In recent decades, the ability to identify increasing numbers of tonal reaction centers in the brain has excited scientists to the point where they imagine they are understanding human responses to music, rather than simply locating isolated sound events.
Writing for the Sunday Review in the New York Times of June 9, 2013, entitled, “Gray Matter - Why Music Makes Us Sing,” Robert J. Zatorre and Valerie N. Salimpoor locate the pleasure of listening to music “in the reward system deep in the brain. The music activates subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion,” a reward system “that causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine.” “In the cross talk between our cortical systems, which analyze patterns and yield expectations, and our ancient reward and motivational systems, may lie the answer to the question: does a particular piece of music move us?” (Italics mine).This part of the brain is also "known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex, and … is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.” (1)
These results are misleading. The response to music cannot be calibrated according to chemical changes in one or more locations in the brain, in what the authors call “peak emotional moments that produce “a chill of pleasure.
“It’s as hard to study neurons and understand the flavors of meaning as it is to study Shakespeare’s spelling and understand the passions aroused by Macbeth.” - Psychologist Jerome Kagan (2)
“Brain imaging won’t help you to analyze Bach’s Art of Fugue or to interpret King Lear any more than it will unravel the concept of legal responsibility.” - Philosopher Roger Scruton (3)
Those “peak emotional moments” that Zatorre and Salimpoor measure, “the chill of pleasure,” have nothing to do with musical meaning. Since music develops through time, there can be no peak experience without the build-up that precedes it.
The so-called “dopamine high points” which offer and sustain no intensity, afford no musical climax, provide no resolution. They are extracted from context, like baseball highlight reels – tape-measure home runs, spectacular catches, lunging third strikes - one fast take upon another, which lose effectiveness because there is no buildup, no life in time, no sense of the gradual journey to the culmination that gives them their excitement.
Nevertheless, the notion of measuring musical enjoyment by its impact on specific areas of the brain has been spreading like an epidemic as technology provided newer and more sophisticated tools. The field developed quickly, as techniques covering a wide range of inquiries were developed, making the measurement of brain activity gradually more accurate.
The Nobel Laureate Gerald M. Edelman founded the Neurosciences Institute in New York, in 1981. This Institute carried out laboratory research in a number of areas, including molecular biology of gene regulation, cellular and systems neurophysiology, neural plasticity, genetics of behavior, syntactic processing of music and language, and the temporal dynamics of auditory perception.
COGNITIVE MUSICOLOGY, with the goals of understanding both music and cognition, developed alongside cognitive neuroscience of music – the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in hearing music, using such techniques as functional magnetic resonance imaging, trans cranial magnetic stimulation, magneto-encephalography, and electroencephalography. Scientists decided that the responses to these isolated inquiries could be used as the basis for understanding a whole range of musical experience.
“Evidently there is an intimate relation between the physical operation of the brain and our subjective experiences of music and everything else, but we don’t at the moment understand it… And to seek to understand music from the outside by studying the physical correlates of musical experience in the brain is to leave out what makes it music—the inner experience of hearing and producing it.” - Philosopher Thomas Nagel (4)
Laboratory interest in tracing musical sounds into the brain flourished. In a 2008 lecture at the San Diego Neurosciences Institute, Aniruddh Patel articulated the principal goal of cognitive neuroscience of music: “How the brain responds to music and how music can tell us how the brain works itself.” (5) (italics mine)
Here are some results of experiments aimed at discovering locations in the brain “where pleasurable auditory reactions took place.”
“Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system…we provide direct evidence for endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening….These findings help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.”
“Music is strongly associated with the brain’s reward system.…Neuroscientists believe there’s basically one pleasure mechanism, and music is one route into it. Drugs are another.”
And finally, a detailed report. Let’s not forget – the subject of this complex statement is music:
“Parallel generational tasks for music and language were compared using positron emission tomography. Amateur musicians vocally improvised melodic or linguistic phrases in response to unfamiliar, auditorily presented melodies or phrases. Core areas for generating melodic phrases appeared to be in left Brodmann area (BA) 45, right BA 44, bilateral temporal planum polare, lateral BA 6, and pre-SMA. Core areas for generating sentences seemed to be in bilateral posterior superior and middle temporal cortex (BA 22, 21), left BA 39, bilateral superior frontal (BA 8, 9), left inferior frontal (BA 44, 45), anterior cingulate, and pre-SMA. Direct comparisons of the two tasks revealed activations in nearly identical functional brain areas, including the primary motor cortex, supplementary motor area, Broca’s area, anterior insula, primary and secondary auditory cortices, temporal pole, basal ganglia, ventral thalamus, and posterior cerebellum… With these and related findings, we outline a comparative model of shared, parallel, and distinctive features of the neural systems supporting music and language.”
This approach to musical sounds exposes only the location in the brain where it is received. It does not deal with the expressive quality of music as we experience it.
