A new study of brain responses to music has found a striking difference in brain activity when a symphonic movement ends and the next one begins, compared to other parts of the musical work. A team led by Vinod Menon (and including This Is Your Brain on Music author Daniel Levitin) played excerpts from the symphonic works of English composer William Boyce while while monitoring the brain activity of the listeners. Make sure you follow the link to the original press release for an amazing video showing brain activity as one movement ends and the next begins.
Boyce was chosen because his works follow the familiar symphonic form, yet most people haven't heard his music. Here's how Menon describes the results:
"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested.""I'm not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner," Menon said.
How exactly is attention focused by the music?
In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain's evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change--the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement--activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.
"The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music," said Jonathan Berger, PhD, associate professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.
This brings up two questions in my mind. First, would we see this effect only between movements, or could it be found in any pause? And second, if music's purpose is to sustain attention, then how did humans know to start creating music? I'm not saying this to be critical of the study; I'm just interested in the researchers' answers.
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but it isn't entirely clear to me what this experiment has to do with music. Watching the video, brain activity increases only when the tempo of the first movement begins to slow down and seems to reach a peak during the silence. It seems like this effect could be produced with any stimulus that changes and then stops (or violates expectations in a variety of other ways). This seems especially true of speech. Anecdotally, it would seem that large sections of speech are often demarcated by a slow down in rate followed by a pause. I'm sure there are many examples of segmentation of time in other practices as well. I don't see how the results "suggest" much of anything at all about the purpose of music (especially since there are numerous forms of music which purposefully eschew obvious boundaries).
Classical form is a very unnatural development in the history of music. Drawing broad conclusions from symphonic form about the evolution of music is like drawing conclusions from Shakespearean plays about the evolution of language.
As a trained musician and music scholar, my reaction to studies of music cognition studies range from bemusement to frustration. I think they're making this much more difficult than it is. Some factors that aren't being considered:
1) Recorded music is a recent phenomenon, and the act of listening to recorded music is highly atypical of how music has been perceived in human experience. A recording is a document, and not the thing itself. Listening to a recording is a vicarious experience, at several cultural removes from the historical praxes of musicmaking. It would be like studying speech cognition by examining people while they read novels. Any study involving recordings is going to introduce a whole bunch of irrelevance into your data.
2) Music is a social activity, and until recently in historical terms, an almost exclusively participatory activity. (To put it more glibly, music is not that different from the hooting of social primates, with 50,000 years worth of human technology, imagination, and culture glued onto it.)
3) Musical response is learned, not instinctive. Formally trained musicians have the advantage of a vocabulary that allows them to verbalize how they hear and respond to music, but everyone learns how to respond to music through socialization and experience. Head-bobbing to Queen 8-tracks in a tricked-out van is a form of musical training, every bit as much as being forced to take piano lessons from that scary lady down the street.
4) European classical music is not representative of anything except European classical music. Far from being some kind of normative standard, it's an arcane, heavily formalized statistical outlier with no necessary relationship to 99.999... percent of human musical activity historically and globally. Any meaningful cognitive data would have to be equally applicable to Bach, Coltrane, Australian aboriginal clapping sticks, African drumming, Orthodox plainchant, Tuvan throat singing, etc., etc., etc. To the best of my knowledge, European classical music is the only form of music that regularly creates long works by joining related smaller movements into extended suites. I don't see how the perception of movements ending and beginning tells you anything about music as a whole.
I don't think that cognitive science will add anything definitive to knowledge of music until the anthropologists and sociologists nail down a workable definition of what music is and what it does for humans as social animals. Music is behavior; the sounds are just artifacts of that behavior. Without that framework, you've got a bunch of pretty fMRIs of brain activity with no working theoretical framework to put it in.
Ack. I gotta run--I'm late. I could write much more, but hopefully you get the drift.
I too wonder about what is being observed here. The change in fMRI begins at least as soon as my mind is aware that the music is winding down, maybe even just before that. I'd bet it doesn't require silence to produce this. Maybe a change in a medley of songs without a silent period would do the same thing. Maybe a change in rhythm or key would. So it might not be the correlate of, "I wonder what's coming next?" Then again maybe that's exactly what it is. More data in different settings would be nice. Would noise vs. non-noise work as well or a distinct visual transition?
It is puzzling to me that as I imagine being a subject in this study, I see my mind as being just as active during the movements as at times of transition, analyzing what I hear and making both musical and non-musical associations to what I hear. Perhaps as suggested by the quote about our attention being arrested, this varies between individuals during the movement, but becomes more stereotyped at times of transition, whether that's anticipating something new, putting to bed what I just heard, or both.
This reminds me of how people wrote about EEG, some paying so much attention to idling rhythms like alpha, when our brains are awake and idle, or delta, when we're asleep, when what everyone actually wanted to know was about thinking processes that weren't defined by such synchrony. With which part of our experience does this colored image actually correlate?
I can't believe all you people have nothing better to do than to chime in your two cents about some irrelevant and obviously scientifically questionable experiment. God, I can barely stand the fact that I took 30 seconds to write this!