Music, Passion, and Cognitive Function

Leonid Perlovsky

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780128096963
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Neuroscience
• Index: Biological Sciences

Music, Passion, and Cognitive Function examines contemporary cognitive theories of music, why they cannot explain music's power over us, and the origin and evolution of music. The book presents experimental confirmations of the theory in psychological and neuroimaging research, discussing the parallel evolution of consciousness, musical styles, and cultures since Homer and King David.

In addition, it explains that 'in much wisdom is much grief' due to cognitive dissonances created by language that splits the inner world. Music enables us to survive in this sea of grief, overcomes discomforts and stresses of acquiring new knowledge, and unifies the soul, hence the power of music.

• Provides a foundation of music theory
• Demonstrates how emotions motivate interaction between cognition and language
• Covers differentiation and synthesis in consciousness
• Compares the parallel evolution of music and cultures
• Examines the idea of music overcoming cognitive dissonances

Chapter 1

Theories of Music

Abstract

Music—why we enjoy it, why it has such power over us, its origins, its evolution, and its cognitive functions—has been considered a mystery by Aristotle, by Darwin, and by contemporary musicologists. This chapter reviews attempts to explain mysterious properties of music from Pythgoras till today. Ancient Greek philosophers saw dangers of untamed emotions and looked for musical appeal to reason. Since Renaissance emotional power of music was gradually accepted, Tonality emerged for expressing emotions in music. Based on Descartes’ theory of emotions, “The Doctrine of the Affections” was developed. Deficiencies of Descartes’ theory are related to opera seria, Calzabigi and Gluck reform is related to synthesis of emotions and reason. Misunderstanding of cognitive mechanisms affects development of opera. The first attempt at scientific understanding of music begins since Helmholtz, whose theory is briefly summarized. While in the Middle Ages Church has been afraid of strong emotions, today this role is performed by “academic” musicians. Prominent current theories of musical emotions are briefly summarized: while interesting ideas are discussed, scientific understanding is missing, contradictions and confusions abound. Music remains a mystery.

Keywords

Music; mystery; emotions; Plato; Aristotle; St. Augustine; polyphony; tonality; opera; Monteverdi; Calzabigi; Gluck; Hanslick; Sloboda; Cross; Mithen; Justlin; Trehub; Levitin; Honing

Contents

Music Is a Mystery 1

Theories of Musical Emotions and Music Origins 2

2500 Years of Western Music and Prescientific Theories (From Pythagoras to the 18th Century) 2

Whence Beauty in Sound? 5

Current Theories of Musical Emotions 8

Difficulties Remain. Music Is a Mystery 15

Music Is a Mystery

Approximately 2400 years ago Aristotle was the first to ask: “why music being just sounds reminds states of soul?” He listed the power of music among unsolved problems next to finiteness of the world and existence of God. Kant, who so brilliantly explained the epistemology of the beautiful and the sublime, which he related to knowledge, could not explain music: “(As for) the expansion of the faculties … in the judgment for cognition, music will have the lowest place among (the beautiful arts)… because it merely plays with senses.” Darwin discovered laws of evolution of species and thought that everything in the living world can be explained by evolution. There was one exception that Darwin had a great difficulty to explain within his theory: music “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious (abilities) with which (man) is endowed.”

Contemporary evolutionary psychologists and musicologists cannot explain music. Pinker follows Kant, suggesting that music is an “auditory cheesecake,” a by-product of natural selection that just happened to “tickle the sensitive spots.” In 2008, Nature, the oldest and most prestigious scientific journal, published a series of essays on music. Their authors agreed that music is a cross-cultural universal, still “none … has yet been able to answer the fundamental question: why does music have such power over us?” “We might start by accepting that it is fruitless to try to define ‘music’.” “Music is a human cultural universal that serves no obvious adaptive purpose, making its evolution a puzzle for evolutionary biologists.” These are just a sampling of quotes from accomplished scientists.

