Deep Music - Quareness Series 177th "Lecture".
Once upon a long time ago an old acquaintance of mine tried manfully to trigger an interest on my part in the intricacies of the wonderful world of music. Regrettably his effort proved futile...I wasn't ready to learn. The passage of time, however, is a great aid to learning and my interest has grown over the years.
It was about 4.4 million years ago that an early hominoid stood up and walked. Ever since, the rhythm of walking has laid its mark on human music as those first steps put us on a path to forging links between the brain and muscular exertion and sound. We learned to hear footsteps as patterns which gave us a sense of time and being able to predict what will happen next. Unlike our feathered friends whose birdsong is as jerky as their motions or the fish with a more fluid rhythm of floating through their own medium, we got/get our primal moving experience in walking through the Earth. And because human music reflects our walking we've developed a fascination with the metaphor that music moves. Of course music does not really move in this way but we can easily imagine that one note moves on to another as if unfolding an imaginary journey (as most of our music tends to do).
There are connections in the human brain between the motor regions controlling our motion and the regions controlling hearing and sound (i.e. the auditory cortex). It's this link between sound and motion which makes the music of our species so distinctive. As a rule, the deeper we delve into the human brain, the more universal our propensity for music and emotion tends to show. Our oldest layer (the brainstem) flinches in response to sound as shown for example when shocks or loud bangs trigger this reflex action. The next layer up (the basal ganglia) responds to pleasure e,g, whether or not a sound is pleasant. The amygdala (next up) is where our emotions happen e.g. anger, fear, happiness, sadness. And the most modern layer (the neocortex) is where we process patterns and the complexities of music.
In appreciating music purely as a form of relaxation or entertainment, we risk missing much of its deep power to foster our mental health e.g. in combating loneliness with every note inherently plugging us into a social network. It generally tends to lower stress by reducing cortisol levels, giving us pleasure and making us happy through flooding the brain with neurotransmitters like dopamine. It can also provide us with an excellent way of tagging memories as well as expressing our deepest emotions and identities...especially when these cannot be captured by language. Indeed it may be fair to say that music is far too precise for mere words. To simply listen is an active and creative (not just relaxing) mode which reveals music as ultimately a thing of mindfulness or contemplation.
Our human propensity to imitate rhythm may be due to the existence of mirror neurons in our brains. When we see an action we don't have to physically move to experience that motion in our brains, because those mirror neurons are responding sympathetically. Yawning, for example, is contagious...if I see you yawning, I tend to yawn in turn. Emotions too are contagious...when I hear a sad song, my body through the action of my mirror neurons instinctively mimics/sympathises. The song isn't just triggering an acoustic experience, it's also encoding the behaviour we associate with the emotion involved e.g. sadness and grieving.
Emotions of course have always had an adaptive role for both animals and people in that they experience such in relation to goals which help them to survive e.g. we may be happy when we achieve a goal, angry when the goal is blocked, sad when we experience loss. We may also be afraid when exposed to threats triggering an instinctive response to either freeze, fight or flee. And music is full of similar responses with intense experiences brought about by say breakthrough moments of loudness or extremity. Indeed the parts of the brain which respond to such extremity are the same as those that respond to fear, which is why we may get to enjoy experiencing those chills/goosebumps (aka frisson).
In plumbing the depths of music we may discover how it can perhaps be disturbing but without the danger. Maybe that's why we think it's able to express emotion in a very visceral (gut feeling) way? There's a kind of mental time travel involved in the listening. When absorbed in the work, we are travelling back through layer upon layer of our brain...almost biologically...and maybe making of music some sort of umbilical cord back to Mother Nature.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
February, 2023.
This is somewhat of a "follow on" to a couple of earlier "lectures" of mine - "About Music" and "Frequencies" - accessible via the link panels shown at top and bottom of this page.