“I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me – like food or water” – Ray Charles

I am with Ray Charles; music is necessary in my life. I don’t need to hear it all hours of the day but when I need it, I really need it. I sound like an addict and maybe I am. But I am not alone.

We know that music can stimulate us both physically and psychologically; it can match and manipulate our moods and emotions. Studies tell us that this ability to change our state is one  of the main reasons why people choose to listen to music. But is this really the whole story? Why do so many of us feel that we need music?

Did we ever need music?

A good place to start with this question is to consider why we as humans started making music in the first place. The vast majority of us are born able to perceive and play music and some may be lucky enough to possess talent. But to become a professional takes hundreds if not thousands of hours of hard graft. Music is not essential to our survival, unlike food or sex, so why have we chosen to devote our valuable energy and resources to its production and possession?

Here are some theories regarding the evolution of musical sound from early humans. No one theory is completely right or wrong. They all probably have a role to play in why we became a musical animal:

1)     Music as sexual display (a.k.a the ‘Mick Jagger’ hypothesis) – from the writings of Charles Darwin who thought that human music, as in birds and other animals, is an effective display of intelligence and/or strength that can be used to attract a mate.

2)     Music to soothe infants – we still communicate in a musical way with our babies, cooing at them in lullaby speech and singing them to sleep. The type of language we use has been dubbed ‘motherese’ and it has been documented in every human culture examined to date. Music probably once helped forge parent-child bonds and allowed us to teach our helpless young in the time before they could speak.

3)     Music for the group – music was probably a useful tool for social communication between adults and helped strengthen group identities. Not a great deal has changed there; consider the role of music in religious or sporting events. Or the psychology of fan culture.

How much of this matters today?

It appears therefore that our modern music has survived thanks to an evolutionary side track. Music is not directly important for our survival but instead is more like a technological advancement that served so many useful purposes and had so many positive impacts that we kept it close to us.

As time went on we then got more creative with musical sound and adopted it into our leisure activities because we enjoyed it so much. Music meets different demands now compared to those faced by early humans but if you think about it many of our needs and desires remain similar.

Fundamentally, we still make music because we have not come up with a better way to communicate word-free intentions, emotions, and identity; whether that message is intended for our young, our friends (and enemies), our lovers, or our own hearts and minds.

On top of all this we now know that making music can have numerous benefits for the development of our brains and bodies, including crucial skills like language and memory as well as social and emotional development. Talk about a bonus!

 Our flexible friend

After tens of thousands of years music is still able to quickly adapt to meet the ever changing demands of our social and personal worlds. If all music was banned tomorrow would the human race suffer?

(image HARDWAX on Flickr)

Yes, I really believe that it would. Not because we wouldn’t survive but because we have built our modern lives around music and as such it has become an intricate part of us. In the rich tapestry of human life our music is a crucial thread; pulling it out would damage the world we recognise beyond repair.

We have been enjoying some rare sun this weekend in the UK and I have been spending time in London’s parks, as part of my campaign to enjoy the best of the city before I leave in September. I attended a super Birthday party for a good friend’s son in the flower garden of Greenwich park where there was plentiful food, games and laughter. And today I have wandering around some of the fine markets in the south of the city, surrounded by fantastic reggae music.

As I was making my way through the market stalls I found myself bobbing my head and tapping my hands to the infectious Caribbean rhythms. Isn’t it funny how music can sometimes trigger you to move before you even realise?

One of the most powerful elements of music that can stimulate us to move is ‘groove’. My new colleagues at the Lucerne School of Music study the phenomenon – why does ‘groove’ make us move – so I am looking forward to learning more about the effect in the near future.

For now I am reading up on a fascinating new article on groove by Jan Stupacher and colleagues  from several of the top German music psychology labs (full reference at the end of this blog). These clever researchers have shown that our brain’s motor system is triggered by the presence of groove in music and that subsequent cortical excitability is higher in musicians.

FIrst question, what is groove? The most common definition I can find is ‘that aspect of music that makes us want to move’ – that does not tell us much about the actual nature of the music does it?!  In my book I have said:

“The beat, the thing we tap along to in a great track – the pulse of music – is not something that necessarily needs to be physically present (audible).  Musicians do not need to emphasise the pulse of music constantly or even include a note on every ‘beat’ within music. Non-audible beat is referred to as ‘implied’; it is something we perceive out of the sound, like the way we extract a sense of depth in a flat canvas or photograph.

A great example of the use of implied beat exists in ‘groove’ –based music where the beat emerges from a complex, multilayered and often syncopated pattern of rhythms and instrumentation. Groove music is present across a range of genres including funk, soul, hiphop, drum’n bass, reggae, jazz and world music”.

