Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 15 Number 1, April 2014

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Music, Language, Memory and Cinema:

Three books on the cognition of music.

 

By

 

Daniel Barnett

 

Music, Language and the Brain; Aniruddh D. Patel, Oxford, 2008, 418pp.(text with appendices);  plus 67pp. bibliographic references. (Approximately 1,300 refs.)

 

Music and Memory, an Introduction; Bob Snyder, MIT 2000; 265pp. (text), 14pp. bibliography

 

Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, Robert Jourdain, Avon Books, 1997

 

 

The cognition of music is a young but quickly growing field and these three books are aimed toward very different audiences - from the serious student, to the general public. Jourdain’s book for a general audience is by far the most entertaining and readable, nonetheless I found it extremely provocative, delightful and useful for generating fresh comparative insights. Snyder’s book is an extremely lucid exposition that skillfully weaves together relevant investigations into the close relationship between the several stages of memory and the impact of each on the perception and construction of musical forms. Patel’s book is a weighty and comprehensive compendium on the state of current research that could shed light on the neural and psychological underpinning of those processes that might be common to both modalities: language and music. But before I begin to discuss the books, a word about my motivation for picking them to review.

 

Cinema, the medium in which I’ve chosen to work and write about is, like music, a time art and as such is processed by the brain via neural pathways that invoke the various levels and organizational strategies of memory. However cinema has predominately developed along narrative lines; and, for the most part, those works in the medium that have well-evolved narrative structures foreground the event-driven causality of stories. Stories are predominately verbal however, and cinema is predominately visual.

 

Along with a cohort of like-minded experimentalists in cinema I have endeavored to develop a line of thought, both in film and in writing that would cleave more closely to what I believe to be cinema’s true nature in order to generate purely visual, time-based structures that could be organized more along the lines of painting, poetry and music than dramatic narrative.

 

 Previously, I developed a series of thought experiments in order to describe a conceptual space where a few universals underlying communication can be addressed vis-à-vis cinema. (Movement as Meaning in Experimental Film – CLA Series #13) Now, for a revised edition of the book, I have begun to develop more direct and explicit comparisons with other art forms, especially other time-art forms in order to get a sense of where the future of a more visually biased and poetically structured cinema may lie.

 

My research to date (beyond the many films and cinematic experiments I have produced) has involved extensive readings in metaphor theory and has been largely of a comparative nature, focusing on similarities and contrasts between language and cinema. My future research will consider photography and painting. But at present I am concerned with the structural parallels between the cognition of music, its formal strategies, and cinema; and at this stage it seems important to stop and summarize findings from three of the many books in neuroscience and psychology, particularly in the cognition of music, that I have found particularly useful to my work, hoping that the following three reviews will be useful to other researchers in allied fields.

 

 Music, Language and the Brain, is a well-designed survey of current experimental work in the field, but a bit ponderous for a somewhat casual reader trying to asses relationships that could be applied outside the field. Since it is an explicitly comparative endeavor, I found its approach especially useful for my own comparative work. The methodological slant Patel takes emphasizes commonalities between mainly western, instrumental, art music and ordinary (rather than poetic or philosophical) language and favors either the psychological or the neurological perspective depending upon where the evidence is more robust. He exploits the tension that exists within the comparative method between the similarities and the differences in an inclusive and methodical way throughout; discussing oppositions within the research with an apparent evenhandedness that gives the novice reader confidence that the book is inclusive and comprehensive; an impression bolstered by Patel’s position at Gerald Edelman’s Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, as well as the nearly 1400 referenced works.

 

However, the overall impression is of a field that is really too young to have reached many specific or settled conclusions about these relationships. Instead Patel simply lays out the hypotheses – around which he rarely takes sides. The general descriptions that he uses to frame the book are illuminating and provoke many observations that can be applied to other comparative endeavors, like my own. It also, and this may be its greatest value, suggests possibly useful experiments that could clarify and amplify the evidence for one or another position. In this way it is an exemplary work for young investigators just entering the field.

 

The book is organized into a chapter each on 1) sound elements, 2) rhythm, 3) melody, 4)syntax, 5)meaning and 6) evolution, as they pertain to music with a separate section within each chapter on their equivalents in language.

 

In the first of these chapters he points out that pitch and timbre are the two basic sound elements in both music and speech, and that pitch intervals represent learned sound categories in music but rarely in speech and that timbre contrasts rarely function as structural categories in music but are especially important in vowel formation in language. He devotes a section within this chapter to the learning of sound categories in both speech and music and emphasizes that while the products of categorization for each are very different there is growing evidence that they share underlying processes.

 

Patel devotes a lot of attention to the various systems of organizing pitches in music, dwells a bit on tonality and the universality of octaves and fifths and considers a great deal of evidence in the discussion about whether these universals, as well as the idea of dissonance, are better thought of as being neurological or psychological. In a later chapter on evolution he discusses evidence as to whether, if these characteristics are indeed neurological, they are specific to the human nervous system.

 

An observation that I found particularly interesting is that asymmetrical scale systems are apparently far more prevalent in world music than symmetrical scale systems - along with a tiny bit of speculation as to why this might be the case. This observation about symmetry has many ramifications if it is generalized throughout aesthetics and across media and modalities; and ties in with observations (from Snyder) about symmetry, memory and the clumping of data in perceptual systems, which could provide, at last, a solid tie between aesthetics and the empirical world - via current strong hypotheses about how human memory systems work.

 

His discussion of timbre in music segues into an analysis of the sound elements of speech and the functional differences between pitch and timbre in the two modalities, and the way sound categories operate in each. The fact that we have two distinct sound category learning mechanisms, he argues, is strong evidence that sound category learning is a neural mechanism that underlies both speech and music. He talks a bit about the concept of statistical learning in psychology and neurology (those things we learn spontaneously from our environment without being aware of it.) Indeed, at this point the book takes a statistical turn, and for those of us with cognitive deficits in this area it becomes somewhat tough going. In the light of the statistical approach however he cautions that the idea of hemispherical localization of music and speech can too easily be oversimplified and emphasizes underlying organizational mechanisms supported by both hemispheres of the brain.

 

The next chapter on rhythm in music and speech stresses a description of rhythm that emphasizes timing, accent and grouping; and deemphasizes isochrony and periodicity. He discusses beat in music perception and findings that the perception of when a beat occurs is not simply a passive response to a physical stimulus, but that it is influenced by learned, cultural factors. He distinguishes the world’s languages into two types as regards their rhythm, as being either stress or syllable based.  He spends a great deal of time on this distinction in terms of differences in periodicity, phonology, consonant vs. vowel duration and perception. This was one occasion where I thought the amount of time spent discussing the topic was not commensurate with firm knowledge in the field. More salient was the controversy over stress vs. syllable typology in determining the rhythms of different languages; and a discussion of the role of prosody and grouping in adding force to syntactical structures in both speech and music. Finally, he emphasizes the commonalities between music and speech in their systematic, temporal, accentual and phrasal patterning of sound; where in each case elements are arranged in hierarchies with the single distinction that musical rhythm usually involves isochronic periodicity and speech rarely does.

 

His chapter on melody is one that more tightly compares and contrasts the two modalities. He describes melody as “a constructive process by which the mind converts a sequence of tones into a network of meaningful relationships.” (182) He notes one big difference between them right of the bat: music has a tonal center to organize melodic structures and speech does not. He claims that intonation in speech is therefore relegated to the affective rather than the semantic; and his reasoning on this point is subtle, interesting and complex. He also claims that intonation patterns are aesthetically inert.[1]

 

There is a long discussion about the relationship between phonology and intonation as well as a long speculation on the statistical relationship between melodic contours in the languages and music of various cultures. Here is another place where I felt the amount of time was not justified by the state of the research. He does give several examples of directions further investigations could take that I found interesting however.

 

The chapter on syntax begins with a description of its mixed history of provoking either enthusiasm or skepticism in the community as to whether there are significant relationships between the syntax of music and speech, despite the fact that we use the same word meaningfully in relation to both. It is divided into a section on musical syntax, a section comparing and contrasting it with syntax in language and finally what recent discoveries in neuroscience reveal about overlaps in processing between the two. The first section focuses on music’s levels of organization: scale structure, chord structure and key structure - building to a description of hierarchies in these structures, including the relationship between structure and ornamentation, tension and resolution, and the temporal ordering of elements. He notes however, two major differences between the modalities: in that language has grammatical categories whereas music obviously does not; also that syntactic trees in language are organized around constituency, i.e. that some clauses are constituents of other clauses in a systematic structure, whereas the relations in musical-syntactic trees join in ways that indicate hierarchies of structural importance. Another notable point of difference that he points out is that that syntactic ambiguity in language is generally eschewed whereas in music it can be a great resource.

