This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science Of A Human Obsession Quotes
"What is music? To many, 'music' can only mean the great masters—Beethoven, Debussy, and Mozart."
"The music of avant-garde composers... stretches the bounds of what most of us think music is."
"As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, 'Music is organized sound.'"
"The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation."
"Pitch is a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale."
"Rhythm refers to the durations of a series of notes, and to the way that they group together into units."
"Timbre (rhymes with amber) distinguishes one instrument from another... It is a kind of tonal color that is produced in part by overtones from the instrument’s vibrations."
"Psychophysicists have shown that these attributes are separable. Each can be varied without altering the others, allowing the scientific study of one at a time."
"Our brains organize these fundamental perceptual attributes into higher-level concepts —just as a painter arranges lines into forms—and these include meter, harmony, and melody."
"The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects."
"Two songs can have the same tempo but feel very different."
"Tempo is a major factor in conveying emotion."
"The average person seems to have a remarkable memory for tempo."
"Meter refers to the way in which the pulses or beats are grouped together."
"Music would be boring if we only had these straight beats."
"In music with lyrics, the words don’t always line up perfectly with the downbeats."
"We have names for the note durations similar to the way we name musical intervals."
"Loudness is, like pitch, an entirely psychological phenomenon."
"Loudness is one of the seven major elements of music."
"A musical key is the tonal context for a piece of music."
"Perception is a process of inference, and involves an analysis of probabilities."
"Our auditory system exploits the harmonic series in grouping sounds together."
"The brain faces three difficulties in trying to identify the auditory objects we hear."
"Perception as a 'constructive process' means that what we see and hear is the end of a long chain of mental events."
"Our brains use cues about the spectrum of the sound and the type of echoes to tell us about the auditory world around us, much as a mouse uses his whiskers to know about the physical world around him."
"Recording engineers have learned to mimic those cues to imbue recordings with a real-world, lifelike quality even when they’re made in sterile recording studios."
"The ability to distinguish a question from a statement, or sarcasm from sincerity, often rests on these right-hemisphere lateralized, nonlinguistic cues, known collectively as prosody."
"Music listening requires, according to the theorist Eugene Narmour, that we be able to hold in memory a knowledge of those notes that have just gone by, alongside a knowledge of all other musics we are familiar with that approximate the style of what we’re listening to now."
"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."
"Our brain doesn’t know before we’re born which language we’ll be exposed to, but our brains and natural languages coevolved so that all of the world’s languages share certain fundamental principles, and our brains have the capacity to incorporate any of them, almost effortlessly, through mere exposure during a critical stage of neural development."
"Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds."
"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."
"We develop schemas for particular musical genres and styles; style is just another word for 'repetition.'"
"The process of maturation creates distinctions in the neural pathways as connections are cut or pruned."
"The best place to begin to look at expectation in the musical brain is in how we track chord sequences in music over time."
"When cognitive scientists talk about expectations and violating them, we mean an event whose occurrence is at odds with what might have been reasonably predicted."
"In the simplest case of a black-and-white photograph, a 1 might represent that there is a black dot at a particular place in the picture, and a 0 might indicate the absence of a black dot, or a white dot."
"The brain represents all music and all other aspects of the world in terms of mental or neural codes."
"The brain’s music system appears to operate with functional independence from the language system."
"To begin with, the research on which this is based was performed on right-handed people."
"Neural firings produce a small electric current, and consequently the current can be measured with suitable equipment that allows us to know when and how often neurons are firing; this is called the electroencephalogram, or EEG."
"Roger Shepard has described the general issue in all of this discussion in terms of evolution."
"The brain’s computational system must be able to separate the aspects of a song that remain the same each time we hear it from those that are one-time-only variations."
"We also know anecdotally that people can recognize hundreds, if not thousands, of voices."
"The pattern of brain activity was virtually indistinguishable. This suggested that people use the same brain regions for remembering as they do for perceiving."
