Music on the Brain - by MCB's Andrew Bender

Welcome to the 3rd installment of Music on the Brain. As much as it probably surprises my readers, I’ll admit that I’m hardly the first person to write about music and neuroscience for a non-science audience. In the last few years a few great books have been published for non-scientists. These include Stephen Levitin’s books This Is Your Brain on Music, and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, wonderful looks at some of these topics. Levitin is a rock musician who became a neuroscientist and professor at McGill University in Montreal who conducts research on the neuroscience of music perception. Additionally, bloggers and neuroscience writers like Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide, address recent findings and do an excellent job putting research findings into broader context and giving meaning to findings. It’s something so difficult and valuable for writers to explain the benefit of basic and applied research to the taxpaying public, and do so in an interesting, engaging, and relatable way.

Although I’m there will inevitably be some overlap in content from time to time, in Music on the Brain, I hope to provide an additional perspective not seen elsewhere, as well as share and interpret some different research findings I think have some relevance to music that may be just pretty cool. Often, much of what I write about will have little to do with music and a lot to do with the brain, or vice versa. Although I try to keep these thoughts organized and coherent enough to make sense and be interesting, I’m somewhat of a connectionist, as one thought or memory triggers another and so on. Thus, MOTB will frequently pick up where I’ve left off in the prior column.

I’d already written most of the MOTB column for the week when I came upon a posting by Jonah Lehrer in his Frontal Cortex blog. He posted the video below from the Sasquatch Festival at the Gorge in Washington State. Lehrer suggests that what you see is the result of social contagion and conformity – similar to the effect of a classic experiment by Stanley Milgram in which a person is looking up, others will stop to also look and see what the person is looking at. The more people looking up, the more will mimic this behavior. The video below is an interesting example of a somewhat different aspect of this phenomenon (Note: the camera shake is kinda bad, but try to bear with it and watch til the end).

Lehrer suggests that after a certain point, social contagion takes hold and people flock to join the dance regardless of whether it’s actually fun. Although I agree that social contagion may play something of a role here, I have to wonder if Lehrer has ever been to such a music festival. Free spirited freaks, there to let it all hang out, get loose, drink, smoke, get wasted, dance and have a good time seem to operate on a bit of a different default mode than many other folks. In the video, I especially like the guy in the red underwear/speedo and umbrella hat toward the end. This is not to say that all people aren’t subject to social contagion or conformity (I’ve no other explanation for people wearing pants and shorts falling off their asses, baby on board placards, and Ed Hardy clothing). However, people running to dance in a big crowd of dancers may not be truly analogous to the standing on the street corner staring up phenomenon. The Gorge has a big sloping grass lawn and it looks like it’s rather early in the day for a festival. Often people will dance toward the sides to avoid obscuring the view of seated festival goers – particularly when it’s not a raging set where the whole crowd is on their feet. If you’re in the mood to dance, you can just dance – why do it where all the other people are? Well, if you want to dance and not look like a lone freak (like the guys at the beginning) you can always blend in. Where I think Lehrer gets it mostly right is in the snowball effect – where all of a sudden people are running to join in the freak fest. But are they running because of the social contagion, or does the social contagion in this example actually feel good? I’d suggest that it’s really a combination of the two. Speaking of which, I’m looking forward to Rothbury this year. Those at Bonnaroo are experiencing that at this very moment.

On a slightly different topic – jazz, jam bands, and why I love improvisation:

In the research I work on as part of my doctoral training, I’ve been studying human aging, brain structure, and cognitive functions such as memory, problem solving, and attention. Much of my own interest in music and the brain is not so much related to the perception of music – how the brain can perceive sounds, pitch, and rhythm and make them into a melody. Rather, my interests center around memory, skill and performance, the social neuroscience of collaboration, like I mentioned in the column last week, and the evolutionary factors that have given rise to this human activity. I’m particularly curious about the neural underpinnings of such highly skilled performance and creativity in not only playing something perfectly from memory (impressive enough in itself when you think about it), but in combining all of those elements and many more to create something truly unique, both by oneself or in a combined effort with one or dozens of other musicians. Much of my own love and interest in music is really centered around the on-the-fly creativity and improvisation. There’s something amazing to me when musicians reach into their distinctive repertoire of knowledge and experience to alter the musical/intellectual/emotional expression in line with what they are experiencing in that very moment to create a truly novel performance, never to be exactly repeated again.

