Why do some cultures use music to cope with emotions?

[Manraj singh]

I have come across some articles saying that the reason we like music is that its auditory cheesecake. And i think someone called steven pinker came up with it. Can someone please shed some light into the matter, what does it mean? Simple explanation please.

 

[Simon Bridge]

It's a metaphor - if you don;t have the correct associations, then it won't make sense to you.

It does come from Steven Pinker.
This article has a discussion that should help.

In a nutshell: it means that music is pleasurable in a complicated and hard-to-describe way.
It is something that appears to be an evolutionary accident, a side-effect, and has no "real" biological purpose.

 

[Chronos]

Music is a persistent evolutionary trait in humans. The logical explanation is it has some obscure survival value. Even animals seem to respond positively to certain musical forms - typically classical.

 

[Simon Bridge]

... like cheesecake.

iirc the suspicion is that musical taste is part or result of some things which have an advantage.
Remembering that "sugar tastes sweet because we like it" ... there are a bunch of such positive responces triggered by cheesecake, and music.

We can also look at it as like humour and showey skills - a kind of secondary sexual characteristic, and sometime debugging routine for self-aware machines.

 

[Sheppie]

It's a funny way of saying music is wonderful and can gently touch your senses and emotions through your ears. Cheesecake is used as a food for the soul because who doesn't like cheesecake, right? :) Basically it's kind of a metaphor :)

 

[zoobyshoe]

I have come across some articles saying that the reason we like music is that its auditory cheesecake. And i think someone called steven pinker came up with it. Can someone please shed some light into the matter, what does it mean? Simple explanation please.

According to the article linked to by Simon Bridge, Pinker sees a whole range of human activities as invented by humans simply in order to stimulate our pleasure receptors, for the sake of the pleasure. The pleasure receptors all evolved for a good purpose because the pleasure was attached to something beneficial to us, like eating sweet fruit and high fat meats, but humans have become adept at finding ways to stimulate the pleasure receptors with no regard for the greater or lesser benefit of the stimulating agent. Pinker counts art, literature, music, drugs and pornography, all as manifestations of this kind of invention, and cheesecake is cited as a typical example. The whole reason for being of cheesecake is to taste good. It was designed without regard to it's health effects.

Pinker asserts music was designed according to the same plan: it's whole reason for existence is to please the auditory faculties. It is like cheesecake for the ears. He asserts we could live perfectly well without music in our lives.

This is one man's opinion, mind you, not any sort of scientific fact. The article is by a man who disagrees with Pinker and puts forth several arguments against Pinker's view. Pinker's field, Evolutionary Psychology, is among the softest of the soft sciences, and everything that comes out of it is subject to debate.

 

[Doofy]

I've wondered why it is that we instinctively know which sequence of notes sounds nice/"musical", and which sounds like ****. Maybe it's because we've somehow been programmed to seek out certain pitch sequences in the distant past that would indicate where food was or something... but when I listen to, say, a present-day bird tweeting away (ie. singing, not making inane 140-character internet posts), it just sounds tuneless. I have no idea why we like rhythmic beats either.

 

[Medicol]

I think it's not instinct related causes. Years ago, I preferred pops while a neighbor of mine preferred only rap or hip hop. Yet, I fell in love with rock the next year then and the guy favored pop genre.
The motor area of our brain controls rhythms of the processed sounds from the source. I suddenly hear a sad slow song from the radio while I'm in a bad mood, for example, will it definitely make me sadder ? I don't think it will. I think the limbic regions are also activated in response to different stimuli selectively.

 

[Doofy]

I think it's not instinct related causes. Years ago, I preferred pops while a neighbor of mine preferred only rap or hip hop. Yet, I fell in love with rock the next year then and the guy favored pop genre.
The motor area of our brain controls rhythms of the processed sounds from the source. I suddenly hear a sad slow song from the radio while I'm in a bad mood, for example, will it definitely make me sadder ? I don't think it will. I think the limbic regions are also activated in response to different stimuli selectively.

