Jazz for Brain Scientists

courtesy of Naxos of America

When I first learned about the album Yuko Mabuchi Plays Miles Davis, my curiosity was immediately piqued. Having spent almost a decade of my life at an “outpost” research laboratory in Palo Alto funded by a Japanese company, I quickly found more enthusiasm for jazz among my Japanese colleagues than I had encountered among Americans. Yarlung Records has provided an impressive platform for pianist Mabuchi and her trio, and it was hard to resist seeing what they would make of compositions that had been indelibly stamped with Davis’ unique approaches to creativity.

I quickly discovered that there was more to this album than I had anticipated. It turned out to be a concert recording taken from a performance in Cammilleri Hall on the campus of the University of Southern California on April 25, 2018. Cammilleri Hall, in turn, is in the building of the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI); and Mabuchi’s gig turned out to be the last in a two-year series of concerts inspired by Davis in response to the hanging of his 1988/89 painting in the Cammilleri lobby. (The painting is reproduced in the booklet that accompanies Mabuchi’s album.) For the record, this is one of two USC research laboratories concerned with what pioneering researcher Warren Sturgis McCulloch liked to call “embodiments of mind.” The other is the Center for Neural Engineering, directed by Michael A. Arbib. BCI is led by Antonio and Helen Damasio, the former having written several perceptive books for lay readers on the relationship between brain and mind.

With all that as context, I found it hard to silence Davis’ own gravelly voice in the back of my head saying, “Jazz ain’t brain science, man!” Indeed, between the history of cognitive psychology and the various “wet brain” specialties, there is a long history behind trying to study “the mind behind the musical ear,” a phrase which happens to be the title of an excellent book by Jeanne Bamberger that was first published by Harvard University Press in 1991. During my tenure with Examiner.com, I wrote about a book entitled Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel, a Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego; and reading that book was not a particularly satisfying experience.

By way of a sidebar, I would like to observe that, when that San Diego campus first opened, its Director, Gerald Edelman, arranged a “launch seminar,” which included, as “entertainment,” a recital by the Juilliard String Quartet. It was on that occasion that I first met Antonio Damasio; and I have to wonder whether “jazz at USC” was his response to “chamber music in San Diego!” If nothing else, the Cammilleri concerts are a sign that brain scientists are still as occupied with music as they were two decades ago.

Where the music itself is concerned, the other members of Mabuchi’s trio on this new album are Del Atkins on bass and Bobby Breton on drums. They are joined by trumpeter JJ Kirkpatrick. I am afraid that Kirkpatrick was the weak link in this chain. I can appreciate that he was determined not to “channel” Davis through his own solo work; but he never seemed to find a distinctive voice of his own to add to the trio players. I was more interested in listening to Mabuchi and what she could do with not only Davis’ thematic inventiveness but also the impact of those themes on the pianist Bill Evans. Indeed, Mabuchi’s creative skills advanced beyond Davis’ legacy to take on three original tracks on the album, culminating in a concluding track entitled “Missing Miles.”

Ultimately, what I most appreciated was that Mabuchi provided me with a new context for listening to the five Davis “classics” included in her recital: “All Blues,” “Blue in Green,” “Milestones,” “So What,” and “Nardis.” For the record (so to speak), “So What” is the longest track on the album; and other Davis motifs creep in during its performance. The most recognizable of those motifs comes from “Four;” and it is introduced at the end of Kirkpatrick’s opening solo. A healthier share of that kind of free-association inventiveness would have been appreciated.

Thomas Clifton’s Impact on James Tenney

My journey through From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, has now come to what quickly became the most significant of my encounters with Tenney’s writings. Readers may recall that my last article examined a five-year period of “struggle” (my word choice) to develop a theory of harmony that would apply to contemporary music as effectively as it did to the traditions of the nineteenth and preceding centuries. The year after that period seemed to have marked Tenney’s awakening from “metaphysical slumbers” (paraphrasing the traditional account of David Hume’s impact on Immanuel Kant) by virtue of his reading and reviewing the book Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology by Thomas Clifton. Clifton died in 1978, and this book was not published until 1983. Tenney’s review appeared in the Journal of Music Theory in 1985.

In the second paragraph of his review, Tenney described the book as “at times brilliant, insightful, and thought-provoking; at other times irritating, exasperating, even embarrassing.” Nevertheless, Tenney is impressively persistent in seeking out the insights while glossing over the exasperations, reminding me of my favorite admonition from one of the pioneers in studying the relationship between brain and mind, Warren Sturgis McCulloch, “Don’t bite my finger, look where I am pointing.” Tenney clearly wanted his readers to grasp just where Clifton was pointing. Over 30 years later I still feel that he did an admirable job, but returning to that review also left me disconcerted at how little has been done to follow up on Clifton’s phenomenological stance.