Groove is primarily shaped by percussion instruments, or those that produce lower frequencies, and involves setting up a predictable patterns of beats as well as subtle micro-variations to maintain a level of interest in the listener. Most groove music has a peak tempo of around 120bpm; a time scale that matches our preferred body movements such as tapping or dance.

We have known for some time that listening to music is associated with activity in the brain’s motor system, even when the listener is completely still. But no-one until now has looked at whether the motor response activity of the brain can be used as a marker for the presence of more or less groove.

An example of the kind of TMS/EMG system used

In the present paper the researchers used two brain stimulation techniques. Firstly,TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) was employed over the primary motor cortex to trigger muscle activity in the arm; then EMG (electromyography) was applied to measure the extent of the resulting response. The researchers timed their TMS pulses to on- or off- beat in music to see whether the presence of the beat influenced motor excitability.

The researchers measured responses in matched high (Superstition), low (Cheeseburger in Paradise) and no groove music (spectral noise)

The researchers tested musicians and non-musicians, and both groups rated the groove in a very similar way; higher ratings for the high compared to low groove music.

What about the motor evoked potentials (MEPs), those measurements of brain response? The MEPs were significantly modulated by the high groove music and but not the low groove and no groove music (these last two were not different overall). This result suggests that high groove really does engage our brain’s motor system.

The musicians were particularly responsive to the TMS pulses that were ‘on-beat’ suggesting that their auditory motor system is more highly tuned to strong groove beats as compared to people who have had little musical training.

I would love to know in the future how this result is modulated by differing amounts of musical listening, musical activity (such as dancing) or liking for groove-based genres. Can you, and if so how exactly how would you, train the brain to respond to ‘groove’?

Interestingly the non-musicians in this study showed a high amount of EMG activity in advance of the TMS pulses – the researchers put this down to them actively trying to suppress movements, as they were instructed, in the presence of high groove. Sometimes it can be a struggle to get the brain not to move to a groove!

This new study marks another great piece of evidence that groove in music really can excite the motor areas of our  brain, the neural signature of that irresistible urge to bob your head and tap your foot; moreover, we see here for the first time that degree of groove we feel can modulate that brain response, especially in musicians. Now, go play Superstition at a decent volume (safe, of course) and I dare you to resist the groove!

Reference

Stupacher, J. et al. (2013) Musical groove modulates motor cortex excitability: A TMS investigation. Brain and Cognition, 82, 127-136.

Apologies for my absence over the last few weeks. Life has been rather hectic so far this year and after my TED talk I took a little time to rest my addled mind. One Saturday a couple of weeks ago I walked for about 6 hours along the Thames path with my partner, stopping off at the occasional pub when the shower clouds floated overhead. What a lovely day and a keen reminder that it is a good thing to rest the mind completely once in a while.

Speaking of my TED talk, the edit is now on YouTube so you are free to have a watch if you like. My talk is about the power of musical memory and is told through three tales; the star, the survivor and the miscreant!

Vicky’s Music and Memory TEDMED talk 2013

If you enjoy it then I would love it if you could pass it on. I can’t bear to watch it myself but friends of mine have said it has been useful material for lectures on memory. It is great to think that after all the stress leading up to that day, the final output may prove helpful for students. I hope you like it.

I also want to make a promise that I will return to normal blogging in just a few more weeks. I am currently completing my first book, a pop science journey through the wonderful world of music psychology. I have been writing the book for a year now (good bye weekends!) and it is nearly complete. You, dear reader, will be the first to know when it is released, should be in early 2014.

Lucerne – beautiful!

In other news, I will be moving in September of this year. This is another reason why my life since the end of last year has been a little hectic! I have been offered a really unique opportunity to work for 10 months in a music performance research centre in Lucerne, Switzerland. The fantastic group at the Hochshule Luzern will be making room for me in their world and I can’t wait to start exploring some new areas of research (and returning to some old loves – musical memory, here I come!!)

After I leave Lucerne I will be moving to the fantastic Music, Mind and Machine group at the University of Sheffield. 

Although I can’t leave you with any detailed breakdown of the latest research today I thought I would give you some nice links to some really interesting new studies. As usual I try to post only “Open Access” materials so there are no barriers to learning. Happy browsing.

Music training, cognition, and personality by Corrigall KA, Schellenberg EG, Misura NM - We asked whether individual differences in cognition and personality predict who takes music lessons and for how long.

Repetition and emotive communication in music versus speech by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis - If repetition is fundamental to emotional responses to music, and repetition is a key distinguisher between the domains of music and speech, then close examination of the phenomenon of repetition might help clarify the ways that music elicits emotion differently than speech.

Sad Music Induces Pleasant Emotion by Al Kawakami, Kiyoshi Furukawa, Kentaro Katahira and Kazuo Okanoya – Results revealed that the sad music was perceived to be tragic, whereas the actual experiences of the participants listening to the sad music induced them to feel more romantic, more blithe, and less tragic emotions than they actually perceived with respect to the same music. 

