Feeling Emotion Conveyed by a Performer

Chopin’s Étude Op. 10 No. 3, Tristesse, performed by Derek Wang (11 years old).

The Musical Brain

The brain processes musical nuance in many ways, it turns out. Edward W. Large, a music scientist at Florida Atlantic University, scanned the brains of people with and without experience playing music as they listened to two versions of a Chopin étude: one recorded by a pianist, the other stripped down to a literal version of what Chopin wrote, without human-induced variations in timing and dynamics.

During the original performance, brain areas linked to emotion activated much more than with the uninflected version, showing bursts of activity with each deviation in timing or volume.

So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians.

Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions.

Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume.

Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing.

“We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.”

Dr. Daniel Levitin’s project found that musicians were more sensitive to changes in volume and timing than nonmusicians. That echoes research by Nina Kraus , a neurobiologist at Northwestern University, which showed that musicians are better at hearing sound against background noise, and that their brains expend less energy detecting emotion in babies’ cries.

Separately, the Levitin team found that children with autism essentially rated each nocturne rendition equally emotional, finding the original no more emotionally expressive than the mechanical version. But in other research, the team found that children with autism could label music as happy, sad or scary, suggesting, Dr. Levitin said, that “their recognition of musical emotions may be intact without necessarily having those emotions evoked, and without them necessarily experiencing those emotions themselves.”

Read the entire article here… 

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See also:

• How Musicians Communicate Emotion (NYT)
• A Brain on Chopin (NYT)
• Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion (TED)
• Musical Language (Radiolab)
• Evelyn Glennie Shows How to Listen (TED)
• This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
• A Complete Experience of Listening

Within this Structure, One is Free

“And in that moment I understood that everything I had gone to Thailand to look for, to search for, I had it already in my singing — the calm, but alertness,the focus, but awareness, and being totally in the moment. When you're totally in the moment, when I'm totally in the moment, the vessel of expression is open. The emotions can flow from me to you and back. Extremely profound experience.”

~ Claron McFadden, from “Singing is the Primal Mystery,” TEDxAmsterdam, November 2010

[Thanks, Kit!]

Let the Love Begin

Happy is the heart that still feels pain
Darkness drains and light will come in again
Swing open your chest and let it in
Just let the love, love, love begin

~ Ingrid Michaelson

• Ingrid Michaelson’s YouTube Channel
• Rekindle Warmth Toward Yourself and Others
• Mindfulness Strategies for Unpleasant Feelings

The Intimacy You Get From Practicing

Flamenco guitarist and Zen practitioner Ottmar Liebert, from “Intimacy Through Practice,” Buddhist Geeks Podcast, September 13, 2010:

There’s a part of practice that I think is inherent in all different practices. The type of concentration, the familiarity, the intimacy that you get to whatever you’re practicing, whether it’s archery or Zen or music or how to make a perfect pancake. You won’t get there unless you get intimate with the subject. You only get there through practice. As you become more intimate, you know more about it, where you can say “This batter is too liquid or too solid or too warm too cold. It’ll act this way.” All that comes only through practice. It comes  up often in conversations with my friends about how people go about life these days, that they’re really not willing to practice anything.

The other day we got to talking about jeans. There’s only one of the old fashioned wooden looms in America. I think it’s actually in Raleigh, North Carolina. All the other ones were shipped to Japan, and that’s in the ‘50s. And that’s where you  get the superior denim because people are willing to make things by hand and become intimate with it. Whereas a lot of people in the United States or in Europe will just go, “I’d rather buy ten pairs at Walmart than buy one pair of really good jeans, even though the really good pair will probably outlast the ten pairs they buy at Walmart.” So, there’s a lack of that—you might say depth—that comes from not practicing, from not practicing a craft.

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Raleigh Denim

Raleigh Denim: Handcrafted in North Carolina from David Huppert on Vimeo.

Listen to the Music of the Traffic in the City

“The song written by an Englishman about an American city whose promise of togetherness really yields loneliness sung by a white Parisian woman everyone thought was black.”

~ From “Pop Music: Songs that Cross Borders,” Radiolab, April 21, 2008

When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go - downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know - downtown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?

The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown - no finer place, for sure
Downtown - everything's waiting for you

Don't hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows - downtown
Maybe you know some little places to go to
Where they never close - downtown
Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova
You'll be dancing with him too before the night is over
Happy again

The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown, where all the lights are bright
Downtown - waiting for you tonight
Downtown - you're gonna be all right now

[Instrumental break]

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along

So maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares
So go downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown - don't wait a minute for
Downtown - everything's waiting for you

Downtown, downtown, downtown, downtown ...

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Listen to the whole fascinating Radiolab episode:

To Be Able to Sing

An excerpt from a Radiolab conversation between Jad Abumrad and musician Juana Molina (May 4, 2009):

Juana: I usually feel that the sounds tell me what to do with them. Every sound has its own behavior. I’m just feeling like a driver of those sounds. Little by little, my ridiculously small universe becomes huge. Anything that has a note or a rhythm, you can make music with.

Jad: Are you inspired more by a thought, like I want to say something?

Juana: No. Never! There’s absolutely nothing that I really want to say.

Jad: Really?

Juana: Really.

Jad: Well, you have lyrics sometimes.

Juana: Most of the times.

Jad: So when the song pops into your head and you develop it, you’re not thinking of  a story per se.

Juana: No. Never.

Jad: But you put the story on afterwards, why?

Juana: In order to be able to sing.

Un Día

Un día voy a cantar las canciones sin letra y cada uno podrá imaginar si hablo de amor, de desilusión, banalidades o sobre platón.

One day I will sing the songs with no lyrics and everyone can imagine for themselves if it's about love, disappointment, banalities or about Plato.

The Way You Are

“You know how unhappy you would be if you thought that the way you are is not okay? I started out my life like that. I don’t want to end up my life like that.”

~ Bill Withers, from Still Bill

On Your Way to Wonderful

Still Bill

 

"It's okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful, you're going to have to pass through all right, and when you get to all right, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you're gonna go."

~ Bill Withers, from “Still Bill: Documenting a Soul Icon,” All Things Considered (March 4, 2010)

Are We Just Going to Wait it Out?

Wait It Out
by Imogen Heap, from Ellipse

Everybody says time heals everything.
But what of the wretched hollow?
The endless in-between?
Are we just going to wait it out?

And sit here cold?
Well, We'll be long gone by then.
And lackluster in dust we lay
Around old magazines.
Fluorescent lighting sets the scene
for all we could and should be being
in the one life that we've got.

Working without Words

“I feel like when I’m performing and I’m really in kind of a state, it’s quite like meditation…especially as a soloist where the forms are precise, but in a different way than when I’m with other people and we’re dependent on each other. But as a soloist I can be very precise and very rigorous and yet at the same time I feel that I’m very open and fluid to what’s happening in the moment. It’s that thing of trying to be really present in experience. In a sense I think that our culture teaches us to describe our experiences, to narrate our experiences, and that’s how we’re one step away from [them]. So in a way, I think that’s why I really like working without words because I think it throws your mind into a very different state.”

~ Meredith Monk, from Inner Voice

Meredith Monk's Songs of Ascension performed at the unveiling of the Ann Hamilton Tower at Oliver Ranch (July 2007).

Strict Joy

Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard recently broke up but are still making music together as The Swell Season. Their new project, Strict Joy, comes out next week.

Marketa tells the New York Times, “Like Glen always puts it, you live your life, and the residue of that life you lead becomes the music. The same way it turned from friends to lovers, it somehow managed to turn the other way around at the end of it, which I’m delighted about because I’d hate for it to be drama.”

Touch the Sound

“Award-winning director and cinematographer, Thomas Riedelsheimer,  takes us on an journey through a universe of sound with percussionist Evelyn Glennie. They map a world of the senses — images and sounds. Hearing images, seeing sound. With Evelyn, we experience sound as palpable and rhythm as the basis of everything that is.”

~ From the Touch the Sound web page

Music is More Magical with Understanding

From “Music Written For Monkeys Strikes A Chord,” by Richard Harris, Morning Edition (9.2.09):

David Teie has been developing a theory to explain why music plays on human emotions. His theory is that music relates to the most primitive sounds we make and respond to, like laughter, heartbeats, or a mother's cooing.

Fearful monkey music:

Happy monkey music:

He says, "the paradox is that I distinctly remember thinking once that when they figure out why Puccini makes me cry, I hope I die the day before the news gets out. But the great news about this exploration into music is it's actually more magical and wonderful once you realize how it works."

David Teie Plays the Schuman Cello Concerto in A minor (Mvt 1) with the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, April 2007

See also: Music for Cats

To Teach the World to Listen

“In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.”

