How/why music causes emotion?

Pythagorean

As a generality, there are four things you can do as a musician to evoke tension: higher notes, faster playing, dissonance, louder notes.

Considering doppler shift, these all simulate something approaching (with the exception of dissonance... though dissonance does produce a rapid beat note

zoobyshoe

I can't tell what "basic data" you mean.
Are you saying you find the piece, itself, soporific, but that despite that Perahia is less soporific than Listitsa? Or are you saying Listitsa is soporific and Perahia not?
I don't think any sensory stimulus is felt without an emotional reaction, however subtle. What I'm calling attention to here is that the Beethoven conveys a complete and elaborate narrative of a human being's train of emotion through sound alone (no words).

I think the assumption is that there's more "natural," unconditioned response than conditioned when we respond to music. Music = salivation caused by meat, not by the bell that rings at the same time. Sudden, loud noises are inherently frightening, for example. It's not something that requires conditioning.

zoobyshoe

Good start. I think all these things have a psychological effect. What's the neurological basis for that? To call one note "higher" than another is a psychological assessment of it. The note is actually merely faster in cycles per second. Why do we equate that with elevation?

And this incomplete sentence is a good illustrative example of how to create tension. We're set up to expect something that never arrives. Music is full of this. A pattern is implied then deviated from.

Pythagorean

about the beat notes, I was going to say it's a fast beat note (the more dissonant, usually the faster the beat note) so it's similar to playing faster.

I actually did a project for my cognition and learning class where the goal was to apply Quantitative Phenomenology (word counting and comparing to regular usage) to a project. For my project, I chose the top 10 cited articles of Elsevier's Cognition and did QP on them all.

I won't go into detail about the QP analysis, as all it really did was reconfirm what I'm about to say the top 10 cited articles were about (it's basically a technique to avoid reading all the journals, but the for the sake of judging the effectiveness of QP I read the articles anyway)

Spatial metaphor. First that numbers and time is thought of in terms of space, but then that pitch (higher notes) are also thought of in terms of spatial metaphor. So the term we use ("higher")is fitting. In general, most abstract reasoning is done through spatial metaphor. It makes sense, as the majority of our sensory systems process spatial dynamics through the somatosensory system.

Only one of those articles are still amongst the top 10 cited (it's number one apparently)

1. Time in the mind: Using space to think about time

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/cog...ited-articles/

The one about pitch was:

Spatial representation of pitch height:
the SMARC effect

http://www.mathematicalbrain.com/pdf/2005ERBKBGBB.PDF

Pythagorean

On "a neurological basis" I don't think that's particularly important. Neurons allow us to learn and adapt. It's the environment and setting and memory/history of an organism that tends to weigh significance of similar stimuli.

Pythagorean

To finish this thought, I meant to say that this is where most of direct intuitive experience in life is.

fuzzyfelt

Thanks, Ben! It missed some things but I tried to keep it short and continue to enjoy the interesting thoughts in the thread.

I liked the idea you suggested of considering the OP with a view to all sounds.

fuzzyfelt

I was just double-checking my facts, confirming, for example, diagrams by Roger Penrose were displayed at the RA, and found this with Keatsian sentiments-
http://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/ev...he-two-collide
It would be nice to know what was said.

BenG549

"maybe advances in science stem as much from the imagination and creativity as works of art? Could it be that the ‘artistic’ process is more disciplined, and regulated than might seem?"

Yeah this was the point I was trying to make earlier, not sure I totally agree with it but there is at least a good case for it!

zoobyshoe

I understood this to be what you meant.
All this got my train of thought derailed from music to the spatial metaphor in reasoning. I also googled Quantitative Phenomenology and found that interesting.
I feel very strongly this is true, but it's the first time it's been pointed out to me and I'm ruminating on it, not even sure what questions it raises in my mind.
Yeah, that question wasn't particularly well aimed. I'll try to better target what I meant at some point.

atyy

Music involves elements that are generally unchangeable by learning such as pitch (there are studies claiming otherwise, but I don't believe they go beyond textbook effects analogous to octave errors due to timbre). But music also involves learning that has just taken place several seconds or minutes ago, as when one appreciates a new piece of music with a recurring motive. I would argue that learning at all time scales between those two are important in music.

Pythagorean

Muscle spindles and vestibular system are two particularly helpful systems in determining the relative positioning of our body in space and our orientation with respect to gravity. Our superior olivary complex helps us make sense of sound location.

What I think is particularly telling is that we use plots to understand unintuitive quantities like charge, mass, electric fields, etc. We just plot them visually, transforming them directly into a spatial coordinate. We don't transform them into a frequency coordinate and listen to them, or a taste/smell coordinate or bumps on a log (unless we're blind, I guess). We transform them to a spatial coordinate for our eyes.

Pythagorean

On some neurobiology of music.

so neurosynth.org is a meta-analysis app that takes fMRI data from multiple studies and compiles the x,y,z coordinates of the maps for a compound view (a meta-analysis) of brain regions associated with particular terms. Here I've entered "music" and "speech":

http://neurosynth.org/terms/speech
http://neurosynth.org/terms/music

You can see here that the music brain regions are a subset of the speech brain regions.

additionally, we can look at tone and rhythm:

http://neurosynth.org/terms/tone
http://neurosynth.org/terms/rhythm

Tone is not much different than music, but rhythm seems to be a smaller subset of music but contain an additional region at x,y,z = (0,-8,56) (somewhat top center of the brain).

Emotion is fairly distributed:

http://neurosynth.org/terms/emotion

Not surprisingly, the amygdala is heavily involved in emotion (it's thought to be a "significance detector" in that regard) and it has inputs/outputs with sensory systems (such as the audio). The prefrontal cortex is also associated with emotion.

Here you can see more about the inputs/outputs to the amygdala... fairly complicated.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/...a_Figure_2.gif

We also can note that the frontal cortex plays a large part in regulation, which indicates a focus/attention aspect, top-down processing meats bottom-up processing. I think the story of expectation is probably has a lot to do with this interplay between frontal cortex and amygdala.

Some music specific disorders (and their associated brain regions) might also give insight into the nature of music in the brain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-specific_disorders

Unfortunately, music-disorder specific terms do not appear in the neurosynth.org database.

Pythagorean

Referring to an earlier discussion on major vs. minor scale... here's The Doors "Rider on The Storm" modulated to major (from minor)

http://vimeo.com/24939393

BenG549

Hahaha, that is quality!

Pythagorean

The following idea begins with Meyer's concept of harmonic tension, that we would want to move (musically) away from such tension, and that in doing so, you must either increase pitch or decrease pitch... and you always get either major or minor depending on which direction you go, given any tension interval.

"“sound symbolism” (or “frequency
code”) of human languages and animal vocalizations:
decreasing vocal pitch is used to indicate strength and
social dominance, whereas increasing pitch signals
defeat, social subordinance and weakness (Bolinger,
1978; Cruttendon, 1981; Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Morton,
1977; Ohala, 1984, 1994). The affect of major or minor
chords is thus inherently positive or negative because
they imply social strength (“happiness”) or weakness
(“sadness”) (see Fig. 5).

http://www.psycho.hes.kyushu-u.ac.jp...ings/O-205.pdf

zoobyshoe

From the paper:
What is meant by "neighboring" here?