Sweet and Heartbreaking

The first talk in the Library of Congress's Music & the Brain series this autumn featured a distinguished panel of speakers - Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins, Julliard Provost and Dean Ara Guzelimian and Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine - speaking on "Music and Grief."

The talk was held in the Coolidge Auditorium and included a performance of the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn's string Quartet in Fm by the Afiara String Quartet from Julliard.

Devastating Loss

Dr. Jamison, an senior adviser on this series and the author of An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness spoke about the loss of her husband, the late Dr. Richard Wyatt and how she grieved him.

Much of what she said followed her book Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir . I purchased a copy and read it cover to cover after the talk. During the lecture, Dr. Jamison - who has a history of bipolar illness - said she was scared of lapsing into depression and detailed her struggle to discern between the two.

A Winding Valley

Dr. Jamison quoted C.S. Lewis - "Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape," she said. "Grief provides a path by those whom broken can find their way. I knew madness well, but I did not know grief.

Jamison said she was distraught, but it was not the agitation of depression. "I was able to reason and imagine that the future held things better for me," she said.

"Yet Richard's death stirred up such a darkness in me that I was forced to examine those things that grief and depression held in common and those that they did not," the Hopkins researcher told the crow.

"I knew depression to be unrelenting, impervious to event. Grief was different; it hit in waves and caught me when I was most alive," Jamison said. "Depression is malignant; grief cut me slack. There was occasional sweetness. My thoughts did not dwell on the pointlessness of life; they dwelt instead on the pain of missing an individual life."

"In depression," she added, "one cannot access the beat of life."

The Hopkins scholar told how she turned instinctively to music, and how hymns brought her comfort. Her book details how she and her late husband had planned his funeral, down to the readings and the hymns, before his death. But nothing really prepared her for his loss. She even tells of dreams in which she conversed with Dr. Wyatt, and then said "wait, you're dead."

"Yes, I am," he replied. And then she awoke.

Reading the details of Jamison's journey was heart wrenching, but the overall tone of the work was one of hope. Jamison said one regret she had was giving away her classical music collection because "Beethoven and Schumann hit me." Jamison told the crowd that in literature grief is talked about for what it can do while in medical literature, most of the focus is on what grief is and not what it does.

She compared grief and its benefits to a visit to the Natural History Museum in Washington, where she saw a group of stuffed owls. "I would have preferred to have seen them in life, or to take a mouse to beak," she said. "Had it not been for their deaths I could not have seen what made them live. Death had something to give. Grief lashed as it is to death instructs, and preserves the salient past. There is a grace in death: there is life."

Mendelssohn

The discussion then centered on composer Felix Mendelssohn and the effect the death of his sister had on his music and his life. Dr. Guzelimian focused on a brief biography of the composer, followed by a discussion of his relationship with his sister, Fanny.

She was five years older that Felix, and was quite an impressive musician, having memorized all of Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier". The Julliard Provost mentioned that Felix and Fanny had "a private world together," in which each depended on the others understanding.

But in 1847, when Felix is at a point of what Guzelimian called "a point of staggering celebrity and activity" Fanny died suddenly of a stroke.

Felix then spiraled into a deep depression. Guzelimian then read a letter Mendelssohn wrote on May 19, 1847 just days after Fanny's death.

"'God help us,' was all he wrote," Guzelimian said. "Since yesterday I don't know what else to say and think' Mendelssohn wrote. For many days to come I shall not know what to write except but 'God help us.' I cannot write or think anything but Fanny," he said.

"He wrote to his brother in law," Guzelimian read, "and said 'we have nothing left now but to weep from our inmost hearts.'"

Dr. Guzelimian told in aching detail how Felix Mendelssohn sank into a deep depression, losing weight, becoming pale, and looking aged and stooped even though he was only 38. Mendelssohn's first burst of creativity was not in music, but in his paintings, including a series of watercolors, many of which feature images of water.

Within months, Mendelssohn was dead - from a stroke like his sister. Hauntingly, Mendelssohn had said "I shall die like Fanny." Clara Schumann wrote in her journal that his death was "an irreparable loss for all those who loved him."

"Other than a handful of works, the only large work he did shortly before his death was the string quartet in Fm," Guzelimian said. "The quartet is an extraordinary departure for Mendelssohn; it is an extreme piece matching the string quartets of Beethoven," he added.

