[Rhodes22-list] Hey Slim! Music

[Brad Haslett]

*Slim, long read but worth it!  This was originally published in the NYT's
Arts & Leisure section.  Brad*
**
*Music of the Hemispheres*
*Are our brains wired for sound? One professor has provocative theories, and
they started with the Blue Oyster Cult*
by Clive Thompson


"Listen to this," Daniel Levitin said. "What is it?" He hit a button on his
computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two
notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify
it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar."

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on
piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in
Elton John's live version of "Benny and the Jets."

Dr. Levitin beamed. "You hear only one note, and you already know who it
is," he said. "So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we so good
at recognizing music?"

  This is not merely some whoa-dude epiphany that a music fan might have
while listening to a radio contest. Dr. Levitin has devoted his career to
exploring this question. He is a cognitive psychologist who runs the
Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill
University in Montreal, perhaps the world's leading lab in probing why music
has such an intense effect on us.

"By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired
really deeply into us," said Dr. Levitin, an eerily youthful-looking 49,
surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enormous 16-track mixers that make his
lab look more like a recording studio.

This summer he published "This Is Your Brain on Music" (Dutton), a
layperson's guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an
unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example
we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that
makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the
cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to
the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His
experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects
brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.

Dr. Levitin is singular among music scientists for actually having come out
of the music industry. Before getting his Ph.D. he spent 15 years as a
record producer, working with artists ranging from the Blue Oyster Cult to
Chris Isaak. While still in graduate school he helped Stevie Wonder assemble
a best-of collection; in 1992 Dr. Levitin's sensitive ears detected that MCA
Records had accidentally used third-generation backup tapes to produce seven
Steely Dan CDs, and he embarrassed the label by disclosing it in Billboard
magazine. He has earned nine gold and platinum albums, which he tucks in
corners of his lab, office and basement at home. "They look a little scary
when you put them all in one place, so I spread them around," he said.

Martin Grant, the dean of science at McGill, compares Dr. Levitin's split
professional personality to that of Brian Greene, the pioneering
string-theory scientist who also writes mass-market books. "Some people are
good popularizers, and some are good scientists, but not usually both at
once," Dr. Grant said. "Dan's actually cutting edge in his field."

Scientifically, Dr. Levitin's colleagues credit him for focusing attention
on how music affects our emotions, turf that wasn't often covered by
previous generations of psychoacousticians, who studied narrower questions
about how the brain perceives musical sounds. "The questions he asks are
very very musical, very concerned with the fact that music is an art that we
interact with, not just a bunch of noises," said Rita Aiello, an adjunct
professor in the department of psychology at New York University.

Ultimately, scientists say, his work offers a new way to unlock the
mysteries of the brain: how memory works, how people with autism think, why
our ancestors first picked up instruments and began to play, tens of
thousands of years ago.


*DR. LEVITIN ORIGINALLY BECAME INTERESTED IN PRODUCING *producing in 1981,
when his band -- a punk outfit called the Mortals -- went into the recording
studio. None of the other members were interested in the process, so he made
all the decisions behind the board. "I actually became a producer because I
saw the producers getting all the babes," he said. "They were stealing them
from the guitarists." He dropped out of college to work with alternative
bands.

Producers, he noted, were able to notice impossibly fine gradations of
quality in music. Many could identify by ear the type of amplifiers and
recording tape used on an album.

"So I started wondering: How was the brain able to do this?" Dr. Levitin
said. "What's going on there, and why are some people better than others?
And why is music such an emotional experience?" He began sitting in on
neuroscience classes at Stanford University.

"Even back then, Dan was never satisfied with the simple answer," said Howie
Klein, a former president of Reprise and Sire Records. "He was always poking
and prodding."

By the '90s Dr. Levitin was disenchanted with the music industry. "When
they're dropping Van Morrison and Elvis Costello because they don't sell
enough records," he said, "I knew it was time to move on." Academic friends
persuaded him to pursue a science degree. They bet that he would have good
intuitions on how to design music experiments.

They were right. Traditionally music psychologists relied on "simple
melodies they'd written themselves," Dr. Levitin said. What could that tell
anyone about the true impact of powerful music?

For his first experiment he came up with an elegant concept: He stopped
people on the street and asked them to sing, entirely from memory, one of
their favorite hit songs. The results were astonishingly accurate. Most
people could hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent margin
of error, and two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch, a
level of accuracy that wouldn't embarrass a pro.

"When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual
recording of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,"
Dr. Levitin said.

It was a remarkable feat. Most memories degrade and distort with time; why
would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because music
triggers the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last year
Dr. Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how.

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I.
machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First
the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning
of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated
to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain's sense of reward.

The cerebellum, an area normally associated with physical movement, reacted
too, responding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was the brain's predictions of
where the song was going to go. As the brain internalizes the tempo, rhythm
and emotional peaks of a song, the cerebellum begins reacting every time the
song produces tension (that is, subtle deviations from its normal melody or
tempo).

"When we saw all this activity going on precisely in sync, in this order, we
knew we had the smoking gun," he said. "We've always known that music is
good for improving your mood. But this showed precisely how it happens."

The subtlest reason that pop music is so flavorful to our brains is that it
relies so strongly on timbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any
sound; it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they are
playing the same melody in the same key. Popular performers or groups, Dr.
Levitin argued, are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but
because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to
song. That quality explains why, for example, I could identify even a single
note of Elton John's "Benny and the Jets."

"Nobody else's piano sounds quite like that," he said, referring to Mr.
John. "Pop musicians compose with timbre. Pitch and harmony are becoming
less important."

