DECEMBER 2014 - APRIL 2015INDRE VISKONTAS18

B eing an opera singer and a neuroscientist, I straddle the grey line between science and art. Ultimately, my goal in both domains is the sameto better understand the human experience and to use that knowledge to connect with others. The goal of science is to extract general principles about our world. The goal of art is to use personal experience to illuminate what is universal. And one of the questions that we need both art and science to answer is why we love music.

But to even begin to answer that question, we first need to consider what we mean by music. Some say a good definition is that music is organized sound. Others add that

a desire to communicate is a key component. Still others eschew any definition at all but agree that they know it when they hear it. Whichever camp you find yourself in, one question remains unanswered: how are music and speech different?

Diana Deutsch at the University of California, San Diego has discovered a series of musical illusions that defy folk wisdom. One of her most famous illusions is called They sometimes behave so strangely: by repeating one phrase in a long sentence several times, she succeeds in transforming our perception of the sound into music. After listening to the repetitions, if you once more listen to the original sentence, it seems as though she bursts into song when she gets to that phrase.

The mere act of repetition turns speech into song. This wonderful illusion at first seems to depreciate

music, though a cynic might argue that it explains the popularity of many repetitive pop songs. But she has put a finger on a simple but key insight: repetition is found in music across cultures and genres. In fact, it is a good candidate for the one universal feature that almost all music has in common. And there are far more repetitions in music than in regular speech.

It almost seems too simple to explain the power of music. And yet, those of us working with living composers, whose music is often unpredictable and difficult to understand, devoid of repetitions, reserve judgment of a given piece until we have heard it, or played it or even simply studied it, more than once. Its often only after many listens that a piece begins to finally sound musical.

So to understand this aspect of music, lets turn to the brain. The adult

Why Music is Compelling:

a Gateway to the Brain

by IndRe VIskontas

photo: Gianna Badiali

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human brain is made up of about 86 billion cells, each of which is fairly stupid on its own. The mind emerges from the signals that brain cells send to each other, and the signals themselves are simple. a cell either passes on the electrical impulse that it receives from the outside world or from another cell, or it keeps quiet, perhaps even turning its own volume down. The power of the brain comes from its wiring: the connections that these relatively simple cells make with one another. Some cells talk only to a few of their local neighbors. Others send tens of thousands of signals across vast distances. Some are shy and keep mainly silent; others are chatterboxes.

These connections are being formed and reformed with every new experience. So listening to music, and learning to play music, shapes the connections in your brain just as does anything else you spend time doing.

Making associations is what the brain is particularly good at: thats what allows us to learn new things and, more importantly, predict whats to come. We want to find the pattern in our random, chaotic world so that we know what to do next, to eat our next meal instead of being eaten.

Our brains have evolved to be excellent and efficient pattern detectors. We search for meaning in even the most ambiguous things. This tendency explains why you often see faces in clouds or cliffs or other ambiguous things. Weve adapted to err on the side of seeing a pattern where there might not be one, so that we do not miss any important connections.

And we enjoy finding these patterns. We love solving these little puzzles, it makes life just a little more predictable. When we detect a new pattern, we actually get a little surge

of enjoyment: in neuroimaging, we see a little surge of a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is involved in our experience of pleasure. And we feel connected to the thing that generated the pattern.

Repetition, in music, taps into our pattern detection system. Recently, a colleague of mine, Elizabeth Margulis, wondered whether repetition, when artificially inserted into a piece, can actually make it more enjoyable. She took music by renowned composers Elliott Carter and Luciano Berio, and added in repetitions. She then asked listeners to rate the pieces in three categories: 1) how much they liked them, 2) how interesting they found them and 3) how likely they were to have been composed by a human being, rather than a computer. Her listeners rated the repetition-hacked examples as more likeable, more interesting and more likely to have been composed by a human

photo: Gianna Badiali

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artist than randomly generated by a computer.

Repetition in music, like repetition in ritualMargulis argues persua-sivelycan serve to signal inten-tionality. If you repeat something, you are underscoring an important idea or feeling, one that you intend to communicate to whomever is listen-ing. This recognition of intentionality helps us understand the emotions and ideas behind a piece of music.

Some argue that the most pleasurable experience we can have when listen-ing to music is to get the chills; that sublime feeling that shivers down your spine and raises the flesh on your arms. Scientists love the fact that peak musical experiences give us the chills because, unlike many subjective experiences, they have a measurable component. We can track the physiological changes that accom-pany this feeling. That means that we dont need to rely on unreliable hu-mans to tell us that they are being moved. We can just slap on a bunch of sensors on a listener and see it for ourselves. As a result, we know a fair

bit about what kind of music is des-tined to induce the chills.

