Music in Brain Waves

Here's a story confirming something I posted on a while back - it's possible to identify what someone is listening to by their brain waves.

To find out, Boynton and his colleague Jessica Thomas had four volunteers listen to various notes, while they used fMRI to record the resulting neural activity. "Then the game is to play a song and use the neural activity to guess what was played," he says.

They were able to identify melodies like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star from neural activity alone, Boynton told the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, California, this week.

The article goes on to talk about how brain function and rhythm appear inter-related. 

David Poeppel at New York University and his colleagues monitored brain activity in 12 volunteers while they listened to three piano sonatas. One sonata had a quick tempo, with around eight notes per second, one had five per second, and the slowest had one note every 2 seconds.

The volunteers' brainwaves – rhythmic oscillations in the activity of neurons – tuned in to the frequency of the notes in the quick and medium-tempo pieces. In other words, if the melody contained eight notes per second, neural activity oscillated eight times per second. But with the slowest piece, neural activity reached two oscillations per second and went no lower.

Poeppel has previously shown that this tuning effect happens when we listen to a conversation: our neural oscillations correspond to the tempo of some signals in speech, such as the number of syllables per second.

The fact that the oscillations did not fall to match the tempo of the slow music suggests there is a minimum pace that the brain can process effectively.

Delayed Auditory Feedback

Here's one of several stories that have come out on this new speech jammer some Japanese have come up with. This paragraph frames the science using singers:

The idea is based on the fact that to speak properly, we humans need to hear what we’re saying so that we can constantly adjust how we go about it, scientists call it delayed auditory feedback. It’s partly why singers are able to sing better when they wear headphones that allow them to hear their own voice as they sing with music, or use feedback monitors when onstage. Trouble comes though when there is a slight delay between the time the words are spoken and the time they are heard. If that happens, people tend to get discombobulated and stop speaking, and that’s the whole idea behind the SpeechJammer. It’s basically just a gun that causes someone speaking to hear their own words delayed by 0.2 seconds.

Music Mapping Speech

The notion that the minor third often suggests sadness in music has been around for a long time. What's new in this article is the connection made to that interval being present in sad speech as well.

The tangible relationship between music and emotion is no surprise to anyone, but a study in the June issue of Emotion suggests the minor third isn't a facet of musical communication alone—it's how we convey sadness in speech, too. When it comes to sorrow, music and human speech might speak the same language. . . 

 . . .Since the minor third is defined as a specific measurable distance between pitches (a ratio of frequencies), Curtis was able to identify when the actors' speech relied on the minor third. What she found is that the actors consistently used the minor third to express sadness. . . 

Music, Movement & Autism

This short article is on some very preliminary work combining music and movement to help autistic children who are non-verbal to learn to speak.

The theory behind the therapy is that the combination of sound and movement can activate a network of brain regions that overlap with brain areas thought to be abnormal in children with autism. Researchers think the intensive, repetitive training on sound paired with motion will help strengthen those abnormal areas.

Singing "Rewires" Damaged Brain

Here's an article from the BBC on the use of singing to help stroke victims regain speech. Nothing particularly new, just the growing awareness of the benefits of music therapy.

By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech. If a person's "speech centre" is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their "singing centre" instead. Most of the connections between brain areas that control movement and those that control hearing are on the left side of the brain. "But there's a sort of corresponding hole on the right side," said Professor Schlaug. "For some reason, it's not as endowed with these connections, so the left side is used much more in speech. "If you damage the left side, the right side has trouble [fulfilling that role]." But as patients learn to put their words to melodies, the crucial connections form on the right side of their brains. 

Dr Aniruddh Patel from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said the study was an example of the "explosion in research into music and the brain" over the last decade.

Speech|Music|Dance

In setting the stage for understanding how music works, the current draft of the learning materials uses the idea that there's a continuum from speech through music to dance. The Horndog Blogger mentioned immediately below has various quotes that show up on his posts. The one that's currently on the compression post is:

"Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.
Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music."
-- Ezra Pound

Such a shame the man had to end up a fascist for Il Duce and then on to St. Elizabeth's. His early stuff has amazing flashes of insight.