-
Paul McCartney talk about piano, harmonies, Bach, and math. Love it.
-
Thanks, David. Maybe we should drop the word hear and say feel vibrations – even if the eardrum is the receptor. ?
-
Well, Tom, I’m no expert in physiology, but I’m pretty sure anything that causes the eardrum to vibrate is processed by the brain as sound (and hence is heard), regardless of how the waves get there. There are still the sensations of pitch and volume. It’s possible to press your ear to the wall and understand what is being said in the next room. But I’d welcome other input on this.
-
I almost don’t dare to post this long text, but after following your discussion I can’t help it, sorry 🙂
A very interesting question from David, which has come up here several times: why does music create feelings and why do certain types of chords lead to feelings of happiness. To explain this from a psychological point of view is beyond the scope of this topic and also of the forum.
If you want to know why music is so important for people and why it has a certain effect on people, you should first deal with biological basics and also with evolution itself. How did life evolve on this planet in the first place and what does it mean for us humans in the end? A biological basic principle says: As little environment as possible. The first simple forms of life are completely surrounded by a membrane, which is only permeable to very specific substances and to which simple life reacts. Communication with the environment also takes place via this membrane. Initially, it is vibrations and pressures that are perceived. The oldest kind of sensory perception. They inform the organism about possible dangers. From this vibration-sensitive membrane our ears have developed at some time (more exactly the middle and the inner ear, to express it once strongly simplified). The sense of hearing is our oldest sense after the habtic sensation. Our ears fulfill first of all only one function: they are a kind of alarm system. Our life insurance. Only much later, after the brain has also developed accordingly, the sense of hearing is also used for social functions such as speech, singing and music. If you take a closer look at this development, you will see that we perceive only a fraction of our environment because we are simply perfectly adapted to our biotope, the earth. Our eyes, our ears and the rest of our senses perceive only what we need to survive. How the world could look like in all its aspects? We do not know. For this we would have to be able to see in the infrared or ultraviolet range and hear in the ultrasonic and infrasonic range. But we have learned very well to live with this limited world. And this brings us to sensory physiology. In order to understand how we hear or perceive and process frequencies and which special features the human auditory system has, one should take a look at the structure of the ear. The first filters are already built in there. Our ears are already neuronally connected in such a way that vital information is perceived better than less relevant stimuli (at the same volume, voices, for example, are perceived better than the rest of the ambient noise. This also applies to singing voices). The perception of acoustic information already functions differently than the physiological structure of our ears would lead us to expect. Now we are already in the area of neuroscience. How is the acoustic (already filtered signal) processed. It is possible to localize certain areas in the brain, which are activated by certain auditory signals (one also speaks of cognitive fields). These areas are always connected to other brain regions, such as the autonomic nervous system, which regulates, for example, the heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing rate. At the same time, certain memory levels are also activated. Complex interactions therefore occur very quickly in the brain. Especially in the field of brain research, rapid progress has been made in recent years, because the diagnostic methods are getting better and better (e.g. MRI or CT). But also here, first of all, processes or procedures in thinking and perception processes are described. This does not mean, however, that one also knows which purpose the whole fulfills or why it happens in such a way.
But that’s not all. At this point, brain metabolism comes into play. So which neutransmitters or messenger substances are released in the brain (e.g. dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, etc.) and what do they do in your head and body? The study of brain metabolism is still a fairly young science. Psychiatrists have been experimenting with various drugs and substances since the 1940s and 1950s. But the mechanisms of action are only now really understood (or not) Yes, and then psychology comes into play: Here it is a matter of understanding what influence already learned or formative experiences have on information processing. How are certain memory contents activated, recalled and linked to each other. What function do emotions have and how do we experience our environment. Social psychology also provides interesting insights at this point: which thoughts and behavior patterns are important in a social context. One can only understand the individual person correctly if one knows his social context. People sometimes think and act as a social group completely differently than an individual person. The perception of the environment can also change considerably.
