Mindfulness in Music Making

This article from Wired talks about how your mental attitude affects your behavior. 

. . .“Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,”. . .

. . . To lose confidence in free will seemingly introduced a lag between conscious choice and action. . . 

My sense is that studies such as these are so very preliminary that drawing hard conclusions on the specifics can lead you astray, especially on topics as controversial as free will. But I do think that they empirically reinforce the common sense idea that your attitude and general mental state as you go about something like making music is going to affect the outcome.

The neuroscience is telling us that it's the simultaneous coordination of many areas of the brain in music making that makes it such a unique behavior. Maintaining continuous awareness of all that can be tough sledding, and I think the concept of mindfulness as put forward by Tibetan Buddhism can be one very useful way of talking about how to go about it. 

A big part of mindfulness is simply observing your thoughts, emotions and behaviors without feeling you're having to make immediate conscious decisions and judgments about everything all the time. In making music this involves being as good a listener as you can be to what you're doing, as well as to those around you if you're in an ensemble. Taking the time to have a better sense of the music as a whole can help you understand what adjustments you want to make on the smaller scale.

One thing about practicing mindfulness is that like anything you practice you can get better over time. One thing which sets high level players apart is their being able to hear and respond to the music they're making both as a whole and in its many parts in real time. For those of us not at that level, understanding that how we're thinking and feeling about making music has a lot to do with how successful we are. It's another way of framing the musicality vs. technique duality.

One thing that can happen as you work with being more mindful is that you become aware that there's more going on in your behavior than you're usually aware of, and that some of it is merely reactive and routinized. A classic example in music making is rushing when playing passages perceived as difficult. Usually it's anxiety kicking in and highjacking the tempo. Coming to realize it's an anxiety issue as much as a technique one is half the battle.

Another point to make about mindfulness in the Tibetan sense is that it has to do with feelings and emotions as well the more rational connotation it has in the West. A Tibetan saying someone has a good mind is like a Westerner saying someone has a good heart. So in music making this means being open to the feeling/emotion content in real time, as well as the technical issues. 

My Friday group has both professional level and amateur level players, and all the amateurs have approached me at various times to say they've had more fun and gotten deeper into making music in this group than any other they've ever been in. I think a lot of that has to do with arranging the music to suit their abilities, which allows them to be more mindful the musicality side of things. That means they can lay down a solid framework for the pros to use to take improvisational flight.

A Song For Japan

Metheny on Improv

This article in the NYT covers some work of neuroscientists I've already posted on, so I wasn't going to link it until I read this quote from Pat Metheny:

The best musicians are not the best players, they're the best listeners.

To me, there's a world of truth in that. It's so very easy to get so caught up in various technique and performance issues, that it can become sort of a vicious downward spiral leading away from good music making; and mindful listening is what can break that spiral and get the technique back into serving the music rather than itself.

Performance Diary

Here in the past month or so our group, with varying personnel, has performed for:

A volunteer appreciation luncheon at a local nursing home - 

An outdoor butterfly release benefit for Hospice of the Rapidan -

An outdoor rehearsal dinner -

An outdoor fundraiser for UVa Children's Hospital - 

A fundraiser for a community 4th of July event - 

A dinner given to Wounded Warriors on a stop between their biking from DC to Richmond.

For all these events we were background entertainment during various social and dining activities. One of the things I've learned is that if we get the volume just right, some people can talk and visit while those right next to them can pay attention to us and clap and sing along if they like. It's really more like a music therapist running a group activity than a straight up performance.

The key element to success at all these events was reading the mood of the crowd and choosing tunes and ways of playing them which added to the convivial atmospheres. I did OK with that, but always afterwards thought of ways we could have done better. I'm still a bit unused to performing with a group of talented musicians and tend to get caught up in performing and not paying full attention to the crowd and thinking through what would be the most effective music to play. When it's just me and the guitar I can watch the audience the whole time, with other performers I need to stay connected with them as well, and it's hard for me to do both.

At the Wounded Warriors event yesterday, even though I knew ahead of time it was well over 100 veterans, many with prostheses, who had biked from Washington DC to Fredericksburg on a hot day and were headed to Richmond today, their energy level from being so physically active caught me off guard. We started out with some upbeat songs, and I should have stuck with that. My usual tack of slowing things down a bit after some fast ones didn't work particularly well. Those guys were pumped up, full of camaraderie, and enjoying a meal provided by the American Legion and the slow tune just didn't connect.

If I could somehow maintain better mindfulness, as the Buddhist call it, the performances could be better tweaked moment to moment to be more fully responsive to the audience. 

The other thing I noticed was that the high energy of the Wounded Warriors got me to singing with more intensity than I can ever recall in a performance. Part of it was the moving Memorial Day performance by the community band the day before building the mood. But I think most of it was their ruddy complexions, boisterous talk and laughter and the full attention some were paying me as a singer. Haven't listened to the recording yet, so don't know how it sounded, but it felt as though I was making some sort of breakthrough in projecting my emotions via my singing voice. It felt as though my voice was complete with nothing hindering its flow.

Horn Diary

Yesterday the community band performed at the Memorial Day service in the little park on Main Street in Orange named for Zachary Taylor. The names of those from the county who gave their lives from World War One onward were read out and wreaths laid. The band played well and the event was a success, and a reminder of the interconnectedness of small rural towns. 