Don't the genres still follow common rules though? Ie. forget about anything so complex as rock vs. hip hop. Just take a simple piano tune. I think in a simple little sequence of notes everyone can identify when one just sounds 'off', right?

 

[zoobyshoe]

I've wondered why it is that we instinctively know which sequence of notes sounds nice/"musical", and which sounds like ****. Maybe it's because we've somehow been programmed to seek out certain pitch sequences in the distant past that would indicate where food was or something... but when I listen to, say, a present-day bird tweeting away (ie. singing, not making inane 140-character internet posts), it just sounds tuneless. I have no idea why we like rhythmic beats either.

We're hardwired to recognize the harmonics of a fundamental as 'proper' which makes major chords sound "right". Deviations from major chords start sounding more and more "wrong" the more they deviate. Minor chords are recognized as "wrong" but they're wrong in an interesting, logical way. There's been no end of experimentation with the introduction of more and more "wrong" elements into chords for more and more interesting effects. The "wrongness" has to have an audible logic that gives overall coherence, just like a caricature drawing of someone has to distort their face using a logical distortion algorithm in order that the subject remain recognizable beneath the distortion. Something like: if a person's nose looks 20% too large for his face, exaggerate it to x% too large. If his eyes are 20% too small, shrink them to x% too small. Artists and musicians do that completely by instinct, but there's always a logic to it.

Music that sounds like junk is music where the listener can't sense any logic in the distortion algorithm. You don't speak "bird" so there's no apparent logic in their deviations from the major chords for you.

 

[Medicol]

Don't the genres still follow common rules though? Ie. forget about anything so complex as rock vs. hip hop. Just take a simple piano tune. I think in a simple little sequence of notes everyone can identify when one just sounds 'off', right?

Yes, that is true and a cultural point. It has nothing related to our gene at all. We hear the differences because we were "taught" or trained to see them so (i.e through a learning process). This can be observed in kids of 4-8 years old, for instance DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL or DO-MI-RE-SOL-FA they will not be able to distinguish which note sequence is better if they are not told or listening to again and again in a particular duration. Also, my 70 year old mother for example can't endure Western musicals (opera, metal or ballad rock), she only likes my country's love songs which makes us the young suffer badly.

 

[zoobyshoe]

This can be observed in kids of 4-8 years old, for instance DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL or DO-MI-RE-SOL-FA they will not be able to distinguish which note sequence is better...

Neither is better. Why should you tell them one of those two choices is better?

 

[AlephZero]

We're hardwired to recognize the harmonics of a fundamental as 'proper' which makes major chords sound "right". Deviations from major chords start sounding more and more "wrong" the more they deviate. Minor chords are recognized as "wrong" but they're wrong in an interesting, logical way.

History doesn't support that, even in Western music. Medieval western music was "logical", but it got along fine for several hundred years without bothering about chords at all in the modern sense of the word. The first theoretical writing on western music that talks about "chords" in a way that a modern reader would recognize was by Rameau, around 1700 - and he was way out of line with most of his contemporaries.

Music that sounds like junk is music where the listener can't sense any logic...

That's nearer the truth IMO. "Logic" is what you have been listening to since birth, plus a selection of unsubstantiated myths and traditions (like "major keys sound happy and minor keys sound sad"). Many westerners will find this rather hard to follow, even with the helpful "hand signals" - but it's entirely logical within its own definition of logic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Icwjd_qpZA

 

[zoobyshoe]

History doesn't support that, even in Western music. Medieval western music was "logical", but it got along fine for several hundred years without bothering about chords at all in the modern sense of the word.

Looks like you're reading something into my post I wasn't saying. Saying we're hardwired to recognize the harmonics of a fundamental as "proper" doesn't mean we therefore must especially like music that's all major chords, if that's what you think I'm saying. The 'impropriety' or 'wrongness' of a note in a chord, and the logic with which that 'wrongness' carries through into the successive chords, is exactly what gives music its interest. It's just like literature or theater: something unbalanced, something wrong, has to happen to drive the story through the protagonist's attempt to recover balance. My point is that recognizing the major chord as "proper" is what tells us the deviations are interesting. Whether or not it's "sad," the shift from a major to minor chord is certainly a shift of the weight in the boat, so to speak.