Indeed, having presented the reader with both pans of the balance required for reading Clifton’s book, Tenney then makes it clear why he believes the book is so important:

A new kind of music theory is needed that deals with the question of what we actually hear when we listen to a piece of music, as well as how or why we hear as we do. To the extent that music theory involves the development and application of a descriptive language for music, this means that both the things named and the relations between things described by such a language must be much more precisely correlated than they are now with things and relations actually perceived or experienced.

Ever since I created this site, I have struggled with the challenges confronting anyone trying to describe “music as heard.” Those who have followed that struggle known that I have, from time to time, tried to take a phenomenological stance; but, at the end of the day, I feel as if what I have been doing all these years amounts to anthropological field work. There are, of course, anthropologists who respect the insights of phenomenology; and some of them have had a definite impact on my own efforts. Nevertheless, as I know from my interactions with “working musicians,” there is a wide gulf between the thought processes behind making music and those behind listening to it; and neither phenomenology nor anthropology currently goes very far in efforts to narrow that gulf.

As those who know a thing or two about phenomenology may guess, Clifton’s primary influence came from, as Tenney puts it, “the methods, insights, and terminology of Edmund Husserl.” Tenney goes on to name others; but Husserl was the one to get the ball rolling, so to speak, particularly through Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (lectures on the phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time), which was published in 1928, based on Martin Heidegger editing notes taken from Husserl’s lectures. The best source in English is the translation by James S. Churchill in 1964, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, published by Indiana University Press. Tenney’s chapter-by-chapter examination of Clifton’s book suggests that Tenney himself was at least adequately, if not sufficiently, acquainted with both Husserl in general and the question of time-consciousness in particular.

Nevertheless, when one gets to the end of Tenney’s review, the major “lesson” is that there are no easy answers to questions about what happens between ears and mind during acts of listening to music. Presumably, Clifton did not live long enough to take the next steps along the path delineated by his book; and, on the basis of the remaining chapters in From Scratch, I would suggest that Tenney was more interested in pursuing the composition of music than in picking up the baton that Clifton had prematurely dropped. Personally, I feel as if I continue to acknowledge the phenomenological stance, even if I do not follow Husserl’s discipline faithfully, whenever I try to account for my own acts of listening to music; and rereading Tenney’s review has given me an encouraging boost to keep at my own efforts, even when they do not (yet?) seem to yield deep insights!

Tenney’s Five-Year Struggle with a Theory of Harmony

If it seems as if it has been a while since I have continued my writing about From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, it is because I have been deeply occupied with four consecutive chapters (and one appendix), which collectively account for a five-year period during which Tenney tried to develop a theory of harmony that would apply to contemporary music as effectively as it did to the traditions of the nineteenth and preceding centuries. The texts that occupied my attention for so long are the following:

• Chapter 10: Introduction to “Contributions toward a Quantitative Theory of Harmony” (1979)
• Chapter 11: The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates (1979)
• Chapter 12: John Cage and the Theory of Harmony (1983)
• Chapter 13: Reflections after Bridge (1984)
• Appendix 3: Excerpt from A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ (1988)

As can be seen from the first of these titles, Tenney’s orientation throughout these chapters is primarily quantitative. His methods are grounded in mathematics, but it is a mathematical orientation that reflects his experiences in using computers to manipulate properties that are fundamentally numerical in nature. It is from that foundation that he believed that there can be “a quantitative theory of harmony.” So it is that we encounter this sentence in Chapter 10:

Unless the propositions, deductions, and predictions of the theory are formulated quantitatively, there is no way to verify the theory and thus no basis for comparison with other theoretical propositions.

This is a rather unfortunate attempt to apply the methods of formal logic to quantitative properties. Sadly, it leads to a misunderstanding of what formal logic can and cannot do. While those who work in formal logic will use terms such as “truth value” casually, Tenney seems to have overlooked that such logicians are not constrained by dictionary definitions of the noun “truth.” The “mission” of formal logic is never anything more than a means to establish whether a collection of propositions is consistent; and deductions involving the determination of truth values is the tool for seeking out an inconsistency. (It takes only one inconsistency for the whole collection to dissolve into uselessness.)

In pursuing that mission, whether or not a proposition is “formulated quantitatively” is not relevant. Identifying an inconsistency is a matter of symbol manipulation, the manipulations being the workings of deduction. As I have previously observed, had Tenney enjoyed the benefit of an intellectual community in which “computing” was more concerned with manipulating symbolic structures, rather than evaluating complex numerical forms, he would have realized that the role of numbers in a “theory of harmony” is only part of the story, a story that is more concerned with finding useful symbolic constructs to represent the nature of signals that must be processed when either making or listening to music.

As a result, even after Cage had radically broadened Tenney’s view to accept that a “harmonic structure” may involve any simultaneity of sounds, Tenney continues to be obsessed with the integers that represent the overtone series. This is understandable, but it also distracts from where the real questions reside. Consider, for example, some of the ways that Cage worked with a piano (both with and without “preparation”). Clearly, he understood that composition and performance needed to deal with simultaneities of sounds. However, Cage was willing to deal with a sequence of such simultaneities as if it were a progression no different from the progression of chords in a four-voice hymn setting. In Cage’s case, however, one could not reduce that progression to a sequence of Roman numerals or figured bass integers.