The Julliard Dean said a series of repeated figures - including tremolos and bare octaves - punctuate the work. The music features a punctuation of what Guzelimian called "an unrelenting drive of vehemence and extraordinary energy - a profound expression of grief."

A couple of questions came to mind: is it our expectation that affects what we hear in a piece of music or does what we hear force us to think in a specific direction? Also, I wondered whether the Quartet in Fm was composed in a burst of emotion or did Mendelssohn take a more methodical approach to composition?

Either way, the audience got a chance to hear the first movement of the quartet performed by the Afiara String Quartet. The talent of these young musicians shone even in a work of great grief and despair. Jamison called it "restless, wild, agitated grief."

What is Grief? What is Depression?

Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine then spoke about the physiological aspects of grief. The world renowned scientist is known for his study on bipolar illness and a leading clinician treating biploar disorder.

DePaulo said grief or bereavement tendsto come in phases. "The experts tell me that they have different tenor, different meaning, but there is a progression of things, which makes it quite easy to distinguish from depression," he said.

The initial stage is shock which is a time when people are surrounded by family and friends doing the rituals associated with grief.

"That is usually followed by a period of profound and deep sadness. But even in those weeks with ups and downs that are really quite noticeable. It goes for some in weeks but for others months and quite longer," DePaulo said.

That period is followed by a time when the bereaved is beginning to function more normally, but "punctuated by tears of extreme sadness, tears, and memories of the lost loved one," DePaulo told the crowd. "I know mothers who have lost children who will tell me that 50 years later they will have these times of sadness," he said. "But as time goes on they have more of the fondness of recollection," he added.

"I guess the other point is that recently, Kay and I have talked a lot about the concept and a phrase that comes up, like complicated grief," he said. "In extreme forms, particularly in people who are vulnerable, one can be sick with grief. And that's when it becomes hard to tell the difference between grief and depression," DePaulo said.

DePaulo contrasted the experience of grief with depression where there is a change in mood, but "only half of patients would describe their mood as sad," DePaulo said. "There is often a loss of physical and mental vitality." And unlike grief, depression is persistent, with the waxing and waning being very small.

"And there is a marked change in one's self attitude," he said. "Patients with depression are often reported to be apologizing all the time," DePaulo added.

Other points include the classic course of depression is toward remission and relapses. Recovery occurs in about two years, but relapses are very common. DePaulo told the crowd that causes of depression can be the loss of a loved one, but also childbirth, life stress, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and high-dose steroids can trigger the disease.

The Hopkins scholar said grief and depression have to be differentiated and they teach their clinicians to discern between the two and act quickly. "We not only want to give solace to the bereaved, but we want to diagnose and treat depression," he said.

Questions and Answers

During a question and answer period, one questioner mentioned having feelings of grief, but he could not say what he was grieving. The questioner also wanted to know about animal grief. Jamison mentioned the grief of elephants and dogs.

"There is no reason to assume that our species is the only one," she said. "But we have not looked at it more clinically."

Another question from a jazz musician who is working on Parkinson's disease wanted to know about scientific research on what music produces in the brain, particularly music that produces grief.

"The evidence is there of an affect," DePaulo said. "One of the things I am excited about is that the functional brain imaging studies that are emerging do let us see the human brain at work doing things other than responding to a reflex hammer or walking down the street."

Guzelimian spoke about Oliver Sack's Musicophilia, which deals with the questions in depth. "He's also profoundly musical. One of my favorite quotes of his was that he said when he was five he decided his favorite things were Bach and smoked salmon and now that he is in his 70s he knows that those are his favorite things."

Another questioner spoke of the loss of his wife in January 2009 and said he was suprised that no one had told him of the process and the feelings of grief. He wanted to know the panel's thoughts about the ongoing loss suffered in wars and terrorism.

Jamison repsonded that looking at great epidemics like plague or the flu or WWI shows a wide variety of reactions.

"Some people just never talked about it till they died. Others had what we call post-traumatic shock, and others never got over it, " she said.

DePaulo added "there is a adjustment of some sort, so that for example kids can go out and play when the killing stops ... it's not to say that these things don't have a cumulative and profound effect, but there appears to be an attenuation of the immediate response," he said. "They have got to go one they have got to survive."

One question spoke about music therapy, and Dr. DePaulo asked her whether the quality of the music made a difference. She said it did make a huge difference.

