[spklnraz]

Baby Got Rhythm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6929895/

[spklnraz]

Here are a couple of cool Music/Science stories that came out last week...

____________

Music and the Brain
What is the secret of music's strange power? Seeking an answer, scientists
are piecing together a picture of what happens in the brains of listeners
and musicians

http://shorterlink.com/?DWXF0Q

or

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...AF8683414B7F00
00
________________

Want perfect pitch? Learn Vietnamese...

http://shorterlink.com/?T592TM

or

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...DD83414B7F0000
________________________________

Music mirrors tone patterns in our speech

Composers' mother tongue helps to shape their work.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/0411...041108-12.html

[spklnraz]

New research shows that the special training of music conductors seems to enhance the way their senses work together – enabling them to quickly tell who played wrong note, for example. Scientists hope the research will lead to new discoveries about how music training may change the brain.
http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/515989/

-------------------------------------------------------

Musical training helps language processing, studies show
Researchers have demonstrated that people with musical experience found it easier than non-musicians to detect small differences in word syllables.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/new...ic-111605.html


--------------------------------------------------------

"brains track time differently depending on the situation"

Not entirely unrelated to music. Like the old joke about the drummer named Panasonic, because he's always Slightly Ahead of Our Time...

Scientists propose theory of time perception
http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/vnews/.../437b1ddfcec72

Al

[MyLeva]

Al
Thanks for this post.
It needs to be read by anyone following Mike's thread.
Mike, thanks for your reply.
Yes, I was being deliberately vague, or painting in broad strokes.
Curious to see response.
Sunday today - a heart without brain day for me too, Paulo. Welcome.
But I will get back to you another day, Mike. You too, Al.
In the meantime, that word Malarkey, Mike.
Lovely sound to it. Irish?
As Mr Fleck would say, "Communication is the name of the game...."
So what does malarkey mean, please.
Nimish - can you remember the title of the English essay in your post to Al?
Over and out to the sound of Mr Parker with a drink and a cigarette.
No balcony, Brian but my garden is beautiful.
Patti

[wmhardware]

Hi patti

Quote:

[spklnraz]

This article gives a bit more information...
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...sic021213.html

Music on the Brain
Can't Get That Song Out of Your Head? Scientists Explain Why
By Amanda Onion
Dec. 13
- What makes a song like "Jingle Bells" stick in your head, and why does a
wrongly played note sound so jarring?
New research suggests the brain has and develops structures designed to
perceive musical patterns and then remember them.
Although the brain appears to tap several areas to hear music, the study
determined its musical ear, so to speak, is made up of set circuits, many of
which connect to the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, a region located just
behind the forehead.
It's the existence of these circuits that gives people their innate sense of
melody (some more than others) and why familiar musical harmonics and
ditties like "Jingle Bells" can literally become branded in the brain.
"As a piece of music fulfills or violates our expectations, it moves around
in this space. And it's this violation of expectations that drives our
underlying response to music," said Petr Janata, an assistant professor at
Dartmouth College's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in Hanover, N.H., and
author of the study appearing in the journal Science.
"So if we're hearing a lot of things we're not expecting to hear, it sounds
unpleasant. But if we're never surprised, it can start to sound simple."

Watching Brains Listen
To map the brain's response to music, Janata and colleagues had eight
students with musical experience listen to a piece of originally composed
music while a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner snapped detailed
pictures of their brains. The eight-minute melody was composed by a
Dartmouth graduate, Jeffrey Birk, who designed the tune to move through all
24 major and minor keys.
Studies show the brain may map melodies at the rostromedial prefrontal
cortex. Neural circuits for music perception also appear in the temporal
lobes, with more activity in the right temporal lobe. (Petr Janata,
Dartmouth College)
As the students listened to the music, Janata had them perform two simple
tasks. He noted their brain activity as they performed the tasks and used
them as markers to detect how their brains were responding to key changes in
the music.
Janata found that while several areas of the brain lighted up as the
students listened, only the rostromedial prefrontal cortex regularly tracked
fluctuations in the music. This suggested that this area is where the brain
maintains maps of melodies.
The work is the first to confirm what neuroscientists had long suspected
about where and how music is interpreted within the brain. Mark Tramo, head
of the Institute for Music and Brain Science at Harvard University, had
argued in earlier work that the rostromedial prefrontal cortex likely had a
role in interpreting and predicting melodies.

