Earworms

When I see this term, the first thing I think of is that scene from Star Trek II. 



Fortunately, thinking of Walter Koenig screaming is more disturbing than the idea of a song rattling around in my mind, so I'm not overly concerned by the real earworms.  There is an article in BBC News Magazine, written by Rhitu Chatterjee, talking about recent research on earworms.  Vicky Williams talks of involuntary memory, and has found suggestions that stress is a triggering factor in causing earworms.  Dan Levitin says we might have evolved with the ability to remember music well, since humans could well have used music to encode information before language developed.  The article doesn't mention that music is unique in stimulating large swathes of the brain, more than perceiving language. Thus it has more of a chance of being stored in memory, because of the redundancies involved in perception.  


 

My guess would be that most earworms involve a high level of repetition within the musical structure.  So just as Mozart was able to transcribe Allegri's Miserere after one hearing, because the subject is repeated so many times, and because the structure is so clear, an earworm song is (too) easy to remember because of the repetitive nature.

Tom Selleck was right!

Remember that scene in Three Men and a Baby, when Tom Selleck's character is reading an article about boxing to the little baby? Steve Gutenberg is horrified, but Tom says that it doesn't matter what the words are, just the tone matters. Well, a new study in Infant Behavioral Development shows that the tone does indeed matter. CD Tsang and NJ Conrad of the University of Western Ontario did a study on infants' pitch preferences in lullabies and and playsongs. The babies preferred low-pitched lullabies and high-pitched playsongs, showing that tone is indeed the most important communication of emotion. Tom. Selleck. is. a. genius.

CD Tsang and NJ Conrad, "Does the message matter? The Effect of song type on infants' pitch preferences for lullabies and playsongs," Infant Behavioral Development, Dec 2009.

Conference wrap-up

I had planned to post some observations during the conference itself, but I was too busy either attending the conference, or socializing with people from the conference. Now that I'm home, I have (some) time to socialize with you, my internet companions. First off, I took part in my first biosensor experiment. On Halloween night, I was wired up with electromyography sensors on my frowning and smiling muscles in my face, with a pulse cuff and galvanic skin response sensors on my left hand, and a respiration monitor around my chest, providing an awesome Halloween costume. I and my fellow biosensor participants were treated to a live concert of three pieces – a madrigal by Arcadelt, a movement of a Schumann string quartet, and a new piece for an electronic instrument (the T Stick) that involves dramatic movements by the performer – while our physiological responses were recorded. Another group of participants at the same concert/experiment were asked to indicate their continuous emotional states in two dimensions – arousal and valence – on specially programmed iPods. Afterward we saw results from previous iterations of the experiment and discussed our reactions to the experiment. This was all hosted by CIRMMT.

I saw two very interesting papers on Copland's Quiet City for trumpet, english horn, and strings. Both papers discussed the shifts in diatonic collections within the piece, though one paper focused more on a system with a dialectic between fifths and half-steps to discuss the dramatic points, whereas the other paper worked on identifying the most stressed pitches, thus a sense of key for the different structural divisions. I disagree with both presenters about the most salient pitch at the opening, but appreciate many of the points they each made.

I'm tempted to read Proust after seeing a paper that explores a narrative of Debussy's instrumental music based on Proust's conceptions of time and memory. The three machines of the "Proustian narrative" are memory, eternity, and crisis, which the author (Michael Klein) identified in key moments of Reflets dans l'eau and the Cello Sonata.

I learned how to part-write Shape-Note hymns from a paper by Robert Kelley. He explained how the harmonic tradition of Sacred Harp music differed from standard harmonic practices, and developed a means for teaching the different way of harmonizing.

I'll finish with a brief description of the keynote address by Susan McClary, entitled "In Praise of Contingency: The Powers and Limits of Theory." Professor McClary is most-known as the author of polemic books such as Feminine Endings that explored how gender bias had influenced musical scholarship. She often beat up theorists for not considering social contexts enough when describing musical structures, so many of us were apprehensive about what she would say. Her speech was great. Funny, erudite, featuring the goblin who strides across the universe as a fitting Halloween topic. In the end, her talk was about a difficulty that was demonstrated in the experiment I described at the beginning of this post. Musicians are very good at performing emotions, but we are not good at describing, or even being conscious of, the emotions we feel when listening to music. Those participants with the iPods had difficulty remembering to move their fingers to indicate shifts in emotion, or to even be able to translate what they were feeling to the two dimensions of arousal and valence. Likewise, Susan McClary described how resistant people are to facing the goblins created by Beethoven's music, that the powerful emotions created are too strong or scary to be clearly identified, much less be analytically described.

