In the Folds of Creativity

Is there a subconscious element to our selection or enjoyment of music? Do we gravitate towards some sounds and away from others because of something beneath our cognitive minds, something baser, more savage? These were some of the questions addressed by cognitive psychologist Michael Kubovy and composer Judith Shatin in a talk at the Library of Congress entitled "The Mind of The Artist."

( This talk was given last March, but the series has resumed this autumn and I will have more to say on that later. However, I wanted to catch up to keep the dialogue about Music and the Brain going.)

The talk focused on "meaning in music" which Kubovy said was pregnant with opportunity.

"Our claim is that music which does not evoke some kind of association or another is not likely to work," Kobovy said. He wanted to point out the relationship between music and language. He used a clever illustration to show there are mechanisms in the brain that we have no control over and some of these mechanisms effect our relationship with music.

The Stroop Effect

Kubovy started the talk with a demonstration of what was called the Stroop effect in which the audience was asked to name colors displayed on a screen (red, orange, yellow, etc.) The color names were originally displayed in the color named - red was red, orange was orange, blue was blue, etc., and the audience was asked to read them out loud.

Then the screen was changed where the words were in different colors - red was blue, yellow was green, orange was purple, etc. When the colors were different from the words it was not easy to read the words out loud without being effected by the color in which they were written. I found myself much more like to call red, "blue" when it was printed in blue than to say "red".

"The point has been made," Kubovy said with a smile. "You can't just say the name of a color without seeing the word and in some sense reading it, and so you have two processes going on. One is voluntary - you are trying to say the name of the color - and there is another process going on which triggers a word in your head and that interferes with your ability to say the color."

This Stroop effect is often used to confound people in psychological experiments. I have to say that worked very well. The experiment was to show how we have some reactions to music that we don't think about. I found this fascinating because of my belief that there are types and styles of music that evoke a response without cognition, strictly on an emotional level.

Two Systems of Brain Function

Kubovy then talked about two systems in the mind and the brain - called system one and system two. I know, not very creative, but that's the best they could come up with.

The first system triggers responses to danger - responding quickly, automatically - and is not amenable to our control. System two is more explicit and is designed to evaluate signals from system one.

"At the same time," Kubovy said, "the implicit system learns very slowly and for good reason, because you want not to unlearn signals to danger. On the other hand, the explicit system learns very fast."

Musical implications?

Kubovy then used what he called a priming experiment - where words preceded by similar words - like couch and sofa - were said more quickly than words that were not related - like car and hammer. Subjects accessed the similar words more readily than non-related words.

The University of Virginia neuroscientist then showed how an EEG was used to show the voltage generated in the brain when subjects were shown different words. An average of the graphs was shown to illustrate how people's processing time varied based upon whether they were saying similar or dissimilar words.

There is a factor called the N-400, which reflects electrical reaction times in the brain. This figure indicates the amount of processing a person needs to do given the previous information.

Kubovy spoke of an experiment when the word wide was suggested by either text "the days wandering into the distance" or by a piece of music. Wide or wideness should produce a larger N-400 number if it follows an unrelated word.

"You can see that that's exactly what happens," Kubovy said. "The N-400 is much bigger for the case of the unrelated word than for the related one," he said. The experiment then used a piece of music from Richard Strauss that was expansive and sweeping to invoke images of wideness. Music in a minor key on the concertina that was more pizzicato and strained resulted in a larger N-400 time to process wideness.

"You can get the same magnitude of effect with music as you can get with a sentence," Kubovy said. "That suggests that music and language are much more closely related than you might expect."

But some of the musical meaning is implied by imitation or by association, such as a fanfare being associated with royalty, or an image of a staircase being evoked by a climbing scale in music.

Kubovy finished with an example using shapes - one pointed and one rounder - to illustrate the difference between the words "takete" and "Maluma". Takete was more percussive and needs sharp changes to draw the pattern. Maluma was rounder and more sweeping.

How does it apply?

Shatin then spoke on how we parse what we hear and what we choose to listen to and how that effects what she as a composer chooses to put in a piece.

"There are several different kinds of relationships between music and our experience," she said. "The use of the flute in Peter and the Wolf to imitate a bird is a perfect example. The sound of the flute flies high - like a bird - and there's a link there," she said.

Shatin then used several of her pieces including one which uses the elements of a clock, to illustrate how musical figures can evoke certain responses in the mind involuntarily, including a variation on Strauss's Fledermaus . She also used a piece named for a wind that races down from the ocean.

"I think one of the things to me that is so exciting about composing music, there are aspects of the narrative we tell ourselves about, and it is very related to shapes. We hear smoothness, bounciness, etc. and there are a lot of shapes we associate with music," she said.

Questions?

During the question and answer session, there were some questions about why other pieces - including some by Schubert - were not used as examples. Both researchers said there were many examples that could have been used, but they made choices using modern works.

One questioner asked how the researchers account for different pieces that have been used for a variety of uses - Samuel Barbers Adagio for Strings was the example.

"Although music can have associations," Shatin said, "the exact elements that they can be associated with are going to vary for all of us. There are certain occasions where you would not want to play that piece, but there are many different situations where that would certainly work."

Kubovy said one of their purposes was to restore credibility to a type of musical analysis that has fallen out of favor. Modern musical analysis tends to be very technical, looking at the key, the notes used, the speed and other elements.

"Music as experience is not all of its technicality," he said. "It has various kinds of associations and we want to restore the legitimacy of that kind of analysis."

This talk, like many of these discussions, only whetted my interest in this topic. These devices, the knowledge we have about brain functions and how much we don't know about how music affects us spurs me to further study.

The Library of Congress Music and the Brain II continues through next year, and talks so far have dealt with Music and Grief, Synesthesia, and Trance Formations, Music and Religious experience. A full schedule and podcasts with the speakers are available here.