Summary: While most people prefer to drift off to sleep listening to quieter and slower songs, some feel more relaxed when listening to familiar, high-energy popular music.
Source: PLOS
A new study has identified several characteristics typical of music associated with sleep, such as being quieter and slower than other music.
However, popular sleep music playlists on Spotify also include faster, louder, and more energetic tracks. Rebecca Jane Scarratt of Aarhus University, Denmark, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 18, 2023.
Many people say that they listen to music to help them fall asleep, raising the question of whether music chosen for this purpose shares certain universal characteristics. However, research on the characteristics of sleep music is limited, and prior studies have tended to be relatively small.
To better understand the characteristics of sleep music, Scarratt and colleagues analyzed 225,626 tracks from 985 playlists on Spotify that are associated with sleep. They used Spotify’s API to compare the audio features of the sleep tracks to audio features of music from a dataset representing music in general.
This analysis showed that sleep music tends to be quieter and slower than other music. It also more often lacks lyrics and more often features acoustic instruments. However, despite these trends, the researchers found considerable diversity in the musical features of sleep music, identifying six distinct sub-categories.
Three of the sub-categories, including ambient music, align with the typical characteristics identified for sleep music.
However, music in the other three subcategories was louder and had a higher degree of energy than average sleep music. These tracks included several popular songs, including “Dynamite” by the band BTS, and “lovely (with Khalid)” by Billie Eilish and Khalid.
The authors speculate that, despite their higher energy, popular songs could potentially aid relaxation and sleep for some people through their familiarity. However, more research will be needed to explore this possibility and identify the various reasons different people choose different music for sleeping.
Many people say that they listen to music to help them fall asleep, raising the question of whether music chosen for this purpose shares certain universal characteristics.
Overall, this study suggests that there is no “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to the music people choose for sleep. The findings could help inform future development of music-based strategies to help people sleep.
The authors add: “In this study, we investigated the characteristics of music used for sleep and found that even though sleep music in general is softer, slower, instrumental and more often played on acoustic instruments than other music, the music people use for sleep displays a large variation including music characterized by high energy and tempo.
“The study can both inform the clinical use of music and advance our understanding of how music is used to regulate human behavior in everyday life.”
Summary: Listening to music from their youth or songs with a strong emotional connection allows those with dementia to enhance social engagement and reduces neuropsychological symptoms of dementia such as anxiety, depression, and aggression. Musical intervention also sparks an emotional connection between the patient and their caregivers.
Source: Northwestern University
People with dementia often lose their ability to communicate verbally with loved ones in later stages of the disease. But a Northwestern Medicine study, in collaboration with Institute for Therapy through the Arts (ITA), shows how that gap can be bridged with a new music intervention.
In the intervention — developed at ITA and called “Musical Bridges to Memory” — a live ensemble plays music from a patient’s youth such as songs from the musicals “Oklahoma” or “The Sound of Music.” This creates an emotional connection between a patient and their caregiver by allowing them to interact with the music together via singing, dancing and playing simple instruments, the study authors said.
The program also enhanced patients’ social engagement and reduced neuropsychiatric symptoms such as agitation, anxiety and depression in both patients and caregivers.
More than 6 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer’s disease.
The study is unusual because it targeted patients with dementia and their caregivers, said lead study author Dr. Borna Bonakdarpour. Most prior studies using music for dementia patients have focused only on the patients.
“Patients were able to connect with partners through music, a connection that was not available to them verbally,” said Bonakdarpour, an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine neurologist. “The family and friends of people with dementia also are affected by it. It’s painful for them when they can’t connect with a loved one. When language is no longer possible, music gives them a bridge to each other.”
The study was published Aug. 25 in Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders.
Musical memory, processing not as affected by Alzheimer’s
Music memories often remain in the brain even as language and other memories disappear in dementia, Bonakdarpour said. This is because regions of the brain that are involved in musical memory and processing (e.g., the cerebellum) are not as affected by Alzheimer’s or dementia until much later in the disease course. Thus, patients can retain the ability to dance and sing long after their ability to talk has diminished.
How the study worked
In the study, individuals with dementia — residents of Silverado Memory Care (in a suburb of Chicago) — and their care partners were recorded on video conversing and interacting for 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after the intervention. Before playing the music, each patient/caregiver pair had training on how to interact more effectively during the music.