There is the issue with Western medieval music that it was church music, and any sounds that exceeded a certain dryness of emotion was automatically prohibited. No cheesecake for the monks.

I'm not sure what point you meant me to take from the video. I think a person raised with Indian music would also be able to hear the 'rightness' of a western major chord when exposed to it. They would 'get' it, whether or not they wanted to listen to it all the time. I don't think they would be confused by anyone saying that C E G go well together.

 

[Medicol]

Neither is better. Why should you tell them one of those two choices is better?

My example is meant to show that human beings do spend time learning to recognize and understand differences in nature; simply our brain is trained to learn things and how to connect them.
I agree that we all share some common background of morality or social memes even though we inherit or live in different cultures. And this commonality fuses our tastes of nature or particularly of music. Any songs therefore possessing this sort of commonality will probably be favored by many worldwide. The auditory part of our brain only takes over tasks to process sounds. To recognize the coming sound as incorrect compared to others, it must map the heard sound to what it has been learned. Familiarity is measured but to dispatch ions for other add-ins (e.g emotions), the whole sequence of sounds need to to be mapped with the learned patterns.

 

[zoobyshoe]

My example is meant to show that human beings do spend time learning to recognize and understand differences in nature; simply our brain is trained to learn things and how to connect them.

You presented the same 5 notes of the major scale twice. The second time the order is changed: the two last notes changed places. You assert that kids aren't able to tell which is "better," because they haven't learned which is "better" yet. The fact is, no adult fully steeped in Western music would say either is better. One sounds like part of a scale, the other like part of a melody. There's no context whatever whereby one might be deemed "better." In other words, you chose a really bad example to make your point.

 

[AlephZero]

There is the issue with Western medieval music that it was church music, and any sounds that exceeded a certain dryness of emotion was automatically prohibited. No cheesecake for the monks.

So the peasants never made any music of their own on the other 6 days of the week?

Actually the aristocrats made plenty of secular music as well, and unlike the peasants they wrote some of it down, so we have at least a vague idea what it sounded like.

Even the monks let their hair down sometimes. The oldest copy of this was in the library of an abbey. The lyrics are mostly about the not-so-monastic subject of sex...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCA9nYnLWo

 

[AlephZero]

I'm not sure what point you meant me to take from the video.

Mostly "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio..."

I think a person raised with Indian music would also be able to hear the 'rightness' of a western major chord when exposed to it. They would 'get' it, whether or not they wanted to listen to it all the time. I don't think they would be confused by anyone saying that C E G go well together.

I can't give a direct quote without ransacking my bookshelves, but somewhere I have the autobiography of the 20th century conductor Antal Doráti, who once took a western symphony orchestra on a tour of India (in the 1950s, IIRC) The audiences found most of what they heard totally incomprehensible.

Personally I don't buy the "simple integer ratios" theory of why western music is what it is. Traditional musical instruments just don't fit the pattern, and they must have been designed and tuned "by ear", not by a mathematical theory.

FWIW, Indian music divides an octave into 22 notes, not 12. Some modern composers are experimenting with 53 notes per octave, which isn't a new idea - the earliest known mention of it was a Chinese music theorist writing about 2000 years ago.

 

[atyy]

Some modern composers are experimenting with 53 notes per octave, which isn't a new idea - the earliest known mention of it was a Chinese music theorist writing about 2000 years ago.

Really?

 

[Pythagorean]

Personally I don't buy the "simple integer ratios" theory of why western music is what it is. Traditional musical instruments just don't fit the pattern, and they must have been designed and tuned "by ear", not by a mathematical theory.