As a child I decided that I had inherited my grandma’s wonderful memory for music.

I found that I could easily learn music and lyrics, and went about amassing a mental library of the sounds that I liked, including Nat King Cole’s songs, Beethoven’s symphonies, and just about every note that the Beatles ever played. All this I managed just by listening.

It was not long before I realised that my grandma and I were not alone. In my school common room friends would often gather to listen to music, quietly singing or acting out a teenage rock fantasy on an imaginary drum kit. Suddenly, knowing all the words to ‘American Pie’ was not so impressive. It seemed everyone had a pretty impressive memory for music.

Today, I am a scientist who studies musical memory. One of my favourite cases of astonishing musical memory is that of the brilliant Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini.

The legend goes that he knew every note by heart of around 250 symphonies, 100 operas and volumes of instrumental works and songs.

Extreme memory such as this is not limited to music. Every year people complete in the World Memory Championships having trained for hours to remember packs of cards or lists of random digits. And let’s not forget the everyday memory experts; waiters who take orders for a table of 20 without writing anything down or cooks with a hundred recipes in their mental store cupboard.

Memory expertise is a skill that requires practise. Techniques for building expert memory have been recounted in ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’ by Joshua Foer. They include creating structure within new information, grouping it more effectively and thereby increasing the amount that may be retained. Another method is to use existing knowledge to ground new facts within memory.

In one famous scientific case, an undergraduate known as S.F was able to boost his digit recall from a very average 7 to an astonishing total of 80. It took him months of practice but eventually he learned how to structure and group numbers more effectively using his knowledge of running times.

In a similar way musicians like Toscanini put in a great deal of effort to encode volumes of music for performance from memory, by creating structural boundaries within scores and using their knowledge of scales, cadences and phrases to group swathes of notes together in the mind.

To me, that seems like a lot of work. My grandma and I have not put in anywhere near that effort to remember our music. So how do the rest of us build up such an amazing musical store?

Once again, the secret is in memory techniques but in the case of music much the work is done for us. S.F had to learn how to build structures within random strings of digits; music comes with its own intricate patterns of melody, rhythm and harmony. These built-in structures provide a perfect recipe for storage over time with minimal effort from the listener.

Furthermore, virtually all new music from our own culture builds on aspects of our existing knowledge of music that we have built up over a lifetime of listening.

Scientists have found that our memory for brand new music is not actually very good but over repeated exposures the trace becomes detailed, refined and strengthens such that many people can reproduce the exact pitches of their favourite songs, even if they have had no musical training.

Musical memory is also a strong survivor. There are many cases of amnesia, dementia or head injury where a person suffers extensive memory damage but is still able to recall music. There are also touching cases where music can provide a communication portal for memories that seem otherwise lost.

Our musical memories tell our life stories. My grandma’s musical mind pops tell of her childhood experiences in 1930s Cornwall while mine speak to an incurable crush on John Lennon. With minimal effort music embeds itself in our minds and provides a pathway to ideas, thoughts and experiences. The new challenges for scientific research will be to learn how to target and harness the power of music to aid in memory loss as well as help us meet everyday memory challenges.

This Sunday (21st April) I will be giving a talk about musical memory at the TEDMED Imperial Event. Wish me luck!

I have been super busy of late – the world of earworms keeps me occupied but I have also been refreshing my knowledge of music memory research for a number of projects including a chapter in my book, a TEDMED talk that I will give in April, and a chapter for another volume that I am writing with one of the lovely PhD students in our lab, Georgina.

Thanks to my music memory research alerts I came across a recent paper published in PLoS ONE regarding musical imagery.  Imagery and memory are very closely related in psychology research terms, since imagery is essential for many memory processes.

Research into musical imagery is relatively scarce – this situation can mostly be blamed on the difficulty of exploring imagery itself. How can we get an accurate idea of what is going on inside someone’s head?

The answer to this question has often been to rely on indirect indications of mental activity. So, for example,  a priming task.

One study that used priming asked people to imagine tones at a soft or loud volume and then presented them with a second real tone that either matched the imagined tone for loudness or not. If people could imagine loudness then their responses to the second real tone should be faster if the imagined tone, the prime, matched the loudness of the real tone.

This early study found no evidence that people’s responses were primed by imagery, suggesting that we may not reliably be able to represent loudness in imagery. But a valid criticism of the study was that it used only single tones – maybe imagining loudness on a single sound is an odd thing to do? Maybe we are better at imaging how loudness changes, dynamically, over real pieces of music. 

This hypothesis was the basis of the new paper by Laura Bishop and colleagues, and published a few weeks ago in PLoS ONE (hurray for free access!!) - click on this link to see the paper

Profile of the kind produced by continuous response to music

The authors employed a different method to measure imagery, one previously reported by Professor Andrea Halpern. In the “continuous response method” participants imagine music and at the same time give dynamic, second by second feedback on how their imagery is changing, using a manual response known as a ‘slider’.

