The past has been visiting lately. It ain't trippy or haunting – nothing like that. Just a mark of advancing age! When I recently turned 30, I took stock of some of my “talents” and realised with a sinking heart that I'd let one in particular go. As a child, I was a pretty good pianist and violinist without having to dedicate hours of practice in order to do pretty well in examinations and competitions. (I remember my daily practise limit was about half an hour to my mother's consternation). What's more, I was one of the lucky few to be in possession of a special something known as Absolute Pitch whereby I could name any note played to me on the piano. Given this happy accident of biology and upbringing, I probably had the potential to become something of a performer had I not first been knocked off my perch by a turbulent adolescence and chronic fear of my piano teacher (I think she's still alive).
You might recall that the turn of my fourth decade resulted in a discombobulating need to go searching for my soul, which had gone wandering again after I thought I had it nailed. For the first time in my life I felt that the aphorism “use it or lose it” actually meant something. Since life purpose was what I was looking for, the quickest way to get unstuck was by looking at what I had – in my brain, my body – and try to make something of it rather than reaching for something that was, well, as yet out of reach. So through this came the urge to reclaim the musical bit of myself.
I'd always wanted to learn the classical and Spanish guitar. With its singular capacity to produce the lulling Balearic sounds of my endless beachside fantasies, the classical guitar is the only instrument that succeeds in calming me right down. So as a birthday present to myself, I bought a cheap nylon string guitar off eBay and Googled the teacher nearest to where I live. As luck would have it, the teacher I decided was “the one” had just broken his thumb (!) and was out of action for 6 weeks. Yet something told me I should wait for him to recover rather than go hunting elsewhere. So I waited. And while I waited I did what probably most people who want to learn an instrument do these days. I YouTubed some video tutorials and then found some free TABS on the internet to start picking at.
Having barely touched an instrument for a decade, I was initially filled with trepidation. I questioned whether I could still claim to be musical, not to mention whether I still had Absolute Pitch. I wondered how easily I would take to the guitar, having experienced a discouraging false start at age 16 when I couldn't play the F chord on Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit” because my hands were too small. Fortunately, I got confirmation that I hadn't completely “lost it” before I'd even begun lessons: I'd taught myself a ABSRM Grade 4 syllabus piece without knowing it. My hands are also a lot stronger if not wider in reach than when I was 16 (all that yoga!)
Private lessons have now been going for three months and have given me further courage that I'm not too old to pick up an instrument. Had I no other ambition, I would probably heed my teacher's advice and go on to do grades and examinations. But it seems old habits really do die hard. I still only practise 30 minutes a day – max – and not every day at that.
All of this is really a preamble for another past event that has come into the present. When I moved to England in 2008, the first book I bought on these shores was Daniel Levitin's “This Is Your Brain On Music”. The purchase was probably a hangover from my student days studying neuroscience at university. But I only read a third of the book at the time.
When M and I recently moved home, in the midst of sorting out all our Stuff!, I told myself that instead of filling up our new bookshelf with new purchases, I should try and get through the books we already own but haven't read. “This Is Your Brain On Music” was one of them. It seemed like the perfect read for the moment in any case as not only was I now learning an instrument, I've also been contemplating doing a Masters in Neuroscience. And as someone who is undergoing a slow career transition, I found a kindred spirit of sorts in Daniel Levitin.
Levitin would know a thing or two about career moves. He went from being a university drop-out and guitarist in several bands to becoming a record producer, working with some of the biggest names in rock history, to then geek it out as a neuroscientist and cognitive scientist specialising in music cognition, working with some of the biggest names in brain science. Whoa! “This Is Your Brain On Music” pretty much sums up all the research on the subject until 2006 when it was first published.
You're not a true music geek unless you like books like this. With passion bursting from the page, Levitin does a marvellous job at entertaining us on what can be a pretty abstruse subject – he canvasses music theory, for instance – while furnishing the reader with an introduction to the general discoveries and principles of neuroscience and brain cognition along the way.
Levitin begins by exploring what music actually is – there's doubtless much more to it than simply being “organised sound” - to then dissecting how we perceive music and what goes on in the brain when that happens. Auditory perception, he explains, is actually the product of our brains working to construct its own version of reality when stimulated (via the eardrum) by certain disturbances of air molecules. In other words, music, let alone sound, only exists if there are perceivers like ourselves. This is analogous to the reality of colours, which are also just the perceptual products of our brains transducing frequencies on the visible spectrum into patterns of neural firing. Then out of the raw material of the audio waves, the brain is somehow able to parse and compute all the various components of music including pitch, timbre, rhythm, meter and so on – in parallel (known as “parallel processing” as opposed to “serial processing” as a computer might). This kind of mental processing touches on one of the most fascinating things about auditory perception. How can we perceive and identify the multidimensional qualities of, say, Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven” just from vibrating air molecules hitting the eardrum?
In fact, how can we distinguish different sounds at all?
As Levitin writes (p.102): “Let's consider a typical auditory scene, a person sitting in her living room reading a book. In this environment, let's suppose that there are six sources of sound that she can readily identify: the whooshing noise of the central heating... the hum of a refrigerator in the kitchen, traffic outside... and a recording of Debussy preludes.”
From the eardrum's and brain's point of view, it's like throwing Ping-Pong balls against a pillowcase which is held taught across the opening of a bucket. The pillowcase is the ear drum and the ping pong balls are the moving air molecules. The brain's ability to discern the different kinds of “hits” from the balls is part of its genius. It turns out that the brain does a lot more to complete an aural picture than just using the information its given by moving air molecules.