There was a heat advisory and some of us in the band were sitting directly in the noonday sun. My shirt was soaking wet in just a few moments and I kept telling myself to watch for signs of heat stroke. By the end of the service some clouds came over and a slight breeze stirred. 

I was the only horn, so had spent the past couple of weeks re-inhabiting first horn territory and played my parts acceptably well, but the hot sun on my face made my lips and cheeks feel as though I were in the midst of a hot bath. Muscles I never think about went slack and trying to maintain embouchure became a moment to moment chore. I'd never experienced that before, and will be perfectly content not to experience it again. There were no horribly bad notes, just ones that never really quite formed and sounded, and came out as sort of an barely audible mush.

People who've played in bands often mention the issues with playing in cold weather, but it had never occurred to me that extreme heat could have such an effect on my embouchure.

On a different note entirely, have been meaning to mention that besides disagreement in the horn community about any number of issues, they can't even get together on how to oil the instrument. Over the years I've seen various authorities say different things. Way back when I started I read Barry Tuckwell's book and he suggested just buying kerosene at the hardware store and using that, which is what I've done. I pour it through a coffee filter lined funnel from the gallon jug into a small needle nose applicator bottle.

It's thin and in the summer needs to be applied every day. But it works well, and very rarely do I have to pull tuning slides and put it down them. Most of the time under the rotor caps and on the shafts on the other side keeps things nicely lubricated and the action quick and responsive.

This Be a Rockin' Music Blog

Even though I've been blogging for over two years now, I've just recently discovered the "stats" feature that let's me peek at how people get here to read what posts. Just now was following one of those referrer links and discovered the blog made a list of "50 of the best music blogs out there", which was created by a site called Guide to Art Schools. The title of the page is 50 Rockin' Music Blogs By Real Musicians.

Here's their description of the blog:

Music Therapy: Music has many purposes, one of which lies in its therapeutic nature. On Music Therapy you can explore the workings and benefits of music and music making by referencing an organized archive of links having to do with music therapy. The blog's author is a part-time musician, part-time registered music therapist who has had first hand encounters with music's physical and emotional healing powers.

I'm delighted by being found and recognized, and that someone looked at the blog enough to write such an accurate description of it. Knowing there are some good readers checking in from time to time makes writing posts a fun challenge.

Blogger Issues (again)

Looks like Jonathan West's problems trying to comment on the post below were the first signs of more Blogger problems. Currently my log ins fail far more often than they work. This a.m. the Blogger people say it's a "known issue" and they're working on it. Looks like a good day to get outside more ;-)

Update - Turns out it was a "corrupt cookie" thing and all you have to do is remove them and let new ones be accepted. I guess it's my age, but the phrase "corrupt cookie" somehow associates in my mind more with comics and cartoons than with computers.

Music and Evolution

Mark Changizi is an "evolutionary neurobiologist" and has a brand new book out called Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man. Because what he seems to be saying overlaps so nicely with my idea that physical gesture is a primal constituent of music, the book jumps to the top of my to read list.

Here are some excerpts from an interview published in today's WSJ:

. . . My research suggests that when we listen to music without any visual component, our auditory system—or at least the lower-level auditory areas—"thinks" it is the sounds of a human moving in our midst, doing some sort of behavior, perhaps an emotionally expressive behavior.

The auditory system "thinks" this because music has been "designed" by cultural evolution to sound like people moving about. That is, over time, humans figured out how to better and better make sounds that mimicked (and often exaggerated) the fundamental kinds of sounds humans make when we move. . . 

 . . . Just to give one example of a fit between music and movement, consider that when people move faster (i.e., have greater tempo), their Doppler shifts are amplified, and so the difference between the highest (going toward you) pitch and the lowest (going away from you) pitch is greater. If music sounds like moving people, then we expect that faster tempo music should have melodies with a greater pitch range. And, indeed, that's what we found in our data. . . .

. . . Not all music induces dancing. What one wants to explain is why any music should induce this (and yet no other kind of thing induces movement time-locked to it).

If music has come to sound like someone moving in your midst, and probably moving evocatively in some way, then it is not very surprising. Lots of human behaviors are contagious. Dancing amounts to just another case of humans moving in reaction to, or following, the behavior of other humans. . . 

Two previous posts on Changizi are here and here. I really think he's on to something, but wonder if he's overstating his case. On down the line, when I've had a chance to actually read the book, will post again. 

Update - Jonathan West wanted to make the following comment, but Blogger, which has been more than a little buggy lately, keeps being stuck in "preview" rather than "post", so here is the comment as Jonathan emailed it:

I'm seriously skeptical.

First, the Doppler explanation just doesn't hold water at all. At the speeds unassisted humans move about, doppler effects on sound are all but undetectable to the human ear. That is why the Doppler effect wasn't discovered until the 19th century, when we started having machines (i.e. railroad engines) that could move fast enough for doppler effects to be heard.

Also, the conclusion that faster music has a wider pitch range I would want to examine very closely. What music was chosen in order to make the comparison? How was the sampling scheme set up? What kinds of music were included (or excluded) and why?

It sounds very much as if a superically plausible theory (doppler effect) was dreamt up, and then the data (different kinds of music) cherry-picked to match. Unless you take great care to prevent it, this sort of thing can happen without any intent to deceive anybody.

That there is a link between music and movement is beyond doubt. How much of it is culturally determined and how much is genetic is an interesting question - but I suspect that the answer, when it finally appears, will be to the effect that it is all intertwined to an extent that makes it hard to describe the contributions in terms of proportions.