The simple integer theory is somewhat aligned with physiology. I don't think the theory is a complete description, though. I think it would have been more strongly guided by what people heard in their environment (via Melodic expectation).

But what simple integers do, because of the way our brain handles frequencies (storing an octave as the same note) and because of the beat frequencies in the physics. Integer ratios can help describe harmonic tension between two notes. 1:2, the octave is the least tense, 2:3. the fifth is more tense (but more stable beat-wise than any other interval besides the octave. The most tense notes are closer together. Of course, this doesn't predict who will like what combination of tension and resolution and progression, but one thing you could say about it is that it can be used to construct a standardized music system and that makes it a more stable meme.

But I agree. Ultimately, neither melodic expectation or integer ratio theory say anything about emphasis, timbre, or rhythm and those account for a lot of cultural differences in music.

I think a person raised with Indian music would also be able to hear the 'rightness' of a western major chord when exposed to it. They would 'get' it, whether or not they wanted to listen to it all the time. I don't think they would be confused by anyone saying that C E G go well together.

I don't think that's true for a laymen. Even western laymen can only reliably detect octaves.

I do think an experienced Indian musician would be able to see the harmonic tension (maybe they have their own word for it) increasing with higher integer ratios, and you could explain the musical logic behind using a fifth to reinforce the tonic, but the third would be more difficult. They would have neither in their system though (12 is nicely divisible by 4, 3, and... 22 is only divisible by 11 and 2) and they likely won't see the significance of it with respect to what they call music.

 

[zoobyshoe]

So the peasants never made any music of their own on the other 6 days of the week?

Actually the aristocrats made plenty of secular music as well, and unlike the peasants they wrote some of it down, so we have at least a vague idea what it sounded like.

Even the monks let their hair down sometimes. The oldest copy of this was in the library of an abbey. The lyrics are mostly about the not-so-monastic subject of sex...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCA9nYnLWo

Whether or not the composer of this song thought in terms of chords he was certainly employing them, don't you think? The harmony in this tune is not obscure. To the extent there is no theory behind it's composition, if that's the case, it would seem to be evidence for hardwiring.

Apropos: I recognize these lyrics from Shakespeare, though I can't remember the specific play, and I seem to recall a footnote saying it was a rare instance where he used a pre-existing folk tune. Unusual for him.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I can't give a direct quote without ransacking my bookshelves, but somewhere I have the autobiography of the 20th century conductor Antal Doráti, who once took a western symphony orchestra on a tour of India (in the 1950s, IIRC) The audiences found most of what they heard totally incomprehensible.

He would have had the same experience had he toured the United States limiting performances to towns with a population less than 10,000. Hell, I could fill San Diego symphony hall with people picked off the street here who would find the normal repertoire of a symphony orchestra incomprehensible. The first time I played a recording of Beethoven piano sonata #8 for a friend in high school (who was raised exclusively on pop), he said it sounded like a crazy person crashing randomly on the keyboard.

The question is, would any of them authentically find a major chord to be illogical, unpleasant, incomprehensible? I don't think so. I think they would all immediately understand why someone would claim those notes go together naturally.

Personally I don't buy the "simple integer ratios" theory of why western music is what it is. Traditional musical instruments just don't fit the pattern, and they must have been designed and tuned "by ear", not by a mathematical theory.

Not sure what you mean. Pre-Bach, instruments were not well-tempered, of course, so the tuning was different, but I'm not sure that's why you don't think they fit the pattern.

FWIW, Indian music divides an octave into 22 notes, not 12.

They have octaves? Hmmm. That's interesting. Where would they get the idea that's a desirable sound?

My question about the 22 notes would be, are there among them notes that approximate the harmonics? Our "half tones" are kind of arbitrary and they're often used as mere "passing tones." To what extent does the Indian musician use parts of the 22 divisions the same way, to "slide" from one tone to a goal tone, and to what extent are peculiar intervals not available to us intrinsic to the kind of sound they want to create? I think I hear both things happening when I listen to Ravi Shankar. The "peculiar" intervals are of interest to me because I sense the extent to which they deviate from a harmonic interval. Does the Indian listener unconsciously hear the same thing? I'm asserting yes.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I don't think that's true for a laymen. Even western laymen can only reliably detect octaves.

