The Universal Sense (19 page)

Gamelan music is quite beautiful, but it takes some getting used to before you can appreciate it—the fine structure of the complex intervals and partial overlap of harmonics, particularly when played on percussion instruments, would make most naive listeners wonder who killed the piano tuner. Several years ago, I was co-teaching a class on musical perception and a student who was a devotee of gamelan questioned the very idea that the Western twelve-tone scale was really hardwired. To test this question, she gathered students who were not musicians themselves and had never heard gamelan music and had them carry out a traditional consonance/dissonance rating, comparing snippets of Western music and gamelan. Not surprisingly, the students
showed the expected ratings for consonance and dissonance for the Western musical intervals and pieces but rated most of the gamelan music as dissonant or unpleasant.

The student then took another two groups but had them listen to a half hour of gamelan music before doing their ratings. She found that the students who had listened to the gamelan music still rated the Western music the same way, but significantly increased their ratings of the gamelan music as more consonant and pleasant. So with only brief exposure to an alternative tuning system, the supposedly hardwired system started rewiring, changing the psychological impact of what was heard. This led me to carry out an ad hoc experiment of my own without having to go too far afield musically. I typically ran the consonance/dissonance study as a demo in class, usually with twenty to thirty Brown undergrads, but I never separated out the musicians from the non-musicians. When I finally did, I found that those with musical training almost always shifted the scale towards consonant across the board, and among the jazz studies students, it was almost impossible to get any dissonance rating at all. Experience, at either a cultural or personal level, probably didn’t change the distribution of firing from the hair cells in their ears, but it certainly changed the higher-level assessments of the intervals. None of this means there is no biological basis for the musical chords we recognize and the way we respond to them, but it certainly raises warning flags about making broad statements about music and the brain. It’s important to remember that the thing being used as a measure, our own emotional responses, arises from a very complex infrastructure in the brain.

If the complex aspects of cognition are getting in the way of trying to find a “bottom-up” way to address music, another
way to get a handle on the interaction between music and the brain is to try a more gestalt, “top-down” approach (to return to our jigsaw analogy: look at the picture on the box and try to match it) and see what kind of effect actual music, rather than a tiny acoustic subset such as a specific interval, has on the brain.

For example, almost everyone in the Western world is subjected to the seasonal terror that is Christmas music. If you listen to Christmas songs, especially popular-music ones, what you will hear is almost pure consonance. The intervals are almost always octaves, major thirds, major fifths, and major sixths with a few daring quickly resolved minor intervals, but all in all, these are songs to make you feel cheerful, relaxed, and happy. All of the songs have what would be termed “positive valence” by someone trying to calculate the statistics of an fMRI study while wearing a little red elf hat. Christmas carols emerged from the efforts of small groups of people singing a capella to celebrate the end of the harvest and the holidays. (A recent study showed that amateur singers tended to show a decrease in cortisol, a marker of stress, while professional singers showed the opposite; both groups showed an increase in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter implicated in arousal. This may be why you see highly enthusiastic off-key carolers plaguing the streets, while professional musicians often put out canny, cynical-sounding Christmas singles.)

Christmas songs have been around for more than six hundred years, and the basic musical tradition of consonance and simple tempos repeated at seasonal intervals has created years’ worth of memory traces and emotional-auditory associations with holiday events. But there are caveats to even this seemingly innocent use of music to affect our emotions. If you hear “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” when you’re a kid, it becomes associated
with the holidays, getting presents, and general family cheer. When you get a bit older, it can act as a pleasant reminder of happy times past. But after a while, you hear the first few notes and your brain says, “It’s that song again.” You tune it out. And shortly it becomes environmental noise, which is in fact more of a stressor than an emotional conditioner.

The phrase “familiarity breeds contempt” has a certain neural basis. As all of us who have almost reflexively rolled our eyes while being forced to listen to “The Twelve Days of Christmas” would agree, overpresentation of any stimulus often leads us to ignore it. While the
idea
of consonant music works in general at a population level, constant repetition begins triggering habituation.
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Habituation is characterized by diminished responses to the same stimulus over multiple presentations. This is why you don’t usually startle at the second loud sound you hear in short order. It also kicks in faster and lasts longer if the stimulus is repeated more rapidly (with a shorter interstimulus interval, or ISI, in neurospeak). So after you survive the holidays and have nine months or so to recover from hearing “Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and other consonant offerings, when the season rolls around again, the first few times you hear these songs it works again, bringing on the holiday spirit, but as soon as the barrage of Christmas music gets going, so does habituation. And while every new singer and band hopes that
their
rendition of a Christmas song will be different enough to become a classic, it’s pretty unlikely. Songs in a specific genre follow compositional rules, and when you’re trying to keep a song Christmassy and recognizable as such, you have to
go pretty far afield acoustically to break away from the eventual habituation and stressor-based annoyance that most constantly repeated consonant songs impose.