All these scientific sub-disciplines have also conducted many studies on the topic of human perception and emotions and my impression is the following: the overarching interdisciplinary exchange takes place only slowly, so that one has no choice but to deal with all sub-disciplines and their results in order to get an overview. Only in the recent past have physicians, psychologists and physicists come together to form appropriate research teams, because it has been realized that a single, isolated view is not particularly helpful.
To summarize, as beautiful as all the arts we know are, they have their origins in one basic function: to enable or make life easier for us. So if you want to understand why an increase in chords causes feelings of happiness: look around at our environment. What function might it serve, when was it needed in the course of our evolution, or is there perhaps an equivalent to it in our social environment. What happens sensory-physiologically when a single person speaks and what happens when several people speak at the same time, or people sing together? Why does a mother change the pitch of her voice when talking to her infant, why do mothers (and fathers too) sing at all to soothe or cheer up their children? What do we perceive as a fetus already in the womb, initially blind and deaf? From the seventh month we are already able to recognize our mother’s voice, to hear her heartbeat. Do we already perceive there the first chords of our still young life, which shape us forever? All possible factors that could explain the feeling of happiness through the change of chords. Emotions always fulfill a social function and at the same time ensure survival. Emotions are directly linked to our perception. They are much older than language or intellectual achievements such as mathematics. And also interesting: feelings can be triggered by thoughts and/or body sensations (every person with anxiety disorders will unfortunately know this phenomenon) or even music. Music directly addresses the archaic part of our sensory perception: we can feel the vibrations of strong basses (the diaphragm plays a special role here as a ressonance amplifier), feel the rhythm (physiological reactions) and hear the melody (cognitive processes). Certainly a reason why music and emotions are forever connected. Music has become an art form through geniuses like Bach, Beethoven and many other musicians, but music in its pure form can always trigger the same basic emotions: Joy, fear, anger, love, sadness, surprise, and perhaps shame.
One last remark: if something is experienced as harmonious or disharmonious it also has something to do with the synchronization of our two brain hemispheres, which must constantly exchange information. This synchronization follows its own “rhythm” or a certain frequency and also influences our interpretation of the sensory information we receive.
Fun fact: Music is understood worldwide. The African Mafa tribe rarely comes into contact with Western music. A research team headed by Thomas Fritz from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig changed that in 2009. For a study, the scientists played various styles of music to the Mafa, including tango, rock ‘n’ roll and Johann Sebastian Bach. The people were supposed to assign the three basic moods happy, sad or threatening to the different sounds – which they managed without any problems.
-
Hi Jurgen
Wow, great write up, a lot to chew on. I find fascinating what you said. I can see the physiological and evolutionary link back to the rudimentary life forms where vibrations triggered primal survival responses that could be inferred as the basis of fear, and the sound of a mother’s heart beat to a fetus or infant the source of comfort, and the effect of soundwaves triggering these responses across a spectrum between fear and comfort or pleasure. I think though emotions are much more complex and intangible than that, as are feelings of love, sorrow, and longing. We live in a biological shell, and biological processes keep the heart beating and neurons firing in our brains, but there seems to be a gap when the human experience is stripped down to the purely physiological explanation. So far no one has been able to explain consciousness, identity, love, all the intangibles that are experienced through emotions.
For me music is in the realm of the intangible too. Bob Dylan explained it as coming from a well spring of inspiration. Keith Richards explained it as “incoming”. Brian Wilson explains it as exploding out of his chest. I heard an interview recently with a famous producer, his name escapes me at the moment, who at different times produced Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones , Bonny Raitt, Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and a host of others and he was asked, what do all the geniuses he worked with have in common. He said their inspiration seems to come from the ether, and no one owns it, and it’s really high up there that most people can’t reach it. You need long tentacles to be able to access it, and Brian, Bob, Keith, Bonny etc…have long tentacles.
-
-
Hi David,
i’m not trying to win an argument.
But if the poor man had his ear to the floor to hear vibrations then he wasn’t quite deaf it seems. The question becomes did he memorize the chords he intended to use and continue to compose after losing hearing all together.
Juergen, that’s quite an essay to take in. Thanks for the effort.