I do think an experienced Indian musician would be able to see the harmonic tension (maybe they have their own word for it) increasing with higher integer ratios, and you could explain the musical logic behind using a fifth to reinforce the tonic, but the third would be more difficult. They would have neither in their system though (12 is nicely divisible by 4, 3, and... 22 is only divisible by 11 and 2) and they likely won't see the significance of it with respect to what they call music.

Someone could certainly do a poll. We could play C E G for random people in various countries and ask if they find they sound well together or if they sound bad together. The point would be to uncover possible hardwiring, so you wouldn't want to ask, "Is this good music?," or anything that would invite comparisons with their own culture's music. You'd want the phrasing of the question to be neutral. I think harmonics are universally 'recognized' just like perspective in a painting or drawing would be universally recognized, even among peoples who don't employ it in their artwork.

edit: I'm not claiming anyone'd be able to name the chord as 1-3-5, if that's what you thought I meant.

 

[Pythagorean]

Someone could certainly do a poll. We could play C E G for random people in various countries and ask if they find they sound well together or if they sound bad together. The point would be to uncover possible hardwiring, so you wouldn't want to ask, "Is this good music?," or anything that would invite comparisons with their own culture's music. You'd want the phrasing of the question to be neutral. I think harmonics are universally 'recognized' just like perspective in a painting or drawing would be universally recognized, even among peoples who don't employ it in their artwork.

They have octaves? Hmmm. That's interesting. Where would they get the idea that's a desirable sound?

The octave is the only thing in music that is consistent across cultures and can be recognized by laymen (and perhaps the fifth). The octave has the same meaning across cultures too: it's the beginning and the end; it marks the cyclic auditory property (the octave is perceived as the 'same note'). The fifth serves no universal purpose. Even if it can be recognized by another culture, it likely doesn't have a musical meaning to them - it would just be a neat sound observation. Higher integer ratios (like the third) won't translate in a meaningful way. If you went and tried to explain it to a musician from another culture, it would be a lot like an acoustic scientist trying to explain some random acoustics facts to you - you might be able to understand the logic of it, but you'd likely walk away having not gained any musical appreciation of it.

Here's an excerpt from an essay written in Nature:

So how do different cultures decide on their musical scales? Cognitive studies on infants and primates offer some evidence that the brain recognizes the octave, and possibly the fifth as 'special'. Indeed, these intervals feature in nearly all musical cultures that use scales. The other notes in a scale seem to be constrained in other ways, too. If there are too many notes per octave, it is hard to tell them apart, and instruments are difficult to tune. There is probably a good reason why most scales have unequal steps, as in the way the Western diatonic scales switch between whole notes and semitones. This asymmetry offers clues about a melody's tonal centre, letting a listener quickly figure out 'where the tune is' in relation to the tonic note.

It is also not obvious how much of the relative consonance and dissonance of different intervals, if any, is a 'natural' phenomenon. Certainly, notions of consonance in Western music have been fluid, defined largely by convention. But there does seem to be a genuine sensory dissonance in some combinations of tones, caused by the unpleasant sensation of beating between two tones that differ only slightly in frequency. Hermann von Helmholtz first did the maths in the nineteenth century and showed that sensory dissonance dips at the intervals corresponding to the Western scale, suggesting that physics does play a part in determining this scale. Yet there is considerable flexibility in the range of tunings that our ears will tolerate. It may even be that acclimatization to a convention can completely override these acoustic facts.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7192/full/453160a.html

 

[zoobyshoe]

The octave is the only thing in music that is consistent across cultures and can be recognized by laymen (and perhaps the fifth). The octave has the same meaning across cultures too: it's the beginning and the end; it marks the cyclic auditory property (the octave is perceived as the 'same note'). The fifth serves no universal purpose. Even if it can be recognized by another culture, it likely doesn't have a musical meaning to them - it would just be a neat sound observation. Higher integer ratios (like the third) won't translate in a meaningful way. If you went and tried to explain it to a musician from another culture, it would be a lot like an acoustic scientist trying to explain some random acoustics facts to you - you might be able to understand the logic of it, but you'd likely walk away having not gained any musical appreciation of it.