During the 45-minute musical intervention, an ensemble of chamber musicians and a singer performed songs that appealed to the patients from their younger days. The patients and their caregivers received simple instruments such as tambourines and shakers to accompany the music. Specially trained music therapists interacted with patients during performances, getting them to beat on drums, sing and dance.
Music memories remain in brain after patients lose language and other memories.
A group conversation followed the music. Patients were more socially engaged as evidenced by more eye contact, less distraction, less agitation and an elevated mood. In comparison, the control group, which did not receive the intervention and were exposed to usual daily care and programs, did not show such changes within the same time frame.
T‘All could relate to their loved one’
Before the intervention, some individuals would not communicate much with their partners. However, during the intervention, they started to play, sing and dance together, which was a significant change for the family. These changes generalized to their behavior outside the sessions as well.
“As the program progressed, caregivers invited multiple family members,” said Jeffrey Wolfe, a neurologic music therapist-fellow at ITA and leader of the Musical Bridges to Memory program. “It became a normalizing experience for the whole family. All could relate to their loved one despite their degree of dementia.”
The next step in the research is to conduct the study on a larger group of patients. ITA and Northwestern have been funded by a three-year grant through the National Endowment for the Arts to expand this study.
The study is called “Musical Bridges to Memory: A Pilot Dyadic Music Intervention to Improve Social Engagement in Dementia.”
Math can be experienced as play much as music is—just what’s needed to enlarge the tribe of creative problem solvers in mathematics and other human disciplines
Marcus Miller on sax.
Like most New Yorkers, I tend to work late. My typical evening involves leaving the stage shortly after midnight and then preparing some problems in number theory or combinatorics until about 3 or 4 AM. I am a jazz musician and mathematician. My skill set allows me to interpret musical experience through the language of mathematical structure and creative problem solving.
My practice involves using ideas of mathematical transformations on melodies, rhythms, and harmony. My compositions are developed using relationships between sound frequencies. But, to me, the notion that math and music are the same thing is both terribly poetic and also too reductionist to be useful. Still I believe the two disciplines are connected by an uncanny similarity in the roles creativity and imagination play in both.
I started learning music at nine years old and worked as a musician through my teenage years, but opted to attend a university instead of a conservatory on the advice of my music mentors who encouraged me to learn more about the world. At school, I became enamored of math because of the allure of the elegant theoretical worlds mathematicians built. Upon graduation, however, I decided to spend my twenties back on stage rather than in a graduate school library. Still, I continued reading math texts, as well as tutoring high school and college students, whenever I wasn’t touring around the world.
The uses of math in music are legion. You can find math the construction of modern harmony and counterpoint, development of rhythms, and the proportioning of arrangements. What I would like to see further explored, are the commonalities between the subjective experiences of doing math and music. Although the lifestyles of mathematicians and musicians might seem worlds apart, at least for me, the “thought work” behind them are more closely related than you might think: the magic of engaging with math and music fundamentally changes the way you imagine and create.
Marcus Miller.
Much of this “thought work” can be summarized as first creating, in the senses (and perhaps on a whiteboard or an instrument), a representation of an idea, and then imagining it transformed in creative and useful ways. Developing the representation is thus a form of self discovery, while transforming it is a kind of play. Can you spot the inference to be made here? It deeply informs my life and I would love to see it become more present in our culture:
Math can be experienced as play in much the same way music is.
Let me explain. To improvise or compose one must learn the technique of the instrument and the harmonic and rhythmic language of music. All the while, the fun comes in imagining and experimenting with the technical and linguistic components one has incorporated, in order to invoke a sensation, express an emotion, or tell a story. As the mastery of both the instrument and the underlying language expand, the mind becomes more sensitive to different ideas while the body becomes more competent at putting those ideas in practice. The process thus expands naturally from creative absorption to transformation, and eventually to execution.
Math can work similarly. A student must become adept with numbers and other symbols, various rules of algebra and calculus to manipulate symbols, and several functions. This is the language of mathematics; its grammar, and its technique. Mathematical problems can be viewed as structured opportunities to play with what is already known in order to discover what is not.
Through this process, a mathematician begins to develop a sense of the nature of mathematical ideas and their logical interrelationships, thus becoming sensitive to new ideas while becoming better equipped to manipulate them internally. To think of math as just formulas memorized through rote learning and mechanical thoughtless symbol shunting tragically misses the point.