 

There is an elaborate discussion of the neural resources that might be common to the processing of syntax in both modalities along with descriptions of research on how to distinguish between syntax and semantics, that considers how the processing of one modality may interfere with the processing of the other. There is also a brief discussion about the neural vs. the psychological status of musical syntax and the role that context has on the perception of musical syntax. Again, as in the endings of the other chapters, I found this discussion weak on evidence for one of the sides of the argument and feel the chapter would perhaps have been more persuasive overall without it.

 

On page 261 he gives a description of music (that he takes from Sloboda, 1985): “A defining feature of music perception is hearing sounds in significant relation to one another rather than a succession of isolated events.” He continues (in a vein that I find especially salient to comparisons between cinema and music) to suggest that similarity and hierarchical contrasts are especially key elements in creating syntactical coherence in music.

 

The chapter on meaning contains observations that I not only found especially relevant to my own work but also especially illuminating about the comparative method itself, learning a great deal from Patel’s way of proceeding with this exposition. For one thing, music has the twin and seemingly contradictory properties of both being (like cinema) untranslatable and universally “understandable” across many cultures. For another, there is a lot of discussion about the meaning of the word meaning in different contexts.[2] Meaning in language is almost exclusively referential, whereas meaning in music rarely is. In music the relationships that give a sense of meaning to a piece are almost exclusively internal, derived from expectations about conventions developed either within a single piece, a genre or a culture. Thirdly, there is also the issue that music’s meanings, beyond gross affective categorization, are ineffable, whereas in language they are` usually quite effable.

 

 The first part of the chapter on meaning deals loosely with the first two of these issues and in somewhat more detail with the issue of relative ineffability, hence the unavailability to science of meanings in music. He points to experiments that use 67 adjectives in 8 affective categories as the closest science can come to a categorical take on meaning in music. On the other hand his consideration of the work that has been done to relate perceived expressiveness with specific acoustic properties – both in music and speech, is extremely interesting and engaging, particularly the question as to whether the emotions one experiences listening to music are the “same” as the emotions of everyday life; that is, do they have the same neural substrate?

 

His discussions of motion, tone painting, the topical and the cultural in relation to meaning in music are somewhat disappointing throwaways, but this probably relates to the absence of experimental work in these areas. One interesting, but far-fetched example he gives is “One could argue that the sense of harmonic progression that is so valued in Western musical chord syntax reflects a Western cultural obsession with progress and transformation.” (326)

 

He discusses the question of semantics in music and the impossibility of semantic meaning in music for the obvious reasons. But then he goes on to talk about experimental work that investigates the neurological impact of linguistic anomalies in meaning and an equivalent neural marker for musical anomalies in meaning that I found fascinating.

 

Patel’s analysis of semantics really begins to take off with his discussion of music and pragmatic meaning. He explains that there are two kinds of meaning: local meaning and the meaning of a word in its larger context: its functional or pragmatic meaning. Drawing from the work of A. Kehler and the much earlier work of David Hume he says, “…there are three broad types of connections that listeners make between utterances: resemblance, cause-effect and contiguity. Importantly Hume’s ideas were not developed in the context of the study of linguistic discourse, but as a part of a philosophical investigation of the ‘types of connectivity of ideas’ that humans can appreciate.” (336) This leads directly to the question: “Do coherence relations between clauses in linguistic discourse have analogs to coherence relations between phrases and themes in musical discourse?”[3] He also briefly describes the differences and similarities in the recursive use of elements in the two modalities.

 

The final chapter on evolution begins with a long discussion about whether language or music is the product of natural selection. He leads us through experimental work on babbling, anatomy, disposition, toward different aspects of learning, critical periods for acquisition, genetics and whether there could be biological costs for the failure to acquire one system or the other that could lead to selective processes. Then he considers whether music is unique to humans and whether we are simply, species-wise, predisposed toward it.

 

Fond as I am of the perhaps fanciful idea that language may in fact be descended from music, I was disappointed that this juicy and highly speculative topic apparently is not the focus of any experimental work.

My own two most significant take-aways from the book occur at the very beginning in the short introductory chapter:

 

“…within our own minds are two systems that perform remarkably similar interpretive feats, converting complex acoustic sequences into perceptually discrete elements (such as words or chords) organized into hierarchical structures that convey rich meanings.” (3)

 

And shortly thereafter (4)

 

“These mechanisms include the ability to form learned sound categories, to extract statistical regularities from rhythmic and melodic sequences, to integrate incoming elements (such as words and musical tones) into syntactic structures and to extract nuanced emotional meanings from acoustic signals.”