In Professor Halpern’s study people used a slider to track the emotions in imagined music. Halpern then compared the imagined profiles people produced to profiles that they created when listening to the same music for real. She found remarkable consistency between the two.

This evidence supports the idea that people are able to imagine music well enough to sense changing emotions, and that what they imagine in this sense is pretty similar to hearing real music.

In the new study, Bishop and her colleagues used the slider technique to indicate changes in loudness in both imagined and real music. They  tested nonmusicians, novices and expert musicians. The researchers reported that it was difficult to find pieces that people knew well enough and in the end they only had reliable data for two that they trialled; Habanera (Bizet) and Blue Danube (Strauss).

By tabitum

Each participant listened to the two tracks twice a day, every day, for a week in advance of the study. When they came to the lab they were asked to first imagine the piece from start to finish and to use the manual slider to indicate when changes occurred in the loudness of their image.

If the imagery became louder then they moved the slider away from them and if it became quieter then they edged it closer to themselves. They then lapped loudness while listening to each piece.

RESULTS: The authors report a high degree of similarity in the loudness profiles people created when imagining music as compared to profiles that they created when they listened to the same music for real.

The musical experts, and to a lesser extent the novices, produced more accurately matched profiles (imagined and listening) compared to non-musicians, a finding which indicates that the ability to imagine changes in loudness may improve with increasing musical expertise.

One point to note is that there was no independent measure of music listening habits taken in the present experiment (this factor was included alongside the one total measure of musical training and other formal music skills) so we do not yet understand clearly how everyday musical behaviours impact on imagery of this kind.

The task of imagining these two classical pieces was very hard for people. The authors had to exclude 57% of the data from the Blue Danube trials and  53% for Habanera. No doubt imagining music over several minutes is very tricky and perhaps in the future studies could benefit from using shorter pieces – or people’s favourite pieces of music, thereby reducing the impact on memory demands.

The present study does, however, neatly demonstrate how the slider technique can be used to track the dynamic characteristics of musical imagery and, in this case, shows that aspects of changing loudness are likely to be maintained when we imagine music in our minds. 

Paper: Bishop L, Bailes F, & Dean RT (2013) Musical Expertise and the Ability to Imagine Loudness. PLoS ONE 8(2): e56052. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0056052

I have been enjoying some time in the Twitter-scape recently, which is one way to hear about new, hot-off-the-press papers in music psychology. One fellow music psychologist on Twitter is Professor Tuomas Eerola (@tuomas_ee) who is an author on a new paper looking at emotional communication in music, which I will share with you today.

Big thanks to Tuomas for sending me a copy last night

Is the emotion we perceive and/or feel in response to music a result of universal reactions to sound or our own cultural exposure over a lifetime. I have written about one small aspect of this debate, the major/minor vs. happy/sad effect, this week in NME. But happy vs. sad is just one angle within a myriad of musical emotions. Can we ever hope to understand what is universal and what is culturally driven about musical emotion?

Our response to music is never, of course, going to be wholly one or the other. We all have similar auditory equipment and perceptual systems so it is only logical to assume that some reactions to musical sound are going to be the same across cultures. The basics of pitch organisation in music seem to be mapped for the properties of our auditory systems, which is either a remarkable coincidence or evidence that our choices we make when we create music follow our understanding of what we are capable of hearing.

Then again, culture is bound to have an influence, as it does in every human intellectual endeavour or technological development be it language, art or music. The authors of the present paper, headed by Petri Laukka, cite a quotation from Ian Cross to make the point that “music takes as many forms as culture” 

Let us start therefore with the viewpoint that our emotional performances of and reactions to music are going to be a mix of universal and cultural principles. The next, and far more complex question, is:

Which aspects of musical emotion expression are common and which differ depending on our musical experiences? Put another way, when do our emotional reactions show an in-group advantage and when do they not? 

Petri Laukka and his team have published an ambitious study of emotional communication in music from the perspective of the performer and the listener. Today I am going to talk about the results from their listeners. I hope next week to go into the results about emotional expressions in performers from different cultures.

THE STIMULI: Musicians from three different musical traditions (Swedish folk music, Hindustani classical music, and Japanese traditional music; 3 musicians each) performed short pieces of music (30 seconds – 1 minutes) to express different emotions. The authors also recorded 3 musicians performing Western classical music. This condition was designed to act as a control, meaning that the researchers expected everyone would react in a similar way to this kind of music due to its more mass exposure.

