How strange the change from major to minor may have relationship with speech patterns

I've often wondered why certain keys lend themselves to different moods in music -- B minor is the key of great drama, C major is for sun and simplicity, for example.

The New Scientist has published a little tidbit, "Songs in the Key of Life: What Makes Music Emotional?" that suggests the possibility that musical intervals may have a link to speech patterns. Major keys mirror excited speech. Minor keys mirror subdued speech. The researchers also suggest that these patterns cross cultures.

Here is an example of contrasting major and minor from my other favourite set of 24 Preludes & Fugues, the ones written by Dmitri Shostakovich. Sviatoslav Richter performs the A Major, followed by A Minor set from Op. 87. These were recorded in 1956.

British researchers invite Web listeners to vote in exercise on Darwinian musical evolution

In an interesting twist on the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, a group of researchers in biological sciences at Imperial College, London, led by Dr. Bob MacCallum, are running an experiment on musical evolution. They created a group of musical parents -- "loops" -- which are then propagated, nurtured or killed via Internet participation at darwintunes.org.

The effort is an interesting, electronica-pop-focused game. Because it evolves on the basis of note patterns rather than a combination of factors, such as tone rows or scales, harmony, drones and possible counterpoints, just to mention a few tools in the Western composer's toolbox, this isn't really a slice of cultural evolution as seen under a microscope, but an interesting exercise in capturing the mood of a moment. 

This morning, the site was up to 25,000 ratings, so the music loops are getting more sophisticated. Because the music is built on short, repeated note motifs, it is, essentially, what we would call minimalist. I would love to see how the finished result compares with today's favourite electronica and new-music artists working within a similar style.

Will it be survival of the slickest?

Participating properly demands a bit of a time commitment. You have to register first (which isn't complicated), so don't expect to be able to start instantly.

This video explains the project in brief:

We don't always need to question the mysterious bond between man and music: New York critic

Mystery -- both the kind that invites and the kind that repels -- is compelling. And Wall Street Journal theatre critic Terry Teachout believes that having some mystery present when we listen to music can't be a bad thing.

Teachout commented yesterday on another in a long string of scientific studies that try to explain humans' bond with music. It's a good read. He ends his article with a plea for not trying to over-analyze a good thing:

It won't surprise me if neuroscientists eventually succeed in unlocking the mystery of music. I don't fear that prospect, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that part of the charm of music lies in the fact that we don't know what it means, any more than we can explain the equally mysterious charm of a plotless ballet by George Balanchine or an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian. "We dare to go into the world where there are no names for anything," Balanchine once said to Jerome Robbins. Most of us, on the other hand, live in a prosy, commonsense world where everything has a name and most things have an explanation. That's why it is so refreshing to enter into the presence of great art, and why the greatest works of art always contain an element of ambiguity. A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means—and change it as often as you like.

Here are the late Robert Shaw and his festival choir singing my favourite setting of "O magnum mysterium," by Francis Poulenc:

A thousand Kiwi ringy-dingies in honour of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture

It takes a load of creativity to put a symphony together -- whether it's for a 100-piece orchestra or 1,000 cellphones. It says a lot about our world that some of the most creative moments in art come from advertising and marketing these days.

But fun is fun.

The first clip was posted this week by Vodaphone New Zealand. Kiwi music producer Jol Mulholland is the mastermind (as well as the conductor).

The second and third clips give us a behind-the-scenes glipse at some of the logistics involved in making those 60 silly seconds possible:

Toronto invention opens up deaf people to music's good vibrations

When people say they want more feeling in the music, they usually don't mean it literally. But Dr. Frank Russo at Ryerson University does.

He and a team of colleagues and students at the institution's Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology (SMART) lab have developed something they call the Emoti-Chair (seen in a Star file photo, left).

Embedded in the seat is an array of tiny electronic devices that translate sound into physical vibration. The object is to allow a deaf person to feel music.

There's a great profile of the wondrous chair on the clip from Discovery Channel's Daily Planet, below. My Star colleague Debra Black wrote about the chair in an article on July 2, 2008.

Torontonians have an opportunity to experience the device in a live concert setting today at 3 p.m., as part of the X-Avant New Music Festival at the Music Gallery. The proceeds of the concert, presented by Arraymusic, will go to help the Bob Rumball Foundation buy Emoti-Chairs for its community centres.

Dr. Russo and members of his team will be there to talk about the chair at 2 p.m. and chat with the curious before and after the concert.