After reviewing selected theories, I present a new theory based on arguments from cognitive science and mathematical models of the mind suggesting that music serves the most important and concrete function in cognition and in evolution of the mind and cultures. This function is elucidated, its neural mechanisms are discussed, and experimentally testable predictions are made. Then I describe experimental verifications of this hypothesis and discuss parallel coevolution of music and culture.

Theories of Musical Emotions and Music Origins

During the last two decades, the mysterious powers of music receive scientific foundations due to the research of scientists in several fields. Integration of this research in recent years provides evidence for the evolutionary origins and cognitive functions of music. This chapter provides a selection of views on the function of music in cognition from ancient philosophers to contemporary research.

2500 Years of Western Music and Prescientific Theories (From Pythagoras to the 18th Century)

Pythagoras described the main harmonies as whole-number ratios of sound frequencies about 2500 years ago. He saw this as the connection between music and the celestial spheres, which also seemed to be governed by whole numbers. The tremendous potency of music to affect consciousness, to move people’s souls and bodies since time immemorial was ambivalently perceived. Ancient Greek philosophers saw the human psyche as prone to dangerous emotional influences and “proper” music served to harmonize the psyche with reason. Plato wrote about the idealized imagined music of the Golden Age of Greece: “… (Musical) types were … fixed. Afterwards … an unmusical license set in with the appearance of poets … men of native genius, but ignorant of what is right and legitimate … Possessed by a frantic and unhallowed lust for pleasure, they contaminated … and created a universal confusion of forms … So the next stage … will be … contempt for oaths … and all religion. The spectacle of the Titanic nature … is reenacted; man returns to the old condition of a hell of unending misery.”

The same appeal to reason among the positive content of music we find 800 years later in Boethius “…what unites the incorporeal existence of reason with the body except a certain harmony, and, as it were, a careful tuning of low and high pitches in such a way that they produce one consonance?” According to foremost thinkers in the 4th and 5th centuries (including St. Augustine), the mind was not strong enough to be reliably in charge of the senses and unconscious urges. Differentiation of emotions was perceived as dangerous.

Only with the beginning of the Renaissance (13–14th century) did the European man feel the power of the rational mind separating from the collective consciousness. For 12 centuries, the positive content of music was seen in its relations to the objective “motion of celestial spheres” and to God-created laws of nature. This changed by the 13th century: Music was now understood as being related to listeners, not to celestial spheres. J. Groceo wrote: Songs for “average people … relate the deeds of heroes … the life and martyrdom of various saints, the battles…”; songs for kings and princes “move their souls to audacity and bravery, magnanimity and liberality…” Human emotions, the millennial content of music, were now appreciated theoretically.

Although music had appealed to our emotions since time immemorial, a new and powerful development toward stronger and more diverse emotionality began during the Renaissance. It came with the tonal music that had been developed from the 15th to 19th century with the conscious aim of appealing to our musical emotions. Tonality is the system of functional harmonic relations, governing most of Western music. Tonal music is organized around tonic, a privileged key to which the melody returns. Melody leads harmony, and harmony in turn leads melody. A melodic line feels closed, when it comes to rest on (resolved in) tonic. Emotional tension ends and a psychological relaxation is felt in the final move on to the tonic, to a resolution in a “cadence.”

Creating emotions was becoming the primary aim of music. Composers strived to imitate speech, the embodiment of the passions of the soul. At the same time the conceptual content of texts increased, “the words (are to be) the mistress of the harmony and not its servant,” wrote Monteverdi at the beginning of the 17th century. This became the main slogan of the new epoch of Baroque music. Operatic music was born in Italy at that time.

The nature of emotions became a vital philosophical issue. Descartes attempted a scientific explanation of passions. He rationalized emotions, explaining them as objects and relating them to physiological processes. “Descartes’ descriptions of the physiological processes that underlay and determined the passions were extremely suggestive to musicians in search of technical means for analogizing passions in tones.”

