The Neuroscience of Music

The Neuroscience Of Music

·         By Jonah Lehrer  

·         January 19, 2011  | 

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Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”

We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand new paper in Nature Neuroscience by a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.

Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI) they were able to obtain an impressively precise portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered (using ligand-based PET) is that music triggers the release of dopamine in both the dorsal and ventral striatum. This isn’t particularly surprising: these regions have long been associated with the response to pleasurable stimuli. It doesn’t matter if we’re having sex or snorting cocaine or listening to Kanye: These things fill us with bliss because they tickle these cells. Happiness begins here.

The more interesting finding emerged from a close study of the timing of this response, as the scientists looked to see what was happening in the seconds before the subjects got the chills. I won’t go into the precise neural correlates – let’s just say that you should thank your right NAcc the next time you listen to your favorite song – but want to instead focus on an interesting distinction observed in the experiment:

In essence, the scientists found that our favorite moments in the music were preceeded by a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate. They call this the “anticipatory phase” and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favorite part:

Immediately before the climax of emotional responses there was evidence for relatively greater dopamine activity in the caudate. This subregion of the striatum is interconnected with sensory, motor and associative regions of the brain and has been typically implicated in learning of stimulus-response associations and in mediating the reinforcing qualities of rewarding stimuli such as food.

In other words, the abstract pitches have become a primal reward cue, the cultural equivalent of a bell that makes us drool. Here is their summary:

The anticipatory phase, set off by temporal cues signaling that a potentially pleasurable auditory sequence is coming, can trigger expectations of euphoric emotional states and create a sense of wanting and reward prediction. This reward is entirely abstract and may involve such factors as suspended expectations and a sense of resolution. Indeed, composers and performers frequently take advantage of such phenomena, and manipulate emotional arousal by violating expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted outcome (for example, by inserting unexpected notes or slowing tempo) before the resolution to heighten the motivation for completion. The peak emotional response evoked by hearing the desired sequence would represent the consummatory or liking phase, representing fulfilled expectations and accurate reward prediction. We propose that each of these phases may involve dopamine release, but in different subcircuits of the striatum, which have different connectivity and functional roles.

The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. What aspects of music are they responding to? And why are they so active fifteen seconds before the acoustic climax? After all, we typically associate surges of dopamine with pleasure, with the processing of actual rewards. And yet, this cluster of cells in the caudate is most active when the chills have yet to arrive, when the melodic pattern is still unresolved.

One way to answer these questions is to zoom out, to look at the music and not the neuron. While music can often seem (at least to the outsider) like a labyrinth of intricate patterns – it’s art at its most mathematical – it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. (Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited.) This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. That is when we get the chills.

To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic  book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the 5^th movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with – but not submission to – our expectations of order. To prove his point, Meyer dissected fifty measures of Beethoven’s masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven will play incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its “connotative” meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself.  This “embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. “For the human mind,” Meyer writes, “such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty.” And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven’s established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, “is the whole raison d’etre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic.” The uncertainty makes the feeling – it is what triggers that surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. And so our neurons search for the undulating order, trying to make sense of this flurry of pitches. We can predict some of the notes, but we can’t predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the errant pattern to be completed. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.

 

Thank you to Nora Mote for passing this along!

 

 

Joyce Keil, Artistic Director

Ragazzi Boys Chorus

 

Chorus Effect in School

By Ann Meier Baker
This past holiday season was filled with choral singing, when holiday concerts in schools, concert halls, places of worship, shopping malls were all in full swing — not to mention all the caroling and sing-alongs. This holiday season everybody was also talking about the singing in the popular television show “Glee.” I am one among the millions of people who tune in Tuesday nights.

But it’s not just “Glee” that is making choirs cool these days. The a cappella singing competition “The Sing-Off” on NBC is shining a light on the popularity of contemporary a cappella singing; choral flash mobs are all over YouTube and choral music is an important element in many of the most popular commercials on the air today.

In addition to choirs being featured front and center in the popular media, teachers across the country are reporting that the “ ‘Glee’ effect” is paying off for their own school choir programs. In a recent poll by the National Association for Music Education, music teachers reported a surge in the number of students who want to be involved in their schools’ choral groups and new ensembles are being formed to accommodate all the interest.

This is the first good news that school music programs have had in a long time and it couldn’t come soon enough. Since choirs, along with other arts programs, have been sacrificed during recent budget cuts, it’s especially good to see student enthusiasm for singing creating more demand that could influence school boards and other decision makers to keep singing in schools.

But being popular with students is not the best reason to support choral programs in schools. The value of singing for kids is both wide-ranging and well documented in research commissioned by Chorus America in 2009. According to both parents and educators who participated in the Chorus Impact Study, children who sing in choruses have more academic success and advanced social skills than children who don’t sing, and parents and educators attribute a significant part of a child’s academic success to singing in a choir.

Choruses are not the only activity most of these children are participating in, yet parents definitively date their child’s improvements in a variety of areas to their joining a choral group. That, and the breadth of benefits described by both parents and educators, argues for a unique “choir effect,” one that isn’t simply replicated by participation in other activities, according to the researchers.

When it comes to grades, children who participate in a chorus do significantly better than children who have never sung in a choir. Forty-five percent of parents surveyed whose children sing state their child receives “all or mostly A’s” in mathematics (versus 38 percent of nonchoir parents) and 54 percent get “all or mostly A’s” in English and other language arts classes (versus 43 percent).

And there’s more. An overwhelming number of parents surveyed in the study reported that multiple skills increased after their child joined a chorus, from more self-confidence and self-discipline, to improvements in memory skills.

Beyond academics, educators and parents surveyed report that children who sing are better participants in group activities, and that singing in a choir can keep some students engaged in school who might otherwise be lost, which resonates with some of the story lines in “Glee” about bridging student divides at the show’s McKinley High School.

The evidence that the “choir effect” provides benefits that can produce a smart and engaged citizenry is compelling. The next time tough school budget choices are made, enlighten your school leaders. Let’s not give in to the Sue Sylvesters of the world.

Ann Meier Baker is president and CEO of Chorus America.