Upcoming Philharmonia project takes London visitors right inside the orchestra

First there was Being John Malkovich. In 10 days, Londoners get a double bill of Being Esa-Pekka Salonen and Being the Philharmonia Orchestra. Think of it as a full-immersion experience, like being inside the actor's brain, except that this is inside a symphony orchestra.

Instead of being thrown out onto the side of a highway in New Jersey when the experience is over, you emerge into the sights and smells of the Thames.

I'm describing an art installation where each room takes the visitor into a different section of the orchestra visually (video screens showing the view from a particular spot inside the section, as recorded from multiple cameras, some strapped onto individual performer's heads, above) as well as aurally (speakers broadcasting the sound captured in the same spot) that opens Nov. 3 at the Bargehouse on London's South Bank.

If you've got conductor-envy, there's even a podium spot available.

This fascinating project is called re-rite, named after the performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring taking place simultaneously in each room.

Te website promises all kinds of online resources once the installation opens. Stay tuned, as they say.

Scientists ponder the creative value of daydreaming

An article in the November issue of Wired magazine suggests that moments of mental abstraction are good for us -- and conducive to creativity.

I've lost count of the number of times I have, or people have told me how they have, had a bright idea in the shower, for example.

Here's the core of Clive Thompson's article:

Why do our minds wander? Brain-scanning technology has uncovered some clues. It turns out that when your mind drifts, your temporal lobes — which are associated with processing long-term memories — become busier. So when you float off into a reverie, you’re actually doing important data-storage work.

Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though. Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving. The upshot, says Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who is studying this area, is that your idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work, tackling your hairiest long-term tasks — projects you’ve been trying to address for months, the arc of your career, the state of your marriage. “Mind-wandering is actually a very involved task,” Schooler says. “You leave the here and now and focus on more remote concerns that nevertheless might be more important. We’ve been focusing on the downside of this, but we need to think about the upside.”

Indeed, Schooler suspects that research like his explains why so many “aha” moments occur when we’re drifting — like Archimedes in the tub.

I worry about the vast amount of time we spend connected to e-babble from the moment we wake up to when we try to close our eyes at night. Willingly turning all the noise off for a few minutes every day may do us some good.

To help get you in the mood, here is a bit of music composed and performed by Italian cellist Giovanni Sollima (pictured above). The video starts with a clever visual montage to match the mix of audio tracks, each recorded separately by Sollima. The title of the video is "Dream with Open Eyes," and gets a bit more energised than its title might suggest:

Anonymous Rx for the stressed-out brain

Although not licensed by any sane or credible oversight body, I'm here to write you a late-summer prescription for stress-relief.

As far as I can tell, this will not lead to nausea, dizzyness, drowsiness or sexual dysfunction. Nor will my prescription block or unexpectedly interact with your other medications -- including but not limited to Zinfandel, Grenache, Leffe and Kaipirinha.

What prompted this flurry of concern on my part is a New York Times article from earlier this week that mentioned a study that says stress rewires rats' brains. Since most of us have at some point called our daily grind a rat race, let's take heed.

Here's the part you need to know:

... the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.

In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” Dr. Sousa said. “I call this a vicious circle.”

In other words, stress closes us off from many of the things that make life worth living, including the wonder of discovery.

Whenever I'm totally stressed out, I usually find that sitting down at the piano for an hour or so will help iron out the kinks in my brain. I also have a favourite collection of discs that I might turn to.

I'm offering up a new album as a stress-relief aid: Anonymous, a compilation of 48 pieces of music from the Middle Ages through the end of the 17th century on two CDs freshly issued by Naxos. The name of the composer of each piece vanished long ago but, miraculously, the music survived.

Normally I don't pay much heed to compilation albums, but I randomly chose the first CD for a moment of midday reflection (i.e. a nap) a few days ago. I listened to both discs and found them captivating.

A program is made up of individual pieces as well as an overall arc, and whoever came up with this compilation has done a masterful job of layering and texturing and punctuating the rhythmic and tonal moods from first track to last.

Plainchant sits alongside troubadour songs in happy harmony.

Unfortunately, the artists here -- all fine performers, as far as I can hear -- are also anonymous, unless you want to squint at the reproduced CD covers from the original albums to see who is performing what. But that might induce stress, so just accept the music and the artists as they come up.

So, here are my dosage suggestions to help you de-stress before the summer is over:

Find 15 minutes of alone time. Drop any and all activities. Turn off all communication devices. Insert disc into your player and start with any track. Close your eyes, clear your head and focus on a voice, or instrument, or rhythm.

Repeat as needed, and extend listening time as you begin to feel positive results.