“Music is made of sound, yes, but only in the same way as painting is made of colored pigment, canvas, rabbit glue and so on, in the same way as drawings are made of lines. No one these days would defend a view according to which the significance of a painting can be elicited by really efficient color spectography.” - Chaim Tannenbaum, philosopher and musician (6)
One of the most active and influential proselytizers of the neuroscientific approach to understanding music is Daniel J. Levitin, whose book This Is Your Brain on Music was published in 2006.(7) Levitin teaches at McGill University, in Canada, where he runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise. He is a former jazz musician, sound engineer, and recording producer, and is fluent in all kinds of music. His researches and interests are wide-ranging.
Dr. Levitin agrees with his colleagues that the sources of musical experience in the brain can be clinically identified:
“At a deeper level, the emotions we experience in response to music involve structures deep in the primitive, reptilian regions of the cerebellar vermis, and the amygdyla - the heart of emotional processing in the cortex…” (8)
In 2009, Levitin’s ideas were the subject of a two-hour documentary broadcast on PBS, entitled “The Music Instinct, Science and Song.”
The voice of the narrator states a basic theme of the program:
“This journey of exploration into music takes us into the musical body and brain, into the essence of our emotions.” (9)
Dr. Levitin turns to his theme:
“How do you take something that’s as imprecise as emotion and make it rigorous and subject it to scientific study?” (10)
He wants to “take something as imprecise as emotion, in all its richness” and from laboratory responses to a series of isolated tonal moments, extrapolate a theory of musical understanding.
“The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum’s contribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system.” (11)
Surprisingly, Daniel Levitin himself quotes in his book a neurosurgeon who once told Daniel Dennett, “(a prominent and persuasive spokesperson for functionalism), that he had operated on hundreds of people and seen hundreds of live, thinking brains, but he had never seen a thought.” (12)
“When you look at a painting or read a poem your brain no doubt undergoes electrochemical activity. [But] the artwork is the object of the mental act of apprehending it; it is not the mental act in which it is apprehended. So we cannot claim to study beauty-in-objects by studying the human psychological response to beauty.” - Philosopher Colin McGinn (13)
Dissonance and Consonance
The observation of the secretion of dopamine in experiments by Levitin and his colleagues, led them to equate pleasant and unpleasant sounds with consonant and dissonant music. Consonant sounds are deemed pleasant; dissonant, unpleasant.
Levitin: “Some sounds strike us as unpleasant, although we don’t know why.…Some people find particular intervals or chords particularly unpleasant…Musicians refer to pleasing-sounding chords and intervals as consonant and the unpleasing ones as dissonant.…So far, we’ve been able to figure out that the brain-stem and the dorsal cochlear nucleus - structures that are so primitive that all vertebrates have them – can distinguish between consonance and dissonance….There is widespread agreement about some of the intervals that are deemed consonant.” (9)
Wrong! Like reactions to experience, and to human personalities, the notion of pleasant and unpleasant musical sounds in music has varied through the ages and across the continents. The interval of an augmented fourth was prohibited in European medieval and Renaissance church music. Repeated drum patterns in Asian music, Asian scales and some African drumming music is unpleasant to many westerners, pleasant to others. And Carnegie Hall subscribers will very quickly give you a list of music they find dissonant (they call it modern), and can't understand why enough people like it enough to put it on the program. Furthermore, responses to music are much too nuanced to be categorized as pleasant or unpleasant.
“It has been discovered that individual judgments of consonance can be enormously modified by training. Perceptions of consonance by adult standards do not seem generally valid for children below the age of twelve or thirteen, a strong indication that they are learned responses.” - Norman Cazden, composer (13)
“Ideas about consonance and dissonance also change with experience.” - Composer Igor Stravinsky (14)
Summarizing, we can say that cognitive neuroscientists
reduce the experience of music to numerically calibrated measurements of stimuli conveyed by the auditory system to specific locations in the brain, and
limit reactions to music to false dichotomies, such as pleasurable or not pleasurable, and dissonant or consonant - denying the richness of the musical experience, and ignore the fact that not all cultures, or listeners in the same culture, respond the same way to the same music.
“The scientific research that hopes to understand how a human being responds to the magic of music has never interested me because I am not a scientist and my experience follows its own inward, intuitive and emotional expression that reasons with my brain, and I understand music in a way that can’t be put down in equations and principles.” (15) - Robert Mann, founding first violinist, The Juilliard String Quartet
NOTES
Robert Zatorre et al, New York Times, June 9, 2013
Jerome Kagan, Quoted by David Brooks, NY Times, June 17, 2013.
Roger Scruton, The Spectator, 17th March, 2012
Robert Nagel, letter to the author, 2013
Patel, lecture, Jan 22, 2008; Uploaded, California Television (UCTV)
Chaim Tannenbaum - statement to the author, NYC, NY 2011
Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music, Penguin Group USA, 2006
ibid p. 85
“The Music Instinct – Science and Song,” PBS
ibid
Daniel Levitin, op.cit. p. 187
ibid. p. 92
Colin McGinn, “What Can Your Neurons Tell You?” Review of The Good, The True, and The Beautiful: A Neuronal Approach by Jean-Pierre Changun, New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013 – pp.49f
Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1947, p.34
Robert Mann, founding first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, Statement to the author, NYC, 2012