As with music, everyone incorporates the underlying language, grammar and technique in their senses differently, and thus comes to their own individual understanding that leads them to express ideas in their own unique way. Contrary to the trope of the socially dysfunctional lone genius, mathematicians collaborate for most of their work, which makes them in some sense much like musicians. Expressing our internal worlds through pictures, words, and symbols and sharing them with one another, riffing off of each other’s ideas is how much of modern mathematics is done.
What if the world understood math in this way? What if we educated with the idea of playing with numbers in order to master arithmetic the same way improvising musicians are taught to play with musical notes to learn their scales? What if we honored the unique way that people understand and taught from that space rather than by rote? What if we refined people’s logical aesthetics to the point that mathematics felt more personal, more artsy, and the profound experiences of mathematical “beauty,” “elegance” or “risk” weren’t reserved for an intellectual elite?
Math as self-discovery, math as play. These two ideas may seem foreign at first, but I am convinced this change in paradigm is exactly what’s needed in order to enlarge the tribe of creative problem solvers in mathematics and many other human disciplines—equipping them to “jam” on the world’s toughest challenges.
Billions of people enjoy music; many feel that they can’t live without it.
Why?
It’s a question that has puzzled scientists and philosophers for centuries. 2,400 years ago Aristotle wondered, “Why does music, being just sounds, remind us of the states of our soul?”
In the 19th century Darwin tried to decipher if our ability to create music evolved by natural selection. Of all human faculties, only music seemed beyond understanding; flummoxed, he came to the conclusion that “music is the greatest mystery.”
More than 200 years ago, Kant declared music useless. And near the end of the 20th century, celebrated psychologist Steven Pinker – also unable to comprehend its purpose – called music “auditory cheesecake.”
A few years ago, the respected journal Nature published a series of essays about music. Their conclusion? That it’s impossible to explain what music is and why it affects us so strongly – and that it’s not even clear if music can serve “an obvious adaptive function.”
But my recentresearch suggests otherwise: music is an evolutionary adaptation, one that helps us navigate a world rife with contradictions.
The crippling effect of cognitive dissonance
Music’s effect on our brains is closely related to what’s been dubbed “the greatest discovery in social psychology” of the 20th century: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the idea that people experience unpleasant feelings when they either possess contradictory knowledge, or are confronted with new information that opposes existing beliefs.
One way we alleviate dissonance is through suppressing or rejecting this contradictory knowledge.
Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes” illustrates this common human response. In the tale, the fox is distressed over the fact that he can’t reach a bunch of grapes. Even more unpleasant is the dissonance he experiences: the grapes are so tempting and so close – yet unattainable.
‘If I can’t have it, I don’t want it’: the fable ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ illustrates cognitive dissonance, a core human response to conflicting information.
As a result, the fox attempts to alleviate the dissonance by rationalizing, “Oh, you aren’t even ripe yet! I don’t need any sour grapes.”
During the 20th century hundreds of experiments confirmed this common psychological response. When faced with dissonant thoughts, children, teens and adults all responded the same way: if I can’t have it, then I don’t need it.
A manifestation of cognitive dissonance is the rejection of new knowledge. Even some great scientific discoveries have had to wait decades for recognition and acceptance, because they contradicted existing beliefs that people didn’t want to surrender. For example, Einstein didn’t receive a Nobel Prize for his Theory of Relativity – now considered one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind – because it contradicted our core beliefs about space and time.
Music helps us grapple with dissonance
So if people are willing to deceive themselves or ignore new information, how has human culture evolved? After all, the foundation of culture is the accumulation of new knowledge – much of which contradicts existing knowledge.
Consider language: when language emerged in our species, every new word was a nugget of new information that contradicted an existing idea or belief. A powerful mechanism of the mind must have evolved to enable our ancestors to overcome these unpleasant dissonances that split their world, and allowed them to keep contradictory knowledge – to absorb new words rather than immediately discarding them.
Could it be that this ability was enabled by music? While language splits the world into detailed, distinct pieces, music unifies the world into a whole. Our psyche requires both.
Several experiments have proven music’s ability to help us overcome cognitive dissonances and retain contradictory knowledge.