Here's the Oni Wytars Ensemble (one of the consorts featured on Naxos's compilation) performing "Reis Glorios," an instrumental piece by French troubadour Giraut de Bornelh (approx. 1138-1215):

Music and the mind, revisited

With the sounds of Caribana mingling with all the other music in and around us this weekend, I thought about how unconscious most of us are about our aural environment.

If our TV broadcasters can do reruns, so can writers, right? So, this being Simcoe Day, a public holiday in Ontario,  I'm going to take it easy. Here's an article of mind published in the Star in October, 2007 about the interaction between our brains and music.

The book in question, Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks, was later published in paperback and as an audio book (Vintage Canada). You can also check out the detailed website for the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind.

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Look down any bus, subway car or sidewalk and you'll see many a pair of slim wires dangling from earlobes, the telltale signs of our obsession with music.

We pipe it directly to our eardrums. We surround ourselves with it at home, in the car and while shopping.

We instinctively know our favourite song or the perfect piece to fit or change a mood. We pump up volume and tempo to get our adrenaline flowing. We look for slow melodies and easy harmonies to unwind after a stressful day.

Could it be that this is the ultimate in psychological self-medication?

Although most of us don't know why we choose to listen to a particular kind of music at any given time, we know it affects how we feel. And we know how and when to administer the right dose.

Filmmakers have worked the art of emotional manipulation through music from the days when the soundtrack came from a live piano or organ player in the theatre.

Consumer marketers know how to push these buttons as well. Next time you walk through Ikea, stop to listen how the ambient music is different in each department.

But this is nothing new.

Three hundred years ago, William Congreve wrote the now-immortal words in his play The Mourning Bride: "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast/To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak."

Two thousand years before that, Socrates sat down with his pupils Glaucon and Adeimantus to discuss how to create a good and noble human being. As recorded in Plato's Republic, Socrates stated that, "rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace..."

Yet for all of history (and iPod playlists), the science of understanding the link between music and the brain is only in its infancy.

Thanks to electronic and magnetic brain-imaging equipment and sophisticated computer data analysis, a cutting edge of scientists is accumulating data that show precisely what is going on between the ear buds and the smile on our lips.

Last year, Montreal cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin published This Is Your Brain on Music, a lively book based on his research at the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University.

Last week saw the release of prominent American neurologist Oliver Sacks's latest opus, Musicophilia, a riveting compilation of his decades of work with people and music.

A former music producer and punk-rocker, Levitin indulged in such public scientific spectacles as attaching hundreds of electrodes to symphony orchestra conductor Keith Lockhart, five members of the orchestra, and a handful of audience members during a live performance last year.

Levitin's computer screen showed instant physical responses to changes in the music's tempo and pitch.

Sacks's approach is deeply personal, yet the accumulated weight of his experiences is even more compelling.

Somehow the issue remains abstract until someone places electrodes on your own head.

Deep inside a building on the Hamilton's McMaster University campus recently, I sat down in a soundproof studio while a research assistant placed a "cap" containing 128 electrodes on my head.

I sat facing a video monitor so that I could see the 128 lines of data being sent to a computer in the next room.

The slightest twitch of my head or the blink of an eye would send the steady lines into jagged paroxysms. "So try to stay as still as possible, " I was instructed. Yeah, right.

I was about to hear sequences of two simple tones. In most instances, the second tone would be higher than the first. But then, without warning, would come a tone manipulated to sound like it was lower than the others.

If my brain worked like everyone else's, it would register the sound of something different as a sudden increase in activity. And, blinking aside, that's exactly what happened. As soon as the tonal pattern was broken, the jagged waves would appear once again on the video monitor.

This experiment, and dozens like it, is being repeated several times a day in that room, mainly with infants and children, so that we can better learn how young brains develop.

The research is led by Dr. Laurel Trainor, the founding force of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM).

Started in January 2006, it and the research institute at McGill University are Canada's contribution to unlocking the electro-chemical secrets of how our brains respond to music.

But the focus at MIMM is a bit different than in Montreal, as Trainor has included professors and researchers from other departments and faculties.

"This is an interdisciplinary effort, " she says in her office, in which every flat surface testifies to the international conferences she has attended, or is about to visit, and to the reams of research coming out of MIMM and its counterparts.

"Because McMaster's music department is focused on education, " says Trainor, "much of our research is aimed at helping improve how music is taught to children." She introduces Dr. Keith Kinder, director of the McMaster School of the Arts, who is keen on building on the institution's reputation in the music-teaching field.

