How We Receive Music

     As we’ve gotten the Music Room up and running this year, what has struck me most has been the audience reactions. Because it’s a very comfortable space with sparkling acoustics, the audience experience is about as good as it gets aurally and socially. At intermission and after the music, people are physically and verbally animated; there are lots of wide eyes, hand gesturings and animated conversations. I always ask as many people as I can what it is they like, and the answers are all over the board. 

     Back in the 60’s I came across Karl Jung’s idea that there are four ways of experiencing the world around us - via thinking, via sensation, via feeling, and via intuition. A recent FaceBook conversation with Kyle Gann catalyzed my realizing those four modes are a great way to talk about how different people receive music, and that since we all have different combinations of these four modes of experiencing music, it goes a long way towards explaining why so may different kinds of music can have such ardent fans.

THINKING - “Theory mind” is the term I use for people who can distinguish instantly between major, minor, diminished and augmented chords and whether they have added pitches like 2nds, 4ths, 6ths, 9ths, 11ths and so on. Theory mind can also hear and name the chord functions in real time, such as the I chord leading to the IV chord, to the vi chord. When modulations occur, they can say what the new key is and how the chords in the previous key were manipulated to prepare the ear for that modulation. 

On many occasions I’ve had band directors and fellow brass players tell me that when you have the third of the chord it should be played slightly flatter than it would be in equal temperament, and I marvel that they can automatically know where in the chord the pitch they’re playing fits. 

Part of Kyle Gann’s FB comment that triggered this post illustrates theory mind:

The other day a cultured woman with a little musical knowledge asked me what I thought made Schumann's music so wonderful. I went into my spiel about his diagonal harmonies, how he'll hit a dissonant note and not resolve it until the chord meant to harmonize the resolution has already passed, and also about how unusual the spacings of his piano sonorities are.

SENSATION - I think one of the reasons the live performances at the Music Room so affect people is that they’re simply hearing the various timbres of the instruments much more fully than what recordings can ever capture, especially if those recordings are compressed down to mp3 levels. Even audience members sitting in the back are quite close to the performers, and the very good acoustics make the aural sensations immediate and fully textured. This means the fast/slow; high/low; and soft/loud parameters of the music are easily perceived. 

When playing the horn, I have to trust that my sensation is helping me play in tune, even though my weakness in “theory mind” means I don’t know where in the chord the pitch I’m playing fits.

FEELING - One way music “touches” us is that it often encodes physical gestures that trigger our emotions. Most straightforwardly, when we see a violinist caressing notes out of their instrument or a timpanist pounding out a martial rhythm, we feel the emotions we associate with those gestures. The neural pathway for this phenomenon employs mirror neurons. When we see someone making a physical gesture, our brain fires the neurons we’d use to make that same gesture (more here). I also think, with zero proof, that just hearing some gestures in music can trigger mirror neurons, even if we can't see the performer making the physical gesture. Less straightforwardly, while phrasings and articulations in music may not have direct physical cognates, they can evoke less specific feelings and moods.

Also, a piece of music can call up emotions we’ve come to associate with that particular piece because of when and where we’ve heard it before. 

INTUITION - Intuition is non-verbal and non-rational by nature, so it’s hard to talk about. I’ve been told professionally I’m more intuitive than most, and while it’s a great help to me as a group therapist, the problem is that I can’t know right away if my intuition about something is correct. With that caveat in mind, I’ll suggest that one way intuition may come into play is those of us without “theory mind” can still intuit the general structure of a piece. I think our intuitive side can also inform us as to how the performers are approaching the music and their connection to the audience.  

Our intuitive sides are probably also part of whatever it is that happens during “flow” experiences  when our normal ego fades, time flows differently, and we feel part of a larger whole (more here).