Programmed for Music?
Tramo says the new study not only backs up that idea, it also helps explain
why some people show musical intuition.
"Four of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century - Stevie Wonder,
Irving Berlin, John Lennon and Paul McCartney - wrote most of their music
without musical training or before they had studied music theory," says
Tramo, who is both a neurobiologist and a published songwriter. "That's
because they could rely on implicit knowledge about how to become the most
effective manipulators of music."
One thing that is not yet clear is to what extent the brain's hardware for
music is there at birth and how much is acquired through exposure to music.
Tramo says it's likely a combination of both.
This might explain why music traditions around the world share features,
such as octaves (scales of eight notes), but also exhibit key differences,
like an emphasis on major or minor keys.
"There's fairly good evidence that it's possible to acquire structures
through repeated exposure to music," said Janata.
One way to test this question in the future could be to scan and compare
brain activities of experienced musicians and people with no musical
background as well as people who come from Western musical traditions and
those with Eastern musical upbringings.

Moving to Music
Janata says his work might also explain one other aspect of music
perception - our impulse to dance.
He explains the rostromedial prefrontal cortex is not only where we seem to
interpret music, it has also been identified as a region that plays a role
in directing motion. As the brain perceives music, he says, it could also be
sending out signals to groove.

[spklnraz]

http://exn.ca/sciencenews/?t=dp

Delving into a musician's brain
A new study says that professional musicians are a little different. British researchers recently scanned the brains of a number of classical musicians. They found that no matter what type of instrument was played, all of the professionals had an enlargement in one region of the brain. In addition, the more years the musicians spent in training, the larger the region was. The region is known as Broca's area, and it's known to play a key role in our ability to speak and understand language. This is the first time someone has shown such a clear link between musical ability and Broca's area, or between music and language in general.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>

Hear are some other articles on the music/language connection

Chords strike a grammatical note
The brain region that senses sentences also tells music from noise. http://www.nature.com/nsu/010426/010426-4.html

Left in music
Musicians' brains may use language modules listening to music. http://www.nature.com/nsu/010816/010816-4.html

Exploring the Musical Brain
Music may be even more ancient than the human race, over which it holds tremendous sway. Scientists are beginning to find out why http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...81809EC588EF21

[spklnraz]

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/0603.../060313-2.html

[spklnraz]

www.delosis.com/listening

[invest7manager]

now if I could only use music to somehow write my english essay...

[spklnraz]

http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7enews/rel...melodies.shtml

Melodies In Your Mind: Researchers Map Brain Areas That Process Tunes
HANOVER, N.H. – Researchers at Dartmouth are getting closer to understanding how some melodies have a tendency to stick in your head or why hearing a particular song can bring back a high school dance. They have found and mapped the area in your brain that processes and tracks music. It's a place that's also active during reasoning and memory retrieval.
The study by Petr Janata, Research Assistant Professor at Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and his colleagues is reported in the Dec. 13, 2002, issue of Science. Their results indicate that knowledge about the harmonic relationships of music is maintained in the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, which is centrally located, right behind your forehead. This region is connected to, but different from, the temporal lobe, which is involved in more basic sound processing.

"This region in the front of the brain where we mapped musical activity," says Janata, "is important for a number of functions, like assimilating information that is important to one's self, or mediating interactions between emotional and non-emotional information. Our results provide a stronger foundation for explaining the link between music, emotion and the brain."

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, the researchers asked their eight subjects, who all had some degree of musical experience, to listen to a piece of original music. The eight-minute melody, composed by Jeffrey Birk, Dartmouth class of '02, when he was a student, moves through all 24 major and minor keys. The music was specifically crafted to shift in particular ways between and around the different keys. These relationships between the keys, representative of Western music, create a geometric pattern that is donut shaped, which is called a torus.

