One of the consequences of this great mix is that I get to supervise lots of different masters projects. I thought I would give you a flavour of the projects I am overseeing this year, so you can get an idea of what sort of things can go on in music psychology.

This summary is anonymous but in alphabetical order – no preferential ranking is implied!

1)      Music and movement

One of my students is a physiotherapist and wants to investigate the effects of music on movement. He wants to move beyond a traditional finger tapping paradigm and measure a behaviour that is far more relevant to his clinical practice – walking. He intends to look at the effects of music familiarity and liking upon people’s ability to walk to a beat.

2)      Musical ‘shape’

This project is running in collaboration with Dr Helen Prior and Dr Dan Tidhar at Kings College. The student will be testing how many different conceptual ideas of musical shape (including performance dynamics and cultural traditions) influence a person’s ability to entrain (tap) to a beat.

3)      Music and sexiness

This project represents a second collaboration with Kings College, this time with Professor Daniel Leech Wilkinson. Our student will be looking at the question of whether witnessing an expert musical performance can have an effect on how attractive we find a person. It is essentially a test of the sexual selection theory of music evolution.

4)      Musical working memory

This year I have been working with a student whose interests in music and working memory are very similar to my own. She is interested in whether there are similarities to the way that language and music are processed in memory. She is developing updated (and much better!) versions of my old experiments, with the assistance of Professors Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch.

5)      Musical quality

Linn are a company who produce high fidelity studio sound files of music and they are working with one of my students on a project that will determine whether there is an effect of music recording ‘quality’ on peoples’ responses to music and listening choices.

6)      Music for little ones

Jo Jingles provide parent and child music activity classes in the UK, Ireland and Australia. They have been kind enough to allow one of my students into their classes for a few months to observe the lessons and to take some measures of the children’s development using standard behavioural tests and parental report.

7)      Musicians’ memory

I have one ‘team’ project this year, consisting of two students are working together. They are interested in whether musicians show superior memory skills and have designed a large memory battery in order to test various hypotheses about how and why musicians might show improvements to their memory.

8)      Musical memory and perception in the brain

This year will mark my first involvement with a tDCS paradigm, in the form of two projects that I am running with Dr Michel Banissy. The students intend to use the brain stimulation technique in order to determine whether certain brain areas are involved in 1) musical memory processing and 2) pitch perception.

I hope that brief overview gives you an idea of the wealth of projects that are possible when you study music psychology. All the students have been able to follow their personal interests and this always makes for the best projects. I will keep you updated as to their progress as results emerge over the next few months. Should be a fascinating summer!

It is not a surprising fact that speakers acquire vocabulary by watching films or TV, but there is not a great deal of evidence that listening to music has a similar influence. On top of this, the present paper argues that hip-hop is especially problematic as a test case for an effect on language development due to a number of issues:

1) Hip-hop albums rarely include lyric sheets (more likely in pop and rock albums)

2) The fast pace of rappers can often impair comprehension of the words uttered.

3) The voice quality, often in shouting timbre, can also impair comprehension of the exact lyrics.

4) Hip-hop is full of atypical syntax, double entendres, and deliberately obscure language, which can include mixtures of two or more languages.

So there are a number of factors that mean that hip-hop in particular creates ‘excruciatingly difficult’ conditions for lyric comprehension and transcription, and subsequent vocabulary acquisition (Devlin, 2010). Given these difficulties, why might we suspect that hip-hop is influencing language?

Young adults listen to more music than previously recorded generations in America and hip-hop has now evolved into widely available mainstream music. It is also one of the most popular video media music genres and there are a number of websites devoted to documenting the slang and ‘urban language’ that is used by different hip-hop artists.

The study set out to test 166 non-African American young people’s understanding of ‘African American English (AAE)’ terms, which are frequently used in hip-hop. She hypothesised that a higher level of familiarity with hip-hop would be correlated with a higher level of understanding of AAE vocabulary.

