How Music Works (58 page)

but the neurons do act as if we are mimicking the observed. This mirror effect goes for emotional signals as well. When we see someone frown or smile, the

neurons associated with those facial muscles will fire. But—and here’s the

significant part—the emotional neurons associated with those feelings fire as well. Visual and auditory clues trigger empathetic neurons. Corny but true: if you smile you
will
make other people happy. We feel what the other is feeling—maybe not as strongly, or as profoundly—but empathy seems to be built

into our neurology. It has been proposed that this shared representation (as neuroscientists call it) is essential for
any
type of communication. The ability to experience a shared representation is how we know what the other person

is getting at, what they’re talking about. If we didn’t have this means of sharing common references, we wouldn’t be able to communicate.

It’s sort of stupidly obvious—of course we feel what others are feeling, at

least to some extent. If we didn’t, then why would we ever cry at the movies or smile when we heard a love song? The border between what you feel and

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what I feel is porous. That we are social animals is deeply ingrained and makes us what we are. We think of ourselves as individuals, but to some extent we

are not; our very cells are joined to the group by these evolved empathic reactions to others. This mirroring isn’t just emotional, it’s social and physical too. When someone gets hurt we “feel” their pain, though we don’t collapse in agony. And when a singer throws back his head and lets loose, we understand

that as well. We have an interior image of what he is going through when his body assumes that shape.

We anthropomorphize abstract sounds, too. We can read emotions when

we hear someone’s footsteps. Simple feelings—sadness, happiness and

anger—are pretty easily detected. Footsteps might seem an obvious example,

but it shows that we connect all sorts of sounds to our assumptions about

what emotion, feeling, or sensation generated that sound.

The UCLA study proposed that our appreciation and feeling for music

is deeply dependant on mirror neurons. When you watch, or even just hear,

someone play an instrument, the neurons associated with the muscles

required to play that instrument fire. Listening to a piano, we “feel” those hand and arm movements, and as any air guitarist will tell you, when you

hear or see a scorching solo, you are “playing” it too. Do you have to know

how to play the piano to be able to mirror a piano player? Dr. Edward W. Large at Florida Atlantic University scanned the brains of people with and without music experience as they listened to Chopin. As you might guess, the mirror

neuron system lit up in the musicians who were tested, but somewhat sur-

prisingly, they flashed in non-musicians as well. So, playing air guitar isn’t as weird as it sometimes seems. The UCLA group contends that
all
of our means of communication—auditory, musical, linguistic, visual—have motor

and muscular activities at their root. By reading and intuiting the intentions behind those motor activities, we connect with the underlying emotions. Our

physical state and our emotional state are inseparable—by perceiving one, an observer can deduce the other.

People dance to music as well, and neurological mirroring might explain

why hearing rhythmic music inspires us to move, and to move in very spe-

cific ways. Music, more than many of the arts, triggers a whole host of

neurons. Multiple regions of the brain fire upon hearing music: muscular,

auditory, visual, linguistic. That’s why some folks who have completely lost their language abilities can still articulate a text when it is sung. Oliver 320 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

Sacks wrote about a brain-damaged man who discovered that he could sing

his way through his mundane daily routines, and only by doing so could he

remember how to complete simple tasks like getting dressed. Melodic Into-

nation Therapy is the name for a group of therapeutic techniques that were

based on this discovery.

Mirror neurons are also predictive. When we observe an action, posture,

gesture or a facial expression, we have a good idea, based on our past experience, what is coming next. Some on the Asperger spectrum might not intuit

all those meanings as easily as others, and I’m sure I’m not alone in having been accused of missing what friends thought were obvious cues or signals.

But most folks catch at least a large percentage of them. Maybe our innate

love of narrative has some predictive, neurological basis; we have developed the ability to be able to feel where a story might be going. Ditto with a melody. We might sense the emotionally resonant rise and fall of a melody, a

repetition, a musical build, and we have expectations, based on experience,

about where those actions are leading—expectations that will be confirmed

or slightly redirected depending on the composer or performer. As cognitive

scientist Daniel Levitin points out, too much confirmation—when something

happens exactly as it did before—causes us to get bored and to tune out. Little variations keep us alert, as well as serving to draw attention to musical moments that are critical to the narrative.

These emotional connections might help explain why music has such a pro-

found effect on our psychological well-being. We can use music (or, for better or worse, others can use it) to regulate our emotions. We can pump ourselves (or others) up, or calm others (or ourselves) down. We can use music to help integrate ourselves with a team, to act in concord with a group. Music is social glue—it holds families, nations, cultures, and communities together. But it can tear them apart as well. As much as music sometimes seems to be a force for

good, it can be harnessed to swell nationalistic pride and stoke belligerent warmongering, too. Beyond these applications for communities and nations,

it’s also a cosmic telegraph that links us to a world beyond ourselves, to an invisible realm of spirits, gods, and maybe even to the world of the dead. It can make us physically well, or horribly ill. It does so many things to us that one can’t simply say, as many do, “Oh, I love
all kinds of music.” Really? But some forms of music are diametrically opposed to one another! You can’t love them
all
. Not all the time, anyway.

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MUSIC AND RITUAL

Music features in most religious and social ceremonies around the world.

Ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam points out that social organization

is marked at almost every point in the lives of communities by song—birth

songs, lullabies, naming songs, toilet training songs (I want to hear those!), puberty songs, greeting songs, love songs, marriage songs, clan songs, funeral songs. A Sia Indian who lives in a pueblo in northern New Mexico said, “My

friend, without songs you cannot do anything.” Without music, the social

fabric itself would be rent, and the links between us would crumble.

Ritualistic music has to be repeated in the same way, in more or less

identical circumstances every time that ritual is performed. If you get it

right, you are, it is assumed, in accordance with the patterns and order

of the universe, but woe unto you if you screw it up. According to Hindu

scripture, the inaccurate singing of a raga can be fatal to the singer. Apache shamans ran the same risk if they sang off-key. In Polynesia, a careless performer might be executed. In the context of a ritual, there is no concept of an “original” creation of a piece of music, a composer, or a first performance.

Such music is thought to have always been there, that it exists outside his-

tory, like a myth. Our task as performers and participants is simply to keep it alive. In this sense, music and the rituals it is part of keep the world going.

The urge to notate music, especially music that was going to be used in

rituals, emerged naturally from a need to get it absolutely right before performing for the gods—the music being played had to be correct, and the same each time. Written music is thus a useful means of maintaining continuity, but it can also stifle change and innovation. The strict ordering of music was originally a byproduct of theocratic and even political control. Written notation is fairly accurate, but it’s also imperfect, it’s not an exact “recording” of a piece of music.

Lots of expressive, textural, and emotional nuances are lost with any kind of notation—they simply are not transcribable. However, as long as the written

symbols and notes are accompanied by oral instruction and some modeling

and physical demonstrations, one can imagine that this ritual music would stay the same and get passed on largely intact. It’s presumed to be healing; spiritual and social agency would be maintained. But if that instructional thread gets broken, if all that’s left is the written music, then there will be a lot of guess-work involved, and what gets passed down might bear little resemblance to

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the original. This inaccuracy isn’t all that bad for music, but it’s not good for serving the interests of the powers that be. For all we know, the sound of a performance of Mozart’s music in his time might be somewhat intolerable to our

own ears—we can play the same notes, but we have modernized his pieces and

many other musical forms so that they are palatable to contemporary sensibilities. Even the instruments themselves have changed—and in many ways that

is what has allowed the music to stay alive and somewhat popular. Similarly, moving liturgical music away from its original Latin—a language almost no one understands anymore—diminishes some of its power and mystery. The Church

inevitably loses some of its deep cosmic power when the hymns are written in languages everyone speaks.

THE GREAT DISENCHANTMENT

Penelope Gouk of the University of Manchester wrote a wonderful essay

called “Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explana-

tions for Music’s Effects.” By “early modern,” she means the late seventeenth-century. At that time, a more modern, scientific conception of the universe was beginning to take hold. The scientific method, with its experiments and proofs, had—or so they claimed—no place for the Music of the Spheres and ethereal

harmonic spirits. Music was now to be explained by science; it was a symptom of something greater, something scientific that would describe how the physical world works. Music was no longer viewed as the motor that drives every-

thing. It was the physics of the universe that drove music. The universe was no longer enchanted, and music’s all-powerful place was usurped by science.

Those religious rituals that had provided a reason for music to be written

down in the first place began to be looked down on, too. The Protestant ethic and the Enlightenment viewed ritual—both social and religious—as superfluous. A

lot of rituals were therefore tossed out, and much music went with them. But people like and even need rituals. Humanity’s unmet needs demanded satisfaction, and people eventually found an outlet in a newly emerging secular and

social rituals that also involved music. The first public concert was in London in 1672. It was organized by a composer and violinist named John Banister shortly after he was fired from the royal band. The price was one shilling, and the audience could make requests. Who could say that music performances—in opera

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halls, cabaret bars, rock clubs, and outdoor festivals—are not rituals? They all have their own very special sets of prescribed behaviors associated with them, they heal and consecrate community bonds. The ritual was preserved under

another name.

VISUAL CULTURE VS. ACOUSTIC CULTURE

Marshall McLuhan famously proposed that after the Enlightenment and

the Scientific Revolution, we shifted from an acoustic culture to a vis-

ual one. He said that in acoustic culture, the world, like sound, is all around you, and comes at you from all directions at once. It is multilayered and non-hierarchical; it has no center or focal point. Visual culture has perspective—a vanishing point, a direction. In visual culture an image is in one very specific fixed spot: it’s in front of you. It isn’t everywhere at once.

McLuhan claims that our visual sense began to get increasingly bom-

barded by all the stuff we were producing. It began to take precedence over

our auditory sense, and he said that the way we think and view the world

changed as a result. In an acoustic universe one senses essence, whereas in a visual universe one sees categories and hierarchies. He claims that in a visual universe one begins to think in a linear fashion, one thing following another along a timeline, rather than everything existing right now, everywhere, in

the moment. By blocking your sight, a wall can erase the existence of a man

shouting on the other side, but you can hear things happening all around

you—left, right, front, and back—even things that are happening behind the

wall, like that shouting man. We tend to downplay the influence of some of

our senses, especially our sense of smell, partly because it can work on us

subconsciously and partly because we don’t have the words to describe the

myriad smells that affect us every day.

The way we imagine what our senses do is affected by our cultural biases

as well as by the way our language limits our perception. What we refer to

simply as the sense of touch actually includes separate sensors for vibration, texture, temperature, and movement—each of which could have qualified as a

separate sense, should our culture have deemed them important. The Hausa