"The piece of music moves around on the surface of the torus, so we had to figure out a way to pick out brain areas that were sensitive to the harmonic motion of the melody," explains Janata. "We developed two different tasks for our subjects to perform. We then constructed a statistical model that separated brain activation due to performing the tasks from the activation that arose from the melody moving around on the torus, independent of the tasks. It was a way to find the pure representation of the underlying musical structure in the brain."

The two tasks involved 1.) asking subjects to identify an embedded test tone that would pop out in some keys but blend into other keys, and 2.) asking subjects to detect sounds that were played by a flute-like instrument rather than the clarinet-like instrument that prevailed in the music. As the subjects performed the tasks, the fMRI scanner provided detailed pictures of brain activity. The researchers compared where the activation was on the donut from moment to moment with the fluctuations they recorded in all regions of the brain. Only the rostromedial prefrontal area reliably tracked the fluctuations on the donut in all the subjects, therefore, the researchers concluded, this area maintains a map of the music.

"Music is such a sought-after stimulus," says Janata. "It's not necessary for human survival, yet something inside us craves it. I think this research helps us understand that craving a little bit more."

Not only did the researchers find and map the areas in the brain that track melodies, they also found that the exact mapping varies from session to session in each subject. This suggests that the map is maintained as a changing or dynamic topography. In other words, each time the subject hears the melody, the same neural circuit tracks it slightly differently. This dynamic map may be the key to understanding why a piece of music might elicit a certain behavior one time, like dancing, and something different another time, like smiling when remembering a dance.

Janata adds, "Distributed and dynamic mapping representations have been proposed by other neuroscientists, and, as far as we know, ours is the first paper to provide empirical evidence for this type of organizational principle in humans."

Not only are these results published in the journal Science, the raw data from this study will also be submitted to the fMRI Data Center at Dartmouth College. The fMRI Data Center provides a publicly accessible repository of peer-reviewed fMRI studies and their underlying data. All traces of personal identity information are removed and the image files are converted into a standard format. This provides access to anyone interested in order to develop and evaluate methods, confirm hypotheses, and perform meta-analyses. It also increases the number of cognitive neuroscientists who can examine, consider, analyze and assess the brain imaging data that have already been collected and published.

Janata's co-authors on the paper are Jeffrey Birk, Dartmouth class of '02, John Van Horn, Research Assistant Professor, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth; Marc Leman, Ghent University, Belgium; Barbara Tillmann, formerly a Research Associate at Dartmouth, now faculty at Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique in Lyon, France; Jamshed Bharucha, formerly Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth, currently Provost at Tufts University, Medford, Mass. This research is part of the Program Project in Cognitive Neuroscience funded by the National Institutes of Health.

[spklnraz]

The latest in Music Science:

1) Music instruction aids verbal memory

2) Researchers find way to improve musical performance

---------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.apa.org/releases/music_memory.html

MUSIC INSTRUCTION AIDS VERBAL MEMORY
Hong Kong study explored the possibility that music training changes the
left brain, aiding other left-brain operations