The musicians were asked to convey an amazing 11 different emotions in the one piece that they selected as representative of their genre: affection, anger, fear, happiness, humour, longing, peacefulness, sadness, solemnity, spirituality, and neutral. The selection was made based on theories of musical expressivity. In the end the researchers recorded 132 musical stimuli (12 musicians across 11 emotions).  I think they deserve a medal just for the stimuli creation!

THE TEST: Listeners were recruited in each of the three different represented countries; Sweden, India and Japan. Each listener was presented with a list of the 11 emotions and asked to chose which one was best represented by each of the 132 musical excerpts. Each person also had to rate their familiarity with all 4 musical traditions to make sure that the manipulation of cultural familiarity was valid. Each session in total took 1-1.5 hours. Another medal to this group for data collection!

RESULTS: As expected, listeners rated Western classical music as more familiar than the other 2 unfamiliar cultures. Only the Indian group rated their music as more familiar than Western classical. It is therefore no surprise that overall accuracy was higher in the Western classical music condition, a result which confirms that this musical form is widespread and not a great candidate for looking at specific cultural reactions (unless you can insure that someone has never heard it before).

In terms of the emotions, the best recognised were (in order, all within a small margin of each other) anger, fear, happiness, humour, and sadness.  Solemnity and spirituality were the most poorly recognised overall.

There were many interesting interactions in the data such as Swedish listeners showed higher recognition rates for fear and longing. Also, Indian music was particularly effective for conveying anger and sadness. Other examples can be found in the paper.

The main result of interest is whether there was a cultural in-group advantage for recognising emotion in music; yes, there was a small overall advantage.

However, there are complicated undercurrents, such that the Japanese listeners, for example, who did not show an in-group advantage and were in fact better with Western music than their own. Here we see the complexities of assuming that people have equal exposure to their cultures musical form just because they come from the country and provide one rating of their subjective familiarity.  Perhaps estimates of time spent actually listening to different musical forms would be helpful in the future?

The second main result of interest is whether there was any evidence for universal perception of emotion in music; yes, listeners were able to deduce the emotional intentions of musicians performing music from outside their culture at above chance levels. 

Happy vocalisations with my other half

The authors suggest that this second finding supports the theory that there are universals in the way we express emotion in music across different cultures, and that these arise principally from overlaps between expression in our emotional vocalisations and musical performances.

Overall, the authors did an incredible job with this cross cultural study which must have been a very long time in the making.

Tune in next week for the results of the analysis regarding the universals in the emotional performance of music across cultures.

Paper: Laukka, P., Eerola, T., Thingujam, N. S., Yamasaki, T., & Beller, G. (2013, February 11). Universal and Culture-Specific Factors in the Recognition and Performance of Musical Affect Expressions. Emotion. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0031388

This week I am trying to do some testing but it is going very slowly as people are frequently not turning up for sessions (grrrr). One advantage of this is that I have some extra reading time and thanks to this I came across a new paper that is all about the issue of whether there is a ‘sensitive period’ for musical training.

Does earlier musical training have greater effects on the brain and behaviour? Does that explain why most really amazing musicians, such as Lang Lang and Oscar Peterson, started training when they were very small? Their superior ability could of course be down to the fact that they have just been playing for longer. Does an early start really make a difference?

It seems a lot harder to start musical training as an adult as compared to as a young child. I, for example, tried to teach myself clarinet as an adult and it was a lot harder than when I taught myself to play flute at the age of 12, which was in turn harder than learning the guitar, which I started playing when I was 6. The most common explanation for this is that the brain is more malleable when we are children and just ‘learns faster’ than the adult brain – our mind at this age is more ‘sensitive’ to training.

There is evidence for sensitive periods in other domains such as second language learning and cortical reorganization after early blindness.

Studies of sensitive periods use cross sectional studies, where you compare a population who started training young vs. one who started training later in life.  Evidence already gathered using this technique suggests that musicians who begin earlier show differences in some brain structures; their anterior corpus callosum tends to be larger and there tends to be more extensive representation of motor movements in the cortex. However, no previous study has compensated for the problem that we mentioned right at the start; musicians who start early typically have simply MORE training under their belts – might this explain the differences we find?

A new study by Christopher Steele and colleagues has answered this criticism by pairing two groups of highly trained musicians, one early trainers (ET; began training before the age of 7) and one later trainers (LT; began training after 7). Both groups had around 16 years of experience, meaning of course that the early training group were younger (about 23 vs. 28). There was also a matched group of controls who had minimal musical training experience.

The groups performed a temporal motor sequencing task where they had to tap in synchrony with a ten-note rhythm that was represented visually. They did this task over two consecutive days so the researchers could get a learning score. The researchers then scanned using Diffusion Tensor Imagining (DTI) to identify which white matter regions might differ between the groups.

Results: All 3 groups improved on the tapping task over time. The ETs performed the task better than the LTs, a result which is supported by previous research into synchronisation ability. The DTI data was analysed by looking for unique white matter activation in the ETs that was not present in the LTs or controls. The researchers highlighted a large difference in the posterior midbody/isthmus of the Corpus Callosum.