Critics

Here's Terry Teachout's almanac quote for the day, which I really like:

"It seems to me that a prig is someone who judges people by his own, rather than by their, standards; criticism only becomes useful when it can show people where their own principles are in conflict."

Evelyn Waugh, Remote People

I'm always amazed by critics whose gigantic egos allow them to think their take on a piece of music is the only one worth having. This quote brought that to mind and takes it another step, that criticism is useful when it helps others deepen their perceptions and thoughts on art.

Whether it's an art or music critic, or a music educator or therapist - I'm immediately suspicious and somewhat put off by anyone saying theirs is the only correct approach. 

Update - Jonathan West puts it very, very well in his comment below.

". . . while there are a thousand wrong ways of doing anything in music, there are at least a hundred different right ways."

Empathy and Proprioception

This article in Forbes (there's an ad that you have to click through) is one of several in the past six months or so talking about research indicating the use of botox can weaken one's empathy for others. 

“When the facial muscles are dampened, you get worse in emotion perception, and when when facial muscles are amplified, you get better at emotion perception.” . . .

. . . Taken together, the two studies seem to indicate a direct relationship between ability to express emotion through facial expression, and the ability to experience emotion oneself, or identify it in others.

Seems to me there's probably a connection between this information and the new information on mirror neurons.

Large explained that when we see someone doing something, our mirror neuron system attempts to replicate the same condition in our own mind. This enables us to empathize with someone else on a very fundamental level.

The discovery that mirror neurons are involved in hearing music shows that when we listen to music, the same cells that are active in motor actions are part of the response to the music. . .

In making music, proprioception would seem to be involved as well, as that's the sense that besides telling us how physically accurate we are, it's part of how we can tell whether and how we are gesturally informing the music with emotion.

During the learning of any new skill, sport, or art, it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity. Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.

Flexible Stability vs. Contorted Rigidity

I had a great back and forth with David Wilken down in the comments on this post of his. The topic was embouchure, but it's my feeling the general concept plays in to music making on all levels. Here's something I said:

The other thing I keep wondering about is your point of the less movement of the embouchure the better. I understand how that really helps cleaner playing. The problem for me that led to an embouchure crisis that nearly had me give up the horn was that I think I got more over into “rigid” rather than “stable”, and that the appropriate supporting musculature and fascia weren’t in place, leading to over stressing some parts of the embouchure and not using others as much as needed (if that makes any sense).

And here's Dave's response:

I understand exactly what you mean here. It’s very common for players to concentrate their effort in areas that aren’t ideal, while letting the muscle groups that should be doing the work be lax. This happens with breathing as well as embouchure. If you look back a few posts I wrote up on a study that used infrared photography to note the areas on trumpet players’ faces that were doing the work while playing. One thing that was noted was that the professionals had a more uniform look compared to each other, whereas the amateurs had their muscular effort all over their face, with a lot more variety.

It's my feeling that this idea of the physical effort being evenly distributed throughout the embouchure applies equally to other areas of music making. One of the constants of my helping people make music on a whole panoply of instruments over the years has been helping them see and hear and feel how they're stressing where they don't need to and not giving full attention to other areas. 

So often people starting to play an instrument seem to be contorting themselves in ways they never would in everyday physical endeavors. I think this becomes less immediately apparent as we play our instruments better over time, but needless small rigidities can still lurk just below the surface and hinder us from being as fully expressive as we might be.

Part of my recent "flow" experience was not once experiencing any physical glitches and the horn simply making the sounds I wanted it to. I just thought about the sound I wanted, not about what I needed to do to make it. My sense is that having a flexible stability in physical technique makes that more likely to happen than when you've got some physical contorted rigidities getting between you and the music.

Just as music making and meditation seem to have some overlap in terms of brain function, music making and yoga seem to have some overlap on the physical level.

A Pauky Poem

Kyle Gann just posted this wonderful poem, which uses the word "pauky", which I'd never before encountered. It means shrewd or cunning, often in a humorous manner. The poem was written about this event. The poem and the brief introduction are in this post of Kyle's.

And speaking of poetry, a Boston poet friend of John Luther Adams, John Shreffler, wrote the following poem in response to JLA’s and my pilgrimage to Concord:

For John Luther Adams

The experience aspires to communion,
But the art is various, so many
Different ways to do it, sometimes you feel
It wrap its arm around you as its other
Hand reaches in and neatly lifts your wallet;
That would be Wagner, while Beethoven and Ives
Storm Heaven, locked in wars into which you’re drafted,
But sometimes, now and then, the artist nods,
Lost in his thought and fumbles with the keys
And turns the pauky lock and opens the door
And inside lie mansions, where the conversation
Is real and equal and, as well, ecstatic
And shimmers like the Northern Lights laid out
In a Heaven into which you’re invited.

Sometime back I posted another poem about poetry itself, wishing there were one as good for music and this poem by John Shreffler makes a good companion to it.

Harmonious Feeling of Oneness

This BBC article is the first I've seen which talks about how there are apparently two mostly independent neural networks in our brains. The suggestion is that usually one or the other predominates our consciousness, but that, at least in the case of Tibetan Buddhist meditators, the activities of the two networks can be balanced. 

He says the brain appears to be organised into two networks: the extrinsic network and the intrinsic, or default, network.