From TED Talks (Filmed 2/2003; Posted 4/2007)

Touch the Sound

Arrive to a Place in the Middle

“I think this idea that we meet one person and you stay with them your whole life until you die, for me, is unrealistic. I’ve loved a lot of people at many different times in my life. And the love doesn’t stop when we’re not together. And I feel as though, I’ve come to a place in my life, where the climax isn’t watching the love arrive, it’s watching the love in full. Just like our life goes in a cycle, that song has a descension which is just as beautiful as the middle. And in fact, the metaphor that I gave was the same. It was, arrive to a place in the middle where you watch everything in its radiance, you watch the beauty, it unfolds like a flower. And then, you watch it descend. And there’s just as much beauty in watching something recede into the soil as there is watching it come back because that’s full. And I feel the same way about love. So I feel no loss when love leaves because it truly never goes anywhere, and I feel no joy when it sticks around because honestly I kind of like to sleep alone now and then.”

~ Melody Gardot, in conversation with Bob Edwards (July 11, 2009)

The Gradual, Lifelong Construction

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”

~ Glenn Gould

How to Fly

Regina Spektor on trying to explain her song writing process:

“To try to go back and take it all apart, then try to put order on it, is almost not fair to it. Let’s say somebody actually knows how to fly, but people just can’t deal with that, they’re constantly looking, going, ‘But where is the button, the propeller, the jet?’ And eventually the person has to strap on the jet and say, ‘Here’s the button.’ I think that’s what happens with people having to explain their songs. The song was flying, and now I’m being pushed to make up shit about it. Sometimes it’s almost like people take it as an insult, like you’re being facetious or pretentious. Or, and this upsets me even more, people say, ‘Random’, ‘Puts together really cool sounds’. It’s not random, it’s very specific, and when I’m writing it, it feels like life and death. It would be so much more fun if people went, ‘Wow, that’s cool, he just flew.’”

[Thanks JC!]

I Lose Interest

“I feel like my last album was really very much about this emotion to want justice. And maybe I go with this emotion as a way to get at how it is to feel injustice—to want justice and to demand it. It’s very strong, this image of a person with a flag, declaring independence. But I’m not interested in politics. I lose interest the microsecond it ceases to be emotional, when something becomes a political movement. What I’m interested in is emotions.”

~ Björk, from Interview Magazine (June/July 2009). Voltaic, a two-CD, two-DVD box set of live recordings from Medúlla and Volta, will be available June 23 from Nonesuch.

Identifying Emotion in Sound

From “Musicians’ Brains ‘Fine-Tuned’ to Identify Emotion,” by Wendy Leopold

In a study in the latest issue of European Journal of Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary Northwestern research team for the first time provides biological evidence that musical training enhances an individual’s ability to recognize emotion in sound.

“Quickly and accurately identifying emotion in sound is a skill that translates across all arenas, whether in the predator-infested jungle or in the classroom, boardroom or bedroom,” says Dana Strait, primary author of the study.

A doctoral student in the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music, Strait does research in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory directed by neuroscientist Nina Kraus. The laboratory has done pioneering work on the neurobiology underlying speech and music perception and learning-associated brain plasticity.   

[A] study titled “Musical Experience and Neural Efficiency: Effects of Training on Subcortical Processing of Vocal Expressions in Emotion,” [which was] funded by the National Science Foundation, found that the more years of musical experience musicians possessed and the earlier the age they began their music studies also increased their nervous systems’ abilities to process emotion in sound.

[Thanks Dōshin!]

How Relevant is this Anymore

“…in 1996 I was in my hardcore Romantic phase. I was so in love with Puccini and Tchaikovsky and stuff like that. Very romantic, emotional music. And I got to Harvard wanting to learn how to do that. Of course that music is not only a hundred years old, but it was just completely out of style after the 20th century and everything that happened. So I don’t even know what I was hearing. It was atonal. But several years later I got another music teacher and I was in a different frame of mind and I really came to love some of that 20th century music—Stravinsky and Bartok and even Schoenberg—stuff like that.

“I got this great composition teacher who taught me private lessons from UCLA. Some of the homework assignments he gave me at that time—2004—I integrated into a song on Weezer’s latest album, the Red Album, called The Greatest Man That Ever Lived. At the end of that song—it’s a six-minute song, very epic—and at the end there’s all this vocal counterpoint. He taught me how to do all that. And actually, a lot of it is from a homework assignment he gave me. I was learning how to write three-part vocal counterpoint in the style of 16th century.

“And as soon as the album was finished, I sent it to him. I knew he would be overjoyed to hear his influence on a modern rock record. You know, as a college professor in a somewhat obscure field, you might start to think like how relevant is this anymore. And he probably would have been overjoyed to hear that on a Weezer record. He was such an enthusiastic guy. And I was sad to learn that he passed away before he had a chance to hear that album.”

~ Rivers Cuomo, speaking to Terri Gross on Fresh Air (1.21.09)