 

It seems to me that these same mechanisms, when applied to the visual, set the groundwork for comparative studies of many other modalities of communication – like language in its written form, graphics and cinema.

 

Bob Snyder’s book, Music and Memory takes a somewhat more tentative (and a bit more detached) approach to the relationship between music and the current state of affairs in neuroscience, although one with which I feel Patel would ultimately agree. The book is structured by the notion that memory is organized in three tiers and that musical form is constrained by this division. The book is divided into two parts, the first focusing more closely on the surrounding cognitive concepts and how they underlie the musical; and the second on the musical concepts themselves that are constrained by these aspects of cognition.

 

The three distinct types of memory that he posits are echoic, short-term and long-term. (Echoic is ultra-short term memory with latency measured in milliseconds.) The three levels of musical organization he posits that are constrained by this division of memory processes are pitch (or event-fusion), phrase (rhythmic and melodic grouping) and structure or the level of overall form. From this broad base he carves both widely and deeply through the relevant literature in neurology and psychology, his sourcing of references seemingly directed by a strong personal curiosity while his exposition seems driven by his personal experience as a musician, composer and teacher (at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Unlike Patel, for whom the research literature, with all its complexity and contradiction, seems in the foreground, clarity of exposition is dominant in Snyder’s book and as a result it radiates lucidity.

 

Snyder begins with an overview of Auditory Memory. The first observation that he makes provides a very solid and ultimately very revealing background for thinking about all aspects of memory, hence all aspects of the perception of time-arts. He says on page 4, citing Ira Black, “Because activity at the connection of any two neurons can cause chemical changes that outlast the activity itself, memory could be said to be a characteristic of virtually all nerve cells.” This is just one example that is indicative of the spatial and temporal granularity of Snyder’s analysis throughout this book.

 

His analysis of auditory, echoic memory takes us from a stream of undifferentiated impulses to ‘feature extraction’, to ‘perceptual binding’, and on to ‘grouping’, or registering as a segmented event. His analyses of short-term (sometimes considered ‘working’) memory are similarly detailed. An observation he makes about long-term memory haunts me: “ … a large percent of the long-term memory in use at a given time is only semi-activated, and remains unconscious, although it has a large effect in guiding what we are conscious of – indeed, constitutes the meaning of what we are conscious of.” (9) His prose is sparse but occasionally will leap to a relevant generality that will prove to be a jewel of insight: “What we already know literally determines what we see and hear, which means that we see and hear what we look for more than what we look at.” - a very nice way of introducing the impact of expectation on perception in general. His overview of auditory perception contains cross-references to visual perception and therefore makes his observations on echoic memory convertible to perception in cinema.

 

Next he tackles the issue of how things are grouped in memory at each perceptual level beginning with the observation (31): “To say that something is “organized” is really just a way of saying that it lies within the limits of the processing capability of the human nervous system. The organization of our experience often correlates with the order of the physical world because the human nervous system has evolved to comprehend and survive in that world.” (Here he cites Roger Shepherd.)

 

He describes a composer’s control over grouping as the main way that music can be dynamic and give a sense of movement or progression in time, and that grouping at different levels can be plastic, with groups shifting from listening to listening, or listener to listener; and that this is not only a feature of music but a feature of perception.

 

What struck me in this analysis is the degree to which Snyder’s descriptive paradigms cleave to a particular way of thinking and writing to which I have long subscribed: one that is marked by a constant awareness that language has a very peculiar relationship to descriptions of the phenomenal world.

 

In the next chapter on short term and working memory he invokes a metaphor from Lashley (and perhaps Edelman) of reverberation to explain short-term memory, paraphrasing them both on the subject: When, after the experience of ‘an event’, no new energy enters the loop the reverberations gradually cease and the memory dies out. If the energy is caught and willfully amplified through overt repetition or rehearsal, or if it associates with something that is already in long term memory it then has the opportunity to be encoded in long-term memory. He notes that if we think of short-term memory as a process we can see it as one that applies across domains: language, spatial relations, physical movement, etc. He describes the ways that the term ‘working memory’ is used, how it relates to long-term memory and how its role as an intermediary term between short-term and long-term memory, makes it almost but not quite coincident with consciousness. I found his argument fascinating. He spends quite a bit of attention on the time-span and item limitations of short-term memory and the ramifications of those limits; including the perception and organization of temporal patterns.