For example, in one experiment, an experimenter gave a group of four-year-old boys five popular Pokemon toys. Playing with each boy individually, she had them rank, one by one, their preferences for the five toys. Then the experimenter told each subject that she needed to leave for few minutes, and asked him not to play with his second-ranked toy. When she returned, she re-initiated play and found that the formerly second-ranked toy was entirely ignored. When confronted with conflicting information (“I like this toy, but I shouldn’t play with it”), each boy apparently rejected his initial preference for it.
But when the experimenter turned on music when leaving, the toy retained its original value. The contradictory knowledge didn’t lead the boys to simply discard the toy.
In another experiment, we gave a group of fifteen-year-old students a typical multiple choice exam, and asked them to record the difficulty of each question, along with how much time it took them to answer each one.
It turned out that more difficult questions were answered faster (and grades suffered), because students didn’t want to prolong unpleasant dissonance of choosing between difficult options. However when Mozart’s music played in the background, they spent more time on the difficult questions. Their scores improved.
Life’s big choices become more informed
Beyond multiple choice tests, we’re constantly confronted with choices in our day-to-day lives – from the mundane (what to buy for lunch), to the major (whether or not to accept a job offer). We often use both intuition and pragmatism when evaluating complex situations, but we also incorporate emotion.
And then there are choices related to two universal themes of our existence – love and death – which are inherently steeped in contradictions.
With love, we’d like to fully trust it. But we know that to fully trust is dangerous – that we can be betrayed and disappointed. With death, one of the most difficult contradictions of all is our longing to believe in spiritual eternity and our knowledge that our time on Earth is finite.
Is it any coincidence, then, that there are so many songs about love and betrayal? Or that we are drawn to sorrowful songs in times of mourning?
The idea is that music – which can convey an array of nuanced emotions – helps us reconcile our own conflicted emotions when making choices. And the more diverse, differentiated emotions we possess, the more well-founded our decisions become. Whether it’s choosing to play with a toy or deciding to propose to a boyfriend or girlfriend, our research shows that music can enhance our cognitive abilities.
Thus, because we constantly grapple with cognitive dissonances, we created music, in part, to help us tolerate – and overcome – them.
LSD and music are always linked, and it is now known that music alters the experience of taking the drug. Imperial College neuroscience student Mendel Kaelen has been studying music and the drug, and a big challenge is the type of music.
It has been Mendel Kaelens job to set the ideal playlist for a trip, and as it must fulfill research regulations, it has not been easy. The intent is to find a therapeutic use for the drug, and the initial attempt is to find a way to treat depression. As all therapy trials use music now it is vital the right tunes are used.
The areas that contributed to vision were more active under LSD, which was linked to hallucinations.
Before testing on people, the team tested the theory that drugs such as LSD improve the response to music. Volunteers listened to a few musical tracks, once after taking LSD once after taking a placebo. The tracks were largely unknown so as there would not be an immediate attachment and Brian McBride’s and Greg Haines music was used – along with others. Emotional responses were given to the tracks – were they peaceful, was their tension – and emotions were rated higher after taking LSD not the placebo. Power and tenderness were emotions that scored highly.
Kaelen has also researched using a substance found in magic mushrooms to patients who were resistant to treatment for depression, but the results are not yet available. Here the music ad to last for 6 hours and some tracks were taken from the list of Helen Bonney, a music therapist in the 1960’s.
Alternative and complementary treatments such as creative art, meditation, and yoga have been proposed to bridge many gaps that conventional medicine cannot. But music, because of its ubiquity in our society as well as its ease of transmission, has perhaps the greatest potential among alternative therapies to reach people in deep and profound ways. Music matters and it heals.
Music instruction appears to accelerate brain development in young children, particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for processing sound, language development, speech perception and reading skills, according to initial results of a five-year study by USC neuroscientists.
We now know through controlled treatment outcome studies that listening to and playing music is a potent treatment for mental health issues. 400 published scientific papers have proven the old adage that “music is medicine.”
Research demonstrates that adding music therapy to treatment improves symptoms and social functioning among schizophrenics. Further, music therapy has demonstrated efficacy as an independent treatment for reducing depression, anxiety and chronic pain.
The Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) at USC began the five-year study in 2012 in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) to examine the impact of music instruction on children’s social, emotional and cognitive development.
These initial study results, published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music education at a time when many schools around the nation have either eliminated or reduced music and arts programs. The study shows music instruction speeds up the maturation of the auditory pathway in the brain and increases its efficiency.
