Is music the universal language?

Laura-Lee Balkwill asks of a neurologist, a psychologist and an anthropologist, in a most wonderful All in the Mind podcast (30'):

Is music the universal language?

One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

An excerpt from the podcast transcript that summarises the interests of each speaker:

Laura-Lee Balkwill [interviewer]: So why is music interesting – that's a complex question with a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to.

Catherine Falk [ethnomusicologist]: Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own specific, very culturally specific ways.

Laura-Lee Balkwill [psychologist] : I find music interesting because of its power to evoke emotion, to express emotion, to make people feel. And that's how I got into studying music and emotion to begin with because I wanted to explore how that worked and whether that worked the same across cultures.

Ani Patel [neurologist]: And it presents science with opportunity to study the relationship between brain function and complex cognition, which is one of the big topics in neuroscience today: how does brain circuitry give rise to the mental experiences that we have of the world? And music is a wonderful domain to explore that because of its complexity and its reducibility, I would say.

A summary of some other points that fascinated me:

• Cathy Falk: archeological evidence of Neanderthal dwellings suggests music may pre-date language;
• Ani Patel: alternatively, we may not have evolved a capacity for making music so much as creatively adapted other cognitive mechanisms such as those responsible for language;
• Ani Patel: "modern neuro-imaging has shown us that both sides of the brain are very much involved in processing music. Language as well – but language does have a strong left hemisphere bias whereas music seems to draw on both sides of the brain – and does importantly, integrate different aspects of brain function in [...] waves of integration as opposed to simple processing chains";
• Laura-Lee Balkwill: Some aspects of music, such as certain fundamental characteristics' evocation of particular emotional responses, seem to be universal;
• Patel & Falk: whereas many others are culturally-specific;
• Ani Patel: "Some very deep and evolutionarily ancient reward centres of the brain [are] activated by [...] music. And these are areas that are typically activated by biologically significant behaviour such as eating, or reproducing or so on, and yet they [are] activated by this abstract acoustic stimulus with no obvious survival value";
• Cathy Falk: "Music is not an universal language any more than language itself is an universal language. I don't understand Swahili; it is a language. People construct the syntax of music very much in tandem with the way they construct themselves socially in their own very culturally specific ways."

I very much recommend listening to the podcast itself, which is interspersed with some great audio illustrations of diverse musics.

Music taps into our richest, deepest selves: our emotions, our language skills, our imagination, our universal humanity and the culturally-contextualised aspects of our identity. To understand music (and, in many ways, we are only just beginning to) really would be to go a long way to understanding what it is to be human.

Sound branding

Noel Franus writes about "Building Brand Value Through the Strategic Use of Sound":

Most organizations have relied almost exclusively on the sense of sight to communicate who they are, what they do and why they matter. Pirates have their unmistakable skull-and-bones flag. Nearly all religions have their own unique symbol. And today, practically every brand on earth has its own visual identity. Other senses are rarely part of the equation.

Yet sound has unquestionable potential in creating impressions. Consider the sonic snippets in your life—imagine Chariots of Fire or Rocky without music, a PC commercial without that Intel Inside bongggg, or a Harley-Davidson hog without its expertly calibrated tone. Sound triggers recall and reactions. And much like good visual or industrial design, it also has the ability to convey value and strengthen brand reputations.

Forward-thinking brands are catching on. In this first of a two-part series based on my co-presentation at the “Gain” conference last October, we introduce the practice of audio branding and identity – the intentional use of music, sound and voice to create a connection between people and organizations.

The full post has some great examples of the use of sound for brand identity enhancement. As a musician and identitologist, this topic fascinates me. Music has the ability to resonate with us on so many levels. The "food of love", indeed!

Musical anatomy

WARNING: off-topic silliness follows. ; )

Sight reading with a piano pupil through a duet reduction of Haydn's Symphony No. 2 in D major yesterday, I was reminded of an experience I had as a callow seventeen year-old in my Music A Level Analysis class (I was studying on the Preparatory Course in Music at Dartington College of Arts in Devon; wow, I just realised that was half a lifetime ago!).

Our Analysis teacher, Dave (I forget his surname, which is probably fortunate), is fresh out of university and evidently keen to impress the class with his knowhow and enthusiasm. As we reach, in a group analysis, the point in the first movement of the symphony where Haydn modulates rather dramatically and loudly to A major, Dave melodramatically expostulates, in his vowel-softened Newcastle accent:

"Can't you just feel the massive A-ness?!"

The image Dave had just unintentionally conjured in our minds seems to hang in the air for a moment.

A deranged laughter bursts across the room, uncontrollable and side-splitting. We are falling off our chairs. Poor Dave flushes beetroot red.

Then some wag pipes up:

"It's a good job there's no key of P!"

Musing on music

I have a particular piano pupil who is on the autistic spectrum. I shall call him Alan. Alan likes routine and dislikes changes in his routine. We have taken a few months to get to know each other, and now it is becoming really quite rewarding to teach him, as he is musical, motivated, and full of wild notions.

However, when I told Alan's dad that I had pointed Alan towards Wikipedia as a resource for finding out about the lives of the composers of the pieces he is playing (he always asks about them), the dad told me glumly that, while Alan had learned to read excellently by the (exceptionally early) age of two, he found it very difficult to sustain his attention for more than a few written words before his mind shot off on some tangent or other.

I realised that music making must be providing Alan a thread to keep hold of through passing time in a way that the act of reading the written word does not: he often sustains his attention well through his renditions of his piano pieces. Not always, and not perfectly, but there is certainly a continuity of attention present when Alan is playing the piano than at other times.

Music making simulaneously requires attention and expression on aural, physical and conceptual levels. It is an extraordinarily immersive experience. I am really glad that, through music, Alan seems to be strengthening his ability to sustain a dialogue with his world through time—and having a lot of fun doing thats, of course.

On a related note, while Alan is an intelligent boy, Charla and I heard a podcast from CBS's 60 Minutes the other day about so-called "idiot savants" who exhibit amazing musical skills. More than one child featured on the podcast was able to reproduce and improvise music on their chosen instrument, in a variety of styles and with no little panache. Yet the same children were unable to dress themselves or hold a basic conversation, thanks to their overall mental age of around two years (their actual ages were between 8 and teen).

Apparently, it is thought that such people hold the patterns and rules necessary for their musical feats in procedural memory—the type of memory that helps us to ride a bicycle or do the ironing.

Perhaps we could just about get a sense of how the learning and reproduction of a pre-determined piece of (e.g. classical) music could be achieved in this way, but musical improvisation is a far more complex activity than the simple execution of a pre-determined sequence of actions. With improvisation, the timing and pitch of each note must be chosen in the context of other simultaneous notes, previous notes and following notes, with respect to global rules and/or piece-specific templates (in the case of e.g. a jazz standard) of harmony, texture, melodic shape and phrase structure—rules which are at best partially understood by music theorists!

I know that when I improvise at the piano, I am far from conscious of what in my mind is generating all the simulataneous choices I am making about the movement of my fingers over the keys (and foot on the pedal). I just know or guess what feels and sounds good to me.

What an amazing gift music is for us—but also, what a mystery it remains!