Once again, the corpus callosum is a region where early musical training makes a difference. The researcher showed that the volume of this area correlated with how long an individual had been training; the earlier people started the larger the difference.

Taken together the evidence suggests that early musical training is associated with larger brain changes and with improved performance on a musical synchronisation test. The authors argue that this data provide evidence for the existence of a sensitive period for musical training – no matter how many years people train, you will find larger differences in this particular brain region in those who begin earlier.

What is the corpus callosum and what does it do for a musician, I hear you cry! The corpus callosum (latin for ‘tough body’) is essentially a thick band of nerve fibres right in the middle of the brain that helps to hold the right and left cerebral hemispheres together. It is theorised that the CC allows ‘cross talk’ between the brains two hemispheres.

Particularly important for music is the CC’s potential role in bimanual coordination, very important if you need both hands to play an instrument (most do to some degree). It contains fibres that connect to the sensory motor system and, crucially, undergoes a lot of development between the ages of 6-8.

From this study we can conclude that early musical training (before age 7) has a special impact on the brain which could potentially facilitate musical ability.  However, this study does not say that the ETs are better musicians overall. There is no measure of actual musical performance in the study, other than a quite abstract tapping task.

We must be very careful not to assume that someone who wishes to begin musical training later in life can’t achieve an impressive level of musicality. There are many examples of wonderful musicians who began training as older children or even adults. Louis Armstrong reportedly did not start learning trumpet until his early teens and Andrea Bocelli didn’t start singing opera seriously until the age of 34.

It is important to understand ‘sensitive periods’ but not to be ruled by them. Our brains are capable of music making at any age. 

Paper: Early Musical Training and White-Matter Plasticity in the Corpus Callosum: Evidence for a Sensitive Period by Christopher J. Steele, Jennifer A. Bailey, Robert J. Zatorre, and Virginia B. Penhune. Journal of Neuroscience (2013). 

One of the first things I picked up this week was a review article by Robert (Bob) Slevc on the shared and distinct processing mechanism for language and music. The review was so good I added it to my lecture on this subject and replaced my previous ‘essential reading’ for this class. This article is a highly accessible read so  perfect for the students.

I thought as well I would write a bit here about the main points covered. This will have the benefit of cementing the arguments in my mind and give you guys an idea of the contents. I certainly recommend that you read the original as well.

The article summarizes evidence for both overlap and distinct processing between language and music in three key areas: sound, structure and meaning. 

Sound: The most obvious similarity is language and music are both complex human sound systems. Therefore, it makes sense that there is an overlap in processing during the early stages of the auditory system.  At some point later joint the brain pathways of the two sounds appear to diverge in the brain, with speech processing relying more on structures in the left hemisphere and music on the right.

One recent argument made by Robert Zatorre is that this split does not reflect specialization per se but rather shows off the specialist subjects of each hemisphere with the left being naturally better with rapid temporal processing (needed more of the time for speech) and the right preferring spectral discrimination (relatively more important in music). According to this view the hemispheres might just be biased towards particular characteristics of sound rather than specialized for language and music.

At the moment I like this argument as it leaves room for explaining how we process other types of sounds that we must process but that tend to get ignored in a comparison of music and language. What about animal or environmental noises, which we must have been hearing long before we invented speech or song?

Although there is divergent processing of language and music at higher stages in the brain this does not mean there can’t be overlap here too. Bob discusses the evidence for music to language (e.g. musicians better at verbal tasks) and language to music transfer effects (e.g. speakers of tone language show some music related advantages such as higher rate of absolute pitch and more accurate memory for melody).

I am naturally biased but my top candidate for a shared process that links verbal and musical sounds is working memory. I spent years exploring recall of musical and linguistic sequences and I have seen how, especially in musicians, the two codes within memory can mesh, bind, and support each other. What I would like to better understand is the extent to which this is automatic/subconscious or whether it is a result of conscious strategies that facilitate music/language dual processing.

Structure: Language and music both have their own type of syntax or grammar. In order for a sentence or a melody to ‘make sense’ it needs to follow certain rules, otherwise it sounds like a messy jumble of words/notes.

Ani Patel hypothesised that although these rule systems differ, their integration probably demands a similar processing system. In other words similar processes are probably involved in implementing known grammar rules, online, as new notes/words arrive in order to make sense of the evolving melody/message. This shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis has received widespread support from both brain and behaviour studies, which are expertly outlined in the review.

This research represents an important step forward in understanding how the brain shares resources across the two sound systems; within a complex system like the brain as well as in the current world financial system, economy is important.  The next step will be to work out which processes are really being shared and how – again, my vote goes for exploring working memory!