Tenney clearly appreciated this quality of Cage’s music; but, by the end of Chapter 12, one gets the impression that he had not quite figured out what, in his capacity of theorist, he should be doing about it. The good news is that he was aware that there are actually (at least) two different kinds of simultaneity. In one case, such as in those hymn settings, one is aware of both the individual notes and the chords that they form. In another case, such as one of Henry Cowell’s tone clusters, the individual notes “fuse” into a single “sonorous object,” whose “signal” is an integrated whole, rather than a superposition of recognizable parts.

The good news is that, by the time Tenney wraps up Chapter 12, he is beginning to appreciate that time-consciousness is more relevant to perception than “score reading,” associating correlations between auditory constructs and symbols on staff paper. Once again, however, I need to be fair to Tenney. He was writing at a time when few were focusing on issues of time-consciousness raised by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and even fewer were trying to relate their focus to the cognitive foundations behind listening to music. Those who read From Scratch today are better equipped to consider going down roads not taken by Tenney; and, if Tenney’s efforts did not lead very far, they may yet provoke a new generation of readers to seek out new paths.

Tenney’s Effort to Move from Theory to Practice

The ninth chapter of From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, seems to be the second-longest in the book: “Hierarchical Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music: A Metric Space Model (with Larry Polansky).” This was written in 1978 and was subsequently published by the Journal of Music Theory in 1980. It basically involves first distilling a hypothesis out of the theoretical speculations that first emerged in Tenney’s “Meta + Hodos” Master’s thesis and then testing the hypothesis by implementing its content in a computer analysis program, which was written by Polansky and executed on input from three scores of twentieth-century music compositions.

Before discussing the model, the hypothesis behind the model, and the testing of the hypothesis, however, I want to call attention to a published review of “Meta + Hodos.” This took place after “Meta + Hodos” itself was published as a monograph by the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research in 1964. The Spring 1966 issue of the Journal of Music Theory published a review of the monograph by A. Wayne Slawson, which was pretty devastating.

Slawson provided the reader with a paragraph explaining the the “birth” of Gestalt psychology as a result of observations made by Max Wertheimer in 1912. However, Slawson then accused Wertheimer and his colleagues of oversimplifying the theory they developed, concluding that “the Gestalt movement failed to go beyond a particularly apt and persuasive presentation of new questions.” This was the stick he used to subject “Meta + Hodos” to a rather merciless beating.

Thus Tenney’s effort to develop a model that could then be realized through software-based testing amounts to a response to Slawson’s review. The fact is that this was a time when painfully little was known about the “wetware” of a brain embedded in the larger complex system of the human body. Thus, even a precept as straightforward as Donald O. Hebb’s famous postulate that “neurons that fire together wire together” could not be tested in the absence of technology for observing the “wiring.” One of the reason’s that I have been citing the work of Gerald Edelman is that he recognized that his own theory of perceptual categorization could not be tested through direct observation; so, as an alternative, his team developed a computer-based simulation model of Hebb’s “wiring” process. Tenney’s model, on the other hand, was based on an attempt to turn the theoretical speculations of “Meta + Hodos” (a product of the theoretical speculations of Gestalt psychology) into practice.

At this point I feel it is important to note that the term “metric space” that appears in the title is never explicitly invoked in the article’s text. Nevertheless, there is an implicit sense of “distance” that Tenney seeks to apply to his “temporal gestalt-units” (TGs), focusing primarily on those constructs captured by the terms “element,” “clang,” and “sequence.” The model requires a quantitative representation of the amount of difference that distinguishes two TGs. A metric space is a topological construct that defines the concept of distance in terms of four criteria:

1. The distance from a point to itself is zero.
2. The distance between two distinct points is a positive number.
3. The distance from point A to point B is the same as the distance from point B to point A.
4. For any point C, the distance from A to B is less than or equal to the sum of the distance from A to C plus the distance from C to B.

(That last criterion is sometimes called the “triangle rule” because the length of the hypotenuse is always shorter than the sum of the lengths of the other two sides of a triangle.)

As we liked to say as freshmen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, these properties were “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.” However, those of us who went on to major in mathematics discovered that the most interesting insights were those involving counterexamples to the constraints of those criteria. Every math major knew about the book Counterexamples in Analysis by Bernard R. Gelbaum and John M. H. Olmsted and the critical role it played when trying to solve homework problems. So, in the interest of seeking out counterexamples, it is important to determine whether or not the concept of distance can actually be applied to comparing two TGs.