Walk with the Instruments, Talk with the Instruments

There is plenty of debate on whether music is a language. But there is no debate that this friggin' piano is talking!



Actually, there was debate about this on the Auditory e-list, which prompted this article on sine-wave speech and this raw demo. Want to try it yourself? Here is a program that will convert any WAV file to a MIDI file, so go ahead and record yourself saying something, then convert it to a MIDI file to be played back with the sampled instrument of your choice.

Your Blogs on Brains on Music on er... Running?

Cognitive Daily reports that musically-inexperienced people are just as able to communicate emotions as experienced musicians when given only one pitch to express their emotions. The study by Baraldi, Poli, and Roda asked people to express eight different intentions by choosing one musical note on a keyboard and repeatedly playing that note as loud as desired, as long as desired, and as fast as desired. Look at the charts to see how similar the two groups (very small, only three people in each group) were in their choices. Likewise, 30 listeners (15 of them experienced musicians) matched the intended expressions pretty well (5 out of 8).

Mind Hacks reports on three things that affect my life. First, how does telephone hold music (Muzak) affect our perception of time? And more importantly, how can phone systems best use music to keep people from hanging up? Apparently the answer is for familiar music in short bursts, alt rock for women, classical for men.

Second, apparently my plans to run a marathon in November will put my body through the same mental stress as "soldiers during military training and interrogation, rape victims just after the attack, severe burn injury patients and first-time parachute jumpers." What the hell am I thinking?

And third, shifting your perception of location through the use of prism glasses affects your perception of time. Shift your vision to the right, and time durations seem longer. Shift your vision to the left, and time durations seem shorter (than actual clock-time durations). This is very interesting, given my interest in musical time. How could the manipulation of musical events be equivalent to shifting the vision to the left or the right?

A new view of musical space?

Mind Hacks reports on a a new study in Perception which determined that people's comfort zones for personal space was altered by listening to music on headphones. The music hampers the ability of people to aurally track other people, especially important when those people are out of visual range (behind the listener). So more personal space is needed to feel safe.

What is a musical experience?

Okay, it took a week to recover from the Mannes Institute. It was fabulous, but the intensive reading and thinking involved required many days of decompression. One thing that really struck me was a line in David Huron's plenary talk. He said he poses the following question to his graduate students every once in a while: "If you had a chance to talk to God, and could ask Her anything about music, what three questions would you ask?" David calls these the God questions, and says these are the questions that should impell a research agenda. It made me think about what things I'm really curious about, tempered by what my training and resources permit. I also had a great chat with Steve Larson on metaphor theory while jogging through Central Park, giving me a much better handle on that mode of understanding music. I'll start posting weekly about Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space, working out my understanding of this complex idea as I attempt to explain it to you.

But for now, I'm bothered by something I read today in Harold Fiske's Understanding Musical Understanding. On pages 25-26, Harold writes,

[Sculpture can be observed by any angle and for as long as the viewer desires.] Not so for music, where 'viewing' time for music is controlled exclusively by the performer. And once over, returing to the room in which the performance occurred would not afford continued experience with the same work. Once the piece is over, it is over. Even playing the piece again (a recording for example) does not represent a continued experience with the piece but rather a different experience, though it is the same music being listened to.

First of all, I don't believe the performer controls all aspects of the performance time. Besides the instructions of the composer, there are constraints placed on the performer(s) by cultural expectations, acoustic limitations of the venue, and general perceptual limitations. And the listener does have control of what performance aspects to which s/he pays attention. This attention is a main part of Fiske's thesis that musical time is very different from clock time, thus the listener does control his/her musical time experience.

But the second thing is more troubling, that rehearings are different experiences rather than a continued experience. It is troubling, because part of me agrees that rehearings (whether a physical rehearing or a mental replay) are indeed different experiences. The listener has different knowledge by the time of the replay, etc. But the two hearings share a commonality of the schemata of the performance. The order of the notes, the timings, the timbres are all the same, just as a sculpture keeps the same physical features. So I really want to say that the rehearing is a continuation of the experience of the piece, just as when I revisit the sculpture it continues my experiences with that artwork, even though I have different knowledge from the last time I experienced it. What say you? Is a rehearing a completely new experience, or is it a continuation of the same musical experience?