Although this can be a simple as a guitarist taking a solo and riffing off a few notes in the same key as the song, or something far more skilled and complex, either involves a tremendous amount of skill from the perspective of all that’s going on in the brain. That’s probably another reason that I have a deep love for jazz and for many so-called ‘jam bands.’ Jam bands gotten something of a bad rap of late in the music industry, probably as the result of making more money touring and less selling albums or downloads through a label. However, as far as I’m concerned, the only thing that makes a band a ‘jam band’ is improvisation - or maybe patchouli-scented hippies dancing and following in the band’s wake. Although I love many kinds of music, improvisation is the foremost among reasons that I’d usually rather see a jam band (or a band that jams) than a band with a highly produced show repeated for an entire tour. When the set list, lighting, solos, and all are choreographed, produced, and well-rehearsed, nothing is left to chance. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve got a huge appreciation for well-composed songs and for the skilled performance of those, but I usually prefer an element of unpredictability in the music I see in person. I want to see something that nobody else has seen and nobody else will see – something unique to that time and place.

But even with improvisational genres and formats, there can be big differences such as those I see between jazz appreciation and jam appreciation. For example, I can go see a jazz or funk artist that I don’t know many of the songs, but can enjoy and appreciate the performance of the songs and creative jamming or soloing and really get my groove on and feel the music. In this category, I’d place my appreciation of artists and bands like Charlie Hunter, Robert Walter, Stanton Moore, and Fareed Haque. With a lot of jam bands, like rock, bluegrass, blues, soul, or whatever, most of the audience knows many or most of the songs played and enjoys both the parts played that sound pretty much like on the studio album, AND the solos or parts where the band essentially goes off on a musical tangent, soloing, communicating, noodling, and creating an avenue for exploration or expression. This expression can be on a continuum of actual improvisation ranging from a well-rehearsed ‘jam’ to a flying-by-the-seat jam where it might not always sound like music as much as noise. Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton do this as jazz musicians and they are seen as avant-garde. The Grateful Dead do it and it’s psychedelic noise for a bunch of drugged out hippies. More often than not, I can get lost in following the noise in particularly long jams. Also, I’ve found that it really helps if you can see who’s playing what to appreciate the communication going on on-stage. Regardless, after 15 minutes of such jammed out, deconstruction, it’s easy to forget that such sound actually started out as a song. I can’t tell you how many times at Grateful Dead or Phish shows I’ve turned to my show buddies to ask, ‘what song did this start out as?’ But, even with that deconstruction of a jam, where a shared beat gives way to multiple discordant rhythms, melody is non-existent, and feedback has a home (do you hear me Jeff Tweedy?) it’s not the noise I personally enjoy. Rather, I love seeing bands try to play their way out of those situations and take their noise making back to the song they started jamming out of. In any case, as a function of this relatively experiential musical singularity the environment in where music is performed can play a major role in that expression. This introduces more of a social neuroscience element to the mix as the interaction of performer and audience has greater potential to modify a musician or band’s creation. Next week I’ll talk more about collaboration, and the how audiences shape the musical expression by artists.

And now – some picks for things to do over the weekend:

Friday:
There’s supposedly a (not so) secret show tonight at the Magic Stick or Majestic Theater (depending on your sources) by Jack White’s newest band Dead Weather. I may be heading down to the Majestic complex to check it out and see if someone will let me in on charm and good looks alone.

Also going on over there, the Volcanos are doing a free show at the Garden Bowl – I think it’s the stage set up over the lanes, which is way cool to bowl with that going on.

My Dear Disco plays at Luna in Royal Oak

Tyvek (not just for mailers and home improvements) has a CD release party at Jumbos

The Macpodz play at the Elbow Room in Ypsi

Saturday:
The Red Bull Air Races are going on both days this weekend and should be a fun watch from either side of the Detroit River.

Later that night, the Von Bondies are dong a free gig at the Center Garage in Detroit
Sunday:
Red Bull Air Race Finals during the day

Get your singer/songwriter, folkie/bluesy vibe at the Ark in Ann Arbor with Kasey Chambers, Justin Townes Earle and Shane Nicholson.

MOTB Festival(s) of the Week:
My first pick is an arts and music festival, - the Clay Glass & Metal Show in Royal Oak, featuring some truly outstanding artists in these 3 dimensional medias.

Head on down to St. Clair Shores for their Splash Bash festival and enjoy music, fun, food and family activities at what they’re billing as “METRO DETROIT’S LARGEST WATERFRONT PARTY”

Have a great weekend y’all!

WERD!!
-drew

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