Emotion and Meaning in Music

This landmark book from 1956 by Leonard Meyer spells out

"The difference of opinion that exists between those who insist that musical meaning lies exclusively within the context of the work itself, in the perception of the relationships set forth within the musical work of art, and those who contend that, in addition to these abstract, intellectual meanings, music also communicates meanings which in some way refer to the extamusical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character. Let us call the former group the "absolutists" and the latter group the "referentialists."

Somewhere in here I see a clocks/clouds analogy along the lines of reductionism and systemic awareness. Stay tuned...

Shakespeare is the best guide to Afghanistan

George Packer of The New Yorker interviews Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s finance minister from 2002 to 2004. He’s about to throw his hat into the ring of Afghan politics and challenge his former boss, Hamid Karzai, in the presidential election scheduled for August 18th.
Ghani:

“When people suddenly come to office from exile, without any previous history, sycophancy becomes a very high component, because they’re dependent on relationships,” Ghani said when I asked what had gone wrong with Karzai. “No one has a constituency, and the person at the top is bombarded with praise—‘You’re the greatest thing since sliced cheese’—and human beings being human beings, if they hear they’re great, and only a few people are saying no, who are they going to believe? Shakespeare is the best guide to Afghanistan.”

It reminds me of Obama's attempt to escape the bubble of his office. If the information one receives comes from very few sources, the chance of entertaining the whole (sensing the balance of the largest system possible) becomes remote.

If science breaks us apart, art puts us back together

Again, from Proust was a Neuroscientist, Leherer quotes Noam Chomsky:

It is possible, overwhelmingly probable, that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.

The sound of Art changing the Brain

Leherer really makes an intriguing hypothesis. Stravinksy's The Rite of Spring's musical patterns were so new to the audience at the premier in Paris in 1913, that the performance stimulated a dopamine response in the listeners which literally drove them crazy. We enjoy making easy predictions about where music will go, fulfilling our pleasure responses in the brain. When we cannot make any predictions about where the music is going, we

"begin the neural process that ends with the release of dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that reorganizes the auditory cortex. Dopamine is also the chemical source of our most intense emotions, which helps to explain the strange emotional power of music, especially when it confronts us with newness and dissonance. By tempting us with fragile patterns, music taps into the most basic brain circuitry."

Leherer writes that the Rite, essential caused the listeners to overload on dopamine, and experience temporary madness.

Fortunately our brains adjust (via our corticofugal network) , and with repeated experience, we can process the new patterns, stretching our minds, by literally changing our brains.

Plato on Music

From Leherer's Proust was a Neuroscientist:

Plato insisted that music (along with poetry and drama) be strictly censored inside his imaginary republic. Seduced by the numerical mysticism of Pythagoras, Plato believed that only consonant musical pitches - since they vibrated in neat geometrical ratios - were conducive to rational thinking, which is when "the passions work at the direction of reason." Unfortunately, this meant systematically silencing all dissonant notes and patterns, since dissonance unsettled the soul. Feelings were dangerous. At first glance, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring seems like perfect evidence for Plato's theory of music. Stravinsky's orchestral dissonance provoked a violent urban riot. This is exactly why the avant-garde must be banned: it's bad for the republic. Better to loop some easy elavator music. But Plato- for all of his utopian insight - misunderstood what music actually is. Music is only feeling. It always upsets our soul. If we censored every song that filled people with irrational emotions, then we would have no songs left to play. And while Plato only trusted those notes that obeyed his mathematical definition of order, music really begins when that order collapses. We make art out of the uncertainty.


What Leherer via Plato is wrangling with is the cognitive dissonance we experience with music. The tension. What I would add to Leherer, is that the art is in building the tension, and then, how we resolve the tension. Resolving the dissonance. Without the act of resolution, cue the elevator muzak.

The irrepressible plasticity of our brains

From Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist:

"Neurogenesis is cellular evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving. George Eliot was right: to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning. Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis ensures that we are never done with our changes. In the constant turmoil of our cells - in the irrepressible plasticity of our brains - we find our freedom."

Wisdom of feelings

I've been making my way through Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist, essentially about 19th and early 20th century artists predicting contemporary neuroscience. He quotes Antonio Demasio, who writes about Walt Whitman:

"The body contributes more than life support. It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind."

Lehrer writes that one of Demasio's discoveries is

"that feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought. When Demasio's patients lost emotion, they became incapable of making reasonable decisions. Demasio argues that rationality requires feeling, and feeling requires the body."

From Neitzche via Leherer:

"There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom."