The science of music

Whether you’re into your Beatles or your Beethoven, music can connect cultures and people in a way no other art form can. But just why do people sound great in the shower, and can a burst of Mozart really make you brainy? 

Throughout scientific history, music – and the understanding of its most fundamental principles – has occupied many great minds. That’s not to say that teams of scientists sit and ponder why yet another insipid boy band is in the charts – for that is a mystery never to be solved – but rather, the history of science is itself inextricably linked with music.
Up until 1650, music was actually treated as a branch of science, with Pythagoras, Aristotle and Plato just some of the scientific heavyweights that considered it on a par with astronomy and geometry. This has changed in modern times, but slowly science is returning to consider many of the un-answered questions surrounding music. Indeed music is also being used as a tool to help push forward the very cutting edge of science. However – more importantly than that – it can also shed light on why your shower is lying to you, and why the bass from the party next door has hijacked your quiet evening in front of the telly.

There is no known culture in the world that lacks music, and some of the oldest human-made artifacts are musical instruments. Music outdates agriculture in the archeological record, and may even precede spoken language - but just what is music? Well, despite all the scientific attention, no one definition has ever quite covered it. ‘A pleasing pattern of melody and rhythm’, ‘a conglomerate of sound waves at different frequencies’ or even ‘any organised sound’ – every definition can be broken by some sort of music. But one thing is common to all music – sound.
Music travels through air as sound waves - no surprise there - but what might surprise you is that even without sound waves bouncing around, air is still a pretty hectic place. The molecules that make up air are moving around at an average speed of over 1000mph, each having around 5 billion collisions per second. This excerpts a pressure on your ear drums of over one ton per square foot. All this, and still not a sound to be heard.  
In fact, even when you turn your stereo up to full, the sound waves created only produce miniscule changes in molecular motion compared to those occurring during silence. At a sound level of 117dB, the bunched up bands of a sound wave only have an extra 140 molecules for every million, creating a pressure change of only 0.4lbs per square foot. So how do these small changes produce such loud sounds? The answer is a simple matter of imbalance.

The key difference between blissful silence and a thumping party is that the sound pressure outside your ear is not balanced by an equal pressure inside (a balance normally provided by the eustachian tube), and so your eardrum moves back and forth. This signal is then transferred to the fluid filled cochlea of your inner ear where hair cells are excited by the vibration. A nerve impulse is then generated in the auditory nerve, sent to the brain and you hear the sound.

But of course, not every sound is musical - one listen to a Des O’Connor record can confirm that – but musical sounds do share several characteristics: pitch - our perception of the frequency of a sound wave; loudness - determined by the size of the vibrations producing the sound; and timbre - the quality or character of a note.

The frequency of a sound wave is also responsible for those bass notes that just won’t quit. Higher frequency treble sound waves cause faster molecular movement in air, and are therefore more prone to losing energy through friction, hence bass tones remain while higher tones die away. But is not only friction that bass can survive. Sound waves pass right through walls and floors when their wavelength is longer than the walls or floors are thick. As bass notes can have wavelengths of up to 30ft, the chances are your walls will offer little protection from the party next door.

Sad science

The ability of music to trigger and manipulate emotions is undeniable. Samuel Barber’s adagio can render some tearful and others joyful, but what is the reason for this?

Actually, very little research has been done get to the bottom of music’s ability to physically influence the brain. This is partly due to a lack of expertise says Geetanjali Vaidya, author of Music, Emotion and the Brain. “The fields of music and biology are generally seen as mutually exclusive, and to find a Neurobiologist also proficient in music is not very common. However, some do exist, and partly as a result of their research some questions about the biology of music have been answered.”

The problem that arises in trying to study music's emotional power is that the emotional content of music is very subjective. A piece of music may be undeniably emotionally powerful, but at the same time it will be experienced in very different ways by each person who hears it.

But are your responses to a certain piece of music inherent, or have you just been conditioned to expect that kind of music to be associated with a specific emotion? Mari Jones of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition explains:

“Some scientists suggest that all expectancies are learned and so if one anticipates a sad musical passage in a piece of music, it is based on some sort of learned connection with that emotion that a given society reinforces. But others are open to the possibility of universals such that certain kinds of tempi (slow) and pitch ranges (lower ones) and pitch contours (falling) are more likely to encourage sad emotions than others. Also some research indicates that minor scales are more likely to be judged as sad.”

What ever the emotion invoked, it does seem that music has a kind of short cut to the emotional centres of our brain. Various experiments have shown that paralimbic regions, which are associated with emotional responses, have increased activity when subjects are played musical pieces with emotional value.

There is still a lot to learn though as Vaidya explains: “How does music succeed in prompting emotions within us? And why are these emotions often so powerful? The simple answer is that no one knows. We are able to quantify the emotional responses caused by music, but we cannot explain them.”
Call the tune police!
Many a classic has been slaughtered during a drunken karaoke session, but why is it that some people have perfect pitch while others are tone deaf? Well, according to former professional musician and psychologist Dr Daniel J. Levitin, if we just played our kids more good music, the world could well be singing in perfect harmony. He explains: “When a child is acquiring language, parents often point out objects to their children and say things like ‘see that apple? That’s red. Have you ever heard a parent teach auditory labels, such as, ‘hear that door bell? That’s B-flat’?”
However, although many psychologists think that most musical talent is down to practice, some scientists claim a genetic basis does play a role. Indeed, a team of geneticists at the University of California are searching for an ‘absolute pitch gene’ that presumably would endow its lucky owner with the voice of an angel. In reality of course, both aspects are important. “Both biology and learning are involved, people with a genetic predisposition for aspects of musicality might acquire it more easily but, in my view, would still need some training,” said Dr Levitin.
But even if you don’t have a musical bone in your body and don’t so much hit notes, as batter them to death with a club, there is still one place that you can flatter your ego. The shower. But don’t head off to an X-factor audition just yet – that two-faced shower is lying to you! The hard, smooth tiled surfaces of most showers reflect the sound energy and contain it in a small place, boosting the intensity and giving your voice more power. They also mean that the waves bounce around, giving your voice reverb, a fuller sound and even masking your bum notes.

So, listening to music could well explain variations in talent, but could it also explain variations in intelligence? Studies have shown that music education and music making have positive effects on many mental factors that are themselves not part of music.

In the early 1990’s, a study appeared in Nature suggesting that a few minutes exposure to a piano sonata by Mozart increased peoples mental capacity. After several attempts to reproduce the effect there is still no agreement within the scientific community about whether it is genuine. However, one thing is certain – listening to complex music is not a mental ‘get rich quick’ scheme. It seems that any increase in mental capacity only ever lasts for 10-15 minutes, and even then is limited to spatial abilities. While this may improve your dancing, it’s not likely to make you more intelligent says Norman M. Weinberger of the Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour at the University of California. “If the question is whether or not brief exposure to certain music can produce long term improvements in intelligence, then the answer is no.”

It seems that the role of science in music has come full circle and is once again being considered important in its own right. The studies of music, and why it produces such profound and important responses in us, is bringing together many scientific disciplines and could eventually broaden our concepts of one of the most complex of human activities. To those scientists involved we say…rock on!

By Phil Prime, assistant editor, Laboratory News