The dense multiple regression linear analysis revealed that three main factors predicted knowledge of hip-hop AAE: musical preferences, weak social ties to African Americans (negatively), and knowledge of popular culture. Specifically, listening to more hip-hop and knowledge of African American social culture (e.g. TV shows with a majority AAE speaking characters) were related to a higher comprehension of hip-hop AAE language. Conversely gender, age, ethnicity and hometown had no significant influences on the results.

 Did any particular artist have an influence? Did popularity of artists have an effect? The results revealed that general use of a hip-hop term most strongly predicted vocabulary acquisition; so the more that a word is used in a similar context by different artists, the more likely it is to be picked up in general language acquisition. But there was also a predictive relationship between preferred hip-hop artist and knowledge of words used by that artist.

Overall the results indicate that people can acquire vocabulary by listening to hip-hop and that this process is influenced by factors including cultural knowledge, social ties and musical preferences.

The next step would be to carry out controlled experimental studies to determine more reliably how exposure factors influence vocabulary acquisition. The author believes that knowledge of AAE used in hip-hop music may be linked to music listening preferences even if peer group usage and media exposure could be controlled in a systematic way. Further work can test this hypothesis more directly.

This study utilises a comprehensive modelling analysis and draws on linguistic methodological traditions to answer an ecologically valid and interesting psychological question – can the dynamic processes of language acquisition and evolution be influenced by exposure to music? The paper makes a good case for a direct influence in one of the most difficult vocal genres, hip-hop.

Article: Chesley, P. (2012) You know what it is: Learning words through listening to hip hop.

What might I do with my career after the course is over?

This blog will summarise my answer to that question. The MMB MSc has been running for a few years now so we are building up a good idea of where our graduates chose to go with their careers. I am basing my summary largely on this information.

So, if you have a Masters in music psychology, what next?

1)      Academia – the first and most common career path. Many of our students have chosen to continue their studies with a PhD and have found places in the best labs in the world, some returning to or staying in their home country and some moving on to try a completely new location. There are a growing number of PhD studentships in music psychology, and there are certainly far more around now than when I was first looking 5 years ago!

Possession of a PhD is still an essential qualification if you wish to become a university lecturer, at least in the UK. Being a lecturer was always my ambition so I knew from early on that I had to complete a PhD; and, in the end, I loved it! Fortunately music psychology is becoming more and more recognised as an interesting and valuable specialism for a lecturer in psychology or music.

2)      Private Industry – a Masters in music psychology will train you in many areas that are very valuable to companies from a variety of industries. You will develop good writing practices, skills in research and planning (including experimental design), knowledge of statistical analysis, and interpersonal and organisational skills. These are traits that are highly prized in industries such as media, research, marketing (where the effects of music is of growing interest), finance and human resources.

3)      Education – the MMB course covers many aspects of developmental psychology and students can chose to investigate aspects of musical or general education as part of their final thesis projects. In general, a music psychology Masters degree will also give you skills for your CV that are important for a career in education, and having the degree will make you a good candidate for a short conversion course if you wish to pursue a teaching qualification.

Of course many of our students wish to continue, or begin, a career in teaching music. A music psychology degree will give you greater knowledge about the cognitive mechanisms that influence learning and development as a musician and is, therefore, extremely helpful for any music teacher. I once worked as a music teacher for the government and know that such a qualification is regarded very highly in this field.

4)      Health and Therapy – some of our students are interested in pursuing music therapy or a health related career where they can involve music in their work (e.g. physiotherapists can use music to help people regain motility). A Masters in music psychology will not qualify you as a music therapist – you would need to do an accredited course in music therapy to gain the practical skills for this occupation. But a Masters will give you a wealth of knowledge about the cognitive effects of music on the brain and behaviour, which lie behind the beneficial effects of music therapy. For this reason we have taught qualified music therapists on our course, and their presence always provides a great contribution to the group.

5)       Music – I have already discussed music education in section 2, but there is of course a wider music industry which comprises a vast array of careers from performance, through to engineering, production, marketing, and management (artists and events). Our masters is particularly well suited in this regard, being London based, as we often include music events (including performances by our own students) in our social calendar. A Masters in music psychology will provide skills and knowledge that are relevant to all these careers and through their final thesis a student can work with music companies, conservatoires and/or performers, all of which can provide useful avenues for a future career.

That is a quick summary of the main career fields into which our previous students have migrated. My experience so far is largely confined to the Masters course at Goldsmiths so if anyone would like to add a career experience following completion of a music psychology course elsewhere then please feel free to leave a comment below for other readers.

My final career advice is always, wherever possible, to follow your passion: If you have an idea then pursue it. Even if things don’t work out exactly as you planned in a practical sense (e.g. I never wanted to live in London when I was younger!), you will certainly enjoy the journey.

We know that the structures within music help to communicate happiness and sadness:

Sad music = soft dynamics, legato articulation, soft tempo and minor mode

Happy music = staccato articulation, louder intensities and major mode

A new article seeks to tackle the next logical question for music emotion studies – is there an additional influence of lyrics?

Bob Dylan

Most studies that present music in order to measure resulting perceptual, cognitive or affective responses stick to using instrumental works. The main justification for doing this is to avoid any confounding influences of activating the language system. This is a completely reasonable argument if your aim is to isolate the cognitive or neural processing of music. But it leaves us unable to draw conclusions about a large proportion of the world’s music – vocal music (e.g. pop, rock and folk music).

A new study by Elvira Brattico and her colleagues in Finland and Germany has looked at fMRI brain activation when people listen to happy and sad music with and without lyrics. They opted to move on from the typical use of western classical music and to use a range of music genres and timbres, as selected by 15 participants who had a wide range of musical training.

Participants selected 16 eighteen second excerpts of music: 4 sad and 4 happy that they liked and that they didn’t like.  They listened to them while in a 3T fMRI scanner and rated them again for liking and emotion (happy or sad?)

RESULTS

1) Acoustic analysis: The authors analysed low level acoustic features of the music itself to determine if there were any patters that marked a piece as happy or sad. They focused on the attack slope and the spectral centroid (i.e. timbre, brightness) as well as tempo and mode. They found:

Happy music with lyrics: Faster attack than happy music without lyrics and all sad music. It also had the brightest timbres compared to all other categories.

Happy music: Brighter timbres and faster tempos compared to sad music. It was also more frequently in the major mode.

Music with lyrics: Brighter timbres than music without lyrics.

2) fMRI analysis

Sad music with lyrics: Unique activation in several brain areas that were not active when lyrics were absent, including parahippocampal gyrus, amgydala, medial and inferior frontal gyri (including Broca’s area) and the auditory cortex  

Happy music with lyrics: Auditory regions alone

Happy music without lyrics: Limbic system and inferior frontal gyrus

CONCLUSION

There were few acoustic differences between music with and without lyrics. There were far larger acoustic differences between happy and sad music. The authors concluded that any differential affects driven by the presence of lyrics in the scanner would be as a result of the semantic impact of the words rather than their acoustic features.

• Lyrics are crucial for defining sadness in music. The presence of lyrics in sad music was associated with brain activations that have previously been reported in response to music chills (see previous blog), judgments of beauty, demanding speech tasks and the human “mirror neuron” system.
• By comparison, acoustic features are key to defining happiness in music. Instrumental happy music triggered more strong activations in the emotion-related limbic regions, in comparison to lyrical music.

Happy music was also associated with more left hemisphere activity, whether or not it contained lyrics. The authors explain this finding as being due to the acoustic features of happy music, including the faster attack and brighter timbres. There is growing evidence to support the theory (Zatorre et al. 2002) that the left hemisphere is not so much language dominant but dominant for sounds that contain fast specto-temporal transitions (including language but also happy music)

There were many other specific findings within the paper but that summary gives you a flavour of the major results and their interpretations. Overall, the paper gives insight into the effects of lyrics on the neural processing of human emotion in a range of musical styles and opens the door for a greater understanding of the potential effect of song, not just instrumental music, on our minds.

My 2009 book “Music, Thought and Feeling” (Oxford University Press) is a leading textbook on the psychology of music. I have completed terms as Editor of the journal Empirical Musicology Review, and President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC). I’m currently Associate Editor for the journals Music Perception, Semiotica, and Empirical Musicology Review.