“We are broadly interested in the impact of music training on cognitive, socio-emotional and brain development of children,” said Assal Habibi, the study’s lead author and a senior research associate at the BCI in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “These results reflect that children with music training, compared with the two other comparison groups, were more accurate in processing sound.”
For this longitudinal study, the neuroscientists are monitoring brain development and behavior in a group of 37 children from underprivileged neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Thirteen of the children, at 6 or 7 years old, began to receive music instruction through the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program at HOLA. The community music training program was inspired by the El Sistema method, one that LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel had been in when he was growing up in Venezuela.
Learning the Violin
The children earn to play instruments, such as the violin, in ensembles and groups, and they practice up to seven hours a week.
The scientists are comparing the budding musicians with peers in two other groups: 11 children in a community soccer program, and 13 children who are not involved in any specific after-school programs.
The neuroscientists are using several tools to monitor changes in them as they grow: MRI to monitor changes through brain scans, EEG to track electrical activity in the brains, behavioral testing and other such techniques.
Within two years of the study, the neuroscientists found the auditory systems of children in the music program were maturing faster in them than in the other children. The fine-tuning of their auditory pathway could accelerate their development of language and reading, as well as other abilities – a potential effect which the scientists are continuing to study.
The enhanced maturity reflects an increase in neuroplasticity – a physiological change in the brain in response to its environment – in this case, exposure to music and music instruction.
“The auditory system is stimulated by music,” Habibi said. “This system is also engaged in general sound processing that is fundamental to language development, reading skills and successful communication.”
Ear to Brain
The auditory system connects our ear to our brain to process sound. When we hear something, our ears receive it in the form of vibrations that it converts into a neural signal. That signal is then sent to the brainstem, up to the thalamus at the center of the brain, and outward to its final destination, the primary auditory cortex, located near the sides of the brain.
The progress of a child’s developing auditory pathway can be measured by EEG, which tracks electrical signals, specifically those referred to as “auditory evoked potentials.”
In this study, the scientists focused on an evoked potential called P1. They tracked amplitude – the number of neurons firing – as well as latency – the speed that the signal is transmitted. Both measures infer the maturity of the brain’s auditory pathways.
As children develop, both amplitude and the latency of P1 tend to decrease. This means that that they are becoming more efficient at processing sound.
At the beginning of the study and again two years later, the children completed a task measuring their abilities to distinguish tone. As the EEG was recording their electrical signals, they listened to violin tones, piano tones and single-frequency (pure) tones played.
The children also competed a tonal and rhythm discrimination task in which they were asked to identify similar and different melodies. Twice, they heard 24 melodies in randomized order and were asked to identify which ones differed in tone and rhythm, and which were the same in tone and rhythm.
Children who were in the youth orchestra program were more accurate at detecting pitch changes in the melodies than the other two groups. All three groups were able to identify easily when the melodies were the same. However, children with music training had smaller P1 potential amplitude compared to the other children, indicating a faster rate of maturation.
“We observed a decrease in P1 amplitude and latency that was the largest in the music group compared to age-matched control groups after two years of training,” the scientists wrote. “In addition, focusing just on the (second) year data, the music group showed the smallest amplitude of P1 compared to both the control and sports group, in combination with the accelerated development of the N1 component.”
Are you suffering from low Vitamin M? Here are some of the symptoms:
depression
lethargy
high stress
poor circulation
weak social or community health
isolation
poor mobility
Are you suffering from a deficiency of Music?
Music has been demonstrated to have benefits as treatment for illness. Sometimes it is dismissed as if it were ‘anecdotal evidence’. In truth, music is a healthicine. Anecdotal evidence is one of the most uninformed and mis-used phrases by the commercial medical interests – but that should be the subject of another blog post.
A GreenMedInfo search for medical benefits of music therapy shows a wide variety of situations where music is beneficial. I believe it is beneficial because it increases healthiness – as opposed to ‘treating disease’. A subtle but important distinction not typically studied by medical researchers.
But be careful of synthetic alternatives. Synthetic music – the worst is elevator music, can actually make you feel bad, and in extended periods can feel like become torture.
