto

the brain, " he said. " But of course it can also simply be beautiful

or just plain fun. "

 

The power of music for infants may arise from its social nature and

its link to positive emotions, Sandra E. Trehub, a University of

Toronto psychologist, reported in Nature. Trehub has shown that

infants as young as 4 months who have been exposed to little music,

nevertheless have a similar appreciation of pitch and rhythm as do

trained musicians. By 16 weeks they fuss, cry and turn away from

dissonant chords, and smile and turn toward harmonious chords.

 

" Music is not communicative in the sense of sharing information, "

she said. " Instead, it is concerned with sharing feelings and

experiences and the regulation of social behavior. "

 

Trehub argues that music appreciation is something people are born

with and may be why people like music without knowing why they like

it.

 

" People who have been trained in music are not so different from

people who haven't had training, except they don't know the names of

things, " she said. " In terms of their perception of music, it's

really not very different in trained and untrained listeners. Maybe

the trained listeners are somewhat more accurate but it's really

very similar qualitatively. "

 

Music's ability to strum the emotions may be the reason it has

become such a persistent evolutionary hanger-on. Who didn't master

the alphabet by memorizing the " A-B-C " song? In ancient times

important historical events were recorded in songs that were passed

down from generation to generation, a practice still used by

Australian aborigines.

 

Both music and language are highly structured, but notes don't carry

the same kind of specific meanings as words do.

 

What music seems to do is attach emotions not only to words, but to

our feelings and experiences, like tags that can be filed away in

different parts of the brain for recall.

 

The clue to music's ability to manipulate emotions is the battery of

brain hormones it may affect. Music appears to soothe anxiety by

reducing levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Trehub discovered

that mothers' singing to distressed babies lowers cortisol.

 

" All you have to do is observe mothers with infants who are fussy or

crying and they sing to them and the stress disappears, " Trehub

said. " Music gets their attention and changes their moods and

mothers everywhere know that. Those who care for infants slip into

that kind of thing automatically. "

 

Physical reactions

 

Neuroscientists speculate that music's ability to tame aggression

may be because it lowers the male sex hormone testosterone, a

phenomenon that some nursing homes use to calm agitated Alzheimer's

patients.

 

Music inspires feelings of love because it may increase oxytocin

levels, a hormone that is known to promote bonding in animals and

that is suspected of doing the same in humans. Premature babies who

are sung to and who listen to background music leave intensive-care

units sooner.

 

Scientists hope to use music as a probe to understand implicit

learning, that " Eureka! " moment when you know you know something but

you don't know how you know it. Perhaps it's because the brain can

retrieve memories that have similar emotional tags and bring them

together in new ways, a process that has been called intuition or

abstract thinking.

 

Does music promote learning, as advocates of the " Mozart effect "

propose? There is no clear answer yet, but evidence suggests it may

help youngsters learn math and reading faster.

 

Children enrolled in an orchestra, for instance, scored 21 percent

higher on vocabulary tests than children of similar socioeconomic

backgrounds who did not take music, according to a new study in the

journal Neuropsychology. The better vocabulary scores persisted when

the students were retested a year later, said Agness S. Chan of

Chinese University of Hong Kong.

 

And the potential emotional benefits of music may not be limited to

Mozart or classical music. Jazz, pop, gospel, folk and other forms

of music may be helpful as well.

 

" In the past, music was sometimes forbidden because of fears it made

people feel good, " Trehub said. " Feeling good is a way of promoting

all kinds of things, not only well being in general, but it can also

be used to promote learning and societal harmony. "

 

Among those who believe music came before language is Dr. Mark

Tramo, a Harvard neuroscientist who studies how music travels

through the brain.

 

Pre-lingual communication

 

Before there was language, emotions were conveyed by vocal sounds

such as moans and groans that are still in use today--ahh, ow, mmm,

ooh, oh, eeeee, uh-huh, aagh, aieee.

 

" There is no speech without music, but there can be music without

speech, " Tramo said. " Inflection of the voice is the critical

element. Humans use voice inflection or melody or intonation for

communication as the basic element of language.

 

" On top of all that modulation of intonation, somehow we were able

to put syntax and morphology and come up with the complex

constructions that could convey the complex meanings that we are

able to share today. "

 

Dale Purves, director of Duke University's Center for Cognitive

Neuroscience, says music and language are so intertwined in the

brain that they probably developed together. His study of 500 people

found that harmony comes from the vocal sounds people were capable

of making during evolution.

 

The points at which sound is concentrated in the speech spectrum

predict the chromatic scale--the scale represented by the keys on a

piano keyboard, he said. Chords are pleasant when they mimic the

human voice and dissonant when they do not.

 

According to Ian Cross of the University of Cambridge, music

promotes the development of metaphorical thinking, the ability to

turn everyday experiences into symbols, which become the shorthand

for fresh ideas, " the hallmark of our species. "

 

Cross studies ancient musical instruments, including the earliest

one found: a bone pipe from Wurttemberg in southern Germany that was

played 38,000 years ago.

 

The flute-like pipe was found in surroundings that link it to use by

modern Homo sapiens at the beginning of the time archeologists call

the " cultural explosion. " During this period, a sudden emergence of

visual art occurred, such as cave paintings and symbolic carvings,

evidence of the blossoming of modern human cognitive capacities.

 

Cross says finding a musical instrument that old means early humans

were making musical sounds with their voices a lot earlier, probably

accompanied by gestures, to communicate feelings.

 

" One thing we know for certain is that music leaves few traces--

except in the minds of those who engage with it, " he said. " It is

quite likely that the traces that it left in our ancestors' minds

still resonate in our contemporary, everyday world, in the agility

of our thought and in the complexity of our social interactions.

Without music, it could be that we would never have become human. "

 

2003, Chicago Tribune

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You are posting as a guest. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...