Other fascinating topics Levitin explores include how and why music – as opposed to just random sounds – can evoke such great emotions in us all; what makes a song groove and our bodies want to dance; and how music memories (and memories in general) are stored in patterns of neural activation. After reading this, you'll no doubt have a better understanding of what your brain is doing when it gets a so-called “ear worm” (bits of musical refrains that get stuck in one's head)!
Levitin also explores why we have music at all from an evolutionary perspective. Does music accord our species with specific survival value or is it simply a “spandrel”, a byproduct of another adaptation such as our facility for language? If it is itself an adaptation, is music like a peacock's feathers, advertising an animal's health and fitness and therefore underlying genetic quality? For instance, is it any accident that rock stars like Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix tend to enjoy more sexual conquests than your average non-musician Joe? Or did music evolve as a form of social glue, bringing people together, and so therefore conferring survival value at the group level?
The most interesting section of the book for me is when Levitin talks about musical expertise. He makes the distinction between expertise as a performer, as a composer and as a listener. You can be a brilliant composer without being very good at playing instruments. Irving Berlin, generally regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest composers, was not a good instrumentalist in the technical sense; while Joni Mitchell, one of popular music's most innovative songwriters, never learned how to read music – and to her advantage.
Most of the rest of us who are neither good musicians nor good composers but who were exposed to music from a young age (perhaps even in the womb) have nevertheless grown up to be expert music listeners. We can tell that a violin sounds different (or has a different timbre) from a trumpet etc; we know the kind of music that we like and dislike; we can generally discern when a wrong note is played or sung especially if the melody or song in question is a familiar one; and we are able to store and recall a vast number of music memories.
But only a small subsection of the population actually become expert performers and accomplished composers. Why? The question inevitably dredges up the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Are some people simply genetically predisposed to be good musicians? It's known, for instance, that music often runs in families. I know my maternal grandmother studied at a music academy while all her children were made to learn the piano. But this is by no means sufficient evidence to suggest my family on the maternal side possesses a “music gene”. The fact that my family had the opportunity – i.e. nurture – to learn to play music counts for a lot as well.
Even if musical ability in the performance sense has a genetic basis, the role of genes could be indirect. Playing music is a complex cognitive behaviour that recruits pretty much your entire brain – from auditory and motor centres to decision-making and emotion-mediating centres. So having musical ability could simply be a side-effect of having more general genetically determined abilities such as hand-eye coordination, motor skills, memory for sequences and certain structures and a sense of rhythm and timing. Furthermore getting anywhere as a musician often comes down to character. Success (in anything) requires one to have passion, determination, discipline, grit, persistence and patience.
So the answer to the nature-versus-nurture debate on musical ability is likely that both have a part to play in a complex web of interactions.
Having said all this, there is still the “talent” itself to explain. Just like some people have an intuitive predilection to work with their hands or to do mental calculations or to master the chessboard, mine is to learn how to play music. I still remember my violin teacher calling me a “sponge” when I started taking lessons, age 8, and going straight to sitting the Grade 3 examination. Just a shame I never had the discipline to make something more of it...
It appears that the origin of such talents remain a mystery to neuroscientists. And it's still a big question whether being musically talented extends to the heightening other cognitive functions. One thing's for sure, though, having a good grasp of any rule-based activity, from a language to chess to music requires a decent memory of the rules and structure of that activity. Levitin writes (p.217):
“Expertise in any domain is characterized by a superior memory, but only for things within the domain for expertise... Grandmaster chess players have memorized thousands of board and game configurations. However, their exceptional memory for chess extends only to legal positions of the chess pieces. Asked to memorize random arrangements of pieces on a board, they do no better than novices; in other words, their knowledge of chess piece positions is schematized, and relies on knowledge of the legal moves and positions that pieces can take. Likewise, experts in music rely on their knowledge of musical structure. Expert musicians excel at remembering chord sequences that are “legal” or make sense within the harmonic systems that they have experience with, but they do no better than anyone else at learning sequences of random chords.”
As I am currently learning simple classical pieces on the guitar, I am experiencing my brain work first hand! As someone whose memory is deeply ingrained with what cognitive psychologists call a “schema” or framework for classical music – that is, implicit knowledge of the way classical music works which is different from the way pop or jazz works - I find myself automatically using this mental structure to help me gain mastery over a new piece of music. I know roughly how a melody will play out, from its contours (the way it moves up or down) to the way it resolves itself. My brain therefore doesn't have to work too hard in memorising the tune while it does the harder task of figuring out what my fingers on both hands should be doing.
Thanks to my musical training as a child, I can also read musical notation. The challenge – albeit a relatively small one – has been to learn the correspondence between the notes on the page and the fingering on the fret board (neck of the guitar), which produces the notes we hear. For general memorisation, we find it easier to memorise sequences in which the units are arranged in series or meaningful chunks as opposed to randomly (so, for memorising number sequences, it's easier to memorise “3456789” than “2978345”). I've found this to be the case in acquiring the muscle memory on the fretboard when learning a tune. Notes that are close together tonally are much easier to memorise and play than notes that jump up and down the fretboard and across strings.
How nice is it to finally read a book that offers insights that are truly relevant to one's life :-) I highly recommend this book if you, music geek, want to vindicate an obsession.
