Interesting read. Though my comment is on a benign technical detail. There were links in the article to other articles that I expected to work given how recently the article was published. For example, I was interested in reading about the 40k year old flutes - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/oldest-%20musical-... Curious that the link would appear at all. I'd think there would be constraints on this during publication?
New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
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Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#12Interesting read. Though my comment is on a benign technical detail. There were links in the article to other articles that I expected to work given how recently the article was published. For example, I was interested in reading about the 40k year old flutes - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/science/oldest-%20musical-... Curious that the link would appear at all. I'd think there would be constraints on this during publication?
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#13Link to the paper: http://web.mit.edu/svnh/www/homepage/Publications_files/Norm...
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#14> Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.
I've long had a pet-theory that music with voices in it interrupts my train of thought (especially while programming) in a way that instrumental/electronic music avoids.
Of course, if unnamed scientists discover that listening to voices is completely separate from writing text, that'd be evidence against it.
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#15I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?…
> Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The piece falls i…
You can make something that has previously been salient become yet more salient by noticing more in it; the two of you are not necessarily disagreeing.
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#16> Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics. I've long had a pet-theory that music with voices in it interrupts my train of thought (especiall…
“Very few drums or vocals” is one of the qualities valued by the Music for Programming podcast: http://musicforprogramming.net/?about
Re: New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’
#17In 2015 I developed a theory that the human response to music is a mutated copy of an evolutionary pre-cursor, and the most likely pre-cursor is a response to speech-like sounds, where this response plays a role in the initial learning of language. I have documented the development of my theory in my "What is Music?" blog at http://whatismusic.info/blog/.
In their analysis of the human auditory cortex, Norman-Haignere et al found six distinct functional groups of neurons. One of those groups is identified as a "music area". Another one of the groups is a close match for the evolutionary pre-cursor that I predicted - a group of neurons that respond to speech sounds, whether or not those sounds belong to the listener's native language.
The initial assumption of my theory is that the primary function of music is to temporarily alter mood. Evidence for this function comes from the strong effect that music has on some people who are "addicted" to daydreaming.
My theory suggests that the response to speech-like sounds also induces an altered mood, when an infant is learning language for the first time. This alteration in mood helps the infant to identify language as a special stimulus which is important and which needs to be processed and understood as something that follows its own peculiar and complex set of rules which are not particularly related to the rules that describe all the other aspects of reality that the infant is learning about. The altered mood may also help the infant to learn that the meaning attached to some language utterances relates to things beyond immediate reality, ie things that other people are thinking about which are not in the "here and "now". (This would relate to the similar effect that music has on our emotional reactions to things we are thinking about that are not in the "here and now".)