Science Confirms: 12-Tone Music Confusing

From the Was This Study Really Necessary? department:

"A new book on how the human brain interprets music has revealed that listeners rely upon finding patterns within the sounds they receive in order to make sense of it and interpret it as a musical composition."

You don't say. Go on...

"While traditional classical music follows strict patterns and formula that allow the brain to make sense of the sound, modern symphonies by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern simply confuse listeners' brains."

Okay, well, first of all, both of those composers died six decades ago, so they hardly qualify as "modern." What the authors actually mean is "modernist," which was a movement that burned brightly with composers (and considerably less brightly with audiences) in the mid-20th century. These days, the number of prominent composers still working who persist in writing modernist music can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

But I'm sorry, I interrupted. You were saying...

"In the early twentieth century, however, composers led by Schoenberg began to rally against the traditional conventions of music to produce compositions which lack tonal centres, known as atonal music."

Now, there again, Schoenberg did not write "atonal" music. He created a new and complex system of tones and chord structures known as "12-tone" music. It involved all kinds of grids and math and chromatic doodads and such, but it is not, strictly speaking, atonal. Atonal means that you can just throw any combination of notes together and call it music.

Yes, I'm a nerd. But my point is that Schoenberg's music is actually more strictly organized, from a pattern standpoint, than a lot of traditional tonal music. So theoretically, our pattern-seeking brains should eventually be able to detect those patterns and relax, once we've been conditioned to hear that kind of music. And as those of us who've spent a lot of time with modernist music will tell you, that does, indeed, happen, up to a point. Your brain will never mistake Webern or Berg for Mozart, but you do eventually get a bit of an aural handle on what's going on.

"Research has shown that listening to music is a major cognitive task that requires considerable processing resources to unpick harmony, rhythm and melody."

Uh-huh. Which is why listening to a Mahler symphony is mentally exhausting (but exhilirating,) while listening to a Lady Gaga song (or, for that matter, a Strauss waltz) is the mental equivalent of eating cotton candy. But this all seems pretty common sensical. Was there some actual, y'know, science in this scientific study?

"Using brain scanning equipment Professor Kraus, who presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, said the brainwaves recorded from volunteers listening to music could be converted back to sound.

"In one example where volunteers listened to Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, when the brainwaves were played back the song was clearly recognisable."

Oh, for the love of... yah. Great. Can we assume that the double-blind study confirming that Wagner had a thing for tubas is on its way?

Music As Brain Food

In the last few years, it seems like there's been a surge of interest in music and the human brain. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks jump-started the conversation with his remarkable 2007 book, Musicophilia, which was part scientific examination of how our brains process and react to music, and part deeply personal memoir of the author's own lifelong love of classical music.

Sacks also showed up on an episode of WNYC's radio show/podcast Radiolab (which I can't recommend highly enough, by the way) to talk about a British man with "the most severe case of amnesia ever documented." Remarkably, while the man had forgotten nearly every detail of his life, down to the names of his children, and could barely speak coherently, he could remember how to read music, sing, and even conduct a choir!

I've been fascinated by the way the brain processes music since the summer when I was 15 years old. I was attending a summer music camp at which we were encouraged, on Sunday mornings, to walk down the hill into the tiny town the camp was in, and become the summer choir at the village church. I loved to sing, and loved the people who attended the church, so I never missed a Sunday, even though I had little interest in the actual service.

But that summer, the church had just lost its pastor to a larger church in another part of the state, so an interim pastor had been appointed while a permanent replacement was sought. The fill-in was named Jed, as I recall, and he seemed like a wonderful and caring man, but he had a terrible stutter that nearly prevented him from being able to speak complete sentences. His condition was ameliorated by an electronic device, but it still made his sermons a challenge for everyone involved.

But the very first week I attended one of Jed's services, I was dumbstruck to see him open a hymnal and sing along with the choir, in full, unstuttering voice. So long as the words were married to a melody, he never missed a beat. A few weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him about it, and he explained that, because music is processed by a different part of the brain than language, people with his condition could frequently leave their stutter behind when singing. Remarkable.

Late last year, a new scientific paper was published that really gets into the nitty-gritty of how we hear various kinds of music, and why, evolutionarily, we even bother with the stuff at all. You can get the full paper here, but unless you're actually a scientist, you may have better luck with this excellent summary by science writer Jonah Lehrer. Here's the money graf:

"There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of 'low-probability notes'. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty - we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns - that's exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance."

All of which could help explain why fans of one kind of music have trouble understanding or liking another, or why someone who listens to a lot of Stravinsky and Bartok might have an easier time deciphering Schoenberg than someone who listens to a lot of Mozart and Haydn. The real bottom line seems to be that our brains are designed to be exercised, and respond best when regularly challenged. And yes, I'm already trying to work out a way to insert this whole concept into next season's ItC concerts...

Notes and neurons

Early this year I posted about a Bobby McFerrin concert at Orchestra Hall - in the last few paragraphs, I was marveling at the fact that McFerrin got the audience to sing along on a pentatonic scale without a word of explanation or even teaching all the notes in the scale. Which turns out to be a conscious tactic on his part, as we see below:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Again, I marvel; understanding of the organization of pitches in the pentatonic scale seems instinctive. McFerrin provides the context of the scale through his "descant" above the audience. The audience understands the tonal context both unconsciously and automatically. Another clear-cut example of how our brains are hard-wired for music.