I asked the panel about the cathartic effects of music on those who are grieving, and I asked the musicians about playing a piece like Mendelssohn's Fm quartet, whether they had to identify emotionally with the piece to play it.

One player said the reason he plays is because it has all these powerful emotional connection and understanding things like timing and dynamics and sound colors a musician needs to understand both the composer's intention and their own emotional attachment to the piece. The cello player said that he lost his father at 12 and that was what pushed him to want to take the instrument more seriously.

"I found an outlet in the music," he said. "No so much redemption, but the beginning of a language that was wiser than my command of English. From there I tried to understand the depths of what Beethoven was saying, what he was going through when he wrote the piece."

Dr. Guzelimian told of his surgery a few years ago, and how he put together an "Emergency kit" of music. "One of the pieces I chose for myself was an aria from Bach's Cantata No. 82 "I have had enough',"he said.

"Initially I thought 'why am I choosing this?' but there is something profound about Bach's faith and that was what I was listening to when the anesthesia took hold. About a month after that my closest friend died and it took me months before I could listen to that piece again," he said.

"I could use that piece to talk about the philosophical subject of my own death, but I couldn't for my friend. Any music that really mattered to me for the longest time unlocked things that I wasn't able to absorb and deal with. And there was a real progression of the grief."

As in all of these talks, I found myself wishing that the discussion could go one for several more hours, particularly with several glasses of our favorite beverage. I look forward to the remaining lectures.

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.

Hey You! Stop or I'll Bach Blast You!

Can music be used to deter crime? Or does music just move crime farther away? And is it ethical to use music as a weapon, even against elements of our society that are less than desirable? These and other questions were raised in Jacqueline Helfgott's talk "Halt or I'll Play Vivaldi," part of the Library of Congress's Music and the Brain series.

Jacqueline Helfgott is from Seattle University, the author of Criminal Behavior: Theories, Typologies, and Criminal Justice (2008). Norman Middleton of the Library of Congress's Music Division joined her on the program March 13th at the Library's Jefferson Building.

The discussion started with Middleton quoting William Congreve, in The mourning bride, 1697:

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I've read, that things inanimate have mov'd,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform'd,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.

He also cited the Biblical example of David playing his lyre for king Saul when an evil spirit would overtake him, and Saul was relieved. In 1989, the U.S. Army bombarded the Vatican Embassy in Panama City with loud rock music as it tried to capture former strongman Manuel Noriega. Mr. Middleton also cited cases of the West Palm Beach, Florida police using classical music to deter crime and of the Rockdale, Australia authorities using Barry Manilow to drive off teenagers who were revving their cars in parking lots. This effort was after the authorities had tried using something called the mosquito, a high-pitched squeal that the teenagers could hear, but adults cannot. Apparently Barry Manilow was not happy with being used as a crime control element, but the kids left the parking lots anyway.

Mozart meets CPTED

Dr. Helfgott then told the audience about the prevailing criminological theory called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design or CPTED.

The Dr. Helfgott raised some questions about the use of classical music as a crime prevention technique. Is classical music a good way to control crime? What about the relationship between music style and culture or subcultures? And finally what are the ethical and methodological issues in studying the use of classical music as a crime deterrent.

One factor she asked the audience to consider was the so-called situational aspects of crime prevention. She mentioned that there is a relationship between the high aesthetic - such as the presence of classical music - and a perception of a lower risk of crime.

"Basically they're using music as a territorial marker," she said. "Classical music is saying 'we are going to beautify this area, and part of that is to play classical music so you (criminals) need to move down the street.'"

She said different music was one of several ways to set boundaries, including lifting building entrances to make them seem distant, increased lighting , and senior citizens playing pinochle in a city park.

Potato Chip theory?,

Another theory put forth in the discussion was the idea of changing the environment to make crime less tempting. This included making spaces where crime is not okay. This included using music as a territorial boundary. One factor Dr. Helfgott pointed out was that certain music types are often associated with what she called "hyper-masculine" identity, including gangsta rap, metal and punk music. But the music did not produce the aggressive behavior, it merely accompanied it.

"A lot of this is about what we are all told is associated with being hip, young, and cool," Helfgott said. "This is less about the music and more about the sub-cultural ritual and identity."