Based on Descartes’ theory, Johann Mattheson formulated a theory of emotions in music, called “The Doctrine of the Affections.” Emotions “are the true material of virtue, and virtue is naught but a well-ordered and wisely moderate sentiment.” Now the object of musical imitation was no longer speech, the exterior manifestation of emotions, but the emotions themselves.

Beginning from this time musical theory did not just trail musical practice but affected it to a significant extent. Descartes and Mattheson understood emotions as monolithic objects. This simplified understanding of emotions soon led to the deterioration of opera into a collection of airs, each expressing a particular emotion (“opera seria” or serious opera); the Monteverdi vision of opera as integrated text, music, and drama was lost. In the middle of the 18th century Calzabigi and Gluck reformed opera back to the Monteverdi vision and laid a theoretical foundation for the next 150 years of opera development.

As we discuss later, music is different from other arts in that it affects emotions directly, not through concepts as, e.g., visual arts, which first have to be understood conceptually. This clear scientific understanding of the differences between concepts and emotions did not exist during the Renaissance. Nevertheless the idea of music as expression, differentiating and creating new emotions, was consciously formulated in the second half of the 18th century. This idea of music as the expression of emotions led to a fundamental advancement in understanding music as the art differentiating emotions; it related the pleasures of musical sounds to the “meaning” of music. Twining emphasized an aspect of music, which today we would name conceptual indefiniteness: musical contents cannot be adequately expressed in words and do not imitate anything specific. “The notion, that painting, poetry and music are all Arts of Imitation, certainly tends to produce, and has produced, much confusion … and, instead of producing order and method in our ideas, produce only embarrassment and confusion.”

Yet understanding the nature of emotions remained utterly confused: “As far as (music) effect is merely physical, and confined to the ear, it gives a simple original pleasure; it expresses nothing, it refers to nothing; it is no more imitative than… the flavor of pineapple.” Twining expresses here a correct intuition (music is not an imitation), but he confuses it with a typical error. Pleasure from musical sounds is not physical and not confined to the ear, as many have thought. As discussed later, pleasure from music is an aesthetic (not bodily) emotion in our mind unlike, e.g., the flavor of a pineapple which promises to our body enjoyment of a physical food. Even the founder of contemporary aesthetics, Kant had no room for music in his theory of the mind. Later we discuss the specific scientific reason preventing Kant from understanding the role of music in cognition. Even today, as discussed later, the cognitive function of musical emotions remain unknown among musicologists; the idea of expression continues to provoke disputes, “embarrassment and confusion.”

Whence Beauty in Sound?

A scientific theory of music perception began its development in the first half of the 19th century by Helmholtz’s theory of musical emotions, summarized here. A pressed piano key or plucked string produces a sound with many frequencies. In addition to the main frequency F, the sound contains overtones or higher frequencies, 2F, 3F, 4F, 5F, 6F, 7F,…, which sound quieter than F. The main tone corresponds to the string oscillating as a whole, producing F; on top of this, each part of a string, 1/2, or 1/3 or 2/3…, can oscillate on its own. The interval between F and 2F, double frequency, is called an octave. If F is “Do, first octave (256 Hz),” then 2F is the Do of the second octave.

Our ear almost does not notice an overtone exactly one octave higher, because the eardrum oscillates as a string in concordance with itself (this is the mechanical foundation of musical consonants). For the same reason all exact overtones, 2F, 3F, 4F…, are perceived in concordance with the main frequency F and among themselves. Because of the mechanical properties of the eardrum, two sounds with close frequencies (say, F and 0.95F) produce eardrum oscillations not only with the same frequencies but also with the difference of these frequencies (F−0.95F=0.05F). These low-frequency oscillations are perceived as physically unpleasant, sounding “rough,” and even painful, though at normal loudness they are barely perceived. This is the mechanical reason for musical dissonances. Sounds with exactly the same overtones are perceived as concordant, agreeable, or “mechanically pleasing.”