The most organic music, is music you create. But, the healthiest music is not music you create yourself, it’s music you create in a community. Even if you are only helping put out chairs in the community hall, and tapping your toe to the ‘real musicians’, your participation is enhancing your health, and the health of your communities.
Listening to music on your iPod, or a CD, can be healthy, healthier if it activates you to movement. It might lift your spirits, but it does little for your community. Music in isolation is limited in health benefits and can lead to more isolation from your community, resulting in poor community and spiritual health.
Listening to the radio can be pure commercial poison – or, if you have a good community radio station that is more interested in music than in ‘sales’ – it can be a health benefit. My favorite radio station, the best radio station in the known and unknown universes – is CKUA.
CKUA is all about the music, which ranges – sometimes from moment to moment – from the musician who lives down my street, to blues from the south, jazz from northern Europe, drums from Africa or Japan. There is no world music – they say, just music. The announcers at my radio station choose what they want to play – it’s not commercial music.
Kill your television. Or turn off the sound. Vitamin M on your television can be toxic. Pretending to be real music, but not involving you. Television plays on your emotions, not on your musicality. Television is designed for passive watchers – not active participants. Not as bad if it’s seen but not heard.
Church music is involving. I think it’s one of the greatest strengths of religion. In the forest, even the ugliest bird can sing. And even the poorest song is beautiful. And so it is in church. Everyone sings. It’s about creating music together – not about competing for the next idol. The churches don’t need another idol. I like churches where the people get up and move to the music. Music has power, let it loose. Poetry is music. Prayer is music. Everyone sings. Everyone prays.
What about ‘best music’? The Grammy’s? Billboard music awards? The latest craze? Music from the 50s, 60s, 90s? Rock music? Blues music? Jazz? Concert music? The best music for you is the music that involves you – the music that you can participate in. Awards are important, they encourage us to reach new heights, creation of new music is healthy. But creation of your own music is important too – even for those of us who might never win an award.
Several months ago, I wrote a post titled “Is listening to the Blues Healthy“, and concluded – yes it is. But it’s not just blues – it’s all Music. Music is vital. Vitamin M.
I love, and actively encourage live music. Support your local musicians. Help music grow and flower in your lives, your communities, your children. Music truly is an essential element of healthiness.
Some people have claimed that Vitamin M is ‘movement’. I beg to differ. Movement comes from the inside, not from the outside. Music inspires movement – let the music move you! Note: In actual fact, Vitamin M is assigned to folic acid or folate, presumably because Vitamin F had already been assigned to fatty acids. I prefer think of Vitamin M deficiency as a deficiency of frolic.
Can we dance without music? Not me… Even if a dance is silent, I hear the footsteps. Music in my head. There is, for me, always music in my head. I don’t get ‘earworms’, I enjoy earworms all day long.
I’m off now, to listen to some music, and of course to dance a bit (in my quiet way), to sing along (under my breath), to tap my toes, and of course to take some pictures.
YOUR TASTE IN music is weird. Maybe you just can’t stop listening to that power ballad, or you’ve wondered about your bewildering weakness for yodeling. And maybe, justmaybe, nobody understands your all-consuming obsession with Steely Dan, the greatest band of all time.
But even with all these differences, neuroscientists have noticed there’s something pretty much everyone agrees on, musically: Some chords sound good—they’re consonant—and other notes grate when they’re played at the same time. Unraveling why that is could explain something basic about how humans perceive the world. Maybe people are just wired that way. Or maybe, as a paper argues today in Nature, it’s a product of human culture.
Yes, this is a nature versus nurture debate. And it’s been raging for centuries, if not millennia. Scientists trace it back to Pythagoras, who theorized about musical intervals in the first place. Over the years, the heavyweights of science and philosophy have chimed in—Galileo, Kepler, Descartes.
Today’s scientists have their own explanations. Maybe it’s the structure of the inner ear, or the neat ratios of frequencies in harmonious chords. Or maybe dissonant chords sound dissonant because of something called roughness: If you were to simultaneously play two notes right next to each other on a piano—a C and a C-sharp, say—their sound waves would clash in a jarring, unpleasant way.
Composers and ethnomusicologists have pushed back on those physical explanations, though. Maybe people prefer those consonant thirds and fifths because so much of Western music is built on them. They’re just used to it.