The review also covers overlaps in rhythmic structure. Rhythm also exhibits rich hierarchical structure and I would not be surprised if the processing systems that were involved in deciphering and predicting complex rhythms also sub-served elements of linguistic processing.

We see commonalities in the rhythms of some languages and their native music (e.g. French and English) and native language can impact on how people hear rhythms. This field is really in its infancy however and more causation work is needed.

Meaning:  Finally Bob summarizes  research into the similarities between meaning in music and language. This field has been brought to the fore recently following the publication of Stefan Koelsch’s book ’Brain and Music’ which defines two categories of musical meaning that share characteristics with language; extramusical meaning (referring to something in the world; in music this is seen in tone painting and leitmotifs) and musicogenic meaning (emotional communication).

The most important thing I take from this review is that we are moving beyond the old arguments of modularity and into the promising are of exploring where, how and why pockets of music/language processing overlap exist. Narrowing these down will provide great deal of hope for understanding how music can aid verbal processing through life from learning through to preserving function when faced with illness, injury or age related decline.

Thanks to Bob for this article. Anyone who would like a copy can contact him on slevc- at – umd.edu. Slevc, L.R. (2012). Language and music: Sound, structure, and meaning. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3, 483-492. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1186

I would like to wish you all a very Happy Holiday and a prosperous New Year. I will be heading off soon to spend time with my families both in the UK and Spain so this will be my last blog of 2012. Thank you all for your kind comments and for spending time on my blog over the past year. I hope to see you back again in 2013!

As part of my last blog it is my pleasure to introduce you to Diana Hereld, a fellow blogger who recently interviewed me for a Hypebot, a music technology industry online magazine. Diana asked some great questions about  music psychology and she was kind enough to allow me to reprint her article here for you to read.

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The psychological conversation surrounding music has boomed. In a few short years, the studies of music therapy and the applied neuroscience of music have hugely invaded the mainstream — the question is, why?

As many publications have noted, the initiative that music may be used in rehabilitation has been around for a century or more. What then has catalyzed the influx of media coverage in the last few years? One reason may simply be that as the success of these techniques become popularized via persons in the public eye, many of us are beginning to understand that music may be used for far more than we had ever imagined.

It was less than a year ago that NPR released the news story on the effectiveness and use of singing therapy on stroke patients. You may recall the Gabrielle Giffords story with regard to her suffering major brain trauma and later a surprising recovery. It is through the sharing of success stories such as this via the media that the infusion of music, psychology, and neuroscience are coming to light.

Medical resilience, however, is only one facet of this field. In addition to all of the rehabilitative functions music is being found to support, there exist many others. For the music industry, it may prove profitable to look toward music psychology as a potential market sector. Companies such as Prescriptive Music develop “branded-music” programming which they believe can increase sales.

Marketing through music is a relatively new advertising theme. That being said, experts in neuroscience and emotion studies are being called upon more and more as sales consultants in a variety of venues including hotels, restaurants, and major retailers. Previous studies have shown increases in sales in resultants when the right music is carefully selected; one test conducted by marketing professor Ronald E. Milliman exhibited an 11.6% sales increase when up-tempo music was played during the lunch hour.

What does this mean for the music industry? Is it possible that via the study of our decision making, analysts will be able to discern the types of music that affect consumer behavior in a wide variety of markets? Sidewinder.fm has asked Dr. Victoria Williamson, a music psychology lecturer and course co-director on the “Music, Mind, and Brain” program at Goldsmiths, University of London, for her take on these questions.

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Fifty years ago, people might appear at a loss if you mentioned “music psychology,” or simply the act of synthesizing music and neuroscience, or music and psychology. What exactly is this field, and how has it become a mainstream topic in recent years?

Dr. Victoria Williamson: People are still often a little lost when you mention music and psychology/neuroscience together although it is of course more well-known now than it was fifty years ago. I come from a psychological interest and I wrote an article called “Thank You for the Music” a few years ago that outlined the kind of things that are studied in this field and why. Essentially, music is a universal human activity whether we chose to play or to listen. Therefore, as a psychologist, music is my chosen tool for learning more about the human mind and behavior. Studying the way we perceive, process, generate, and respond to music can therefore tell us something unique about what it means to be human.

What are some of the field’s most impacting accomplishments?

Dr. Victoria Williamson: Tricky one. I like to think that using music in psychological paradigms has taught us a great deal about how we learn both as babies and adults, how our memories work (or don’t work sometimes!) and how our emotions can impact on cognition. Using music in brain imaging has revealed a lot about the activity of the mind both when we are listening to sounds and when we are simply thinking about them. And there are a number of cases, such as with autism, where studying music psychology has given us new insights into different people’s worlds. The new horizon for music psychology, which is just beginning to be touched upon, is the power of music to help us deal with both everyday and extraordinary life situations.