My research concerns auditory cognition, including topics such as emotional communication in music and speech, the use of facial expressions during emotional communication, and the effects of music listening on concurrent cognitive-motor activity.

In addition to my research and administrative roles, I teach a course at Macquarie University entitled “Music, Mind and Message” which examines music on perceptual, cognitive, neuroscientific, social, and semiotic levels. Until two years ago, I was a fanatical squash player (have calmed down since), and I enjoy improvising on piano. I’ve also composed and performed music for a number of films, radio plays, and stage plays.

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1)      What led you to want to study/work in music psychology?

It was partly a random set of decisions, but it does seem to balance my twin interests in music and the mind, along with my scientific and artistic sides. Music was always in the background when I was growing up – both parents played (different) Chopin waltzes every evening on the piano, and I also played regularly. The field allows me to investigate something that is personally very close to me.

2)      What are your current areas of focus/interest in music psychology?

The truth is I almost always feel that I’m at a crossroads. For many years I have enjoyed working on music and emotion, but recently I’ve been examining timing in individuals with expertise in movement-based skills such as music and sport. I’ve also recently become interested in the right hemisphere, and have a new grant to investigate whether melodic intonation therapy (MIT) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can jointly recruit the right hemisphere (RH) to assist with impaired left hemisphere functions.

3)      What do you enjoy investigating the most?

I have no big preference but I recently discovered that I quite enjoy working in the area of exceptionality – whether with people with specific disorders such as amusia, or people who have acquired elite levels of skill, such as athletes, expert chess players, or musicians.

4)      Is there any area you would like to investigate in the future?

I have a nagging interest in how and why music has the capacity to interact with belief systems.

5)      What is your proudest career moment?

Seeing my 2009 book finally published after such an embarrassingly long time writing it.

6)      Who inspires you?

I read a lot of psychology and music texts but the truth is I seem to get most of my inspiration from novels by writers such as Colm Tóibín (The Master), Ian Mckewn (Atonement), and dozens of others. I also enjoy reading books about fields other than psychology and I get a lot of inspiration from powerful theatre, film, music performances, and dance.

7)      What is the best part of your job?

I appreciate the flexible working hours, the ability to travel to interesting places for conferences, and generally being able to follow my curiosity and get paid for it.

8)      What do you think might be a future, exciting challenge for music psychology?

Coming up with a general theory of music and the brain that accounts for all of its features and functions, or if that doesn’t work, hosting ICMPC on a Mediterranean cruise ship.

9)      What music do you like to listen to or play in your spare time?

I listen to baroque music, classical vocal music of most genres, various popular styles as they come and go and music from the 40s. I love playing piano and improvising on music from the 40’s. I also enjoy playing four-hand (classical and romantic) piano.

10)  Do you have any advice for future, budding music psychologists?

My advice is to define yourself by addressing a very specific and important research question, and avoid spreading yourself too thinly across several research topics. Affiliate yourself with the best researchers in the world: most of them are generous and willing to help out young researchers.

There are many things to look forward to in the world of music psychology in 2012. One great source of excitement is the International Conference on Music Psychology and Cognition (ICMPC12) which this year will be twinned with a meeting of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 8). The conference will be held in the beautiful city of Thessoloniki in Greece at the end of July and is sure to be one of the largest such conferences in recent years.

Like many I am sure I am eagerly awaiting news about my submitted abstracts. Fingers crossed for all of us! But whatever happens I am very much looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible at what is sure to be a fascinating conference. If you are unable to make it on this occasion then be assured that musicpsychology.co.uk will carry day by day summaries of everything that I see and hear, just as with ICMPC 11.

There are many other excellent meetings planned for 2012 and the sheer number of conferences from around the world, covering so many sub-disciplines, speaks to the happy continued growth of interest and research in music psychology. I am especially happy to see so many meetings organised by early career researchers. You can browse a list of the current planned meetings on my conference page. If anyone is planning a meeting and would like me to list it on this page then please feel free to drop me an email.