The criminologist expressed concern about using music to mark territory and to influence behavior. She said the ethical implications are disturbing, in that "it has the impact of exploiting classical music and takes use away from the larger conversation about why we are doing that."

During the question and answer period, Dr. Helfgott pointed out that the use of classical music in certain areas does not deter crime, it diffuses it. "We are moving it a block away," she said. "If we had studies that showed that it actually reduced crime ... then it certainly has the potential to be used in a negative way."

The educator was asked about the use of classical music in prisons to deter violent behavior. She had just been to a criminologists' convention and had spoken to a warden who said classical music was used in his prison with positive effects.

"But, if you you start playing classical music in a maximum security prison without changing the rest of the environment, it is not going to have a huge effect," Helfgott said.

There were many subjects which Dr. Helfgott said would merit further study, including whether men prefer different music to women. The discussion ended so the audience could attend a chamber music concert in the Coolidge auditorium.

I found this discussion fascinating, though it seemed sometimes that the audience was looking for Helfgott to say something she wasn't ready to say - the classical music can be used to deter crime through changing the brains of the criminals. That might be asking too much, even of Mozart.

Music, Modes & Emotions

The Library of Congress Music and the Brain series resume earlier this month with a lecture and discussion featuring Dr. Steven Brown of McMaster University and the NeuroArts Lab in Hamilton, Ontario. Dr. Brown's lecture at the Whittall Pavilion in the LOC's Jefferson building included a discussion of whether music can induce emotion in listeners.

What are Emotions?

Dr. Brown's talk was "From Mode to Emotion" and one of his points was that emotions were based on some kind of evaluation - emotions have a stimulus and object to which the evaluations are attached. There are three dimensions of emotion - valence, the sense of what feels good or bad - intensity, glad ecstatic, annoyed, enraged, etc. and focus or quality what are the emotions about.

Brown mention that facial expressions have been used to determined emotions, but sometimes the five or 10 categories that scientists often talk about don't take into account the thousands of various degrees of emotion which people can express.

Dr. Brown said after some of his own explorations of emotion, he came across Clore and Ortony's research that encompassed many of the questions he was asking. He applied their theory to the arts and then to music.

Goal motivated emotions, object aesthetic emotions and agency emotions are three kinds Brown mentioned. The room got a good laugh when he said that the two things that caused revulsion included feces and politicians.

Cognitive theory applied to arts

"To what extent do art works induce emotions in its receivers?" he asked. "And to what extent do they simply represent emotions?" He said artworks are expressions of emotions, so receivers have to recognize the emotion in order to understand.

"When art work is most appreciated, the work elicits positive aesthetic emotions in the receiver," Brown said. "Sometimes art works have no effect on us, but when they do we are going to have this kind of positive emotional aspect that we feel."

The emotion in the art work can sometimes induce the same emotion in the recipient, but Brown said that is not often the case. Sad music cannot make you sad. However, we can recognize the emotion and the actual response might be different.

We might also have emotional appraisals of content - like disgust at something we don't like.

"The basic response we have in listening to music is an aesthetic one," Brown said. "We feel a sense of liking or disliking. It can be very strong, we might have chills, we can cry we feel moved, but in general that is the response to music and no so much the empathic induction of the emotion," he said.

Other arts

Brown said that other arts - dance, poetry, visual arts - are also capable of expressing emotion.

"I think music is very good at expressing some of the so-called 'outcome emotions'," Brown said. "Being happy, being sad, being pleased. As far as shame, pride or embarrassment, I think music is not so good," he added. Music often expresses beauty by being beautiful, but does not induce beauty in its hearers.

Brown said that music is often called a "prostitute" where music becomes associated with everything under the sun, where music reinforces other messages. He used an example of a time when he worked in Sweden and studied neo-Nazi martial music. The content was violent, but the music sounds very similar to western Classical music. There are evil associations of music, but music itself is not evil.

How does it do that?

Dr. Brown then explored how music does what it does. He mentioned the general arousal mechanisms, but music also uses different kind of scales to express emotions.

Three ways music expresses emotion include register, tempo and volume.
The different emotional valences are associated with different scale types - like the difference between Major and Minor scales. This was in Western music only, because in India Ragas there are literally thousands of different scales and each one represents a different emotion.