Dr Josipovic has scanned the brains of more than 20 experienced meditators during the study.
The extrinsic portion of the brain becomes active when individuals are focused on external tasks, like playing sports or pouring a cup of coffee.

The default network churns when people reflect on matters that involve themselves and their emotions.

But the networks are rarely fully active at the same time. And like a seesaw, when one rises, the other one dips down. . . 

. . . Dr Josipovic has found that some Buddhist monks and other experienced meditators have the ability to keep both neural networks active at the same time during meditation - that is to say, they have found a way to lift both sides of the seesaw simultaneously.

And Dr Josipovic believes this ability to churn both the internal and external networks in the brain concurrently may lead the monks to experience a harmonious feeling of oneness with their environment.

If this hypothesis proves out, it seems to me it could be part of the explanation of the state a music maker can sometimes enter when the ego falls away and the music seems to flow on its own. I've been talking to music friends about this and here's a great note I got from Billy Brockman, a friend I knew as a child and who went on to make a living as an electric guitar player. Billy is now proprietor of Charlottesville Music.

Time would definitely slow down. It gave me the ability to transfer what was in my head (and heart) to my fingers more easily. The ability to "play what you hear." It's analogous to a batter being able to "see the seams rotating" on a fastball. The ball is coming to the plate at 90 mph, but to a hitter "in the zone" the ball appears to be traveling slower.

Brain Plasticity

This brief article is useful in explaining that the "plasticity" of the brain often mentioned by neuroscientists is more than simply creating new grey matter. It's also the creating of new subnetworks in what's already there.

The new study uses computational methods developed to analyze what the researchers call multilayer networks, in which each layer might represent a network at one snapshot in time, or a different set of connections between the same set of brain regions. These layers are combined into a larger mathematical object, which can contain a potentially huge amount of data and is difficult to analyze. Previous methods could only deal with each layer separately.

"Parts of the brain communicate with one another very strongly, so they form a sort of module of intercommunicating regions of the brain," said first author Danielle S. Bassett, postdoctoral fellow in physics at UC Santa Barbara. "In this way, brain activity can segregate into multiple functional modules. What we wanted to measure is how fluid those modules are."

Bassett explained that there are flexible brain regions with allegiances that change through time. "That flexibility seems to be the factor that predicts learning," said Bassett. "So, if you are very flexible, then you will end up learning better on the second day, and if you are not very flexible, then you learn less."

The central finding that the better the flexibility, the better the learning, might be behind the studies indicating music making is helpful for overall cognition, because music making seems to be all about creating lots of subnetworks throughout the brain.

Flow and Something Else

In my most recent Horn Diary I mentioned how my playing in the Fauré Requiem on Palm Sunday induced an altered state during the performance which lasted for hours after the concert. In a comment, Jonathan West pointed out that that state of mind is described by "flow". In a subsequent comment he said that in the hundreds of times he's performed (and he's high level, not an amateur), he's experienced "flow" only a dozen or so times.

Judging one's own mental states is a dicey proposition at best, but my sense is that I've experienced "flow" hundreds of times - practicing, performing, composing, running group music sessions, etc. - so I'm pretty sure there's a semantic issue here.

I've been wandering down the foggy ruins of time trying to think of other times I might have had experiences like the one playing the horn in the Fauré on Palm Sunday, and the only one I can come up with is my having attended a teaching given by H. H. the Dalai Lama and having had the opportunity to shake his hand. 

I've also been trying to find words to describe both experiences and have come up with:

Exalted - in a state of extreme happiness, from the Latin exaltere from ex- 'outward, upward' + altus - 'high"

Exultation - show or feel elation or jubilation, esp. as a result of success, from the Latin exsultare, frequentive of exsilire 'leap up' from ex- 'out, upward '+ salire 'to leap'

Individuation -  a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious is brought into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination or free association to take some examples) to be assimilated into the whole personality.

I want to take this discussion further in a subsequent post and would welcome any further comments or emails on this subject, and I can't help thinking our Vermont readership might have something interesting to say on all of this.

Limitations and Style

Here are two quotes that reinforce one another. The first is one of Terry Teachout's regular almanac citations and this one is by Igor Stravinsky:

"My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

The other is a quote from Rosanne Cash from that recent NYT article:

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

A first approximation of the difference between a music educator and a music therapist might be to say that the educator is concerned with the student being able to play in whatever style the composer asks for, while the therapist helps the client find the style most suited to that particular client's personality and abilities.

Horn Diary

Last Sunday I played horn in a performance of Fauré's Requiem and it went well. While a couple of attacks weren't as clean as they might have been, some notes weren't held as long as they should have been, and some slurs had a bit more color than the score asked for - there were no wrong notes. There's not really that much horn music in the piece, so I'd memorized all the bits and pieces and was able to blend with and help shape the sound of the chorus. 

The only other instruments were strings, including harp and piano. I ended up standing behind the chorus with all the other instruments down front. The bell of my horn was pointing right at a corner of the sanctuary, the walls of which are brick and only a couple of feet from the horn. That had the effect of broadcasting the sound throughout the space in a wonderful way. Sort of let the welkin ring.

The other thing about standing behind the chorus was that I felt much freer putting some body english on some of those lovely sighing pianissimos. From years of playing guitar and singing in front of groups, I tend to dance and move with the rhythms, which just looks wrong with something like the Fauré. Being hidden from the audience let me not worry about that.