Let’s start with something simple. Imagine music as it is printed on score pages. Imagine, then, that you take a pencil and draw circles around groups of notes that you wish to identify as TGs. You can then take a ruler and measure distances between TGs on the score page. Even if those distances are somewhat rough (since a TG is not a simple point on the page), it is easy to see how the four distance criteria are satisfied.

However, as we all know, the marks on the score pages do not constitute the music. The music only exists through the experience of listening to a performance, even if that performance involves playing a recording. I would now suggest that the time-consciousness required for such listening involves awareness of differences that do not necessarily satisfy the distance criteria.

To make my point, I need to appeal to the reader’s imagination. Think of a flowing stream. Now, imagine that every point along that stream can be established as a fixed position (through a very precise measurement of latitude and longitude, for example). Suppose, now, that “distance” is not measured by difference in latitude and longitude but in the amount of time it takes a reference object, such as a fish, to swim from one point to another. By virtue of the flow of the river, the third property of a distance metric is violated because swimming “downstream” takes less time than swimming “upstream,” even though the beginning and ending points are fixed! I would argue that the passing of time is like the flowing of that stream and that Tenney’s model, while it looks good on paper (such as score pages), does not adequately capture the phenomenology of difference in a situation requiring the dynamic nature of time-consciousness.

After I first performed this exercise, I realized that I had been about as merciless in approaching Tenney’s work as Slawson had been. The reason is that the model that provided Tenney’s point of departure was required a quantitative foundation based on the topological properties of distance. Even the hypothesis being tested in his article, involving relationships among elements, clangs, and sequences, had been undermined in the absence of how those relationships could be represented quantitatively; and, if the hypothesis was no longer sound, then testing it was out of the question.

Once again I find myself thinking about the problems with Tenney being ahead of his time in terms of the tools available for his efforts. This particular paper predates the earliest efforts that would eventually lead to MIDI. For all of its shortcomings, MIDI provided a symbol representation that could capture not only marks on score pages but also the time-dependent factors inherent in any performance involving the interpretation of those marks. As a result of MIDI representations, it has been possible to investigate structural questions that go beyond music notation and enter the realm of time-dependent interpretations of the notation. It is in those interpretations that we need to seek out patterns and make sense of both what they are and why they are, and it is a pity that Tenney did not have such tools at his disposal when he first set off down his phenomenological path of inquiry.

James Tenney’s Formal Thoughts about Form

In “Form in Twentieth-Century Music,” written between 1969 and 1970 and the sixth essay in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, James Tenney returns to matters of phenomenology after accounting for his computer-based research activities that took place between 1961 and 1966. This is a relatively short essay that, more than anything else, reminded me of a caustic remark made by Arnold Schoenberg in a letter to René Leibowitz:

I do not compose principles, but music.

The good news is that Tenney avoids making Leibowitz’ mistakes. He is fully aware that the prize on which he must keep his eyes is that of music (as opposed to, for example, music theory).

Mind you, he resorts to philosophy-speak to establish this point:

Actually, the “thing-in-itself” doesn’t even exist in music apart from our perception of it. All that may be said to “exist” are various partial manifestations or symbolic representations of it, and even these must be mediated by perception.

However, we are on a slippery slope here. There is, of course, the problem that “thing” is a notoriously vague weasel-word (Does “Ding an sich” sound classier just because that is what Immanuel Kant wrote?); but, even more problematic is that fact that it is a noun.

The wording of Tenney’s next sentence seems to recognize the distinction between nouns and verbs:

So it is really the form of the musical experience that must be dealt with.

Nevertheless, as the essay proceeds, one finds that Tenney’s argument is linked to the fact that “experience” is also a noun, suggesting the premise that the attribute of form only applies to noun-based constructs. That slippery slope seems to be pulling us into a pit in which terms that we use comfortably, such as “perfect cadence” or “recapitulation” have more to do with “forms” perceived on score pages than with the experience of listening to the “music-in-itself,” an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.

To the best of my knowledge, the earliest studies of perception dealt with the “processing” of visual stimuli. That processing involved how the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals registered by the retina (as William James put it) are ultimately registered by mind as configurations of objects. However, the operative phrase in that last sentence is “registered by mind.” Perception is in the mind of the perceiver, so to speak; and mind is always in the midst of processing, whether or not the stimulus is static.

The best example of such ongoing processing may be found in the response to the stimuli of the Necker cube. This is a line drawing of a cube in which it is possible to interpret two different squares as the front face of the cube. The Wikipedia page for this optical illusion illustrates that ambiguity of interpretation as follows:

What is important is that the ambiguity is dynamic. Mind can flip back and forth between those two interpretations, even though the stimuli themselves never change.

When we shift from visual to auditory stimuli, the dynamic nature of perception is further confounded. We are no longer trying to reduce the process of vision to a “scene analysis” consisting of a configuration of static objects. Rather, the sensemaking that emerges over the course of listening involves ongoing dynamic interpretations of stimuli that are, themselves, dynamic. To push that theatrical metaphor, one is not only occupied with the “scene” but also with the “actions (physical and verbal) of the “actors performing” in that “scene.” Mind is no more occupied with trying interpret musical stimuli in terms of static marks on score pages than it is with trying to reconstruct the text of the script while experiencing the play being performed on the stage.