WASHINGTON-Those dreaded piano lessons pay off in unexpected ways: According
to a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal
memory than their counterparts without such training. Plus, the longer the
training, the better the verbal memory. These findings underscore how, when
experience changes a specific brain region, other skills that region
supports may also benefit -- a kind of cognitive side effect that could help
people recovering from brain injury as well as healthy children. The
research appears in the July issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by
the American Psychological Association (APA).
Psychologists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied 90 boys between
age six and 15. Half had musical training as members of their school's
string orchestra program, plus lessons in playing classical music on Western
instruments, for one to five years. The other 45 participants were
schoolmates with no musical training. The researchers, led by Agnes S. Chan,
Ph.D., gave the children verbal memory tests, to see how many words they
recalled from a list, and a comparable visual memory test for images.
Students with musical training recalled significantly more words than the
untrained students, and they generally learned more words with each
subsequent trial of three. After 30-minute delays, the trained boys also
retained more words than the control group. There were no such differences
for visual memory. What's more, verbal learning performance rose in
proportion to the duration of musical training.
Thus, the authors say, even fewer than six years of musical training can
boost verbal memory. More training, they add, may be even better because of
a "greater extent of cortical reorganization in the left temporal region."
In other words, the more that music training stimulates the left brain, the
better that side can handle other assigned functions, such as verbal
learning. It's like cross training for the brain, comparable perhaps to how
runners find that stronger legs help them play tennis better - even though
they began wanting only to run. Similarly, says Chan, "Students with better
verbal memory probably will find it easier to learn in school."
Chan, along with Yim-Chi Ho, M.Phil., and Mei-Chun Cheung, Ph.D., followed
up a year later with the 45 orchestra students. Thirty-three boys were still
in the program; nine had dropped out fewer than three months after the first
study. The authors now compared a third group of 17 children who had started
music training after the initial assessment. This beginner's group initially
had shown significantly lower verbal-learning ability than the more
musically experienced boys. However, one year later, these newer students
again showed significant improvement in verbal learning.
On the other hand, unlike the music students who stuck it out, the dropouts
showed no further improvement. However, although the beginners and the
continued-training groups tended to improve significantly, there was one
consolation for the dropouts: At least they didn't backtrack. After a year,
they didn't lose the verbal memory advantage they had gained prior to
stopping lessons.
Ho, Cheung and Chan propose that music training during childhood is a kind
of sensory stimulation that "somehow contributes to the
reorganization-better development of the left temporal lobe in musicians,
which in turn facilitates cognitive processing mediated by that specific
brain area, that is, verbal memory." They contrast their evidence with
inconclusive reports that listening to Mozart improves spatiotemporal
reasoning, which most researchers have been unable to replicate. At the same
time, Chan notes that it's too simplistic to divide brain functions (such as
music) strictly into left or right, because "our brain works like a network
system, it is interconnected, very co-operative and amazing."
Most important, the authors say, "the [current] findings suggest that
specific experience might affect the development of memory in a predictable
way in accordance with the localization of brain functions. . Experience
might affect the development of cognitive functions in a systematic
fashion." More research is needed, but knowledge of this mechanism can
"stimulate further investigation into ways to enhance human brain
functioning and to develop a blueprint for cognitive rehabilitation, such as
using music training to enhance verbal memory."
Article: "Music Training Improves Verbal but Not Visual Memory:
Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Explorations in Children," Yim-Chi Ho,
M.Phil.; Mei-Chun Cheung, Ph.D.; and Agnes S. Chan, Ph.D.; The Chinese
University of Hong Kong; Neuropsychology, Vol. 17, No. 3
------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ic.ac.uk/P4330.htm

