The Science of Music

(NASA)

The Juno spacecraft just recorded these creepy sounds around Jupiter

Via Science Alert

Image Source: pianocentralstudios.com The link between music and brain development has been studied over the years. And many of these studies showed that musical training or listening to music benefits a person’s brain in more ways than one. A team of researchers from the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Liverpool conducted a study to find out how musical training affects the flow of blood to the brain. They found out that short musical training increases blood flow in the brain’s left hemisphere. One of the researchers, Amy Spray, explained: “This suggests that the correlated brain patterns were the result of using areas thought to be involved in language processing. Therefore we can assume that musical training results in a rapid change in the cognitive mechanisms utilized for music perception and these shared mechanisms are usually employed for language.”

Image Source: medicalnewstoday.com This is possibly one of the reasons why the genius Kameron Clayton chose to study at the College of Arts and Science of Boston University because he could major in both music and neuroscience. Clayton is a tuba player whose passion for music is as strong as his love for science. “Music in human culture is a great mystery. It elicits deep emotions; it has the power to change one’s mood. After traumatic head injuries or a stroke, people can learn how to sing before learning to speak. Even someone with an abnormal gait can learn to walk again to the rhythm of music. What really interests me is, how all this happens?” Clayton quipped. That said, he organized a symposium titled “The 2014 Boston University Music and the Brain Symposium” which tackled several studies on where the subject of music-neuroscience relationship is going.

There are a few subjects I’ve been thinking of a lot since I started this blog: women in science and the connections I’ve been making between science and music. Both of these have large personal connections to me. The first is pretty obvious. The second is that my boyfriend is a composer. So to learn what he does (and because learning new stuff is awesome!) I started a self-study about classical music, including my slightly stalled out efforts to teach myself music theory (I reached the point where I needed both a piano and the ability to play one). When I embarked down this trail I started off thinking a lot about the physics and mechanics of sound and music, but as I met more people involved in the field and began to see how the popular and academic cultures of both music and science, especially physics, were a lot alike for women.

 Both are fields where stereotypes pretty much loom over the popular imagination of who is a physicist and who is a composer. Honestly, two and a half years ago the first mental image when I though “composer” would either be Mozart from “Amadeus” or Beeth-oven from “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. It’s the old, white man stereotype agin, except this time with more dead people!

 So it’s not surprising that recently on the internet, I’ve seen many great blog posts from women composers that echo many of my thoughts and feelings on being a lady physicist (“woman physicist” makes me feel kind of old and “lady physicist” seems cooler and like it could be a title in some sort of scientific nobility).  I could probably write way too much them, so here are a few that have been making the rounds. While reading them, one of the most striking things to me was that you could pretty much replace “composer/musician” with “physicist” and each article would be virtually unchanged.

The President of Cornell University, David J. Skorton, has endorsed the growing recognition of the importance of arts and music in the making of young scientists. In tune with Nobel Prizewinner Tho…

Science and Music

Sir James H. Jeans

Song of the Day: The Quantum World | Symphony of Science 

Christine Sun Kim has been deaf since she was born. She’s been an artist ever since.

The Brooklyn-based TED fellow has travelled around the world making art that not only causes participants to be more aware of the way they hear, but also teaches them the mastered science of actively listening. She’s experimented in sonic sound, the physicality of sign language, and other various forms of “reclaiming” sound – a medium she does not have direct access to.

As a Lincoln Reimagine Project honoree, she’ll set up a walk-able art installation that employs the observer as a moving instrument. Her idea is to create a direct connection between movement and listening, causing attendees to be more aware of the way they hear.

Physicists tend to be polymaths, so it’s not entirely surprising that Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, UC Santa Cruz professor of astronomy and astrophysics, cites the short story “The Library of Babel” by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges as his inspiration. Borges played with notions of time and space, so it’s easy to see the attraction to a budding physicist. And like Borges, Ramirez-Ruiz can fairly be called a wunderkind. 

Zebra finches use ‘baby talk’ to teach chicks (with audio)

Adult songbirds modify their vocalizations when singing to juveniles in the same way that humans alter their speech when talking to babies. The resulting brain activity in young birds could shed light on speech learning and certain developmental disorders in humans, according to a study by McGill University researchers.

Music listening habits tell about mental health

Brain imaging reveals how neural responses to different types of music really affect the emotion regulation of persons. The study proves that especially men who process negative feelings with music react negatively to aggressive and sad music.

Emotion regulation is an essential component to mental health. Poor emotion regulation is associated with psychiatric mood disorders such as depression. Clinical music therapists know the power music can have over emotions, and are able to use music to help their clients to better mood states and even to help relieve symptoms of psychiatric mood disorders like depression. But many people also listen to music on their own as a means of emotion regulation, and not much is known about how this kind of music listening affects mental health. Researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä, Aalto University in Finland and Aarhus University in Denmark decided to investigate the relationship between mental health, music listening habits and neural responses to music emotions by looking at a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging data. The study was published in August in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening,” explains Emily Carlson, a music therapist and the main author of the study.

Participants were assessed on several markers of mental health including depression, anxiety and neuroticism, and reported the ways they most often listened to music to regulate their emotions. Analysis showed that anxiety and neuroticism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males. “This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood,” says Dr. Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study and developer of the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) test.

To investigate the brain’s unconscious emotion regulation processes, the researchers recorded the participants’ neural activity as they listened to clips of happy, sad and fearful-sounding music using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at the AMI Center of Aalto University. Analysis showed that males who tended to listen to music to express negative feelings had less activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In females who tended to listen to music to distract from negative feelings, however, there was increased activity in the mPFC. “The mPFC is active during emotion regulation,” according to prof. Elvira Brattico, the senior author of the study. “These results show a link between music listening styles and mPFC activation, which could mean that certain listening styles have long-term effects on the brain.”

If Books Could Talk 

In episode 3, Heather & Colleen are asking a single leaf of a medieval music manuscript whether we can learn anything at all from just a fragment of a book.

You can also catch a glimpse of our temporary Rare Book Room during the research montage, where Michele examines several of our medieval music facsimiles for clues about the age of this leaf.