Music Cognition Around the Web

Mind Hacks has two music-related posts: The Brain-Storm Rag and A Night at the Opera. The rag is a two-step by Bud Manchester from 1907 that features a lot of common-tone diminished seventh chords. The second post is about a man who hallucinates entire operas.

Cognitive Daily writes about a study on the association of pitches with direction, either piano-oriented with high pitches associated with the right side and low pitches on the left side, or staff-oriented, with high pitches associated with upper and low pitches associated with lower. The results: musicians have strong associations with both orientations, non-musicians only have strong associations with the staff orientation.

Somewhat related to this study, a recent article in the journal Laterality (May 2009, 1-30) shows that right-handed musicians have more control of their left hands than non-musicians, and that string players have more control than pianists. This control is calculated through tapping exercises that measure speed, regularity, and fatigue. However, the non-dominant hand is still slower than the dominant hand, regardless of musical training.
Kopiez R, Galley, N, Lehmann, AC (2009). "The relation between lateralisation, early start of training, and amounts of practice in musicians: a contribution to the problem of handedness classification." Laterality, (epub).

What's up?

This will be mostly a collection of mini-points, with minimal commentary on my part. One of my former students has started her own blog, called "Ugh!!!! Not another Arts Marketing Blog." She only has two posts up, but it should be interesting. And if you know of anyone who needs a kick ass arts administrator, I can put you in touch with her.

On Wednesday my Psych of Music class had an interesting discussion about the scientific investigation of creativity, specifically composition. It started with concerns on many students' parts that it would ruin the magic. This led to speculations on why scientists try to determine how people are creative, with one possible answer being the hope to create a magic creativity pill. Last week all of the students had thought it was fine to take any sort of drugs that might help performances, especially beta blockers or other means of combating stage fright. Yet yesterday those same students felt that a drug that boosted creativity would be wrong. We explored why they made that split, a very animated and far-ranging discussion.

In that same class, several of the students are always concerned that studies we read only involve Western music. A new article in Current Biology addresses that concern with regards to music and emotion. The team of researchers did a cross-cultural study with a native African population and a Western population. Both groups were able to recognize three basic emotions in Western music: happy, sad, and scared/fearful. This suggests that the emotional content in Western music is includes universally-shared signs. The same team also tried manipulating both Western and Mafa (the African culture) music, increasing the amount of sensory dissonance (intervals of pitches that interfere with each other). Both cultural groups preferred the original versions of both the Western and Mafa musics. The second part sounds questionable, but the fact that the Mafa listeners could identify emotional content in a type of music that they had never experienced, that is pretty amazing.

Fritz, T, et al (2009). "Universal recognition of three basic emotions in music." Current Biology 19/7, 573-576.

I was interviewed today for a news piece on the potential embarrassment of revealing music listening habits, and how iTunes may have affected this. It was an interesting discussion, ranging from social signals and the origins of music to the economic features of online music and Brittany Spears. I'll be curious to see how the piece turns out.

Finally, I recently discovered another online comic (I already follow XKCD), which had one punchline that was too perfect.

Online Experiment

Do you have Absolute Pitch*? Then the Brazilians want you! To take part in an online experiment, that is. They are testing the effects of specific timbres on the ability to label pitches, and want only those who either know or suspect they have absolute pitch. Here is the link, in English and Portugese.

* Known outside of cognitive science as Perfect Pitch.

What shape is your brain in?

Those wacky Canadians have been looking at our brains again, and found more proof that musicians really are different. KL Hyde and others (why do we still use Latin?) found structural brain changes in young children after 15 months of musical training (compared to children who did not receive the training). They believe that these changes through increased brain plasticity suggest that music training in general increases brain plasticity, leading to the structural differences of adult experts (known from other studies). Are these changes a good thing? I'd be inclined to say yes, but I may be a bit biased. Now I have to decide whether my kids' increased brain plasticity is worth driving to Indianapolis five days a week for choir practice. Maybe I should just let their brains go mushy from TV. That's a type of plasticity, right?

Hyde KL, Lerch J, Norton A, Forgeard M, Winner E, Evans AC, and Schlaug G (2009). "Musical training shapes structural brain development," Journal of Neuroscience 29 (10), 3019-3025.