American Pitch: More on music and science

Last week I got this year's Believer Music Issue in the mail. For those not quite in the know, The Believer is not anything alluding to the religious right - rather, it is a marvelous magazine that succinctly describes itself in the following manner:

The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. There are book reviews that are not necessarily timely, and that are very often very long. There are interviews that are also very long. We will focus on writers and books we like. We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt. The working title of this magazine was "The Optimist."

And what's great about this publication is that it works very well in presenting a myriad of topics, ideas, and anecdotes, knowing full well, the reality that books and literature play an everpresent, sometimes direct, sometimes narrative role in whatever process the human mind is pursuing. Yes, I know it sounds a trite pretentious, and it is - sort of, but not really. Plus, it's kind of cool, and true to the McSweeney's vision, it is ever so pretty to look at (although quite expensive at $12 Canadian an issue). Anyway, their annual music issue has something of a cult following, so I was both happy and sad to receive it.

Happy, because being a bit of an audiophile myself, it's always been one of my favourite things to read and listen to, as it comes with a consistently interesting compilation CD - the 2006 one has a great opening track by Graham van Pelt. Sad, because I was hoping to have a piece of my own grace its pages.

I was close though (I think). I was working with them on a one pager essay that looked at the intriguing phenomenon of American Idol, particularly at the contestants who basically sucked but didn't know they suck. I even had the piece go through two or three rounds of edits, but ultimately it got killed near the end of the process. I did however manage to find a home for it elsewhere (here at Seed actually), but I suppose I was always more fond of the Believer edit. Despite being close in content to what went up on Seed, it was a bit more open ended in the "bigger picture" sense. I've put the Believer edit below with a key section, that didn't make the cut with Seed, in bold. I dunno - what do you think?

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The first episodes of American Idol are always the best. They illustrate with painful detail the endless parade of hopefuls with little or nothing to offer in the way of star power or talent. Watching the inaugural episodes of the fourth season, as, one by one, the guests were shot down by the judges with extreme prejudice, I became fascinated at their resolve. I'm referring specifically to the many contestants that performed dissonantly, sometimes wildly out of tune, to the degree that I wondered whether it was possible to measure their dissonance somehow. Because what's notable is that these same contestants seemed completely ignorant of the quality of their singing voice - even defiant. As a scientist, I found myself compelled to ask, "what is up with that?"

To begin with, there is the concept of pitch - this is a subjective quality, depending entirely on the listener's perception of a musical note. In contrast, the measure of frequency is the cold empirical process of equating a note to the number of vibrations per second it produces. It the difference between "that's a nice sounding A" and, "It's emitting at 440Hertz."

This is important because it turns out that holding a tune is all about a person's comfort with this pitch thing, and, in particular, their ability to discriminate the different pitches within a melody. Mind you, this aforementioned skill is not enough in itself to carry a tune - you still need to have the pipes to deliver the notes: i.e the complex organic machinery wedged in your throat needs to be in good working order. And taken together, I suppose the answer to my original question is as follows: those disgruntled contestants are disgruntled because they're unable to both discriminate pitch and overcome their anatomical limitations to result in "singing inaccurately" (actual science lingo).

The skeptic in me, however, soon realizes that this statement doesn't actually answer anything. It's really just an empty mouthful, ironically dissonant in its own right, as jargon tends to be. But when one digs a bit deeper, well then... it starts to get more interesting. Especially when one learns that pitch perception may well be a genetic thing; and that there exist disorders like expressive amusia - an inborn or brain lesion-induced inability to recognize or reproduce musical notes. In fact, there could be a whole host of factors that contribute to a person being biologically hardwired as tone or pitch deaf.

Which, I think, is a notion that is worth finishing with - because if there's anything that is ubiquitous in the scientific study of music, it is its approximation to how humans develop and use language. Scientific papers have even compared aspects of musicality to Noam Chomsky's grand linguistic notions of "grammaticality" and our species' innate "knowledge of language." And it makes me wonder whether these self-perception problems also occur in the way we communicate through words - whether individuals read, write, and listen to words that are, in reality, "out of tune" all the while without ever realizing it.