Researchers find way to improve musical performance

Wednesday 23 July 2003
Researchers from Imperial College London and Charing Cross Hospital have
discovered a way to help musicians improve their musical performances by an
average of up to 17 per cent, equivalent to an improvement of one grade or
class of honours.
The research published in this months edition of Neuroreport, shows that
using a process known as neurofeedback, students at London's Royal College
of Music were able to improve their performance across a number of areas
including their musical understanding and imagination, and their
communication with the audience.
Dr Tobias Egner, from Imperial College London at Charing Cross Hospital, one
of the authors of the study, comments: "This is a unique use of
neurofeedback. It has been used for helping with a number of conditions such
as attention deficit disorder and epilepsy, but this is the first time it
has been used to improve a complex set of skills such as musical performance
in healthy students."
Two experiments were conducted involving a total of 97 students. In both
experiments, the students were assessed on two pieces of music, both before
and after the neurofeedback training, according to a 10-point scale adapted
from a standard set of music performance evaluation criteria of the
Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, by a panel of expert judges.
The judges evaluated video-recorded performances, and were unaware of
whether the performance had been given before or after the intervention.
Neurofeedback monitors brain activity through sensors attached to the scalp
which filter out the brainwaves. These filtered brainwaves are then fed back
to the individual in the form of a video game displayed on screen, and the
participant learns to control the game by altering particular aspects of
their brain activity. This alteration in brain activity can influence
cognitive performance.
In the first experiment, 22 students out of 36 were trained on two
neurofeedback protocols (SMR and beta1), commonly used as tools for the
enhancement of attention, and, following this, on a deep relaxation
alpha/theta (a/t) protocol. In addition a second group of 12 was engaged in
a regime of weekly physical exercise and a mental skills training programme
derived from applications in sports psychology. A third group consisted of a
scholastic grade and age matched no-training group, which served as a
control grade.
In the second experiment, a different cohort of students were randomly
allocated to one of six training groups: alpha/theta neurofeedback, beta1
neurofeedback, SMR neurofeedback, physical exercise, mental skills training,
or a group that engaged in Alexander Technique training.
All of the students who received neurofeedback training were found to have
improved their performances marginally compared with those who received
other forms of training, but those who had received the alpha/theta (a/t)
protocol improved their performance the most. The range of improvement in
performance for the alpha/theta group was between 13.5 per cent and 17 per
cent.
Professor John Gruzelier, from Imperial College London at Charing Cross
Hospital, and senior author of the study, adds: "These results show that
neurofeedback can have a marked effect on musical performance. The
alpha/theta training protocol has found promising applications as a
complementary therapeutic tool in post-traumatic stress disorder and
alcoholism. While it has a role in stress reduction by reducing the level of
stage fright, the magnitude and range of beneficial effects on artistic
aspects of performance have wider implications than alleviating stress."
-ends-

[spklnraz]

This is an article from last year about "Stuck Tune Syndrome"...

The Science Behind the Song Stuck in Your Head

With all the tunes out there, why is it stuff like 'My Sharona' that takes over
our brains?


By ROY RIVENBURG, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Warning: This article could be hazardous to your sanity. It contains
discussions of songs so diabolically annoying that merely reading their
titles--"It's a Small World," "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," "My Sharona"--can
cause them to get stuck in your head. Proceed at your own risk.

For years, humans have been tortured by Stuck Tune Syndrome, in which a
seemingly innocuous piece of music lodges in the brain and won't leave. So far,
no reliable cure exists, but a University of Cincinnati professor hopes to
change that. James Kellaris has embarked on a study to figure out why songs
sometimes commandeer people's thoughts.

Kellaris, a marketing teacher who moonlights as a bouzouki player in a Greek
band, theorizes that certain types of music operate like mental mosquito bites.
They create a "cognitive itch" that can only be scratched by replaying the tune
in the mind. The more the brain scratches, the worse the itch gets. The
syndrome is triggered when "the brain detects an incongruity or something
'exceptional' in the musical stimulus," he explained in a report made earlier
this year to the Society for Consumer Psychology. To help determine which
factors cause songs to stick, Kellaris surveyed 1,000 students at four
universities.

Almost without exception, the respondents had regularly endured stuck songs or
jingles, with the typical episode lasting anywhere from a few hours (55%) to a
full day (23%). Another 17% said the malevolent melodies persisted several
days, and 5% said tunes haunted them longer than a week. One person
claimed--perhaps facetiously--that music from an Atari 260 videogame had been
playing in his head "since 1986."

The survey also asked people to identify the stickiest songs. From this list,
Kellaris hopes to pinpoint the characteristics that make a tune more likely to
bore into the brain.

One possibility is excessive repetitiveness. Although all songs contain
repetitious elements, some rely on the technique so heavily that they might
cause the brain to echo the pattern automatically, Kellaris suggests. Examples:
"Follow the Yellow Brick Road," Queen's "We Will Rock You" and the theme from
"Mission: Impossible."

A related factor is musical simplicity. "Children's songs seem more prone to
get stuck than complicated material, such as a Bach fugue," Kellaris says.
"Perhaps the ease with which a tune can be reconstructed" increases its
adhesiveness.

