Notes: This Is Your Brain on music - 1-27-08

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* Musical notes appear to fall into categories as to whether they are important notes of the piece or not. Many amateur singers dont store in memory every note of a musical piece. Rather, all have an accurate and intuitive sense of which those are -- and we store musical contour. Then, when it comes time to sing, the amateur knows that she needs to go from this tone to that tone, and she fills in the missing tones on the spot, without having explicitly memorized each of them. This reduces memory load substantially, and makes for greater efficiency.
* Music works because we remember the tones we have just heard and are relating them to the ones that are just now being played.
* The regular pulse of music causes us to expect events to occur at certain points in time.
* Real conversation between people, real pleas of forgiveness, expressions of anger, courtship, storytelling, planning and parenting don't occur at the precise clips of a machine. To the extent that music is reflecting the dynamics of our emotional lives, and our interpersonal interactions, it needs to swell and contract, to speed up and slow down, to pause and reflect. The only way we can feel or know these timing variations is if a computational system in the brain has extracted information about when the beats are supposed to occur. The brain needs to create a model of a constant pulse -- a schema -- so that we know when the musicians are deviating from it. This is similar to variations of a melody: We need to have a mental representation of what the melody is in order to know -- and appreciate -- when the musician is taking liberties with it.
* Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic. Too much organization may technically still be music, but it would be music that no one wants to listen to.