14 DAY TRIAL // When listening to good music, people usually emerge in a different Universe, created by the composer and artist playing the tracks. Our brains are capable of such a high degree of abstraction that we are able to identify ourselves with elements of our favorite songs, and get transposed in a state that allows us to “live” the music we are hearing. Researchers suggest that our brains may actually be predicting music, in the sense that, when we accidentally unplug our headphones when listening to a song, the cortex is still waiting for something to happen, something that should be there, but it's not.
These strange side-effects of suddenly interrupted music on the human brain were the target of a new investigation, conducted by experts at the Goldsmiths, University of London. In charge of the study team were researchers Marcus Pearce Geraint Wiggins and Joydeep Bhattacharya. They wanted to find out exactly what happened in the brain in the seconds immediately following an interruption, and also why these effects occurred. In a paper accompanying the study, which the team published in the latest issue of the journal NeuroImage, the scientists hypothesize that different people should experience different effects, based solely on their previous musical experiences and history.
Although it may not be immediately obvious when listening to a tune, music has a very specific set of rules, just like grammar. A certain succession of notes automatically “calls” for another, very specific succession. Some of these correlation patterns are taught in schools as scales, and most people are aware of their existence. But advanced musical theory shows more bizarre correlations, which modify the tone of a scale without actually changing it. This type of theory is widely used in jazz music, where the natural, intuitive order of notes is replaced with other hierarchies.
“The question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others,” Pearce says of the goal behind the study, AlphaGalileo reports. The team used two computer models to test their ideas. One of them was based on hardwired rules, whereas the other was based on statistical predictions. The former therefore relied on the assumption that the knowledge was hardwired into the human brain, whereas the second was testing to see whether experience in various types of music played the most important part in hinting at a natural succession of notes.
The statistical model was discovered to predict the responses of 40 test participants better than the hardwired model, which would seem to indicate that people base their reactions on previous musical experiences, the team says. “It is thought that composers deliberately confirm and violate listeners' expectations in order to communicate emotion and aesthetic meaning,” Pearce says.