Greg Scelsa of Lancaster, who composes and performs children's music for the
duo Greg & Steve, acknowledges that simplicity and repetition are key
ingredients for making children's songs memorable.

A classic example is "If You're Happy and You Know It," he says. The melody in
each verse builds sequentially from the previous verse. He demonstrates by
singing, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. If you're happy and
you know it, clap your hands. If you're happy and you know it, then your face
will surely show it. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands."

With each "happy and you know it" line, the melody changes slightly, "but in a
predictable way," he says. "It's the same pattern, which makes it more
memorable."

Does that also make it more likely to implant itself in someone's cranium?
Probably, he says. Probably? Three hours after Scelsa hangs up, "If You're
Happy and You Know It" has staged a coup d'etat in our brain.

Another possible component of sticky songs is incongruity. If the beat or lyric
defies listener expectations, it might incite a cognitive itch, Kellaris says.
As an example, he mentions the song "America" from "West Side Story," which has
a jarring 12/8 meter.

Then again, maybe melody has nothing to do with Stuck Tune Syndrome, says Diana
Deutsch, a UC San Diego psychology professor who also served as founding editor
of the journal Music Perception.

Perhaps persistent songs are like recurring dreams, she says: "Something in the
back of your mind is trying to tell you something." As proof, Deutsch cites her
own experience. Whenever she can't get a song out of her head, she contemplates
the meaning of the lyrics--and the song instantly goes away. "Even songs
without words can have a larger meaning," she notes, mentioning anthems and
religious music as examples.

OK, but what if the tune circulating in your skull is the theme from "The
Flintstones"? What's the deeper message behind that? Deutsch isn't sure, but
insists that if the human brain has a tendency to play songs over and over,
there must be an evolutionary reason.

If so, evolution should be outlawed. That's because it inevitably favors the
most irritating songs. Let's say the brain wants to send itself an anti-anxiety
message. It could play something like the Beatles' "Let It Be" or the Beach
Boys' "Don't Worry Baby." But nooooo. Instead, the inner jukebox naturally
selects Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

Kellaris isn't surprised. Other research has shown that disturbing thoughts are
usually more memorable and compelling than pleasant ones, he says.

The first case of Stuck Tune Syndrome is lost to history. If ancient Romans had
"Parvus Orbis Est" (Latin for "It's a Small World") chirping incessantly in
their heads, they were kind enough not to mention it.

"Maybe this is a modern phenomenon," says H.A. Kelly, director of UCLA's Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. "I can't think of any literary references
to a haunting or persistent melody."

In recent times, the most bizarre cases of Stuck Tune Syndrome involve elderly
men and women. In rare instances, they begin to hallucinate music, according to
reports in medical journals. The songs are "so vivid that people will look for
a nearby radio," says neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of "The Man Who Mistook
His Wife for a Hat."

Curiously, many of the auditory hallucinations are hymns or patriotic tunes,
sung by a chorus. Some fade after time; others are permanent. "It goes 'round
and 'round in their heads and they can't get it to go away," says UCSD's
Deutsch, who has interviewed three sufferers and hopes to conduct a formal
study of the disorder. "One woman went to her doctor and complained about
hearing a hymn because she's not religious."

Sacks says the songs tend to be "music that was popular or important in the
first 15 years of the person's life." In other words, future generations can
expect to hallucinate Eminem, Britney Spears and the theme from Barney the
dinosaur.

Scientists don't know what causes the hallucinations. Some people begin hearing
music after surgery, others after taking too much aspirin. But most of the
patients are partially deaf, so the hallucinations might be akin to
phantom-limb syndrome, Sacks says.

In any case, no cure is known.

Music exerts a powerful grip on the mind, Sacks says. "It's the catchiest of
all stimuli, at least for humans. I don't know whether it's catchy for monkeys
or apes."

As for run-of-the-mill stuck tunes, the remedies vary. In Kellaris' survey,
people outlined several strategies for derailing a nagging melody. The most
obvious is to drive out the offending song by playing or thinking of another
melody. Unfortunately, the substitute tune also might get stuck. "Some people
turn to folkloric remedies," Kellaris says. "One chews on a cinnamon stick--and
swears it works."