Along with all of the neurological and therapeutic implications of the field, knowledge is become wider spread of the power of music to influence the minds and behavior of consumers. These behaviors can obviously affect their purchasing decisions, inside and outside of the music industry. Who is driving this research? Is there market incentive from large corporations?

Dr. Victoria Williamson: I can only answer for the UK, but this is actually a relatively small field of research with few published papers. It is hard to do genuine consumer research because it requires long-term and effective collaboration between academia and industry, which can be tricky to manage from both sides. The situation may change in the future but in most cases commercial interests are happy to learn from the music psychology that has been conducted in more controlled conditions and extrapolate the findings to their own environments.

One important point I want to make here is that when you talk about the influence of music it should be clear that there is no evidence that I know of that music can make people want to do something they do not want to do. Music has a subtle influence that works in combination with all the other factors in the environment. It is no magic bullet.

As a leading researcher in the field, what are some of the long-term goals this field hopes to accomplish? Do you think music psychology has the potential to become a major sector in the music industry?

Dr. Victoria Williamson: My long term aim is to learn more about the human mind and behavior by studying how we interact with music. From this level of understanding will come the tools for improved communication, wellbeing, and happiness. I think the music industry could learn a lot from interacting with music psychologists and of course vice versa.

A lot of music psychologists (including me) know very little about the process by which music is produced as a commercial product and it would be really interesting to know more about how decisions are made, artists are chosen, and end products compiled. I think the potential is there for many exciting collaborations that will reveal more about how and why we are such a musical animal

Diana Hereld blogs here: www.asthespiritwanes.wordpress.com

Creativity is an areas that we can find quite hard to teach on the Music, Mind and Brain masters, compared to other more well trodden areas of research. In comparison to, for example, studies of music and language or musical emotion there is hardly any research on the creative processes behind musical composition and performance.

Creativity is one of those ephemeral concepts that can be quite hard to capture, like mental imagery. I always thought that getting the creative process into a scanner might be a fun task to try but then getting instrumentalists to play in a scanner is fraught with problems. Singing of course, is possible. And who is best at spontaneous lyrical improvisation? Rappers of course!

A new study out in Nature has reported a fascinating experiment where 12 freestyle rap artists (5-18 years of professional experience) were asked to rap memorized lyrics on an 8-bar instrumental track (conventional condition) or to perform lyrics that were improvised spontaneously, on the same instrumental track (improvised condition). Both these conditions took place in an fMRI scanner and the authors reported a pattern of unique activations that were associated with improvisation but which that they argue could provide a signature for creativity in general.  

For those who are interested in the methods, the authors utilized spatial independent component analysis (sICA) methods recently developed in their laboratory to effectively remove imaging artifacts associated with connected speech or song, making it possible to study improvised rap using fMRI for the first time.

Consistent with a previous study of melodic improvisation the authors reported ‘a dissociated pattern of activity within the prefrontal cortex: increases in activity throughout the MPFC, extending from the frontal pole to the border of the pre-SMA (more pronounced in the left hemisphere), and simultaneous decreases in the DLPFC, from its orbital to superior regions’ (more pronounced in the right hemisphere).

It should be noted that although the left hemisphere activations would be expected in a linguistic task, the activations noted here were associated uniquely with the improvised and not the conventional condition so can not be ascribed to normal language processing per se, rather unique aspects of the improvisation task.

The authors state that “This pattern – activation of medial and deactivation of dorsolateral cortices – may provide a context in which self-generated action is freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control, facilitating the generation of novel ideas.”

In addition, enhanced activity observed in the caudate may support rapid online sequencing of ongoing behaviors in the improvised as opposed to the conventional condition.

The authors then carried out a connectivity analysis to work out how the patterns of activation and deactivation that they observed in the brain may be related to each other. The connectivity results revealed strong positive correlations between activity in a primary seed region in the MPFC and inferior frontal and cortical premotor areas.

These regions were themselves positively correlated with activity in amygdala which itself was strongly coupled to an extended network that included the right IFG, and IPL and anterior insula in both left and right hemispheres. “The connectivity analyses therefore suggested the emergence of a more widespread, large-scale network that might play a role in lyrical improvisation”.

Overall, the results reveal an extensive network that the authors argue is implicated in the initial stages of lyrical improvisation, rooted in prefrontal (in particular areas involved in executive control) and premotor areas but also extending into motivational and emotional areas. Interestingly the authors suggest that “…as a whole, this entire network is more effectively coupled during spontaneous creative behaviour – perhaps facilitating what has been described as a psychological ‘flow’ state“.

Article: Siyuan Liu, Ho Ming Chow, Yisheng Xu, Michael G. Erkkinen, Katherine E. Swett, Michael W. Eagle, Daniel A. Rizik-Baer & Allen R. Braun (2012) Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap. Nature Scientific Reports