Exercise your ears, educate your mind

Rhythm and timbre, melody and pitch: how musicians organise sounds, how we make sense of music and why we can't live without it are key to how music works, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

MUSIC. IT’S part of our staple cultural diet. All societies have had it throughout human history, and it’s easy to see why: just put on a favourite dance track at a party, or sing a Barney song to a toddler, or ask people around a dinner table what’s their favourite piece of music ever, and watch it work its magic. But how and why this magic works is still something of a mystery: which is why the physicist and science writer Philip Ball decided to compile a sort of dossier on the current state of our scientific knowledge about music and how we make sense of it.

A consultant editor for Naturemagazine, Ball's previous books include Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules; Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another, which won the Aventis Prize in 2005, and Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind. In his new book The Music Instinct he turns his attention to music because – as he explains – he is also a pianist who enjoys playing folk, jazz, blues and Bach.

“Music has been hugely important in my life,” he says. “But it had always been completely separate from my science writing – so I just thought it would be nice to try and combine them. I looked at various ways to approach it. There’s the relationship between music and mathematics, for example. But in the end I decided to bite the bullet and go for the big one – how music works. I suppose that’s what I’m really trying to get at here.”

Ball deliberately restricted himself to European classical music, with occasional references to popular music and traditions from other cultures such as the notoriously complex harmonic structures of Indonesian gamelan. Even so, the topic is almost unimaginably vast. Ironically, given his working definition of music as “organised sound”, one of the biggest problems he faced was how to present his findings in a way that readers would find manageable and coherent. He hit on a pleasingly musical method, grouping the material into chapters with titles such as “Overture”, “Staccato”, “Andante” and “Parlando”, then adding an explanatory subtitle to cover the precise subject of each chapter. The somewhat whimsical “Andante” then becomes: “Andante; What’s in a Tune? Do melodies follow rules, and if so, which?”

IT TURNS OUTthat not only do melodies follow rules, but our brains are one step ahead of the musical game all the time. As soon as we hear one note of a melody, we start – subconsciously – trying to predict what's coming next. "It seems that that's kind of how melody works," Ball says. "One thing we want to do straight away is to figure out what the key is. Even people who have no idea what the concept of 'key' means will be doing that, whether they know it or not. Trying to find out where the tune is anchored. It's something we do automatically, on the basis of what we've learned about the statistics of notes that are used. "It sounds very dry and cold when you put it that way – but it does seem, from the tests that have been done, that we're constantly evaluating what's going on in a melody in the light of experience. Where the melody is likely to go; the fact that it tends to go up in small steps; and it tends to go up and then down. There are these particular contours that it tends to follow."

If this is the case, then shouldn’t a computer be able to generate a hit song? Not quite. A laptop programmed to create a melody by shuffling notes in the key of C produces a melody with lots of the wrong kind of variation – too many repeated notes one after the other, too many large skips up and down, apparently at random. According to Ball, this explains why so many European music-lovers find music based on the 12-note rows designed by Schoenberg and other modernist composers “difficult” and unappealing.

Not that that’s an excuse to just set serial music aside as “unnatural”. On the contrary, the idea is that if we understand the underlying neurological reasons that we are resistant to it, we may be able to listen with new ears.

When it comes to rhythm, we are more receptive to subtle changes, complex cross-patterns and shifting patterns – a fact that has not gone unnoticed by contemporary minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Ball provides a striking visual analogy for this patterning – two identical moiré grids that have been placed one on top of another, then rotated very slightly (see illustration, right) Our ears, apparently, can pick out the minute shifts in gradation just as easily as our eyes can.

Listening to any kind of music, however, appears to be good for us in the neurological, if not the aesthetic, sense. Studies have found that music lights up not just particular parts of the brain, as in the case of language and other cultural activities, but all of the brain.

“When you think about it, it isn’t surprising,” says Ball. “In fact, it’s probably why we listen to music. It engages the emotions, the intellect, language processing centres, and obviously some music engages the body as well. It’s a gymnasium for the mind.”