 

 In his discussion of rehearsal and chunking, he frames what to me is a very key observation: “The reason we can process relatively complex patterns of information such as music and language is because there are usually many levels of repetition in their patterns. This is why repetition is essential in the construction of memorable patterns.” (53). He reminds us that, “Our sensory organs and thoughts are virtually always in motion, and we are constantly scanning the environment and holding those scans in short term memory.” (51) Finally, he talks about how chunking of short-term memory groupings into larger, hierarchical chunks is an essential way of extending the perceptual horizons of short-term memory.

 

In the chapter on closure he relates the sense of closure to grouping and expectation. He then observes, “The recognition of patterns is a necessary condition for the establishment of syntax.” (60-61). He next introduces a key concept in the theory of both sound and music – the parametric dimension - that he uses not only to describe the organization of sound from an analytical perspective, but music from a compositional perspective. “Partial closure is achieved by reaching closure in some parameters and by leaving others incomplete.” (61) He explains how the metaphor of motion relates to the ideas of musical tension and release. He describes linearity under the metaphor of causality in terms of creating a sense of motion: “To establish a higher level linear progression, one closure must lead to the next in succession; they must form a graduated series of intensities.” (64) This is his bridge to a beautifully elaborated theory of structure in music, one that he continues to build throughout the book.

 

Long-term memory, the topic of his next chapter lives, as alluded to above, in many states of partial activation. The process of bringing it into cognitive play is referred to as cuing. The three types of cuing are recollecting, remembering and recognizing; the first of these being an active, willed process and the other two spontaneous processes that are going on all the time. He mentions yet other descriptors of long-term memory, implicit memory, which is never conscious and includes the ‘muscle memory’ involved in complicated motor acts. It is contrasted with explicit memory – the product of memorization. Episodic memory always happens as the result of events that occur in the presence of the individual, and are often subject to distortions during the process of recall. Semantic memory is a way of describing memories that are not organized either spatially or temporally but in cognitive hierarchies – it consists of things we think we ‘know’ rather than things we remember.

 

Categorization, the subject of his next rather short chapter is a crucial one. He does not make this explicit, but categorization can be thought of as a kind of chunking that does not necessarily involve proximity. “Categories form the connection between perception and thought, creating a concise form in which experience can be coded and retained . . . Categories are the primary terms in which many types of memories are stored and recalled.” (81) The two types of categorization he is concerned with are perceptual, a function of the previously mentioned feature extraction operating at the level of the organization of pitches at the echoic; and conceptual at the level of long-term memory. Since discrimination is strongest between rather than within categories, nuance, which he describes as a change of effect within a category that is noticed at the echoic memory level, is not well remembered. He believes that we can notice nuances as a manifestation of musical expression because they can be directly perceived, bypassing long-term memory. He notes that this may account for our ability to listen to the same recording again and again, since we perceive nuance although we do not remember that we do. He describes the distinction between nuance and structure but adds that, “Expressive nuance can function in the service of elucidating structure.” (89)

 

Schemas are central structures of semantic memory. They are like categories of categories and are what we “make sense of” when we make sense of a situation. “Selecting the correct schema to process a situation is the basis for the process of understanding.” (96) Schemas, unlike categories tend to be somewhat flexible in order to accommodate the vagaries of life. They guide attention and also offer a perspective from which normalcy and novelty are gauged. They are what set expectations about musical genres. The chapter on schemas takes us from pitch identity to large-scale structure.

 

The last chapter in his cognitive tour is on metaphor; and he immediately removes the idea from the realm of language bringing it into the world of general experience. As such he notes that “Metaphor is therefore a relationship between two memory structures.” (107) It is in fact a relationship between two image schemas. Image schemas are thought to be grounded initially in perceptual experience and Synder speculates, “The original function of image schemas may be to connect motor sequences together to begin the formation of a coherent picture of the world… Image schemas may therefore serve as a bridge between experience and conceptualization.” (109) We use image schemas to understand music; and some of the terms he engages with as metaphors are “up, down, centrality, linkage, causation, tension, pathways leading to a goal, and containment.” (110) Notably he cautions against ‘reification’ or the attribution of these concepts to the music itself rather than considering them as conceptual tools we use to understand the music.