The 2011-12 cohort of masters students in music, mind and brain at Goldsmiths are now settled in nicely and have done a great job with their first modules. They have recently selected topics for their theses and it looks like we are going to have an amazing year of new research from them! They are a fantastic group and I can’t wait to get going on our new module ‘Cognitive Neuroscience of Music’ in a couple of weeks.

As part of the masters theses program, I am really happy that I will get to work with a number of academic partners including Helen Prior and Daniel Leech Wilkinson at Kings College and my wonderful PhD supervisors Graham Hitch and Alan Baddeley at the University of York. I am also excited to learn all about TMS, a completely new area for me, through my Goldsmiths masters project collaborator Michael Banissy.

The masters course also has some great ongoing collaborations with industry partners who are increasingly keen to explore the science behind music products and services. These include Earworms Learning MBT, Linn products, Jo Jingles, and Immedia broadcasting. Thanks to the students and these companies we are looking forward to lots of interesting insights about the impacts of the music in our world on our everyday lives.

And then of course, there will be a wealth of new research to explore from all over the world! For me, this means earworms! Lauren Stewart will return to Goldsmiths in the summer and we will begin three years of work in this area thanks to the Leverhulme trust. Musicpsychology.co.uk will continue to present summaries of this work and the latest papers from the world of music psychology (whenever I get any spare time!) as well as interviews with leading researchers in the field.

Finally, the future of the blog: The blog page on studying music psychology has proved very popular in 2011, as has a recent blog on how to prepare for a music psychology course. I am keen to build on this interest in 2012 and make sure that musicpsychology.co.uk provides useful information for students and early career researchers wherever possible. With this in mind I will begin to post jobs and PhD opportunities more regularly when they cross my path. But if anyone has any suggestions for posts that might be helpful then please feel free to email me.

Wishing you all the very best for a wonderful 2012. ¡Feliz año nuevo!

Aggression: Some of the results replicated those reported in an article that I wrote with Nikki Dibben (Dibben & Williamson, 2007). People who listen to drum and bass and heavy metal music were more likely than listeners of classical music to report aggressive driving behaviours, for example. But then of course there is the large confound in the room – that of age group. Younger drivers are statistically more likely to listen to these genres according to the present survey and according to other evidence they are also more likely to demonstrate aggressive driving.

However, one factor that may play also a role is volume and tempo. These genres can often be played at loud volumes and feature fast tempos. At high levels, fast and loud music can divert attention from driving (Brodsky, 2002) and result in greater driver aggression (Wiesenthal et al. 2003).

There were some other interesting findings in the report that were not necessarily along the lines I would have predicted.

Speeding: Jazz listeners were significantly more likely to report receiving a fine for speeding than any other genre. I can think of three possible explanations;

1) The survey was self report so jazz listeners may simply be more honest than others about their driving mistakes!
2) The complexity of jazz music might mean that the driver becomes more involved with the music (listening analytically) and loses concentration on their exact speed
3) The survey also revealed that jazz listeners make significantly more long journeys that any other genre so they may be more likely to encounter speed cameras.

Near-misses: Reggae listeners were statistically more likely to be involved in near misses. They were also more likely to report that they use music to help them to stay alert and less likely to turn music off in order to help them concentrate.

From this evidence it is possible to speculate that these drivers are over-stimulating their system with music and not recognising the possible consequences for concentration. One issue might be that reggae is often thought of as relaxing music, but it has as much potential to distract a driver as any other type of vocal music.

What music is good for driving? Music listening in cars has both potential benefits and costs. Both of these effects are driven by two main factors; 1) the intrinsic qualities of the music and 2) personal experience and preferences. To explain these in more detail;

1) Music that contains lyrics is potentially more distracting than instrumental music. We know that verbal-based materials interfere more with other everyday tasks such as reading and playing computer games.
2) Music that is louder and more complex (contains more key changes, more erratic rhythms, more layered textures, and more instruments/voices) is likely to be more distracting.
3) Music that is unfamiliar is more likely to be distracting compared to tunes we know well.
4) Not liking the music in our environment can negatively influence our concentration.