Here's what I think: I think if they "recognize" the octave; two notes an octave apart, played simultaneously, then they would judge the addition of the fifth and third to have enriched the octave, to have fleshed it out, to be supporting its "special" properties. This is something we could only test by taking a large poll over many cultures.

If we found people who didn't like the sound, it would be important to hear their objections to it. If they object to it on the basis it's too sweet, too static, too boring, we would know they do experience it as "enriched," but that they have a cultural/artistic bias against that "nice" kind of sound. On the other hand if they described it as sour, bitter, painful, irritating, and such, we would know it's not a matter of taste: the third and fifth authentically confuse their experience of the octave. (However, even in the latter case, care has to be taken to make sure the nature of their objection is clear. "Terrible!, Horrible! Unlistenable!," and equally vague objections might only indicate the experience of a surfeit of sweetness, niceness, regularity. The look on someone's face if you put half a cup of sugar in their coffee might be indistinguishable from the look on their face if you put half a cup of bitter dish soap in it.)

The goal is to explain why that kind of bird chattering bothered the guy back there, earlier in the thread, why it seems so obviously unmusical. Why do some sequences of tones sound like the opposite of 'cheescake for the ears?' Are there, in fact, cultures where the addition of the fifth and third would turn an octave into that "opposite of cheescake?' Can people really become so steeped in non-harmonic music that harmony is experienced as bitter?

Here's an excerpt from an essay written in Nature:

The point that "acclimatization to a convention can completely override these acoustic facts," is non-controversial, and I don't dispute it. I would have you note, though, that it assumes a "standard" ("these acoustic facts") that is being over-ridden. Every culture has an accumulated system of distortion algorithms that are deviations from a standard which that culture may only unconsciously sense and never have defined. If you look at the prehistoric cave paintings of Europe there doesn't seem to be any direct exploration of symmetry or geometry at all, but the level of artistic sophistication is so high they can't possibly have not unconsciously assumed symmetry and geometry. It's as if they jumped right over all that elementary stuff right to sophistication. And it doesn't mean they would be baffled or repelled by a circle or rectangle. A major chord might just be too trivial for many cultures to bother with.

 

[atyy]

According to http://chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/drone.html the fifth is common in Indian music, and is the top choice for a secondary note in a drone. There are similar comments in http://books.google.com/books?id=hGLRqLscf78C&dq=sa+pa+drone+indian&source=gbs_navlinks_s. The second choice is a fourth, which is an inverted fifth. The fifth is the most common option given in http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~mrahaim/.

Of course there are cultural influences. For example, although the perfect fourth in isolation is usually heard by western ears as consonant, "textbook" western harmony usually classifies the fourth as dissonant, because if the third is consonant, then the fourth is dissonant against the third. The most common example of a dissonant fourth in textbook western harmony is the cadential "I-6-4" before a V-I. However, a fourth can be consonant in "passing-6-4".

Also, there are famous cases where even the octave in western music is deliberately "out-of-tune", like the stretched octaves on the piano.
http://www.precisionstrobe.com/apps/pianotemp/temper.html
http://skowroneck.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/tuning-overthinking-inharmonicity/

 

[Pythagorean]

Interesting article that reminde me of this thread:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandso.../why-pygmies-arent-scared-by-the-psycho-theme

 

[atyy]

Interesting article that reminde me of this thread:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandso.../why-pygmies-arent-scared-by-the-psycho-theme

"They can cry, but not while singing," Fernando says. "They sing to pass through the tears." But I think I agree with it, even though I'm not from that culture.