Others try to distract their minds by reading out loud or doing another task.

Finally, there's the "cooties" method, in which a stuck song is "transferred"
to someone else by humming a few bars. Says Kellaris: "It's like, 'Tag, you're
it."'

Of course, the technique isn't practical for all songs. For instance, composer
John Cage's "As Slow as Possible," which is currently being performed in
Germany, begins with a silence that lasts 16 months, followed by a single chord
to be played on Jan. 5, 2003, then another silence, then another chord on July
5, 2004, and the final chord in 639 years.

Luckily, humming isn't the only way to transfer a song. Simply telling someone
the title might also be enough to insert it into their thoughts.

With that in mind, we feel compelled to mention some of the most common stuck
tunes from Kellaris' survey, all of which infected our brain while writing this
article: "The Macarena," "I'm a Little Teacup," "Gilligan's Island," the
Chili's baby-back ribs jingle, Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," Kenny Rogers'
"The Gambler," "YMCA," two Dr. Pepper jingles, Mozart's "Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik" and the themes from "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Odd Couple."

Tag, you're it.

[spklnraz]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0226213431.htm

This Is Your Brain On Jazz: Researchers Use MRI To Study Spontaneity, Creativity

ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2008) — A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.

The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

The scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their curiosity about the possible neurological underpinnings of the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation.

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a trained jazz saxophonist himself. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind,” he adds, “during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous.”

Though many recent studies have focused on understanding what parts of a person’s brain are active when listening to music, Limb says few have delved into brain activity while music is being spontaneously composed.

Curious about his own “brain on jazz,” he and a colleague, Allen R. Braun, M.D., of NIDCD, devised a plan to view in real time the brain functions of musicians improvising.

For the study, they recruited six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute, a music conservatory where Limb holds a joint faculty appointment. Other volunteers learned about the study by word of mouth through the local jazz community.

The researchers designed a special keyboard to allow the pianists to play inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a brain-scanner that illuminates areas of the brain responding to various stimuli, identifying which areas are active while a person is involved in some mental task, for example.

Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnet could attract. They also used fMRI-compatible headphones that would allow musicians to hear the music they generate while they’re playing it.

Each musician first took part in four different exercises designed to separate out the brain activity involved in playing simple memorized piano pieces and activity while improvising their music. While lying in the fMRI machine with the special keyboard propped on their laps, the pianists all began by playing the C-major scale, a well-memorized order of notes that every beginner learns. With the sound of a metronome playing over the headphones, the musicians were instructed to play the scale, making sure that each volunteer played the same notes with the same timing.

In the second exercise, the pianists were asked to improvise in time with the metronome. They were asked to use quarter notes on the C-major scale, but could play any of these notes that they wanted.

Next, the musicians were asked to play an original blues melody that they all memorized in advance, while a recorded jazz quartet that complemented the tune played in the background. In the last exercise, the musicians were told to improvise their own tunes with the same recorded jazz quartet.

Limb and Braun then analyzed the brain scans. Since the brain areas activated during memorized playing are parts that tend to be active during any kind of piano playing, the researchers subtracted those images from ones taken during improvisation. Left only with brain activity unique to improvisation, the scientists saw strikingly similar patterns, regardless of whether the musicians were doing simple improvisation on the C-major scale or playing more complex tunes with the jazz quartet.

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Limb notes that this type of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for artists and non-artists alike. For example, he notes, people are continually improvising words in conversations and improvising solutions to problems on the spot. “Without this type of creativity, humans wouldn’t have advanced as a species. It’s an integral part of who we are,” Limb says.

He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists, as well as non-artists asked to improvise.

The study is published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One. http://www.plosone.org/article/fetch...l.pone.0001679

This research was funded by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.

[spklnraz]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1002172542.htm

Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

"We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box'," Folley said. "We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity."

One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians' elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

"Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres," Folley said. "Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere."

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking, which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of the musicians and the control subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.

In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.