To be fair, the very nature of the noun “form” carries connotations of a static object. The significance of the Necker cube, however, is that, even when the stimuli are static, mind is never anything less than an ongoing dynamic process that terminates only with death. To be fair, when Tenney wrote this essay, there were not very many cognitive scientists dealing with the dynamics of brain that enable what we call “mind;” and, on the philosophical side of the coin, very little had been documented to go beyond Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness other than Martin Heidegger’s proposition that “being” was a verb-based phenomenon, rather than a noun-based one.

As we learn more about brain dynamics, we are less inclined to reduce listening to the noun-based foundations of scene analysis. Nevertheless, the infrastructure of listening to music remains elusive. Those actually making the music probably have some advantage, since they experience the in-the-moment nature of relating what they are doing to what they are hearing. However, when it comes to describing those experiences, they are probably no better at it than those of us trying to account for the “audience perspective” of those same experiences.

I often refer to this site as my “laboratory notebook” for my efforts to understand better just what such description entails. (I also frequently call going to concerts my “field work.”) Whether or not I have yet learned anything of significant value from the pages of that notebook remains to be seen!

New Results in the Study of Memory

It is unclear what to make of this morning's report on memory research filed by BBC News Science Reporter Jonathan Webb. It was definitely helpful that Maria Wimber, the University of Birmingham research whose results were being discussed, went to some length to emphasize that human memory did not follow the store-and-retrieve paradigm of computer memory. When she talked about memory "traces," she seemed to suggested that these were "trails" left by a dynamic process, possibly the way that indentations in the snow indicate not just a path that had been trod but even further details, such as the pace at which that path was traversed. Nevertheless, we must also recognize that the experiment that was discussed in Webb's article, involving recall of photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, was more than a little artificial. Understanding the making of music is probably a more useful domain in which we may come to understand the dynamics of memory, but it is likely to take some time before we can collect data for such a complex setting.

The Representation Problem

Having finished Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel, I discovered that much of my discontent with the author's approach had be well articulated by John A. Sloboda in the Preface to his own book, The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Indeed, the account of Patel's book that I wrote for Examiner.com began by enumerating the way Sloboda felt that the "scientific" study of music had deliberately overlooked valuable input from practicing musicians. As a result, I realized that Sloboda's book (whose Preface was written in July of 1983) might deserve a closer read, even if it predated so many of the recent insights from neuroscience.

As I leafed through my copy of this book, I realized that I had already read it once. Furthermore, I could tell from the paucity of marginal annotations that I had not read it with much sympathy or depth. Having returned to the first chapter of the book, entitled "Music as a Cognitive Skill," I now remember why I was so unsympathetic.

This book was written at a time when the study of cognition was, for the most part, reduced to the premise that thought was based on mental representations. The "cognitive program" was thus one of figuring out the nature of those representations and then understanding how they were formed and subsequently used. My Examiner.com piece included the following observation:

In other words, every time science comes up with a new way of looking at the physical world, there is a rush to seek out the value of that point of view in our efforts to understand both mind and music.

In this particular case the relevant perspective of science was that of symbolic representation, which has pretty much been the bread and butter of mathematics once mathematics extended its capacity beyond mere calculation. The very concept of a mental representation has its roots in those techniques that have represented the processes of logical reading in terms of symbol structures. Drawing upon the terminology of this discipline of mathematical logic, Marvin Minsky claimed that the premise of cognitive psychology was that thought was "propositional."

As an alternative, Minsky suggested that the nature of mind was dispositional, rather than propositional. In other words evidence of such mental concepts as "understanding" or "remembering" are not grounded in the presence of symbolic representations but in an individual's disposition to action, which is as likely to be unconscious as based on conscious motives. My past reading of Minsky remain with me, even to the point where I am "disposed" to consider the "spectrum of emotional dispositions" that "drive" a particular act of performing a piece of music.

It is understandable that Minsky's should be a "minority option" among those seeking a scientific approach to the nature of mind. The nice thing about symbolic propositions is that one can develop a variety of calculi for describing them and analyzing their properties. As I have said in the past, those symbolic constructs are "noun-based." Dispositions, on the other hand, are "verb-based." Not only do we have an impoverished toolbox for studying them; but also they did to defy analysis for the simple reason that they cannot "hold still" while we are trying to analyze them.

I concluded my Examiner.com piece about Patel's book by suggesting that progress will only come with a paradigm shift. To be more specific, we need to be more scientific in dealing with that verb-based worldview. This will require a major departure from what is currently recognized as "normal science."