It is also important to consider circumstances: whether the journey is common for the driver, whether it is taken under stress (mental or physical) and the complexity of the journey itself (how many other cars are on the road, extent of any traffic works and weather conditions).

Once useful conclusion from all this is that genres that are unfamiliar to us and/or not liked by us are more likely to be distracting while we drive compared to our favourite genre that we know well. A great excuse for insisting that when you drive you should pick the music!

One last Christmas-themed point: According to the survey the UK’s favourite Xmas driving song is Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’. Why might this be a good driving song?

The song is mostly in a major key, a musical structure that is often associated with the communication of happy emotions. It is a familiar song for a lot of people so will likely cause a lower drain on cognitive resources compared to an unfamiliar song. It is also quite repetitive in its structure and lyrics, which again will make it easier to process than a more complex melody and song.

Finally, I suspect that it will be linked to plenty of positive memories for a lot of people, being associated as it is with a favourite family holiday in the UK. Triggering pleasant memories can improve current mood and emotional levels, which has the potential to have positive temporary knock-on effects for our behaviour and attitude as a driver.

Please drive safely and happily this Christmas

“I stumbled upon your blog and there is some interesting things on it. But as someone with synaesthesia I was wondering have you done any post on it? My music is full of colours”

The email was from a man called Paul who experiences a rare condition called tone-colour synaesthesia, meaning he consistently experiences sensations of colour when hearing music. At the time I replied to tell him that his was a fascinating condition and that I would love to write about it. But sadly there was no new research out at the time and the idea slipped from my mind.

Luckily a new article has just been published in ‘Neuropsychologia’ which brought me back to this topic. The article seeks to determine the brain correlates of tone-colour synaesthesia.

                  What is synaesthesia? Synaesthetes automatically experience an internally generated stimulus (response) when exposed to a certain perceptual experience (trigger). They may automatically perceive certain words as different colours, certain days as different tastes, or certain sounds as different tactile sensations. You can find more about the details by visiting the UK synaesthesia society. Some famous individuals with synaesthesia include the painter David Hockney, the composer Olivier Messiaen, and the writer Vladimir Nabokov.

Synaesthesia in the form of ‘colour-hearing’ has received a great deal of scientific interest in the past however, there have been few studies of variations of the condition that do not involve a language trigger or response. Tone-colour is one such combination.

Why does it happen? There are two main theories:

1)      There is a direct link between areas of the brain that represent the trigger and the response senses (Direct cross action hypothesis)

2)      The normal feedback mechanisms that prevents our sensory input being jumbled up in the brain in not working properly (Disinhibited feedback model)

The new study: Fourteen auditory-visual synaesthetes and 14 matched controls took part in an fMRI experiment where they were played various isolated tones and chords while images of their brain were scanned.

Synaesthetes showed significantly greater brain activity in an area called the inferior parietal cortex (IPC). The IPC is associated with many tasks including spatial-dynamic processing, mental imagery, attention control and visuo-motor control. It can be thought of as one of the important relay stations in the brain, where input from different sensory areas comes together for processing. The authors suggested that the hyper activity in this area might be behind the extrasensory ‘binding’ that is characteristic of ton-colour synaesthesia – coupling together trigger and response sensory areas via disinhibited feedback.

What about the colour processing area of the brain, known as V4: Do tone-colour synaesthetes show above average activity in this area in response to musical sounds? There was no evidence that brain activity differed between controls and audio-visual synaesthetes in area V4.

This does not mean that there is not V4 activation in other variations of colour synaesthesia, such as word-colour, just that no reliable evidence exists to support this potential explanation for tone-colour synaesthesia.

Conclusion: This new study moves us closer towards understanding one of the less well known variants of synaesthesia, where people reliably see colours in response to musical sounds. The special involvement of the IPC, a multimodal integration area of the brain, supports the hypothesis that colour and music become bound together as perceptual experiences because the area of the brain that fuses these sensory inputs is overactive.