"When we measured subjects' prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information," Folley said.

The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

The research was partially supported by a Vanderbilt University Discovery Grant.

Folley is a postdoctoral fellow. Park is a professor of psychology and psychiatry and a member of the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience. Gibson was an undergraduate student and research assistant in the psychology department at Vanderbilt when this work was conducted and is now a Peace Corps volunteer based in Namibia. Park and Folley are Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development investigators.

[Nikkkola]

Allan :

The brain was first mapped on the battlefields of the Crimean War. As soldiers were dying, the neuro psych crew probed the areas with electrodes. If I remember correctly Broca was one of the neurologists with a battery probe and (this I do know) the speech centre was named after him. Some poor bastard probably yelled at him while he was being jolted......
Interestingly enough the centre for speech is left brain and the centre for language is right brain. I've done music therapy with adults who aphasic post trauma, and singing, especially in pro musicians, is a very useful tool for regaining speech. Doesn't always work, but I have a fair number of success stories. Pre-morbidity music lessons are a good indicator for success. Another argument for getting kids to study music - lots of research to show how music enlarges the neuro-transmitters between the lobes. Apparently this phase of brain development was missed on Stephen Harper who plays the piano quite stiffly.

[spklnraz]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0503081151.htm

Web address:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/
110503081151.htm

Amygdala Detects Spontaneity in Human Behavior: Study of Jazz Musicians Reveals How Brain Processes Improvisations

ScienceDaily (May 5, 2011) — A pianist is playing an unknown melody freely without reading from a musical score. How does the listener's brain recognise if this melody is improvised or if it is memorized?

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig investigated jazz musicians to discover which brain areas are especially sensitive to features of improvised behaviour. Among these are the amygdala and a network of areas known to be involved in the mental simulation of behaviour. Furthermore, the ability to correctly recognise improvisations was not only related to the musical experience of a listener but also to his ability to take the perspective of someone else.

The ability to discriminate spontaneous from planned (rehearsed) behaviour is important when inferring others' intentions in everyday situations, for example, when judging whether someone's behaviour is calculated and intended to deceive. In order to examine such basic mechanisms of social abilities in controlled settings, Peter Keller, head of the research group "Music Cognition and Action" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig and his research associate Annerose Engel investigate musical constellations ranging from solos and duos to large musical ensembles. In a recent study, they investigated the brain activity of jazz musicians while these musicians listened to short excerpts of improvised melodies or rehearsed versions of the same melodies. The listeners judged whether each heard melody was improvised.

"Musical improvisations are more variable in their loudness and timing, most likely due to irregularities in force control associated with fluctuations in certainty about upcoming actions -- i.e., when spontaneously deciding what to play -- during improvised musical performance," explains Peter Keller. The amygdala, part of the limbic system, was more active while listening to real improvisations and was sensitive to the fluctuations of loudness and timing in the melodies. Thus, the amygdala seems to be involved in the detection of spontaneous behaviour, which is consistent with studies showing an involvement of this structure when stimuli are difficult to predict, novel or ambiguous in their meaning.

If a melody was judged as being improvised, regardless of whether this was in fact the case, stronger activity was found in a network which is known to be involved in the covert simulation of actions. This network comprised the frontal operculum, the pre-supplementary area and the anterior insula.

"We know today that during perception of actions, similar brain areas are active as during the execution of the same action," explains Annerose Engel. "This supports the evaluation of other people's behaviour in order to form expectations and predict future behaviour." If a melody is perceived as being more difficult to predict, for example, because of fluctuations in loudness and timing, stronger activity is most likely to be elicited in this specialised network.

A further observation the researchers made may be related to this: Not only musical experience but also the capacity to take someone else's perspective played an important role in judging spontaneity. Jazz musicians who had more musical expertise in playing the piano and playing with other musicians, as well as those who more often described themselves as trying to put themselves in someone else's shoes were best at recognizing whether a melody was improvised or not.

[mr.memo]

Here is a great web site for those interested in reading about improvisation.
http://www.criticalimprov.com/issue/current