Getting Closer to a Time-Based Understanding of the Brain

In my most recent Examiner.com article in which I continue to try to puzzle out the complex relationships among the brain, the mind that emerges from brain behavior, and the responses to music by both brain and mind, I cited Temple Grandin's "very jaundiced view of the rush to use scanning and imaging technology to observe what the brain is doing." One of the reasons I am so supportive of her position is that I believe strongly that we cannot talk about the "brain on music" (to use that somewhat trivializing phrase of Daniel J. Levitin) without taking time-consciousness into account. However, at the time that Grandin made her observation in her recent book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, imaging technology had been confined to snapshots separated by significantly long intervals of time.

If I am to believe Elisabeth Armstrong Moore's post yesterday afternoon to her Cutting Edge blog on CNET, things may be changing. Here is the critical sentence (with hyperlinks) from her article:

So researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Institute of Technology and Advanced Biomedical Imaging at the University of Chieti in Italy are turning to faster technology called magnetoencephalography (MEG) to sample neural activity every 50 milliseconds.

The operative word in that sentence is "activity." By taking those "snapshots" with a finer degree of resolution, we should begin to develop better models of what the brain does, rather than confining our interpretations to currently crude efforts to model the brain in terms of noun-based regions.

This technology is in its infancy; but, for those of us trying to understand not only the nature of mind itself but also the (probably complex) relationship between mind and music, it has the potential to revolutionize the directions of future research.

Getting Beyond Standard Terminology

I finally seem to have built up some momentum in my efforts to read Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel. I was drawn to it because the author wrote it while on a fellowship at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, and I have been interested in that facility as a result of my following Gerald Edelman's efforts to develop a viable model of consciousness. Patel has been very thorough in writing this book, and his thoroughness makes reading it a difficult slog. However, for all of its academic technique, I fear it may be missing the forest for all the the trees it tries to take into account.

One of the things the appealed to me about Edelman was that he was willing to abandon familiar terminology in trying to grasp the nature of mind. The words we use tend to influence our thinking; and, when we adopt words from the legacy of others, we run the risk of adopting the worldview of that legacy as well. Edelman had the courage to rethink worldview; and, even if his current round of conjectures do not survive validation, there is a lot to be said for his method.

As one might guess, the thesis Patel is trying to pursue is one of identifying one or more relationships between how mind thinks about music and how mind thinks about language. He approaches this task by examining a different aspect of music in each chapter. My reading thus far has taken me through the following topics:

• Sound elements
• Rhythm
• Melody
• Syntax

Several things trouble me about this strategy. Most important is that the book does not seem to acknowledge that listening to music should be considered in terms of its relations to making music, rather than just from the "audience point of view." This may be because science has traditionally shown a bias in favor of matters of perception in preference to matters of action, and this raises another point. Anything having to do with sound, such as music or spoken language, only exists in the time domain. It is a product of action, rather than some static image that we can analyze without knowing a lot about its source. As Edmund Husserl observed, music does not exist in the mind unless the mind has time-consciousness. Edelman recognized that time-consciousness is not axiomatic; and he put a lot of effort into relating it to the other components of his model of "primary consciousness."

With all of those disclaimers, it seems necessary to dispense with "standard terminology" until we can try to fix what it is we really mean when using those terms, impeded by as little technical baggage as possible. This is the sort of thing I mean with respect to the above four topics:

1. When we talk about "sound elements," we are actually talking about those basic signals that form sensory impressions, signals that only exist in the time domain.
2. Thus, we are actually talking about the sensation of events; and, at a further level of time-consciousness, it is through rhythm that we recognize how sequences of events are structured.
3. When we then subject those signals we associated to sound elements to sequencing structured by rhythm, we have melody.
4. However, in the broader scheme of both listening to and making music, structure involves more than linear ordering. Embellishment, for example, involves some level of hierarchy (and, if we believe Heinrich Schenker, many levels). Counterpoint involves the sophisticated interplay of sequencing within voices and the harmonies that emerge when those voices are superposed. We tend to associate the noun "syntax" with such higher-level structuring; but, where music is concerned, this is a far cry from diagramming sentences.

Of course the proposition that these alternatives may facilitate our arriving at a better understanding of what mind does with music is still conjectural. However, I am a firm believer in documenting conjectures. You never known when you may be able to validate one of them!

Time-Consciousness in the Performance of Music

This is definitely “rehearsal” material, having grown out of some casual conversations I have been conducting while in the midst of a rather heavy schedule of covering concerts.

The thoughts first emerged through a conversation with a friend who believes that teaching piano should pay as much attention to improvisation as it does to reading from the score page. This struck a particularly resonant cord in my own consciousness, because, while I spent a lot of time improvising as a kid, I was not particularly good at it then; and I am even worse at it now. As a result, I have developed a real interest in the extent to which Johann Sebastian Bach’s approach to pedagogy seems to be grounded in the assumption of a tight coupling (not that Bach would ever have used such a phrase) between proficiency in execution and proficiency in invention.