I will leave the final word on this blog to my reader Paul, who so kindly alerted me to this condition in the first place. I asked him if he would mind telling us a little bit about what it is like to have synaesthesia. This is what he said:

“For me music and colour’s are very much woven together. When I write music I always see it as painting in a way that I match the colour’s of certain instruments together and think in terms of “this needs more green or another colour”. When I hear music I see colour’s which is actually harder than it sounds for me to explain in words. Sometimes it’s a kaleidoscope of colour’s and other times its blocks, blobs, circles or just shapes that float and bend into each other. Also the music I like is always the kind I’m drawn to with regard to atmosphere, colour and vibe I get from it”.

Paul is a music composer and his album is out next year called “Hold Onto The Colours”. His website is www.paulmelia.net

A few weeks ago I had a very kind invitation from the Southbank Centre in London to attend a night at the London Jazz Festival called ‘Phronesis: Pitch Black’.The event was to feature the talents of London-based jazz trio Phronesis, which comprises Copenhagan-born Jasper Høiby on bass, Ivo Neame on piano and Anton Eger on drums.

If you would like a little musical taste of this fantastic band and to hear a little about their stories then they have a handy introduction Youtube video.

The ‘Pitch Black’ project was inspired by Jasper’s sister, who lost her sight to severe cataracts five years ago.  Jasper told me that his experience and admiration for his sister lead him to consider the real importance of senses in the musical experience and how drastically different music listening music be in the absence of vision. The aim of playing in the dark was to inspire a closer communication between the band members and between them and their audience. He was interested to discover how a lack of visual information would influence people’s experience of the band’s music and how it would inspire the band’s improvisation interactions in turn.

My tickets!

I was invited along to be part of the post-show panel and to comment on music perception in the absence of vision. I agreed immediately! It was a chance to experience a new musical event with fascinating possibilities and an excuse to dive into the literature for new ideas on music perception.  A perfect storm of temptation for me!

Findings in this area focus mainly on the difference in auditory skills between sighted and blind individuals. To summarise, the majority of papers in this area have reported that blind people have greater expertise in auditory tasks, including;

1)      Pitch discrimination (ability to perceive small changes to notes)
2)      Spatial localisation
3)      Verbal memory
4)      Speech perception, including hearing speech in noise
5)      Tasks that combine hearing and touching (such as Braille reading)

An excellent summary of the background findings is provided in a paper by Rokem and Ahissar (2009)

Another interesting finding is that blind individuals show greater amygdala activation in response to emotional auditory stimuli compared to sighted people. The amygdala is part of the brain’s limbic system and is strongly associated with the processing of emotion. The theory goes that the amygdale has a natural ‘allegiance’ to visual information, which quickly and more effectively signals emotional intent than sound (such as in emotional faces). When visual information is not available the amygdala switches its allegiance to interpreting auditory information.

This alliance between auditory information and the emotion centres of the brain is primary and therefore more automatic in blind individuals.  Even in sighted people however there is evidence that this relationship between visual and auditory emotional input is in place; sighted individuals experience greater amygdala activation to emotional music when their eyes are closed compared to when they are open (Lerner et al, 2010).

Blind individuals can also sometimes show activity in their visual cortex in response to auditory tasks, including during spatial location tasks (Gougoux et al, 2005) and emotion identification in voices (Klinge, Roder & Buchel, 2010), and there is a relationship between the amount of activation and the length of time someone has been blind. In the words of Robert Zatorre this demonstrates:

“ ..that there is plasticity in the brain. That is, [especially] when we are young we can actually change the way the neurons work, and reorganize brain function to suit our survival needs”

It is impossible to understand the experience of listening to music as a blind person by simply closing your eyes if you are sighted. The brain adapts, learns and grows over the period of time that it is without visual input so that an individual who has been blind for some time activates quite different brain areas when listening to music compared to a sighted person. We know from the behavioural tasks I listed above that this can sometimes, but not always, result in superior auditory skills.