"The common neural mechanisms that underlie perception of music and memory for music help to explain how songs get stuck in our heads."
"Glenn Schellenberg performed an extension of my study in which he played people snippets of Top 40 songs that lasted a tenth of a second or so."
"Before recognizing any details in a picture of these places, you apprehend the overall scene, the landscape, the way that things look together."
"The auditory landscape, the soundscape, also has a presentation that is unique in much of the music we hear."
"Memory affects the music-listening experience so profoundly that it would be not be hyperbole to say that without memory there would be no music."
"The true test of such models is whether they can account for and predict the data on prototypes, constructive memory, and the formation and retention of abstract information."
"The cerebellum's role in helping performers and conductors keep track of musical time and to maintain a constant tempo was well known."
"Real conversations between people, real pleas of forgiveness, expressions of anger, courtship, storytelling, planning, and parenting don’t occur at the precise clips of a machine."
"We know through culture and experience that music is not threatening, and our cognitive system interprets these violations as a source of pleasure and amusement."
"Geneticists seek to find a cluster of genes that are associated with particular observable traits."
"Distinguishing genetic from environmental influences on a skill that has a learned component, such as music, is difficult."
"One way that scientists determine the genetic basis of traits or skills is by studying identical twins, especially those who have been reared apart."
"The newest approach looks at gene linkages."
"Using gene chip expression profiling, I can analyze a sample of your RNA and—if I know what I’m looking for—I can tell whether your growth gene is active—that is, expressed—right now."
"Scientists studying identical twins who’ve been reared apart have found remarkable similarities."
"One alternative explanation is statistical: 'If you look hard enough, and make enough comparisons, you’re going to find some really weird coincidences that don’t really mean anything.'"
"The way someone looks influences the way that others treat him; in general, an organism is acted on by the world in particular ways as a function of its appearance."
"It is no wonder, then, that identical twins may end up developing similar personalities, traits, habits, or quirks."
"Musicians, like athletes, actors, dancers, sculptors, and painters, use their bodies as well as their minds."
"When I was six years old, I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I decided then that I wanted to play the guitar."
"The best guess that scientists currently have about the role of genes and the environment in complex cognitive behaviors is that each is responsible for about 50 percent of the story."
"Even among the elite, top-tier classical musicians, there is more to being a musician than having excellent technique."
"Music listening enhances or changes certain neural circuits, including the density of dendritic connections in the primary auditory cortex."
"Inside the womb, surrounded by amniotic fluid, the fetus hears sounds."
"The types of sounds, rhythms, and musical textures we find pleasing are generally extensions of previous positive experiences we’ve had with music in our lives."
"We take pleasure in the sensory experience, and find comfort in its familiarity and the safety that familiarity brings."
"The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human."
"Connections to the artist or what the artist stands for can thus be part of our musical preferences."
"Johnny Cash could sing about wanting to leave prison without alienating his audience, but if he had said that he liked visiting prisons because it helped him appreciate his own freedom, he would no doubt have crossed a line from compassion to gloating, and his inmate audience would have understandably turned on him."
"Preferences begin with exposure and each of us has our own 'adventuresomeness' quotient for how far out of our musical safety zone we are willing to go at any given time."
"The times when we find ourselves bored are those when we seek new experiences."
"Our music listening creates schemas for musical genres and forms, even when we are only listening passively."
"Musical preferences also have a large social component based on our knowledge of the singer or musician."
"Music is auditory cheesecake. It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate."
"The point of music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females."
"Music may indicate biological and sexual fitness, serving to attract mates."
"The catchphrase most of us are taught in school, 'survival of the fittest' is an oversimplification of evolution."
"Music evolved because it promoted cognitive development."
"Music's evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans."
"Mirror neurons in the primate brain... fire both when performing an action and when observing someone else performing that action."
"Music, particularly memorable music, would insinuate itself into the mind of a potential mate, leading her to think about her suitor even when he was out on a long hunt."