The thing is, most researchers haven’t studied people without experience listening to Western music. It’s much easier to come by undergrads who grew up on Pitbull and Taylor Swift. But Josh McDermott, a cognitive scientist at MIT, managed to get access to the Tsimane, an Amazonian society with minimal exposure to Western culture. “If you ask Westerners, they’ll tell you they like consonance, and dislike dissonance,” he says. But only testing Westerners makes it hard to distinguish whether the preference is innate or cultural.
To get to the villages, McDermott had to fly to La Paz, Bolivia, take a small plane into a town at the foot of the Andes, truck down dirt roads, and finally canoe for several days. Then he played the Tsimane recordings of various chords (minor seconds, major thirds, tritones) and presented a rating scale. They found consonant chords just as enjoyable as dissonant ones. He also tested them to see how they felt about roughness, and found that they disliked it. For good measure, he asked them whether they preferred recordings of laughter over gasps to see if they understood the instructions. (They did.)
Other neuroscientists, though, think that all this talk of nature or nurture props up a false dichotomy. “Music tastes vary even within a culture, and part of the reason for that is difference in experience,” says Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna. “No one would ever doubt that.” You could find a collection of death metalheads or Jimi Hendrix fans or Schoenberg enthusiasts, he says, and they might all say they love tritones.
So culture plays a role, yes. But Fitch and other scientists point to a raft of evidence that show that a preference for consonance is innate. Babies, for example, stare longer at speakers playing consonant music than dissonant. (McDermott, for his part, doesn’t find that evidence convincing—those babies could’ve been exposed to Western music, he says, even in the few months they’d been alive.)
Or, even more fundamentally, animal studies! Fitch points to experiments that show certain species of bird prefer to sing at consonant intervals, or that baby chicks were more likely to imprint on objects making consonant sounds. AndRobert Zatorre, a researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute, notes that the neurons of macaques responded differently to dissonant chords in a column responding to the paper. “It would be hard to argue that this effect is mediated by the monkeys’ musical culture,” he writes.
This debate isn’t getting resolved anytime soon—most of the scientists said they weren’t swayed by McDermott’s study. But many of them also agreed that you can have it both ways. Maybe an innate bias for consonance exists, but that doesn’t mean every culture develops it. Instead, learning and experience ultimately determine what preferences actually play out. Which means no matter what, you can still blame your inexplicable love for ’70s dad-rock on your parents—their genes and their playlists.
Music plays with the brain in interesting ways. For instance, past studies have shown listening to a familiar, favorite song causes our brain to release dopamine — a chemical associated with pleasure and reward. However, some researchers believe music could be utilized to boost cognition in unconscious minds.
Alexandra Ossola from Braindecoder writes about the curious case of seven-year-old Charlotte Neve. In 2012, she had a had a brain hemorrhage while she was sleeping. Surgeons were able to stop the bleeding, but she had several seizures after and slipped into a coma. Ossola writes about her astounding recovery:
“Charlotte’s mother, Leila, was at her bedside listening to the radio when Adele’s hit ‘Rolling In The Deep’ started playing. Leila and Charlotte had sung the song together many times and, as Leila sang along to her unconscious daughter, she saw Charlotte smile. The doctors were stunned. Over the next two days, Charlotte recovered more of her faculties — she could talk, focus on colors, and get out of bed.”
It’s uncertain if this recovery was caused by the music or if the entire thing was just a coincidence. However, it has become the basis of a recent study where researchers played music to 13 patients — all in comas for different reasons. The researchers split the patients into two groups; in one, the researchers played some of the patient’s preferred music and in the other, researchers played a continuous sound to act as the control. Then, the researchers measured the patients’ brains with an electroencephalograph (EEG) while they called the patient’s name.
“The cerebral response to the patient’s first name was more often observed in the music condition, than in the control condition.”
These results have led researchers to demonstrate “that music has a beneficial effect on cognitive processes of patients with disorders of consciousness. The autobiographical characteristics of music, that is, its emotional and personal relevance, probably increase arousal and/or awareness.”
It’s possible that this kind of familiar stimuli could help victims with brain trauma repair certain neural pathways. Past instances have also shown calling a patient’s name shows increased brain activity. But it’s uncertain. The unconscious mind is such a mystery — hopefully, one researchers will be able to figure out how to repair in the future.
But be careful of synthetic alternatives. Synthetic music – the worst is elevator music, can actually make you feel bad, and in extended periods can feel like become torture.
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