After the performance I got a number of enthusiastic comments on my playing from some of the best musicians present. I feel I can now lay claim to being an adequate small town amateur horn player.

Part of the reason things went so well was due to my emotional involvement with the piece. Over the past year a number of us have been all up close and personal with death and dying. In particular, the chorus director lost his wife, who was also the best choral accompanist I've ever heard, and though unspoken, this requiem was for her. I was basically in an altered state for the whole performance and for hours afterwards. There was all the busy technical stuff flying though my head, but there were also deep feelings coming up from my heart and finding expression in the sound of the horn. I've never before participated in such high level music with that sort of deep emotional expression. And the thing about the horn is, no other instrument, including my voice, allows me to tap so deeply into that well of what being human is all about.

Neuroscience Roundup

This long article in the NYT is a nice summary and discussion of things I've already posted on. They even use in the title the "tickle the brain" image I've talked about before. The added value is their having interviewed Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma and Rosanne Cash to get their responses to the data.

I really like this from Ms. Cash:

In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”

“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”

And here's a quote from Dr. Large at FAU on mirror neurons:

So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians.

Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions.

Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume.

And here's something I hadn't come across, but surely reinforces my notion of the primal importance of physical gesture in musical communication.

Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing.

“We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.”

Who's In Charge?

The elephant in the room, as far as all the new neuroscience is concerned, is that our conscious mind is not fully in charge of our behavior. Here's a paragraph from an article looking at how this new information might change our thinking about legal issues. 

The first lesson we learn from studying our own circuitry is shocking: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you – the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.

Freud and Jung may have gotten various details wrong, but they were on the right track with their basic notion that the conscious mind is just one of many players creating our personalities and driving our behavior.

The Buddhist idea of "mind training" is also built in part on the idea that getting our conscious mind more in control of the situation is a tough thing to do, and that having a concept of what you're trying to do and how to go about it can be very helpful.

The previous post on the potentiating nature of dopamine, which can be released during music making, suggests it can be helpful in reinforcing positive aspects of the mind outside direct consciousness while quelling some of the negative stuff rattling around up there.

On a much more specific level, it seems to me that when we're helping someone make music, being open to non-verbal ways of transmitting information is the way to go, because we're probably already doing that whether we're aware of it or not.

More On Dopamine

This article on dopamine release and addiction makes the point that dopamine does more than simply make you feel better.

When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn't stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.

In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics aren't addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They're addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.

"People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it's a learning transmitter," says Morikawa. "It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released."

Since listening and making music can release dopamine, something similar is probably happening. One of the first things that popped into my mind when I read this is that it's a possible explanation for people putting up with music educators that get over into what might be considered abusive behavior in other contexts. I've always felt the context in which music is made affects both the music and the musician and that positive rather than negative emotional environments are better, but this article suggests dopamine release may well trump that in some situations. Lots of abusive relationships in which the participants choose to remain are fueled by alcohol.

The positive side of all this is that paying attention to how one helps a client go about learning music making can reinforce positive attitudes and behaviors. It's another way of seeing how music can have beneficial effects on the personality of the music maker.

Music Making and Seniors

This brief article is about a preliminary study that suggests music making is of cognitive benefit to older people.

. . . Researchers Brenda Hanna-Pladdy and Alicia MacKay at the University of Kansas Medical Center surveyed 70 healthy people aged 60 to 83, giving them a series of neuropsychological tests. Those with at least 10 years of musical experience had “better perfor­mance in nonverbal memory… and executive processes” compared to non-musicians, the investigators wrote. . .

. . . It has already been known that “intensive repetitive musical practice can lead to bilateral cortical reorganization,” or wide spread changes in brain wiring, Hanna-Pladdy and MacKay wrote. But it has been un­clear, they added, whether musical abilities “transfer to nonmusical cognitive abilities” throughout life.

Sackbut Timbre

In my last Horn Diary I talked about enjoying blending the sound of the horn with that of a chorus much more than blending it with the sound of a concert band.

In the sackbut entry in Wikipedia there's this about the timbre of that precursor to the trombone:

Mersenne wrote in 1636, "It should be blown by a skillful musician so that it may not imitate the sounds of the trumpet, but rather assimilate itself to the sweetness of the human voice, lest it should emit a warlike rather than a peaceful sound."

Old Dogs & New Tricks

The problem with old dogs learning new tricks may not be due to brain decrepitude. This brief article outlines a study where adults formed new grey matter over the course of just a few days in response to complex conditioning.

The researchers subjected 19 adult volunteers to a study where colored cards (2 shades of green and 2 blue) were shown to them; each with nonsensical names. The participants were then asked to accept the new words as actual descriptors for the new colors and to memorize them so that they could reply with the correct color name at a later date and to match them when asked. After the conditioning was carried out (over three days with five sessions; total time less than two hours) the subjects all underwent MRI scans, where it was revealed that new grey matter had formed in the left hemisphere of their brains. . . 

. . . It appears the key lies in the name differentiation, and how the subjects perceived the colors based on the names they were given; something much deeper than say, asking subjects to simply memorize a list of names. It was a change in perception. This is backed up by the fact that the areas of the brain that grew new matter were parts of the brain known to process color and vision, but more importantly, perception.