In the course of a day, we also meet Dr. Ian Bruce at the Engineering faculty. As one of the world's experts on electronic signal processing, he is involved in trying to develop better hearing aids.

At the department of Mathematics, Dr. David Earn is honing the language used to compile, interpret and extrapolate research data.

McMaster School of the Arts professor David Gerry also has a part - both as teacher and student.

A professional flutist, Gerry is acknowledged as the world's leading flute teacher using the Suzuki-method (where students learn to play an instrument by imitation and repetition, in a group). His teaching travels regularly take him to Central and South America, where he realized that children from Latin cultures had a much more highly developed sense of rhythm than children in Ontario.

"It has to do with the more complex rhythms that are part of the music, " says Gerry. Wanting to find ways to better teach rhythm here, the flute player looked into the research at MIMM and decided he wanted to be a part of it.

"There is so much we can learn, " he says as he begins a year of post-graduate work with the institute. "I'm nervous about going back to school, but this is also very exciting."

As with Gerry, observation is at the roots of Oliver Sacks's insights. The son of a musician who still plays his father's vintage Bechstein grand piano, Sacks has always been curious about how our brains and music interact.

In Musicophilia, Sacks describes how his professional, neurological connection to music blossomed after he began working with immobile patients in a long-term-care hospital in the Bronx four decades ago:

"In 1966, there was no medication of any use to these patients - no medication, at least, for their frozenness, their parkinsonian motionlessness. And yet it was common knowledge among the nurses and staff that these patients could move on occasion, with an ease and grace that seemed to belie their parkinsonism - and that the most potent occasioner of such movement was, in fact, music."

In the course of 350-plus pages, Sacks shares the extraordinary stories of people whose personal worlds have been transformed by music - from a non-musical football player who became obsessed with classical music after being struck by lightning, to explaining the nature of musical "brainworms, " those nasty little songs that get stuck inside our heads.

Sacks leads us inside the brain to show how and why we combine tone, rhythm and shape into the entity we call music. Along the way, we see how the brain has an almost miraculous ability to adapt to injuries and disease.

The most touching of Sacks's stories is also the most powerful example of music as medicine.

In 1985, British musicologist Clive Wearing, then in his forties, came down with a severe brain infection that left him with a memory span of a few seconds, condemning him to live every moment of his life as if it was his first.

Sacks tells in powerful detail how doctors and Wearing's wife almost gave up hope of giving back Wearing a semblance of meaning to his existence. It took years, but, in the end, salvation lay in reintroducing Wearing to the piano, which he had once played so well.

"The rope that is let down from heaven for Clive comes not with recalling the past, as for Proust, but with performance - and it holds only as long as the performance lasts. Without performance, the thread is broken, and he is thrown back once again into the abyss."

In essence, the melodic line and rhythm carry with them an inevitable momentum that engages our mind in special ways.

"Listening to music is not a passive process but intensely active, involving a stream of inferences, hypotheses, expectations and anticipations, " writes Sacks. It's a tonic at once simple and complex that can soothe the savage breast - or straighten a ravaged brain.

Although neither Sacks nor Levitin nor Trainor would ever stoop to such a blunt conclusion, it seems increasingly clear that we are, each in our own way, experts in musical self-medication.

A more elegant summary belongs to Sacks: "Music, uniquely among the arts, is both abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or eternal, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation

 

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

There have been a number of recent "aha" moments in brain research. Here are some highlights in the music area:

DAMAGE AND DISABILITY

• If some of the thousands of sound-receptor hairs in our ears become damaged, the brain can correct for missing frequencies.
• In most people, if hearing is lost in one ear, the brain will partially compensate over time by creating a fake stereo effect.
• Musical memory is so deeply embedded in our memories that even advanced Alzheimer's patients can respond to music from childhood. Some advanced Parkinson's victims can overcome immobility or tremors and even dance when they hear favourite pieces of music.

CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

• Our preference for consonant over dissonant music is hard-wired in our brain, not acquired.
• The relationship between musical pitch and mood is also hard-wired.
• Our affinity for certain types of rhythms is culturally acquired.
• Physical movement affects how we perceive rhythm.
• Children who get weekly music lessons score a few points higher on IQ scores than those who do not participate in regular musical activities.

 

 

Swine flu the germ of an idea

Stephan Zielinski, a creative San Franciscan with too much free time on his hands, has written Swine Flu Hemagglutinin, a piece of ambient music based on the genetic sequence of the amino acids in the flu bug.

Inspiration really can strike anywhere, anytime.