Classic English and French composers influenced by their language.

Would Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance or Debussy's Clair de Lune have sounded the same if the composers had been born in different countries? Probably not, according to researchers who have found that the melodies composers write are influenced by the language they speak.

The team's analysis shows that fluctuations in pitch in music written by classic French composers vary much less than in British music. The difference mirrors the patterns of pitch found in the corresponding languages.

Musicologists and linguists have tried to connect cultures' speech with their music in the past but have only had luck with tonal languages, such as Chinese, which assign meaning to words based on their pitch.

Imagine a locked room in which a person sits alone staring into space. There is nothing to look at. Nothing to touch or taste or smell. Most of the world is stripped away. Except for sounds.

But these sounds resemble nothing heard before. They lack all similarity to experience and any reference to surroundings. Now imagine that those sounds — heard for the first time — are the sounds of a Beethoven Symphony. Or an Indian raga. What would that disembodied ear and mind make of them? How much would be understood?

In recent decades such a situation would have been considered artificial, abstract and irrelevant. What kind of musical understanding can grow out of this kind of isolation, lacking the resonance of a cultural framework, lacking the expectations provided by the knowledge of a style and lacking some sense of historical and political context? To understand music, we have been taught, that room has to be unlocked, the windows opened and the world fully engaged.

The power of music to convey a certain emotion can now be predicted by a mathematical model, an Australian psychologist has found.

Emery Schubert of the University of New South Wales will report the first study of its kind to mathematically quantify the emotional impact of music at the International Conference on Auditory Display in Sydney in July.
Schubert has developed a formula that relates features such as the music's loudness, tempo and pitch to an emotion perceived by the listener.

Some music makes us weep, some makes our spirits soar. It can lift us off our seats, or put us to sleep.

Now a Sydney music psychologist, Emory Schubert, has developed a way to mathematically quantify the emotional impact of different compositions.

"I have a fascination for how music works and I'm hoping this takes us a small step towards uncovering some of its magical, mystical properties," he said.

Researchers have used many approaches to try to fathom the stirring of a listener's soul, including measuring their heart rate and observing them shift in their seats.

Dr Schubert got 67 people to move a computer mouse across a screen continuously to indicate whether they felt the music was expressing happiness or sadness and arousal or sleepiness.

This is a revised second edition of Dr. Steblin's important work on key characteristics, first published in 1983 by UMI Research Press and re-issued by the University of Rochester Press in 1996. The revision has been limited to a thorough correction and update of the material in the first edition, so as to not disrupt the content and organization, for which the book has been praised as a significant and noteworthy reference for both scholars and research students alike. The book discusses the extra-musical meanings associated with various musical keys by ancient Greek and medieval-renaissance theorists and inparticular composers and writers on music in the Baroque, Classical, and early Romantic periods. Chapters focus on Mattheson's extensive key descriptions from 1713, the Rameau-Rousseau and Marpurg-Kirnberger controversies regarding unequal versus equal temperaments, and C.F.D. Schubart's influential list based on the sharp-flat (bright-dark) principle of key-distinctions. Rita Katherine Steblin is a world-renowned music scholar, living and working in Vienna.

Here we describe loss of the feeling or emotion produced by music itself. Musical emotion can be considered at a number of levels. At the most fundamental level, dissonance produces a perception that is unpleasant to most listeners.1 More variable is the intense pleasure that certain music may evoke in particular listeners, often described as a "shiver down the spine" or "chills",2 which is likely to represent a more complex aesthetic response. We describe a patient with selective loss of this emotional response to music, due to a focal brain lesion.

A 52 year old right handed radio announcer collapsed in February 2000. He was found afterwards to have a total loss of speech comprehension and output, and a right hemiplegia. His speech recovered well, such that 12 months after the event he had only subtle output phonological problems. Motor functions recovered completely and he had no residual lateralising motor signs. However, he reported a persistent alteration in his auditory experience. He was in the habit of listening to classical music, to relax after working his night shift at the radio station, and had derived particular pleasure from listening to Rachmaninov preludes. He experienced an intense, altered emotional state or "transformation" when he did this. In common with other subjects who have this experience, the transformation was only produced by particular pieces, and he did not describe such an experience in response to music other than Rachmaninov’s, nor to other sensory experiences. This emotional response to the music was lost following the acute event, and remained absent during the period of testing between 12 and 18 months after the stroke. During this period he was able to enjoy other aspects of life, and reported no biological features of depression. He had noticed no change in his hearing, and was still able to identify speech, music, and environmental sounds normally.

New research suggests that we like music that sounds just like us.

Music is one of the human species's relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognize music and, in some fashion, to make it.

Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere -- but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organize a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.

Scientists are trying to understand why music - a pleasurable but seemingly unnecessary part of life - is universal in all human societies, ancient and modern.

Archaeologists have found evidence of musical activity dating back at least 50,000 years. Even babies as well as some animals, such as birds, whales and monkeys, have a built-in sense of tone and rhythm, according to a set of six papers on the origin and function of music in the July edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

In lovers' songs, military marches, weddings and funerals — every occasion where a degree of emotion needs to be evoked — music is an indispensable ingredient.

Yet the ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it does nothing evident to help survival. Why, therefore, should evolution have built into the human brain this soul-stirring source of pleasure? Man's faculties for enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."

Duke neuroscientists explore why some musical tones are more harmonious than others in study of musical perception.

For over two thousand years, musicians and scientists have puzzled over why some combinations of musical tones played together sound more harmonious than others. Now, Duke University perception scientists David Schwartz, Catherine Howe and Dale Purves have presented evidence that variation in the relative harmoniousness, or "consonance," of different tone combinations arises from people's exposure to the acoustical characteristics of speech sounds.

Zatorre, R.J. (2001) The Biological Foundations of Music. Ed. Robert J. Zatorre & Isabelle Peretz. Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 930
PDF

Blood, A.J. & Zatorre, R.J. (2001) Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated with reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98, 11818-11823
PDF

Music may be even more ancient than the human race, over which it holds tremendous sway. Scientists are beginning to find out why.
It can bring us to tears or to our feet, drive us into battle or lull us to sleep. Music is indeed remarkable in its power over all humankind. Perhaps for that very reason, no human culture on earth has ever lived without it: people making music predates agriculture and perhaps even language. Take, for instance, the recent discoveries in France and Slovenia of surprisingly sophisticated, sweet-sounding flutes, made by our Neandertal cousins. Some of these instruments, carved from animal bones, are as much as 53,000 years old—more than twice as old as the famed cave paintings in Lascaux.

We used positron emission tomography to study neural mechanisms underlying intensely pleasant emotional responses to music. Cerebral blood flow changes were measured in response to subject-selected music that elicited the highly pleasurable experience of "shivers-down-the-spine" or "chills." Subjective reports of chills were accompanied by changes in heart rate, electromyogram, and respiration. As intensity of these chills increased, cerebral blood flow increases and decreases were observed in brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal, including ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral medial prefrontal cortex. These brain structures are known to be active in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse. This finding links music with biologically relevant, survival-related stimuli via their common recruitment of brain circuitry involved in pleasure and reward.