My biggest age related issue is my fingers not being as flexible and quickly responsive as I'd like on the flute. Part of that might be that even though I've played the flute and alto flute off and on for years, I've spent a lot more time on the keyboard and guitar and banjo, all of which use the fingers in different ways and I'm having to work at not using them in those ways with the flute, as much as trying to learn the new ways.

Horn Diary

I'm having the opportunity to play horn for a performance of the Fauré Requiem on Palm Sunday. We have two violins, two violas, a cello, a string bass and an organ, and, of course, the chorus. The harmonies are wonderful and the writing for the horn brings out the qualities I most love about it.

What I've come to realize is that one reason I so loved playing in the cantata at Christmas was playing horn with voices. Somehow, for me, playing with the chorus feels much more natural than playing in the community band. Maybe it's because I've sung so much and that part of the wonder of the horn is that it's so like the voice. Whatever the reason, blending the sound of the horn with the sound of the chorus is one of the most exhilarating musical experiences I've ever had.

Playing Softly

With both horn and flute I've lately been working on playing more softly than I ever have before. Very helpfully, James Boldin recently posted on that very subject as regards the horn. 

Something that's impressed me is how playing at the softest level possible requires such a different embouchure on both flute and horn, and how that change has deepened my proprioceptive sense of the embouchure. Somehow the delicacy needed reveals the underlying structure of the embouchure in a different light.

Proprioception

Proprioception is a vital component of music making, but rarely expressly mentioned. Here are some snips from the current Wikipedia entry:

Proprioception . . . from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body. . . a . . .  distinct sensory modality that provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally. It is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with the required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other. . . 

. . . Kinesthesia is another term that is often used interchangeably with proprioception, though use of the term "kinesthesia" can place a greater emphasis on motion. Some differentiate the kinesthetic sense from proprioception by excluding the sense of equilibrium or balance from kinesthesia. An inner ear infection, for example, might degrade the sense of balance. This would degrade the proprioceptive sense, but not the kinesthetic sense. The affected individual would be able to walk, but only by using the sense of sight to maintain balance; the person would be unable to walk with eyes closed. . . .

 . . .The proprioceptive sense is believed to be composed of information from sensory neurons located in the inner ear (motion and orientation) and in the stretch receptors located in the muscles and the joint-supporting ligaments (stance). There are specific nerve receptors for this form of perception termed "proprioreceptors," just as there are specific receptors for pressure, light, temperature, sound, and other sensory experiences. . . .

. . . Proprioception is what allows someone to learn to walk in complete darkness without losing balance. During the learning of any new skill, sport, or art, it is usually necessary to become familiar with some proprioceptive tasks specific to that activity. Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.

One thing about music making is that there is really no end to how much we can develop and deepen our ability to do so. Part of that is our becoming more and more proprioceptively aware of how we play our instrument. One reason for this post is for it to be here as foundation for a flute diary post on how an advancement in technique was based on increased proprioceptive awareness in my fingers.

Advances in technique can lead to advances in our more fully inhabiting the music, and our growing interpretive sense can lead to advances in technique. Nurturing that interplay can keep music making fresh and rewarding for a lifetime.

I also have the intuitive sense that there's an overlap between our proprioceptive sense of balance and the ways we can feel "balance" in music making and in music we listen to, particularly in rhythm, but in all the other elements of music as well. How well and in what ways music is "balanced" is sort of a primal gesture to which all the others contribute.

Levitin on Timing and Expression

In the first of these videos, Daniel Levitin gives an overview of work done in his labs showing that variance from metronomic timing correlates with perceived expression in music. In the second he talks more about the implications of this type of research, name checking Stevie Wonder in the process.

This bit of research may well end up being seen as much of a breakthrough as the recent dopamine study, also out of McGill. They both really get at what's going on with music and emotion, and they each seem to be the first solid, repeatable study that nails down a specific mechanism in the way music works on us. 

Music & Parkinson's Disease

A while back I mentioned a proposed study on whether listening to a classical music concert would have an effect on the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Preliminary results are in and are looking positive. The thinking seems to be that the effect is due to music causing a release of dopamine, low levels of which cause the Parkinson's symptoms.

The study involved three concerts, one by a string quartet, one by a wind quintet and one by a brass quintet. I wish more symphonic organizations would put more effort into chamber music and looking for new ways to serve their communities as the Fort Wayne Philharmonic has done in this case. This post by Jeffrey Agrell touches on classical organizations needing to be more versatile.

Horn Diary

I've mostly settled into the Farkas Deep Cup mouthpiece. The diameter may be a bit too big for me, but since switching back at the beginning of the year there's been steady improvement in control and endurance from that moment of switching. The improvement has slowed, but I don't think the point of diminishing returns has been reached. I so much prefer the tone of the larger mouthpiece I really want to work as hard as I can to make it work. I'm also getting those unsolicited positive comments on my tone that I used to get when I used the Very Deep Cup mouthpiece those first years, but that dried up when I was on the Medium Cup. 

Being a total long term novice at the horn, I'm not sure how best to talk about the tone I'm going for and that various band directors and musical friends, whose advice I value, have complimented. The one thing that has given me more of what I want (outside of mouthpieces) has been playing off the leg. That lets the horn vibrate throughout and fully develop its timbre. 

In his book on the Water Music and the Music for the Royal Fireworks, Christopher Hogwood makes the point that Handel was the first to bring the horn in from the out of doors to play with the instruments of the court. What I love about the horn is that it can have an amazing out of doors sound without having to be brassy. 