Helmholtz has explained construction of musical scales. He has considered selection of concordant strings within octave, which main overtones equal 3F, 4F, 5F, 6F, 7F (that is the reason for their concordance). These frequencies are above 2F and therefore outside of the first octave. They can be “transformed down” to within the octave, this could be achieved by dividing these frequencies by 2: 3/2F, 4/2F, 5/2F, 6/2F, 7/2F… (say, by taking a string twice as long). These sounds are perceived by the ear as concordant with the main key (F) and among themselves. This concordance is not as good as among overtones of a single string, but much better than for random sounds. That is the reason for musical importance of the octave: Strings (or keys) separated exactly by an octave (double or half the frequency) have many of the exact same overtones and they sound concordant. Note, only the first of the above sounds, 3/2F, is within the fist octave (above F and below 2F); the rest are in the second octave and above. For a key to sound in the first octave and its overtones to coincide with those of Do, we may bring down each overtone by one more octave (or two, or three): 5/4F, 7/4F, 9/8F.

Notes obtained in this way, if we start with the three main overtones, make up the major scale, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti—the white piano keys. They are perceived by the ear as concordant. The note fa, however, sounds more concordant if its first different overtone coincides with an overtone of do, 4F (therefore the fa key is chosen as fa=4/3F). Concordance, or similarity of overtones, somewhat depends on the training of the ear, also not all overtones could be made completely concordant; therefore musical acoustics is not as simple as 2×2=4. Musical instruments were improved over thousands of years and they incorporate traditions and compromises. There are important differences among cultures in making musical instruments and tuning them. The most concordant keys do, fa, sol (or F, 4/3F, 3/2F) exist practically in all cultures (they are the most concordant because the first overtone of do is sol, and the first overtone of fa is do). Next four overtones closest in loudness and similarity add up to the major scale.

The minor scale is obtained if the three least concordant keys, mi, la, ti, are lowered by a half-tone (tone=1/7th of an octave), so that they are more concordant with the other less loud overtones. If one chooses just one the most concordant note among these three less concordant keys, the note la, the resultant 5-notes are called the pentatonic scale; it is used in Chinese music, in folk music of Scotland, Ireland, and in Africa.

The scale of an accurately tuned piano slightly differs from what is described above. The reason is that all overtones of all keys cannot coincide; scale based on overtones of do is not as well concordant with overtones of other keys. For example, an overtone of mi, similar to sol, is 1/4 tone different from sol and sounds as a strong dissonance. For string instruments, such as a violin, it is not too important; a violinist can take the correct interval for each note, similarly a singer. But for keyboard instruments, like piano, this sound error is not correctable. Therefore, in the 16th century a well-tempered scale was developed, which divides an octave into 12 equal intervals (half-tones), so that errors in the main overtones are equally spread and all keys are slightly discordant. Concordant musical sounds are called consonances, and less concordant, dissonances. The exact meanings of these words change with culture.

The Helmholtz acoustic theory explained the role of the octave, tones making up the octave, the major scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti—the white piano keys) and the minor scale; the pentatonic scale. Notwithstanding Helmholtz’s theory, there is a principled difference between the “mechanical” agreeableness of concordant overtones and the aesthetic beauty of music. For example, the minor scale is aesthetically interesting exactly due to its slight discordance. Therefore Helmholtz’s theory could not be accepted as a basis for musicology. Acoustic prop...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Biography
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Theories of Music
• Chapter 2. Mechanisms of the Mind: From Instincts to Beauty
• Chapter 3. Language and Wholeness of Psyche
• Chapter 4. Music
• Chapter 5. Experimental Tests of the Theory: Music
• Chapter 6. Experimental Tests of the Theory: Beauty and Meaning
• Chapter 7. Music and Culture: Parallel Evolution
• Chapter 8. Musical Emotions and Personality
• Chapter 9. Other Aesthetic Emotions
• Chapter 10. Future Research and Summary
• Literature
• Index