"Organised Sound"

The more I read, and the more I think about how the brain reacts to music, the more conservative my thinking seems to get… how scary.

Writing my recent post about harmony I started to feel a bit behind the times, but the topic of this recent revelation is even further to the right. I might just buy myself a tartan cap and a cane soon.

Anyway, what I have been thinking about is this: According to Levitin, music is processed all over the brain in a complex activation of lots of neural centres, whereas day-to-day sounds - the traffic, my fingers tapping on the computer keyboard, etc - activate fewer areas of the brain. The differentiation seems to be when the brain can perceive some structure or order in the relationships between the sounds. This structure could be temporal or spectral. And when we can perceive that these sounds are “organised” in some way, our brains go crazy.

Flashback to 2008 - I was teaching a subject at QUT about popular music and culture. There was one tute about halfway through the semester in this subject when we would ask the students “What is music”. The discussion would begin quite conservatively, with the students saying “Anything that has a beat” or “Anything that can be written on a staff”, etc. I would play them increasingly challenging examples and ask “Well, is THIS music?”. And gradually I would lead the discussion and use little tricks of logic to push them into a theoretical corner, where they would eventually throw their arms up and say “Ok fine, you win, everything is music if someone thinks it is music”.

Myself and the other tutors took great pride and enjoyment in this process, blasting open young people’s minds over one tutorial into a world of endless musical possibilities.

But now I am starting to think differently. I am considering a new definition of music, in which music is anything which causes the kind of neural response characteristic of music listening.

The conservative edge of this definition is that something like this composition by Boulez:

… may be considered to be not music, if the listener lacks the mental schema to perceive structure within it, because it would not light up their brains with activity the way that Beethoven or Ravi Shankar or Kings of Leon might. And I think that realistically, this would be true for many listeners these days. I would predict that the neurological response to this would reflect sound, but perhaps not music.

This is not to say however that it is not beautiful. I can find beauty in Boulez’s use of timbre and expression, but it is more like looking at an abstract sonic painting than listening to music. It is here that we could draw a line between music and sonic art, perhaps.

There is a lot more questions embedded in this idea, such as; what about the combinations of music and what we might call sonic art? When we hear regular structured sound such as a train passing, is that more musical than some 20th century orchestral works? To what do degree can we percieve structure in timbre, texture, and form - can the perception of structure in these elements also provoke the brain into a musical neurological response? I could go on…

I am not entirely committed to this idea at this stage, as it does seem to go against much of what I have struggled to open my mind to over the last 15 years. It does, however, help me to understand what kind of neural response I would like to provoke with my creations.