Two other things that happened back at the beginning of the year were my getting my first lesson ever and a fine player from the Charlottesville Municipal band joining us here in Orange so as to have the opportunity to play first horn.

The lesson went very well in that no horrible technique issues were discovered and that the embouchure I've worked out using BE looks good and sounds good to a regular teacher. Alternate fingerings were demonstrated and more of them made sense to me than when trying them previously over the years. Since I no longer am responsible for first horn parts, I get to spend a lot more time down on the F horn and get to mostly stay away from all the high stuff on the Bb horn.

Playing second horn is an absolute treat. When I was the only one playing off beats I'd always have to drop out a measure every so often to keep from sliding back on the beat. Just having to follow/be with someone else is astonishingly easier. After playing the first horn parts for so long, playing that secondary harmony under the first parts is a much different proposition, but as I get used to it is a lot of fun. Though it's all written out, it's not dissimilar to throwing on a vocal harmony line to someone else's vocal solo.

My biggest problem right now is getting used to the alternate fingerings. Playing the G above middle C on the F horn is much easier than on the Bb side, but it "tastes" very different. Sometimes it feels so different than what I'm used to I think I'm playing the wrong note. On the other hand, using the third finger instead of one and two for the A below middle C has been a revelation - it speaks more easily, and has better tone and intonation. Besides knowing more now than I used to, I think playing off the leg and having a mouthpiece that allows flexibility have really refreshed my playing. There are times it feels as though I have a new instrument.

Feel Success

Besides the "Regular Read" blogs having to do with music listed over on the right, there are some others I follow, one of which is that of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. As far as I can tell, he's off the scale intelligent, and somehow driven to see things differently than the rest of us. Some posts have ideas over on the weird side of things, others are common sensical, and others are wonderfully "out of the box" thinking and very thought provoking.

In this post, "Happiness Engineering", he lists some of the things he does to make himself happy. One, in particular, caught my attention.

Feel Success - Make it a habit to often do things you do well. It doesn't matter if your best skill is golf or cooking or business or being a parent. Doing one thing well gives your ego some armor to handle all of the little things that don't go quite so well during the week.

That's a cornerstone of my approach to teaching music. My sense is that I spend far more time working with the client helping them "feel success" than music educators do. Rapid technical advancement is not the issue, whereas the client's enjoying making music is. For people not concerned with being first chair or competing with others, but who do want to learn enough to make music in a relaxing and enjoyable manner, that feeling of success sustains engagement and allows for building the motivation to take on more challenging technical issues as time goes on.

I realize educators are dealing with a different population with different natural skill levels and motivations, but one thing I've noticed in community band over the years is that we have never completely "owned" a piece as a group. We've brought pieces close to mastery, but never all the way. Once performed they go away and the sight reading and work on a new set of pieces begins. 

Part of the problem is that we have pro level players mixed in with beginners, and from what I can tell, the pro level folks get more attention when it comes to choosing repertoire. Another factor is that pieces arranged for school bands seem to always assume everyone is at the same skill level (which is logical). Then there's what seems to be "string envy" of the arrangers, so often giving the flutes and clarinets these busy string-like parts and very few gorgeous melodic lines in the middle range.

It seems there might be a niche for someone to arrange music for community bands that would balance things more towards a music therapy approach to music making, where "feeling success" would be more of a factor. The problem is you'd need to have a music educator's skill level at arranging, and they're all going to be much more interested in creating music for the educational environment. 

Another Music Hormone?

This article is a brief overview of the work of David Huron.

David Huron has a theory. People who enjoy sorrowful music are experiencing the consoling effects of prolactin, a hormone that is usually associated with pregnancy and lactation but that the body also releases when we’re sad or weeping. People who can’t bear listening to sad music, Huron conjectures, don’t get that prolactin rush when they hear Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings or Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. They just feel blue. . .

. . .  This is why, he conjectures, the people who like listening to sad music are getting that shot of prolactin, and the people who hate listening to it aren’t. The study is still in progress. . . 

If this hypothesis proves out, it might explain Dave Barry's hilarious antipathy to the music of Barry Manilow, which his wife loves.

. . . Yes, love will make a man do many things. But sometimes a man’s love is sorely tested by a woman. Here I am using the term “a woman” in the sense of “my wife.” Recently, out of the blue, she asked me to do something that was truly repugnant to me, something that violates one of the two fundamental moral principles by which I have lived my life (the other one is, never drink light beer).

She asked me to go to a Barry Manilow concert. . . 

Levitin Memories

With his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Daniel Levitin moved the neuroscience of music out of the labs and into public consciousness. In this column in support of music in the public schools of California he tells the story of how he got started in music in the first place. 

We met 20 minutes a week for a year, just the two of us. Mr. Edie taught me how to put the clarinet together and take it apart, how to condition reeds with sandpaper so that they would play more easily, how to clean the instrument. He showed me how to replace worn pads and to adjust the intricate metal key bars. He taught me how to play it too, how to coax a pleasing tone by breathing from my stomach, how to read music and finger the instrument, how to make a heartbreaking vibrato and a playful staccato. And in so doing, he taught me to respect the instrument, to feel a deeper connection with it. . . 

. . . We now know through neuroscience research that playing a musical instrument confers a number of advantages to cognitive development, especially in training attentional networks. But it also makes for a lifetime of pleasure and companionship. A child with musical ability is never alone and can engage with many of the greatest minds of all time — Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz. We can make our fingers trace the same positions and patterns Chopin did and come to know a little of what it was like to hear the world as he did.