 

He begins the second part of the book with descriptions of ‘event fusion’ or the auditory expression of the effects of echoic memory. The key distinction at this level is that some sounds are pitched and some are un-pitched, which separates musical acoustical events from others, like noise.  Pitched events are those that can be described as being categorized as “higher’ or ‘lower’. A pitched event is one where the individual vibrations in the train that constitutes an event are identical in shape to one another at one end of the continuum vs. different in shape at the other. We describe something as a tone when there are significant repetitions in the shape of the vibrations in the microstructure. Noise has very little or no repetition in the shape of the waveform.

 

Once he has isolated what it is that makes a sound a musical element he quickly moves into a fairly standard exposition of interval, octave and chroma.

 

Snyder’s treatment of melody parallels Patel’s but takes a very different perspective resulting in a tellingly different descriptive paradigm: “…melody, [is] defined here as any sequence of acoustical events that contains recognizable patterns of contour…and that sound similar enough to form a unified horizontal sequence.” (135) He goes on to describe, “A stream is a coherent grouping of pitched events that separates itself from other such groups by virtue of its distance from them in pitch space and the speed at which events happen. We can only attend closely to one stream of events at a time.” (135) As he goes along, his treatment of tonality, scales, melodic contour and motion are organized toward how they relate to memory, categories and schemas. His take on a smooth parametric shift in pitch takes him closest to Patel’s turf where he relates the affective impact of different speeds of slides in both speech and music.

 

To me, the most remarkable observation to come out of Snyder’s style of analysis, or descriptive paradigm for melody, is the idea that, “Streams that occur at the same time but have different degrees of repetition can also have a relationship that is known as “foreground-background” In this case one stream (the less repetitive one) can be perceived as out in front of another.” He then links this to the effects of neural habituation (the consistent decrease in signal from an often activated site.)

 

Snyder on rhythm: “I have used the term event to describe a perceptible change in the acoustical environment. When two or more events take place within the length of short-term memory, we have what will be referred to as a “rhythm”. This is a very different take on rhythm from Patel.

 

He describes the characteristics of events in terms of their attack, or the rapidity of onset of the event and how a clean attack can be thought of as “an edge in time”. He talks about how the amount of time a rhythmical element can take is related to the number of events it contains and the limits of short-term memory. He states that categories of rhythm take place on the levels of beat, measure and pattern. His treatment of pulse, accent, meter, tempo, expectation and metrical hierarchy are all similar to Patel’s descriptions, but with the same shift in perspective:

 

“An interesting aspect of meter is that some kinds of metrical cycles fall within the time frame of short-term memory and some do not. Because of this, meter can have some aspects of schematic structure and some aspects of category structure. Generally speaking, the longer the time length a meter covers, the more schematic it will be.” (180)

 

I especially appreciate how this observation captures a strong advantage for Snyder’s descriptive paradigm: it points to a fine-grained view of schemes precisely, while at the same time allowing for very porous conceptual boundaries in the application of the term.

 

Snyder’s treatment of overall form likewise generalizes to cover many different parameters:  “What music ultimately does, then, is to provide a sensory experience that activates combinations of elements in memory.” (207) With this broad, and I think powerful description, even John Cage’s most extreme works comply. He considers habituation and the limits of patterns; and also general information theory’s input on the analysis of redundancy in form: how redundancy functions as a memory aid for the creation of stable patterns. Not so different again from Patel, but his observations come from this same wonderful angle: “This repetition, in addition to being a memory retrieval cue, is a metaphor for a process of remembering itself. When a pattern that has appeared in a piece of music reappears, it is like a recollection – an image of the past reappearing in the present and its familiarity gives it stability.” (211) Succession; memory and hierarchy; hierarchy and time order; memory and association; primacy and recency; schemas and time order; continuity and discontinuity; and yet another take on syntax are all considered carefully under this same paradigm.

 

Although the subject matter is complex, I found this book a relatively easy (compared to Patel, at least) read and one that is structured in a very compelling way, so it was nearly as close to being a ‘page-turner’ as I could have imagined a work on the cognition of music to be. It stands between Patel’s book and Robert Jourdain’s in terms not only of readability but also in some senses persuasiveness. Whereas Patel’s book contains many detailed descriptions of primary research, along with a logical and credible assessment of their implications, Snyder uses his citations to underpin his arguments. Even though this book is nearly a decade and a half old, and has already been reviewed in this publication I believe it is a must read for anyone seriously interested in developing work in the time arts.