So now the big question: what was it like to listen to 50 minutes of melodic contemporary jazz in the pitch black? It was truly amazing. The lights went down slowly over 7 minutes and at first you could sense the tension in the room. There is a natural apprehension that goes with knowing you are in a room full of strangers that you can’t see! But then once everyone relaxed, this was much easier with eyes closed in my case, the music took over the space. I could no longer locate the exact source of the sound but this soon ceased to matter. My listening became much more global as opposed to local – I wasn’t listening to any one instrument anymore but to the blend. Expectation based on the performers movements was also removed which resulted in some lovely musical surprises and quite a few moments of chills.

The interaction with the performers was, of course, more limited. As one audience member said ‘when the lights came on I suddenly realised that I had missed them’.  So I would not claim that the experience of listening to music in the dark was ‘better’ – just different. Exciting but at the same time very relaxing: A special feeling. And quite simply the best live jazz I have ever heard.

Thank you to the Southbank Centre and of course to Phronesis. I hope to see you guys again very soon.

You can read an interview with Jasper about the gig here.

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A while ago I had a nice email from a media student who was working on her final dissertation project. She was interested in the nature of musical memory and wanted to chat to me for her planned broadcast. It was a very interesting hour. Her first question went straight to the heart of the matter.

Is musical memory special?  My simple answer to this is usually, yes! But here are a few points to back up this assertion:

1)      Music as a ‘super-skill’ – Music stimulates many sensory and motor systems all at once, especially if you have had musical training. But even if you have not, then music still contains complex sound changes, intricate hierarchical patterns, a ‘beat’, and rhythms that trigger multiple brain areas. Memories are more likely to be easy to recall if they have been through a process of elaborate encoding as opposed to simple encoding.

2)      Music is everywhere – The ubiquity of music, in our shops, offices and homes, means that our memory system gets lots of practice at encoding music as part of other experiences. The role of music in many of our important ceremonies and life events (e.g. weddings, birthdays and New Year) means that some of the most emotional times of our lives, and our subsequent memories of them, will have music involved.

3)      Music is personal – Music has no overt referential meaning; unlike language it does not directly refer to the things around us. As an example, try to imagine a piece of music that everyone would agree was about a tree – fairly impossible right?! This concept is what Ian Cross (Cambridge) has termed music’s ‘floating intentionality’. In practice, this means that any one piece of music can be interpreted in different ways by different people. It can be a ‘blank slate’ which we can imbue with whatever meaning we would like. This means that music is inherently flexible, and can be built into memory in a way that is completely unique.

Next question: why is music able to trigger happy memories from so long ago? One important effect to consider is context dependent memory. One of the most famous studies in this area was done by Godden and Baddeley (1975). They designed a real-life study to determine how much influence the context of a situation has on our memory. They tested memories of deep sea divers in two situations; learning a list of words either on the beach or deep under the water (with waterproof lists of course!). They then tried to recall the words in the two situations. And they found a context dependent facilitation effect; if you learn underwater then your recall is better underwater than on land, and the opposite if you learn on the land.

What does all that mean for music? If you learned something in the context of a certain piece of music then your recall is likely to be improved by the presence of that music. And if you were particularly happy at a time in your life, and music was present, then music can help to facilitate that memory of happiness and bring it to your current time.

And then for the final question: Why does musical memory survive so well into old age. At least part of the answer comes from all that I have been describing so far.

1)      Musical memories are strong because they are made up of lots of different parts – sound, sights, movements and so on. This means they can resist the breakdown of neural pathways as we age.

2)      Music is often tied up with very important events in our life so it carries a degree of emotional attachment. Emotion not only helps to code a memory in a more elaborate way (making it stronger) but means that music can be triggered when we are in that emotional state again or indeed trigger that state when we hear it again. This is why music holds so much promise as a form of therapy for people in depressive or anxious states, especially as we age.

3)      We have absolutely unique tastes in music. This means that any musical environment is inherently personal to us. This means that it is very important to personalise music, especially for processes like reminiscence therapy.

So musical memory is a uniquely powerful system that is at the heart of our understanding of who we are as people and what we have been through in our lives, and which can transport us back to our happiest times whenever we need.

Godden, D., & Baddeley, A. (1975). Context dependent memory in two natural environments. British Journal of Psychology 66 (3): 325–331. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1975.tb01468.x.