Live Music in Hospitals

One of the very first posts on this blog linked a BBC story on how live music was helpful to patients in hospital. Then for the longest time there were no other stories, but now two have popped up. In a Washington Post article discussing music and neuroscience there's mention of live music:

"We have musicians here who play for people who've just come out of surgery - a flautist goes up and plays for them and these patients, who are in tremendous pain, at the end of the playing, they are almost pain-free. Now we know that perhaps dopamine is playing a role."

This article from Pittsburgh talks about a program providing music in public spaces in a hospital. 

Performance Diary

Last Friday the Kenwood Players performed at the old building of the Orange nursing home, where the residents are mostly wheelchair bound, and this afternoon we played at the new building which has more ambulatory residents. As we had our full compliment of players both times - trumpet, clarinet, trombone, tenor sax, two Eb tubas, drums and banjo - we were able to play Dixieland arrangements. Live music can play on the emotions of audiences, but Dixieland is more specific - it makes people happy. 

Both audiences moved and tapped and swayed and smiled and were very appreciative with both applause and coming up afterwards and thanking us. I once again had the thought that having been a banjo player in a Dixieland group may well have been the better decision than going into music therapy if simply making people happy was the motivation.

The most striking vignette for me had to do with a wheelchair bound gentleman I've been seeing in the lobby for years on my hospice volunteering visits on Wednesdays. I've always nodded and said hello, and his single response every time has been "Alright, honey!", and that's all I've ever overheard him say to anyone. He appears partially paralyzed on one side, so I've assumed he's a stroke victim. To close things down, we do an "Amazing Grace" sing along before ending with the "The Saints". He sang every word clearly, and in tune, and with great tone and feeling. Amazing grace, indeed.

On the audio front, the rooms are similarly sized, but couldn't be more different acoustically. In the old building there are lots more drapes and thicker carpets. In the new building there's a lower ceiling, bare walls and a little stage right back against a bare wall. I clip a dynamic mic into the bell of each tuba so they can be easily heard without having to work so hard, put a condenser next to the clarinet for the same reason, and have a dynamic mic for Dick the trumpeter to announce the numbers, and another for me to use for vocals. All these mics go to two amps. With all the settings the same, today in the new room we were much too loud until I turned everything down by about half.

Part of the problem is that whenever I ask the group to play up for a sound check, they never get to the volume we get when we really get a groove going. We've talked about it, but somehow we're always louder once we get going, so I've learned to dial back the recording level a bit to adjust for that. It might be that the players somehow think "sound check" is the same thing as "tuning note". 

In my experience, most musicians don't really know much about audio. It's rare to find one who knows the difference between a condenser and a dynamic mic. I'm getting better at being a "sound man", but it's been trial and error all the way. At the least, it's been a long time since I set off a feedback shriek. 

The one thing that I'm learning that's been helpful is to set things up so that the amps work as monitors for the players as well as reinforcing the sound for the audience. The better players can hear themselves and each other, the better they play.

Even More on the McGill study

From what I can tell, there have been more articles on that McGill study (previously posted on here and here) than any music neuroscience study to date. Here are two more articles.

This article by Dario Dieguez, Jr, PhD is great for putting the study in context. Here's the first paragraph: 

Humans experience pleasure from a variety of stimuli, including food, money, and psychoactive drugs. Such pleasures are largely made possible by a brain chemical called dopamine, which activates what is known as the mesolimbic system — a network of interconnected brain regions that mediate reward. Most often, rewarding stimuli are biologically necessary for survival (such as food), can directly stimulate activity of the mesolimbic system (such as some psychoactive drugs), or are tangible items (such as money). However, humans can experience pleasure from more abstract stimuli, such as art or music, which do not fit into any of these categories. Such stimuli have persisted across countless generations and remain important in daily life today. Interestingly, the experience of pleasure from these abstract stimuli is highly specific to cultural and personal preferences.

And here's his final paragraph. I just wish he'd said more about the "ability of music to modulate emotional states".

This study provides the first direct evidence that pleasure experienced while listening to music is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system. This phenomenon may be made possible by the ability of music to modulate emotional states and may help to explain why it has remained so highly valued across generations. “These findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry in the brain,” said Dr. Zatorre. “This study paves the way for future work to examine non-tangible rewards that humans consider rewarding for complex reasons,” he said.

The other article, which is in the Washington Post, reads like a blog post. Here's a bit from the middle of the article.

Indeed, this study fits quite neatly into the growing body of research on music therapy, which has suggests that listening to your favorite aria or pop hit can help you sleep better, lessen the pain associated with surgery or conditions including arthritis and fibromyalgia, decrease stress and improve anxiety and depression, among other health benefits.

Salimpoor stresses that her team's results go a long way toward explaining why other recent studies have shown that music and dance therapy can be incredibly effective for patients with Parkinson's disease, which is characterized by low dopamine levels.

"This is the science behind what we see all the time in practice," agrees Nancy Morgan, director of arts and humanities at the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University Hospital, which provides music therapy programs for patients. "We have musicians here who play for people who've just come out of surgery - a flautist goes up and plays for them and these patients, who are in tremendous pain, at the end of the playing, they are almost pain-free. … (sic) Now we know that perhaps dopamine is playing a role."