Brown also used two pieces from Beethoven to illustrate the arousal mechanisms of music. And he said they can vary independently - a major key can be played high energy or in a low arousal way. The same is true for a minor key piece. Brown used an example from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo where the music changes based upon whether actress Kim Novak was in a good, happy place or a mysterious or dangerous place.

Questions?

During the question and answer period, Dr. Brown discussed articulation, timbre and other elements that would evoke different reactions to music. He said he had simplified the discussion for the audience at LOC.

"In general music can induce emotions, but it is very weak at that. What it can do is bring about different aesthetic emotions, liking and disliking. The biggest effect is the aesthetic response - such as liking or disliking, chills, and all that, but it is a small effect as compared to other kinds of emotion inducers."

There are different rating scales for pleasantness or liking, versus actually being happy or sad. A question arose about the use of scale changes, or suspensions or dissonance as an inducer of emotion. Dr. Brown said it is mostly the same kind of thing, since modes come from scales and harmonies are based on scales.

The general result of the talk was that music seldom induces emotions, but the reactions we have are often aesthetic emotions rather than empathic emotions. It challenged the notion that music can make you feel a certain way; most of it seemed to say that it is what the audience brings to the music more than the music itself that causes our reactions.

You need to watch this!

This is a video documentary called Before the Music Dies. Anyone who loves music, anyone who plays music, anyone who studies music - music and the brain, music performance, music history and especially music educators HAS to watch this documentary.

I realize the producers might have an ax to grind. But it is an ax that needs to be ground, hard, fast and continuously until it's sharp enough to cut through our apathy. Watch it; love it; live it.

The Creative Power

The latest talk in the Library of Congress's Music and the Brain series featured author, musician, producer and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, the author of This is Your Brain on Music.

Levitin has a new book out - The World in Six Songs and that seemed to be the focus of his talk. However, the lecture and the question and answer period allowed fascinating insight into how and why we love music so much.

Levitin works with the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise and is on the faculty of McGill University's psychology faculty in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He has the unique quality of having been a professional musician, as well as a producer and now studies music from a neuroscientific viewpoint. He has 14 gold and platinum recordings to his credit.

During the talk, Levitin recalled how once as a producer, Carlos Santana came in to lay down some guitar tracks for an album. Levitin found himself feeling "goosebumps" as Santana played. He was fascinated by the reaction, and wondered why the music affected him so much. That was the beginning of his journey through neuroscience and led to his place now.

"I had dutifully lit all the candles in the room," Levitin said. "And he was in the studio and I was at the board. It is such an extraordinary experience to be in the presence of someone like that. It was amazing. I thought 'what in the world is going on here?'"

The author said that another of his mentors Norda Michael Waldon told him that if you want to be a producer, you have to feel the goosebumps every day. If you don't - if it's just a job - then you don't belong there. Levitin's curiosity led him back to school at Stanford and UC Berkley. Neuroscience classes were asking the right questions.

The field of neuromusicology got a kick in the pants in 1997 when MIT professor Stephen Pinker (Author of The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works). And he told a room full of music cognition scientists that what they were doing was really not worth anything, "auditory cheesecake" is what he called music. And the challenge was on.

The point of the book was to gather the thought about why we have music and what the latest psychology and neurological studies indicate about the subject. Levitin went back to early origins of music - including going back to what he called Neanderthal speech, which he said was more musical than our current language. He likened Neanderthal speech to the teacher in Charlie Brown, using pitch trajectory and emphasis.

The talk also touched on the argument that music is older than speech by looking at the areas that humans have in common with all vertebrates. These areas light up in brain scans when people listen to music. So since the so-called "reptilian" areas of the brain fire without the speech centers being involved, it suggests that music is an older form of communication.

Levitin mentioned that for most of human history music and dance were inseparable - music-dance. According to Levitin, humans are the only animal species that can synchronize our movement to sound - in dance. Sound comes through the ear, and the motor system figures out how to move the body through another sense and synchronize to sound. Levitin said that large-scale human cooperative enterprises such as building cities and other "civilization" were evidence of the necessity to synchronize movement to music.

I found the talk interesting and - as in all these talks - too short. The evening ended with a question and answer period and there were more questions than there was time to answer them.

Music of the Spheres?

Here is a link about the so-called music of the spheres, first put forth by Pythagoras. It details the work of three scientists who found that music actually does have a geometrical element to it.

The photo at right is a representation of how geometry represents four-note chord types. The photo is by Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University.