Jaak Panksepp, an Estonian-born (were practically neighbors! as my mother would say) neuroscientist in Washington state has studied and written about this phenomenon for decades, with an influential study published in 1995 showing that, contrary to our intuition, we get the chills when we listen to sad music, rather than music that makes us feel happy. a solo line, often in the soprano register (lucky for me), emerging from a denser musical texture most often caused his subjects to experience the chills. He also found that women are more likely than men to get goosebumps when listening to music. He has since gone on to suggest that the experience of chills evoked by music is related to the distress that we feel when we are separated from someone we love and that this response has perhaps evolved to encourage mothers to respond to their crying babies. Its easy to imagine many of the most memorable musical passages as separation calls: Whitney

Houstons version of Dolly Partons i Will Always Love You," the guitar solo in The Eagles Hotel California," the Vocalise" by Rachmaninoff, or Barbers Adagio for Strings" to name just a few. The solo instrument, on a simple melodic line, emerging from a thicket of other sounds evokes that sublime feeling. Blood and Zatorre, neuroscientists at McGill University, used neuroimaging to explore the parts of the brain that are activated during the experience of the chills evoked by music. They report that the same brain regions involved in other pleasurable activities, such as eating or having sexthe orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the striatum and the midbrain, for exampleare also involved in this experience.

When we compare parts of the brain that were active with and without chills, we see that the chills set off the dopamine system. But dopamine, depending on where it is released, has many different effects. If its released in the front of your brain, it helps you track whats important in the environment. In the midbrain, it

photo: Gianna Badiali

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gives you pleasure. In a third region, it helps you initiate and control the movement of your body. And when it comes to music, it seems that all of these parts play a role.

But for now, lets focus on the pleasurable part. In a follow-up study, the authors measured just how much and when the dopamine was released in our pleasure centers. Zooming in on two regions, the nucleus accumbens, which is active when we get a hit of pleasure, and the caudate nucleus, which tracks aspects of the environment that are likely to lead to a pleasureable experience, the scientists found that before the chills came online, the caudate showed a boost in activity that seemed to anticipate the rush of dopamine that hit the nucleus accumbens at the peak of the chills. What can we make of this information?

To answer that question, we need to consider what makes a good story. What creates suspense? In order to generate suspense, we first need to anticipate a particular outcome.

Then we wait for that outcome to happen. Our minds are very efficient at predicting the future (remember our propensity to look for patterns?) and we are intensely interested in doing so. The same strategy is used in music: we enjoy surprises, but we find stories or music difficult to relate to if we have no clue what could happen next. The ending is not why we listen to music, or tell each other stories. Its the journey that we enjoy.

So the better a composer or performer can set up the expectation of reward, essentially building and drawing out the tension, having first established a detectable pattern, the more likely they are to give their listeners a shot of dopamine and the accompanying feelings of pleasure.

Ultimately, a growing body of evidence is showing that music helps us connect to each other, and if a listener is not engaged, the pleasure he might feel is diminished. In one more study, scientists played pieces of music composed by Schonberg and Webern, two composers whose music

is largely atonal, and told subjects that the pieces were either composed by a human being or a computer. The authors found no differences in the emotional valence that listeners attributed to each piece, but they did report that they thought more deeply about what the composer was trying to express when they were told that music was composed by a human.

When listening to the pieces that listeners thought came from the minds of other humans, they engaged parts of the brain involved in assigning intentions to others; what we call theory of mind. This type of thinking is at the core of our ability to empathize with each otherand many of us musicians would argue that music is about communicating emotions, thoughts and experiences that arent easily expressed using language. So as we strive to understand why music is compelling, both from artistic and scientific points of view, we just might also learn a few things about how we are able to connect with one another.

Dr. Indre Viskontas is a neuroscientist and opera singer, straddling the line between science and art. She is a Professor of Science and Humanities at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she is pioneering the application of neuroscience to musical training, and an adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco. She is also the principal inves-tigator of The Ensemble Project, designed to explore the relationship between music and empathy. She has published more than 35 empirical articles and book chapters related to the neural basis of memory and creativity. She is the founder and director of Vocallective, a vocal chamber music ensemble, and Opera on Tap: San Francisco, a chapter of the nation-wide organization whose mission is to create a place for opera in popular culture. A passionate science communicator, Dr. Viskontas co-hosted Miracle Detectives, on The Oprah Winfrey Network. In 2014, The Great Courses released her best-selling 24-lecture course 12 Essential Scientific Concepts, and her next course, Brain Myths Exploded, is slated to be released in 2016. She currently co-hosts Inquiring Minds, a popular science podcast, is a sought-after public speaker, a frequent contributor to MotherJones.com, an editor of the journal Neurocase and a frequent performer of opera and chamber music.

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