Since I still tend to be as interested in “wet brains” as I am in “abstract ideas” and since last year I was put off by what I felt was some really bad experiment design in an effort to identify, through brain scanning, areas of brain activity associated with both memorization of music and improvisation, I tried to relate this inadequate attempt to a firmer foundation of hypothesis generation. It occurred to me that questions concerned with both memorization and improvisation could only be framed in the context of some more general model of time-consciousness. This continues to be one of the most problematic concepts for those trying to get a handle on time-based thinking. Edmund Husserl wrote a whole book about it, but the problem has been nagging great minds going back at least to Augustine, not to mention Aristotle’s efforts to get a handle on memory.

In his book The Remembered Present, Gerald Edelman tries to approach time-consciousness through areas of the brain that he calls “organs of succession.” (For those wanting me to be more specific, these are the cerebellum, the hippocampus, and the basal ganglia.) In his model time-consciousness has much more to do with the ability of the mind to work with the concepts of “before” and “after” than with the more specific matters of duration, whether in the specific domain of clock time or in those of Henri Bergson’s more subjective model of subjectively “felt” time. (This actually suggests that Edelman and Augustine might have easily found a common ground for conversation.)

I would like to suggest that those who are good at improvisation depend very heavily on such organs of succession. In more simplistic language improvisation comes down to continually dealing with two questions:

1. What have I done?
2. What do I do next?

Now, while these questions are good to bear in mind when one is reading from a score page, from a strictly logical point of view, neither is absolutely necessary. Reading music can take place entirely “in the moment,” with no regard to either past or future. The eye is simply providing a stream of answers to only one question:

What do I do now?

This then suggests why Bach felt it was important for the student to acquire both sides of the coin, so to speak. One masters execution because, once you know the answer to the what-do-I-do-now question, you have to have the physical capacity to actually do it. On the other hand Bach’s approach to invention addresses the capacity for improvisation. That requires those before/after questions; and they cannot be satisfied unless your organs of succession have been “primed” to deal with them.

As I said at the beginning, these are admittedly “unkempt thoughts.” However, I figure that a “rehearsal studio” can double as a “laboratory notebook;” and such a notebook is more than a record of hypotheses, data, and analyses. It can also be a diary in which one lays out the “tracks for trains of thought,” so to speak, that direct one to those hypotheses that need to be further investigated.

Your Brain on Music is a Highly Distributed Processor

BBC Science Reporter Victoria Gill in currently in San Diego covering the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After yesterday's proceedings she filed a story that almost immediately grabbed my attention. Here is the opening summary:

Teaching stroke patients to sing "rewires" their brains, helping them recover their speech, say scientists.

By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech.

If a person's "speech centre" is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their "singing centre" instead.

The paper was delivered by Gottfried Schlaug, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, practicing at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The research has been based on a therapeutic technique for stroke patients that has been used for some time. It is based on the premise that the brain has separate areas for processing speech and music. The conclusion of the above excerpt reasons that, if the patient cannot use language through speaking, linguistic performance may still be exercised through singing.

Not only is this principle familiar, it has led to any number of jokes. Had Figaro decided to ask Susanna about the price of the ribbons on her new little hat, one might have ended up with an elaborate duet (of a sort that only Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart could have composed) debating the equally elaborate fine points of the cost of living in seventeenth-century Seville! More seriously, Schlaug's contribution has escalated the study of the stroke-afflicted brain from a successful therapeutic technique to new results in brain imaging. His claim is that he can show "what is actually going on in the brain" (his words) as patients learn to sing their words rather than speak them.

More interesting for me, however, was a reaction Gill reported from another research community:

Dr Aniruddh Patel from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said the study was an example of the "explosion in research into music and the brain" over the last decade.

"People sometimes ask where in the brain music is processed and the answer is everywhere above the neck," said Dr Patel.

"Music engages huge swathes of the brain - it's not just lighting up a spot in the auditory cortex."

Again, there has been talk about the brain as a distributed processor for some time. This inspired the whole connectionist approach to artificial intelligence that was so popular 25 years ago and probably still has its allotment of die-hard supporters. Connectionism never progressed very far beyond serving as a new approach to applying optimization to pattern classification, which is only a small part of what probably occupies "your brain on music" (to appropriate the turn of phrase by Daniel J. Levitin). The practice of music is a far more complex behavior, and researchers like Patel may be leading us into intricacies of brain function that could be only vaguely hinted in Levitin's exposition.

Needless to say, we are still quite some distance from any understanding of music behavior that accounts for the objective, subjective, and social worlds in any remotely comprehensive way. The good news from Professor Schlaug is the imaging technology keeps getting better; and, each time it improves, researchers come up with new ways to leverage those improvements. As we proceed down this path, there will be less talk about the "musical brain" at cocktail parties and more talk at scientific conferences!