 

Jourdain’s Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, How Music Captures Our Imagination uses primary and secondary sources merely as a substrate for his presentation; and a wonderful, provocative and entertaining presentation it is. Structured in a linear way from the experience of music first as pure sound, then as tone, as melody, as harmony, as rhythm, as composition, as performance, as listening, as understanding, to the ultimate - as ecstasy, he considers the neurology of each, in turn; from the perspective of a journalist and musician. His very general audience is the curious aficionado of music. Of the relatively non-technical books on the subject I’ve read, I found Jourdain’s the most cogent; but also the most given to personal opinions; opinions that I found provocative and revealing and others have criticized as “off-the wall”.

 

Instead of giving a chapter-by-chapter synopsis, as with the other two books, it seems more appropriate just to provide a series of quotes from the book with commentary to give a flavor of his presentation and illuminate the original insights his perspective brings to the subject.

 

He begins by tackling the phenomenology of music: “You’ll never see a goldfish twitching in time to a waltz because it is not a waltz’s notes but the relations between the notes that makes a body want to dance. It’s these relations – intangible, resistant to observation, difficult to describe and classify – that are music, not the atmospheric vibrations that jiggle out of musical instruments.” (4) Then he moves to the physiology of sound. Speaking of the bones in the middle ear: “By sizing the ossicles to resonate at these frequencies, evolution gave speech priority over other sounds.” (10) He offers more detail in some ways than either Patel or Snyder on the morphology of the ear: “ Music striking the cochlea’s inner hair cells is dispatched immediately to the brain through high-speed nerve fibers. But the outer hair cells respond less quickly and are much less sharply tuned. Their job is to average information between adjacent frequencies and adjacent moments, to supply a slowly changing backdrop against which instantaneous information from the inner hair cells is analyzed.” (14)

 

His description of what makes a tone a tone is less detailed than Snyder’s but paints a crisper picture: “…  musical tones are produced only from the vibration of certain simple shapes. Such shapes hardly ever occur naturally.” (31) He draws analogies among tones and other natural shapes, including, remarkably enough, the architecture of concert halls and the architecture of the cerebral cortex.

 

Then he moves on to the architecture of the melody. “It is a curious fact” he writes, “that you can file a copyright on a melody, that you can own a particular pattern of sound. As is true of so many clever inventions, the workings of a great melody are inexplicably simple, yet not at all obvious.” (59) His treatment of categorization is equally loose yet informative: “But there is another kind of categorization, not of identity but of position. Our brains subdivide a range of frequencies (or intensities, or frequencies or timbres) into a number of compartments.” And then he generalizes: “Categorization is at the heart of nearly all our mental activity, hence all our musical activity.” And “Without such perceptual categorization both speech and music would be quite impossible.” (63) “So a scale is not a scale until a mind has learned to spontaneously categorize it.” (79)

 

His comparison between melody and spatial depth is very interesting albeit controversial:

 

“Just as the spatial dimensions of breadth and height are easily viewed as they cast a pattern of breadth and height on the retina, time and pitch height are easily observed by the cochlea and the brain stem, making simple rhythms and melodies easy to hear. Conversely spatial depth is much harder to perceive or imagine; it requires lots of complicated processing. The same is true of harmony, which requires long acquaintance before we can look deep into it.”

 

And a bit further, and more controversial:

 

“Significantly harmony became elaborate in Western music at about the same time perspective was introduced into painting during the Renaissance. Four hundred years later harmony fell into crisis (in art music at least) at the same moment the Cubists disassembled perspective.” (93)

 

Jourdain divides rhythm roughly into two kinds, but unlike Patel and Snyder his description of the kinds is, at first, much looser, only becoming more precise as he goes on. One is the rhythm of life and the other is the rhythm of music, a distinction between phrasing and meter, the organic rhythm of natural motion[4] vs. the rhythm of artifice: “the two conceptions of rhythm are sometimes referred to as vocal (for phrasing) and instrumental (for meter). Phrasing is ‘vocal’ because it naturally arises from song, and thus from speech. Meter is ‘instrumental, in that it derives from the way we play musical instruments, which generally permit greater speed than the voice, and finer temporal accuracy. One is the rhythm of the throat and the other the rhythm of the hands.” (123)

 

He includes observations about chunking under the chapter on rhythm: “Music provides us with the longest sonic objects our brain ever encounters. A brain requires some way of breaking these objects into pieces so it can analyze them piecemeal.” And then, “And so a brain is always on the lookout for clues about where musical objects begin and end.”(124)