Dr. Levitin dragged me over to a lab computer to show me what he was talking
about. "Listen to this," he said, and played an MP3. It was pretty awful: a
poorly recorded, nasal-sounding British band performing, for some reason, a
Spanish-themed ballad.

Dr. Levitin grinned. "That," he said, "is the original demo tape of the
Beatles. It was rejected by every record company. And you can see why. To
you and me it sounds terrible. But George Martin heard this and thought, 'Oh
yeah, I can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry built on this.'

"Now that's musical genius."


*THE LARGEST AUDIENCE THAT DR. LEVITIN *has performed in front of was 1,000
people, when he played backup saxophone for Mel Torme. Years of being
onstage piqued Dr. Levitin's interest in another aspect of musical
experience: watching bands perform. Does the brain experience a live
performance differently from a recorded one?

To find out, he and Bradley Vines, a graduate student, devised an
interesting experiment. They took two clarinet performances and played them
for three groups of listeners: one that heard audio only; one that saw a
video only; and one that had audio and video. As each group listened,
participants used a slider to indicate how their level of tension was rising
or falling.

One rapid, complex passage caused tension in all groups, but less in the one
watching and listening simultaneously. Why? Possibly, Dr. Levitin said,
because of the performer's body language: the clarinetist appeared to be
relaxed even during that rapid-fire passage, and the audience picked up on
his visual cues. The reverse was also true: when the clarinetist played in a
subdued way but appeared animated, the people with only video felt more
tension than those with only audio.

In another, similar experiment the clarinetist fell silent for a few bars.
This time the viewers watching the video maintained a higher level of
excitement because they could see that he was gearing up to launch into a
new passage. The audio-only listeners had no such visual cues, and they
regarded the silence as much less exciting.

This spring Dr. Levitin began an even more involved experiment to determine
how much emotion is conveyed by live performers. In April he took
participants in a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert -- the conductor Keith
Lockhart, five of the musicians and 15 audience members -- and wired them
with sensors to measure their state of arousal, including heart rate, body
movements and muscle tension.

At one point during the performance Mr. Lockhart swung his wrist with such
force that a sensor attached to his cuff went flying off. Dr. Levitin's team
tried to reattach it with duct tape, until the conductor objected -- "Did
you just put duct tape on an Armani?" he asked -- and lighter surgical tape
was used instead.

The point of the experiment is to determine whether the conductor creates
noticeable changes in the emotional tenor of the performance. Dr. Levitin
says he suspects there's a domino effect: the conductor becomes particularly
animated, transmits this to the orchestra and then to the audience, in a
matter of seconds. Mr. Lockhart is skeptical. "As a conductor," he said,
"I'm a causatory force for music, but I'm not a causatory force for
emotion." But Dr. Levitin is still crunching the data.

"It might not turn out to be like that," he said, "But wouldn't it be cool
if it did?"


*DR. LEVITIN'S WORK HAS OCCASIONALLY UNDERMINED *some cherished beliefs
about music. For example recent years have seen an explosion of "Baby
Mozart" videos and toys, based on the idea -- popular since the '80s -- that
musical and mathematical ability are inherently linked.

But Dr. Levitin argued that this could not be true, based on his study of
people with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that leaves people with
low intelligence. Their peak mental capacities are typically those of young
child, with no ability to calculate quantities. Dr. Levitin once asked a
woman with Williams to hold up her hand for five seconds; she left it in the
air for a minute and a half. "No concept of time at all," he said, "and
definitely no math."

Yet people with Williams possess unusually high levels of musical ability.
One Williams boy Dr. Levitin met was so poorly coordinated he could not open
the case to his clarinet. But once he was holding the instrument, his
coordination problems vanished, and he could play fluidly. Music cannot be
indispensably correlated with math, Dr. Levitin noted, if Williams people
can play music. He is now working on a study that compares autistics -- some
of whom have excellent mathematical ability, but little musical ability --
to people with Williams; in the long run, he said, he thinks it could help
shed light on why autistic brains develop so differently.

Not all of Dr. Levitin's idea have been easily accepted. He argues, for
example, that music is an evolutionary adaptation: something that men
developed as a way to demonstrate reproductive fitness. (Before you laugh,
consider the sex lives of today's male rock stars.) Music also helped social
groups cohere. "Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have
gotten rid of it years ago," he said.

But Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard known for his defense of
evolutionary psychology, has publicly disparaged this idea. Dr. Pinker has
called music "auditory cheesecake," something pleasant but not
evolutionarily nutritious. If it is a sexual signal for reproduction, then
why, Dr. Pinker asked, does "a 60-year-old woman enjoy listening to
classical music when she's alone at home?" Dr. Levitin wrote an entire
chapter refuting Dr. Pinker's arguments; when I asked Dr. Pinker about Dr.
Levitin's book he said he hadn't read it.

Nonetheless Dr. Levitin plugs on, and sometimes still plugs in. He continues
to perform music, doing several gigs a year with Diminished Faculties, a
ragtag band composed entirely of professors and students at McGill. On a
recent December afternoon members assembled in a campus ballroom to do a
sound check for their performance that evening at a holiday party. Playing a
blue Stratocaster, Dr. Levitin crooned the Chris Isaak song "Wicked Game."
"I'm not a great guitarist, and I'm not a great singer," he said.

But he is not bad, either, and still has those producer's ears. When "Wicked
Game" ended, the bass player began noodling idly, playing the first few
notes of a song that seemed instantly familiar to all the younger students
gathered. "That's Nirvana, right?" Dr. Levitin said, cocking his head and
squinting. " 'Come As You Are.' I love that song."