The Buying Trumps the Drinking

There is something about the very name of the blog Neuromarketing that gets to you even before you have read the subtitle, "Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet." If you had any doubts that the primary objective of marketers is the direct manipulation of your brain regions (probably both emotive and cognitive), a blog like this is sure to dispel them. What I have yet to figure out is why The Huffington Post is tracking this blog. I am hoping that the reason is to provide the rest of us with an early-warning service.

As a case in point, consider the first paragraph of today's post by Roger Dooley:

One of the keys to the phenomenal success of Starbucks has been that its stores offer a consistent and appealing sensory experience. The music, colors, and lighting are all important, but clearly the wonderful coffee aroma is what dominates one’s senses on entering a Starbucks outlet. I enjoy brewing Starbucks coffee at home, too, but it never seems quite the same as when I consume it in the actual shop. It turns out that I’m not alone, and that my coffee maker isn’t the entire problem. Yes, coffee in the coffee shop DOES taste better, but not for the reasons you might expect. Research from another coffee maker, Nespresso, shows that 60% of sensory experience of drinking espresso comes from the retail environment!

In the following paragraph we learn that "another coffee maker" is not other than Nestle; so we seem to be dealing with a serious clash of the Titans here. Here is the background to their performing this particular research:

Nespresso, a subsidiary of food giant Nestle, was faced with a dilemma created by this sensory experience quirk. It had created a home espresso-making system that produced espresso that tasted just as good as what you could find in a coffee shop. Unfortunately, consumers didn’t recognize that.

How did Nespresso respond to the research results? The bottom line is that the took two key actions:

1. "First, they launched upscale coffee shops in major cities for the primary purpose of creating the high-intensity sensory experience people expect, but also with the intention of showing customers they could get the same high-quality espresso at home."
2. "The second thing they did was to modify the home espresso-making system to release more aroma."

In other words, even though they were aiming at a product for home use, they decided to escalate the competition of Starbucks' turf, because it was all about the experience provided by that turf, rather than anything involved with what you happened to be drinking.

This throws an interesting light on just how far we have progressed into our consumerism. Beyond the fact that we can now talk so casually about "shopping therapy," this is a case where the data seem to indicate that the experience of buying is more important than what is bought. In retrospect this should not be that all surprising, given how little utility value there is in so much (most?) of what we buy; but now we have the data to support the hypothesis that "what we buy" barely enters into the equations that determine our shopping behavior. This leads me to ask whether we may actually be dealing with yet another form of addiction with sociopathic consequences.

Duoh!

My interest in learning more about "wet brain" behavior led me this morning to SPIEGEL ONLINE, which ran an extended feature by Gerald Traufetter (translated into English by Christopher Sultan) on recent research into the phenomenon of error-related negativity (ERN). Traufetter described the phenomenon as follows:

It refers to a characteristic wave of voltage beneath the skullcap, which can be measured whenever the brain detects that an error has been made. Especially surprising is the fact the ERN signal already begins to flicker even before a person is aware of his error.

Traufetter then elaborates on the significance of the concept:

In the early 1990s, Michael Falkenstein, a neurophysiologist from the western German city of Dortmund, observed for the first time how voltage declines by at least 10 millivolts in a specific group of nerve cells, and that this occurs only 100 milliseconds after a person has made an error -- about the time it takes for your cursor to respond to a click of the mouse.

Falkenstein's discovery marked the beginning of a period of systematic study of the brain's fine-tuned error detector. It paved the way for fascinating new theories on questions such as why compulsive disorders occur or why some people hesitate while others make confident decisions. It also shines a new light on the development of addiction.

Suddenly it becomes clear why a person can often avoid making a certain mistake based purely on gut feeling. "The experiences of the error system provide precisely that subconscious knowledge on which intuition is based," explains [project manager Markus] Ullsperger.

Needless to say, for all the thoroughness of Traufetter's exposition, it should be read under the assumption that today's scientists, beholden to funding organizations as they are, tend to take a small-boy-with-a-hammer view of every discovery. Thus, much needs to be done before ERN can be taken as evidence that the brain has an "error system," let alone that this "system" will provide us with new insights into the nature of addiction and/or intuition. Nevertheless, it is certainly an interesting result, particularly in light of recent findings concerned with the memory of emotionally charged events (given how emotionally invested we tend to be in the mistakes we make).

Since I am far from an expert in this discipline, I can do little more than view it through a philosophical lens. That lens is heavily informed by Augustine, whom I cited in my previous blog for his insight into the nature of the concepts of past, present, and future:

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come.

The anxieties that arise from those memories of emotionally charged events are very much "a present of things past." ERN may provide us with physiological evidence of that "present of things to come." If so, it will not be the first brick in this particular wall. That previous blog entry cited results from Washington University, which indicated that the "present of things to come," is localized in the left lateral premotor cortex, the left precuneus and the right posterior cerebellum. Presumably ERN researchers will begin to investigate connections between these voltage drops and activity in the regions identified by the Washington University team, in which case it will be rather nice to see such an eminent medieval philosopher getting his due in such a contemporary scientific issue!