Musical notes

I just started Chapter 6 in “This is your Brain on Music” and have learned quite a few new things. As interesting as this book is, sometimes I find myself bored by all the science talk. But persevere I must, I have 4 more chapters to go ’til I’m done!

“Whenever we hear the lowest notes on the piano or double bass, we are not actually hearing 27.5 or 35 Hz, because those instruments are typically incapable of producing much energy at these ultralow frequencies: our ears are filling in the information and giving us the illusion that the tone is that low.’ p. 106

“Due to stream segregation, the melody ‘pops out’ when the notes are close enough together in time-the perceptual system holds the notes together-but the melody is lost when its notes are too far apart in time…” p. 106

“Our brains use cues about the spectrum of the sound and the type of echoes to tell us about the auditory world around us…” p. 107

“Recording engineers and musicians have learned to create special effects that tickle our brains by exploiting neural circuits that evolved to discern important features of or auditory environment.” p. 107

“Our brains are exquisitely sensitive to timing information…the guitar sound of Pat Metheny or David Gilmour of Pink Floyd use multiple delays of the signal to give an otherworldly , haunting effect that triggers parts of our brains in ways that humans had never experienced before…” p. 108

Because of this, does this enable musicians to be more expressive/creative by manipulating what we hear?

“Perhaps the ultimate illusion in music is the illusion of structure and form…Our ability to make sense of music depends on experience…Our brains learn a kind of musical grammar that is specific to the music of our culture-just as we learn to speak the language of our culture.” p. 108

“This becomes the basis for our understanding of music, and ultimately the basis for what we like in music, what music moves us, and how it moves us…structural elements are incorporated into the very wiring of our brains when we listen to music early in our lives.” p. 109

“Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won’t…” p. 111

“In the deceptive cadence, the composer repeats the chord sequence again and again until he has finaly convinced the listeners that we’re going to get what we expect, but then at the last minute, he gives us an unexpected chord…a chord that tells us that it’s not over, a chord that doesn’t completely resolve.” p. 112

“Miles Davis and John Coltrane made careers out of reharmonizing blues progressions to give them new sounds that were anchored partly in the familiar and partly in the exotic.” p. 112

“In ‘Yesterday,’ the main melodic phrase is seven measures long, the Beatles surprise us by violating one of the most basic assumptions of popular music, the four- or eight- measure phrase unit…In ‘I want you (She’s so Heavy),’ the Beatles violate expectations by first setting up a hypnotic, repetitive ending that sounds like it will go on forever…instead they end the song abruptly…” p. 112-3

“The Carpenters use timbre to violate genre expectations…on ‘Please Mr. Postman’…The Rolling Stones…had done just the opposite of this just a few years before by using violins (as for example, on ‘As Tears go By’)…” p. 113

“Rhythm expectations are violated often as well. A standard trick in electric blues is for the band to build up momentum and then stop playing altogether while the singer or guitarist continues on…” p. 113

“The Police combined reggae with rock to create a new sound that fulfilled some and violated other rhythmic expectations simultaneously.” p. 114

“The brain constructs its own version of reality, based only in part on what is there, and in part on how it interprets the tones we hear as a function of the role they play in a learned musical system.” p. 114

“We have musical schemas, too, and these begin forming in the womb and are elaborated, amended, and otherwise informed every time we listen to music.” p. 116

“…it sounds strange by virtue of its being inconsistent with what we have learned to call music. By the age of five, infants have learned to recognize chord progression in the music of their culture-they are forming schemas.” p. 117

“The principal schemas we develop include a vocabulary of genres and styles, as well as of eras…rhythms, chord progressions, phrase structure…how long a song is, and what notes typically follow what.” p. 117

“Melody is one of the primary ways that our expectations are controlled by composers. Music theorists have identified a principle called gap fill, in a sequence of tones, if a melody makes a large leap…the next note should change direction.” p. 118

“Tune recognition involves a number of complex neural computations interacting with memory.” p. 133

“Leonard Meyer notes that classification is essential to enable composers, performers, and listeners to internalize the norms governing musical relationships, and consequently, to comprehend the implications of patterns, and experience deviations from stylistic norms.” p. 147

“After hearing a song thousands of times, might the actual pitches become encoded in memory?” p. 152

“The subjects tended to sing at, or very near, the absolute pitches of their chosen songs.” p. 153

“This was convincing evidence that people were storing absolute pitch information in memory; that their memory representation did not just contain an abstract generalization of the song, but details of a particular performance.” p. 153

“…they were singing along with the memory representation in their head, and that memory representation was astonishingly accurate…majority of subjects sang at the correct tempo.” p. 154

“There are many distinctive elements in the overall timbre of these records that we identify with the era in which they were made.” p. 157

These were some of the more interesting notes I took while reading. I thought it silly that two different areas of thought were competing to see who could take credit for our ability to recognize music despite different versions and identify a group even when they’re playing a song we’ve never heard before. But it makes sense that scientists cannot stand for two different theories to take credit because it’s too confusing.