 

The chapter on rhythm is more complex because it is here that he deals with memory and unlike Snyder’s treatment it is casual and anecdotal. He calls memory and anticipation the ’twin sisters’ that allow us to perceive structure in music. And notes that, “Psychological time is the experience of having experience.” (136) “So when we find rhythm ‘in the body’ one part of the brain is merely observing the activities of another part of the brain, albeit indirectly.” (148) And a little further on, speaking of talking out loud to oneself,  “We merely use the brain’s motor system as a means of perpetuating an idea until we no longer need it.” (149)

 

It is a bit hard to tell how verifiable his observations on hemispheric specialization for different kinds of rhythms are; and observations such as “The more harmony wanders from its tonal center, the more it requires rhythmical buttressing.” (152) seem to be of an order that one suspects are inherently anecdotal – though very interesting to speculate about.

 

Jourdain returns to the topic of memory as he considers composition. He distinguishes semantic memory from episodic memory by claiming one is concerned with the inherent nature of a phenomenon and the other with the actual instance of its occurrence; very similar to Snyder’s description but with a very different spin. He also relies heavily on the concept of musical imagery, especially as he talks about inspiration:

 

“Inspiration is sometimes described as the one aspect of composition that defies explanation. But when imagery is understood as a memory process, and memory as a categorization process, inspiration seems less mysterious. New categories arise naturally as the brain is challenged by new and larger perceptions.” (171)

 

What really sets his chapter on composition apart is that he analyzes the process from the perspective of a wide range of composers, not just Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, but Henry Mancini and the Beatles as well.

 

The chapters on performance and listening could easily be grouped into one and the focus on both is on the motor systems of the brain. Reinforcing Snyder’s observations, he says: “A musical object is not so much something that strikes our brains, but that our brains reach out and grab by anticipating it.” (246) In both of these chapters he also talks about how memory and anticipation shape both performance and listening experiences, and notes: “We share a common apprenticeship in our experience of the world, but not of music.” Further on he adds, “Clearly listening is a skill – a performance skill in which the listener inwardly reproduces many features of a piece by anticipating them, and thereby better prepares himself to perceive them.” (264) Then he adds, “Anticipation frees a mind from surface detail, allowing it to probe for deeper relations.” These are the kinds of observations both Patel and Synder avoid. They are hard to verify but fascinating to contemplate.

 

When he tackles understanding, he immediately gets into the bog of trying to define meaning; although he goes so far as to describe one role for meaning very concisely, “So meaning serves to transfer cognitive states between brains.” [5] (272) Here is where he makes many overt comparisons to language, and if you read Patel’s (newer) book first, then Jourdain’s will seem foggy and dated, though he does make some pertinent observations from a very different perspective. He also makes some provocative generalizations about lateralization wherein the left brain models events across time and the right brain deals with simultaneous events. He describes the work of Heinrich Schenker, a musicologist who derived a very interesting sounding generative grammar for music half a century before Chomsky derived one for language. All in all his consideration of meaning, in a fuzzy but generally convincing way, almost does a better, or at least a more comprehensive (if less well-moored) job of describing the underlying commonalities between meaning in music and language than Patel. In particular his portrait of the relationship of verbal language and music to the inner life is rich and graspable; the summary:  “A nervous system must always be on the lookout for the most important activities to which to devote itself. This is the ultimate purpose of emotion.” (310)

In the final chapter on ‘ecstasy he begins by describing Parkinson’s patients whose inability to smoothly convert intention into action are often roused from an episode of paralysis by listening to music or by attending to some other external, legato, natural rhythm. He grounds the emotional effects of music deep in circuits that generate the basic motivation for movement. He notes that that planning, short-term memory and attention have more in common than just being collocated in the same region of the brain. That they can also be considered in terms of restraint mechanisms that keep one on task, struck me as a gem of insight. He opines that, “Rarely does life offer us the satisfactions of anticipations so roundly fulfilled as in music and other arts and herein leis the path to ecstasy.” That, along with music’s ability to commandeer the motor system.

 

 All three of these books have direct bearing on the organization of elements in cinema at all the levels of the processing of the stimulus - from the neurology of reception through to that level where the new aspects of humanity are wordlessly expressed. The ecstasy of the climax of a narrative and the ecstasy of the climax of a musical form are of very different orders. This is but one characteristic that music can loan cinema.