-
Hi Tom, from what I know, Beethoven did lose his hearing completely towards his later period. Some of his works like the last 3 piano sonatas 30,31, 32 and late string quartets were written when he was completely deaf, and are considered some of the greatest works in music history. It’s not for the faint of heart, meaning it is abstract, for the beginner classical music listener, but for the seasoned, it is amazing. For me, I really enjoy his late piano sonatas, but with the late string quartets, I’m getting there but I need a little more seasoning.
By the time of the 9th Symphony, Beethoven was quite deaf.
Beethoven started to lose his hearing in his late 20s, around 27-28, and there are accounts he came close to suicide when he realized he was losing his hearing. He could have been a Club 27 casualty, but fortunately he embraced his art that saved him.
-
-
Thanks Jung,
That means that Beethoven composed pieces from memory of how they should sound,
That’s truly amazing.
How do you achieve such an accomplishment without the means to experience the result in some way ?
-
Tom you are on the right track. I would first distinguish between hearing loss and deafness. Complete deafness is usually preceded by a longer period of hearing loss. What does deaf mean? Acoustic information causes the eardrum to vibrate. Three small bones are fused to the eardrum. They form a lever system that mechanically transmits the vibrations of the eardrum to the inner ear. The inner ear contains the actual hearing organ: the cochlea (also called snail after its shape). The cochlea is filled with a fluid and on an elongated membrane inside it there are innumerable sensory hairs. These sensory hairs are stimulated by incoming vibrations and convert the mechanical or physical signal into an electrical impulse (in sensory physiology this is also referred to as action potentials). These in turn are transmitted to the brain. If these sensory hairs in the cochlea are exposed to high sound pressure (volume) over a long period of time, they become desolate and die. One becomes hard of hearing. First, high frequencies can no longer be perceived properly. Then the middle frequencies and at the very end also the low frequencies. A phenomenon that is unfortunately only too well known in old people. Inflammatory diseases, such as an inflammation of the middle ear, can also lead to permanent damage to hearing in severe cases. Beethoven is said to have been infected with a typhus pathogen (typhus exanthemicus) and as a result became deaf. Whether Beethoven was really completely deaf or just severely hard of hearing, I don’t know. Probably he could still hear low frequencies for a very long time. As I mentioned before, very low frequencies with a high amplitude are felt over the whole body. Beethoven was a person of exceptionally high musical intelligence. In addition, he is said to have had an absolute hearing. With such highly gifted people, the information processing in the brain runs somewhat differently than with “normal” humans. A study from 2019 by the University of Toronto concluded that various areas of the auditory center in the brains of “absolutists” are larger than in people without absolute hearing. Moreover, in absolute hearers, neighboring areas of the brain turn on, giving them the advantage of being able to detect sounds and pitches much more quickly. And because of this extraordinary talent, Beethoven will probably have been able to arrange his music in his head without ever being able to hear it. Just as we humans have our inner voice, perhaps he had his inner music. There are many forms of giftedness not only in music. Some people have a so-called photographic memory: they can reproduce complete pictures they have seen with all details. And then there are synesthetes. In these people, the senses are linked differently than is usual. Letters and numbers can always have a certain color with these people or the seen picture is connected with a certain smell. There are several other forms of giftedness.
All sensory impressions arise in the head anyway. It is a great human achievement, but actually nothing unusual. We constantly call up some kind of memory content. We can remember. Singing songs, reciting texts and linking thoughts anew. The only reason we don’t perceive this ability as extraordinary is that we take it for granted. Do you like to cook? Maybe more unusual dishes without a recipe? Then think about what your brain is doing there everyday and bon appétit.
-
Thanks Juergen,
old people like Peter Townsend.
Enlarged auditory center like Einstein’s pituitary gland.
The variation in the human brain and the varied encumbent skill sets is awesome.
-
Yes Tom, in an interview many years ago, Pete Townsend reported that he always stood directly in front of the loudspeakers during live gigs (like probably many other musicians of the 60s). No band does that anymore. But when you’re young, you don’t even think about a lot of things. When I think about the ringing in my ears after going to a discotheque. Oh dear.
-
Log in to reply.
