Unless we have been locked up in a closed room all our lives, it is certain that we would have come across it at some point or another. It has the power to enthrall one to elation, subdue one's spirits to the pits, make one feel the bittersweet pinch of nostalgia and reach myriad other emotions with the help of its various hypnotic avatars. Yes, it's 'Music' .We hear it , we sing it, we learn it. But do we ever wonder about how it works, the way it does? It has been found that music is even similar in effect to a few pleasure inducing drugs on the human mind. Why does this happen? In school and college curricula, Music is always listed as a 'Fine Art'. Aren't we ignoring the 'Science' aspect of it? My curiosity whetted, I searched for a few answers and I want to share my limited understanding with you. I got a lot of answers from a book named 'This Is Your Brain on Music' by a neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin. I have discussed three of the most important questions that I had.
1) Where did Music come from?
Music has been around for thousands of years, even pre-dating agriculture. To understand the origin of music, let us borrow a term from architecture called as 'Spandrel'. It refers to the extra space left at the corners when an arch is made in a rectangular space. Being a by product of the arch, resourceful architects not wanting to waste it, end up making angels or other decorations in the space.
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| A typical Spandrel |
This is an analogy to explain that Music is a spandrel to Language. It is a beautiful byproduct of it and was discovered, probably by prehistoric man imitating the calls of the wild. It is no secret knowledge that several animals and birds use musical mating calls to attract potential mates. Starting with coarse songs, primitive drums and flutes, music has now evolved to branch out into a plethora of different forms. Humans discovered the pleasure associated with musical sound and registered it, just as they discovered the pleasure associated with eating fats and sugars. Just as language developed, so did its sibling, Music.
2) What makes music so appealing?
Believe it or not, the extent of pleasure induced by music is measured by its ability to exercise the mind. Our body's neural network is designed to improve the predictability of our actions to a set of stimuli. When we learn walking, talking, writing we are conditioning ourselves to improve our predictability. If we make proper effort, the next time we write, we write better. If a child predicts his next step wrong while learning how to walk, he will fall down. This proves to be painful for the child and consequently, he will not end up enjoying the process of learning to walk.
When a person listens to a piece of music, in his mind he is essentially predicting the next beat or rhythm of the song. The beauty of this is that, it is totally harmless, and contradictory to learning to walk, there will not be any consequences if the mind predicts it wrong. In fact, when the mind does predict the next beat right, the brain awards the body with a surge of hormones which relaxes the body. It is this lack of fear and motive of reward that makes music so pleasurable. If the song is too predictable, the excitement produced is lesser than if it requires more complex prediction models. This explains the fact that when we listen to a song over and over again, a time inevitably comes when we get 'tired of it'. When we listen to it again after a long time gap we regain the original pleasure because the brain has forgotten the rhythm pattern in the meantime and has to predict is all over again. The complexity of music one enjoys increases with exposure to incremental levels of music. We hardly enjoy any rock music in kindergarten, we are content with our 'nursery rhymes'.
3) What about the biology behind music?
I know pairing up biology with music sounds ridiculous, but it is nevertheless, true. We all know that humans consider symmetry attractive. Faces of the other gender which have a higher degree of symmetry are considered more attractive than others. Music, depicted as a waveform is all about symmetry of the rhythmic beats. Noise signals lack any kind of rhythm and are thus very unpleasant to hear. It has been ingrained in nature of human beings that symmetry is beauty, making music pleasing to the senses.
When people listen to complex rhythms, various parts of the brain like left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex and cerebellum get activated. This explains why memory is often enhanced with music. We are able to recall many experiences when we chance upon the music that had been playing in the background at that time. Music therapy is also used to treat Alzheimer's patients who are able to recall experiences when they are made to listen to music they had heard during the experience. Musical memory is more effective than learning memory and this has been testified by the fact that before written language emerged, many ancient texts were passed down through generations by song recitals.
So, is this satisfactory evidence to believe that 'The Mozart Effect' is not merely a myth- Can babies born to mothers who listened to Mozart's symphonies while they were pregnant, really grow up to be smarter? Maybe yes- they had been forced, by over-ambitious parents into training their brain in the comfort of the womb itself. Assuming that the sound is able to penetrate all the way into the womb, I guess we have found a way of increasing the collective IQ of the world.
Images from the Internet