What’s more surprising is that the minds of musicians are quantifiably different to those of the rest of us. They appear to have a three-dimensional map of musical relationships – the relationship between various keys, for example – inside their heads. (see illustration, below centre). “It’s extraordinary to see that imprinted on the brains of musicians,” says Ball. And while some people are naturally more musically gifted than others, intensive training can produce irreversible change, even in the brains of a musician who – to put it bluntly – is never going to be a Mozart, or a John Lennon.

“One of the interesting things is that musical training produces an enhancement in the corpus callosum – that’s the bit of the brain that communicates between hemispheres,” says Ball. “I get a bit tired of the popular idea we have of ‘left brain and right brain’ – and I like the fact that music subverts that, because it‘s using both integrated together. It seems that in musicians the two are, literally, more firmly welded together.”

When it comes to more ineffable matters, such as the link between music and emotion, neuroscience appears to be stumped.

"There is a link," says Ball, "but it's not nearly as simple as we think. Across cultures everyone can say, 'This music is a sad piece of music'. But what does that mean? You recognise a quality of sadness in it – but you won't necessarily feel sad. Clearly, we're not going to feel sad if a chord is thisrather than this, but there's some quality in there that we recognise as happiness or sadness. Most of the research so far has focused on that happy/sad dichotomy. But to me that's just scratching the surface. I think there's a whole aspect to this that hasn't been uncovered."

It has to do with the instantaneous nature of certain musical effects on our brains. This kind of thing will be familiar to anyone who has found themselves sniffing surreptitiously in the cinema, reduced to tears by some ghastly piece of transparently sentimental kitsch – and embarrassed at having been ambushed by such a patently cheap musical trick. Ball has some good news here; there may be a perfectly respectable evolutionary explanation. “If you look at what’s going on in the brain at that point,” says Ball, “the sensory inputs take a short cut to our emotional centres. And there are good evolutionary reasons that should be so. There have been times in the past where we’ve had to respond at a gut level – straight away, before we have time to really think about what it is that we’re hearing.”

Ball’s chapters on how we decode musical sound, whether music is a language and whether it conveys – or doesn’t convey – meaning are fascinating. Sometimes he highlights an area in which science has made little or no progress with regard to the study of music, which is equally interesting. The chapter on timbre, for example, is the shortest in the book because timbre – something we instinctively feel is crucial to how a particular kind of music, or a particular voice, sounds – is so difficult to pin down that it has, as yet, hardly been studied at all.

As neuroscience continues to probe the mystery of the mind and how we assemble a sense of self, more and more of the nuts and bolts of music as a discipline are likely to come under scrutiny. Meanwhile, with this meaty study, Ball would seem to have definitively rubbished the controversial claim made more than a decade ago by the linguist Steven Pinker that music is nothing more than “auditory cheesecake” which could vanish from our lifestyle, leaving us unchanged. Equally, he rubbishes some ludicrous recent theories – such as the so-called “Mozart Effect” – about the effect of music on cognition.

DOES BALL HOPEreaders of The Music Instinctwill take any particular message from the book? "One thing which emerged quite strongly was that if you're used to listening to one particular kind of music, you develop skills which you can then transfer to other kinds," he says. "Researching this book, I had to listen to types of music I hadn't listened to before – and I'm kind of hoping the book will encourage other people to do the same.

“But the main thing I wanted to stress is how important music is in the education of the brain, and in education generally. It’s so important for the development of the brain itself, and for the development of sociality, and because it gives us this rich neurological experience. What’s clear from these studies is that music has so many benefits that it needs to be a core part of the educational curriculum – and not an optional extra.” To which, in these times of cutback and curtailment, one might add a distinctly unscientific but extremely heartfelt “Amen”.

The Music Instinct, by Philip Ball, is published by Bodley Head(£20)