But habituation to music is not just a seasonal malady. Anyone who has been stuck in a waiting room, elevator, shopping mall, or gas station has been subjected to music that would undeniably be described by psychologists, neuroscientists, and marketing people as having “positive valence.” Often tagged with labels such as “easy listening,” “light jazz,” or the more blatant “elevator music,” this type of music consists primarily of consonant intervals in major keys, with only occasional forays into the minor keys for flavor and texture, and is driven by regular, relatively slow tempos that you can tap your fingers to but which are probably unlikely to make you want to get up and dance (which would wobble the elevator). Presenting music with almost no auditory stressors in it is a widespread technique for reducing tension not only in individuals but in groups of people. First tried out in 1936 by the Wire Radio Corporation and eventually renamed Muzak, this type of music became so successful and widely distributed that the name has become a generic term. Despite being known for music that would deliberately not grab your attention by featuring anything with unusual keys, tempos, or intervals, Muzak was one of the first forays into consumer manipulation using music, and a wildly successful one. Purchased by Warner Bros. in 1937, long before the heyday of neuroscience, the Muzak company began formulating the first algorithms for changing group behavior by setting very specific limitations on tempo and tuning. It took this further by introducing what it called “stimulus progression”—piping in music with different tempos at different points in the workday and introducing structured periods of silence to limit
habituation to the music. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that they started broadening out into a wider variety of music, creating the first customized playlists for clients. But at that point they were up against the advent of portable customized players, digital recorders, and the beginnings of Internet music and radio, and Muzak Holdings filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Still, the legacy has lived on, particularly in places where acute stress can be a problem, and where you hopefully won’t be long enough for habituation to kick in.

Think of the music you hear in customer service areas, emergency rooms, doctors’ offices, and dentists’ waiting areas—it is inevitably “easy listening” in some form or another. In an environment that is filled with anticipatory stressors, using highly consonant music may not make you feel better about whatever brought you there, but it is more likely to reduce your stress than a monitor showing the news. There have been hundreds of studies validating the ability of light music to reduce psychological stress. While most of these studies have been carried out using surveys in a relatively ad hoc manner, the findings have yielded some practical benefits. One study was carried out in a hospital emergency room in England faced with an interesting budgetary choice. Having limited funds, they were forced to choose between installing an easy-listening music system and hiring new security guards. What they found was that by electing for the music, they had significantly fewer hostile incidents involving waiting patients or worried families and did not have to resort to beefing up the number of security personnel. There have also been interesting clinical studies that showed that pregnant women waiting for amniocentesis (a common but stressful test that samples amniotic fluid to make sure the fetus is developing normally) who were exposed to music, as opposed to
those who sat reading magazines or just sat, had significantly lower levels of serum cortisol, a metabolic indicator of stress.

But, as in any field trying to tie together complex neurally based behaviors and music, sometimes the research bandwagon picks up a lot of hitchhikers. A search on PubMed for “music” and “behavior” brings up almost 3,000 articles, many of which contradict each other and/or are clearly statistically challenged. One group of studies claimed that patients in a psych ward exposed to hard rock or rap acted out more than those exposed to easy listening or country (with no indication as to which songs, how loud, or why anyone would play highly arousing music of any sort to inpatients). Almost 1,900 papers can be found on the effect of listening habits on adolescents (most of which claim, without worrying overmuch whether their statistics actually prove it, that if your kids listen to heavy metal they will have low grades, display behavioral problems, be promiscuous, abuse drugs and alcohol, and of course get arrested).

These studies rarely add much except confusion to the question of how music affects human minds at a group or population level because they are treating music reductively, as a simple tool. It is very rare to find a study that even controls properly for basic elements such as loudness, repetition rate, or context effects. And the problem of working with groups is that you have to take into account individuals’ history and experience, which, aside from basics such as age, gender, handedness, and hearing health, are usually beyond the scope of most protocols.
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It may be statistically valid to say that consonant music in major keys makes most people feel relaxed or happy, but at an individual
level, if a person had a happy childhood in a household that played a lot of Public Enemy or Trent Reznor very loudly, he or she would probably find the valence of easy listening not so positive. So statistical findings based on generic people get reported in papers, and once the findings get out into the popular arena, things get even weirder. One of the best examples of this is the popular uprising of what started out as a reasonably interesting study on music and spatial reasoning and exploded through the press as a way to increase intelligence.

The “Mozart effect” emerged on the popular scene in 1993, but it had its roots much earlier, in the world of a French otolaryngologist named Alfred Tomatis. Tomatis proposed that auditory deficiencies too subtle to be defined as clinical hearing loss were responsible for a very wide variety of psychological and neurological disorders. His basic tenet was that early developmental problems in the ear led to broad-scale deficiencies in neurological processing of patterned input, such as speech and music. Inventing a system called the “electronic ear,” Tomatis used a combination of filters and amplifiers to try to restructure sounds into areas of his patients’ hearing range that he thought were deficient. His initial patients were opera singers, and his theory was that the sheer volume and stress of the extreme vocalization behavior in singing opera had damaged their middle ear muscles, thus reducing the protection those muscles offered against overloud and usually self-generated sounds.

There is a real basis to Tomatis’s hypothesis: mammals (and some other vertebrates) have a reflex arc that clamps down on the tympanum and ossicles to dampen sounds that may be loud enough to damage hearing. However, the system is limited, in that the amount of time it takes for the reflex to kick in is too long to prevent damage from very fast-onset loud sounds such
as explosions. Plus, like most reflexes, it habituates with chronic exposure, preventing it from being able to prevent hearing loss due to chronic exposure to loud noises. Tomatis’s idea was that “the voice cannot reproduce what the ear cannot hear,” and so his early electronic system tried to present sounds in the range that the patients’ ears were no longer responding to optimally. Claiming success with these techniques, Tomatis expanded his work into other clinical areas, ranging from depression to autism. He had his patients listen to music with very structured tempos and specific registers, including Mozart symphonies and Gregorian chants, two types of music with very different pitch and tempo characteristics, but both sharing a great deal of harmonic content and temporal structure. He claimed numerous successes in treating these psychological and psychiatric conditions, following them up with a book called
Why Mozart?
in which he tried to explain why Mozart in particular was particularly useful for treating conditions of the mind by retraining the ear to hear properly.