[Dixielandjazz] DLJazzDigest, Vol 48, # 72_HAPPY NEW YEAR!_with some Musical BRAIN CANDY

[ALOHArose at aol.com]

This is a long but worthy piece about the effect of music upon us all.  
Thought a little *brain candy* might be fun for the new year! I found it 
fascinating. Unfortunately i cannot capture the photos of the brain as it listens, and 
the NYTimes is very finicky about only members signing on. However, if 
interested in trying go to: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/arts/music/31thom.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
My very best to all for a prosperous and melodious 2007...
ALOHA!

By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 31, 2006
Montreal
Daniel Levitin is the rare music scientist to have worked in the music 
business. “Pop musicians compose with timbre,” he said. “Pitch and harmony are 
becoming less important.”
“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” He hit a button on his 
computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two 
notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify it: 
the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”
Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on 
piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in Elton 
John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.”
Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only one note, and you already know who it is,”
 he said. “So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we so good at 
recognizing music?”
This is not merely some whoa-dude epiphany that a music fan might have while 
listening to a radio contest. Dr. Levitin has devoted his career to exploring 
this question. He is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for 
Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, 
perhaps the world’s leading lab in probing why music has such an intense effect on 
us.
“By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired 
really deeply into us,” said Dr. Levitin, an eerily youthful-looking 49, 
surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enormous 16-track mixers that make his lab 
look more like a recording studio.
This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’
s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually 
deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that 
babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people 
experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part 
of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces 
some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested 
that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from 
listening to a recording.
Dr. Levitin is singular among music scientists for actually having come out 
of the music industry. Before getting his Ph.D. he spent 15 years as a record 
producer, working with artists ranging from the Blue Öyster Cult to Chris 
Isaak. While still in graduate school he helped Stevie Wonder assemble a best-of 
collection; in 1992 Dr. Levitin’s sensitive ears detected that MCA Records had 
accidentally used third-generation backup tapes to produce seven Steely Dan 
CDs, and he embarrassed the label by disclosing it in Billboard magazine. He has 
earned nine gold and platinum albums, which he tucks in corners of his lab, 
office and basement at home. “They look a little scary when you put them all in 
one place, so I spread them around,” he said.
Martin Grant, the dean of science at McGill, compares Dr. Levitin’s split 
professional personality to that of Brian Greene, the pioneering string-theory 
scientist who also writes mass-market books. “Some people are good popularizers, 
and some are good scientists, but not usually both at once,” Dr. Grant said. “
Dan’s actually cutting edge in his field.”
Scientifically, Dr. Levitin’s colleagues credit him for focusing attention on 
how music affects our emotions, turf that wasn’t often covered by previous 
generations of psychoacousticians, who studied narrower questions about how the 
brain perceives musical sounds. “The questions he asks are very very musical, 
very concerned with the fact that music is an art that we interact with, not 
just a bunch of noises,” said Rita Aiello, an adjunct professor in the 
department of psychology at New York University.
Ultimately, scientists say, his work offers a new way to unlock the mysteries 
of the brain: how memory works, how people with autism think, why our 
ancestors first picked up instruments and began to play, tens of thousands of years 
ago.
DR. LEVITIN originally became interested in producing in 1981, when his band —
 a punk outfit called the Mortals — went into the recording studio. None of 
the other members were interested in the process, so he made all the decisions 
behind the board. “I actually became a producer because I saw the producers 
getting all the babes,” he said. “They were stealing them from the guitarists.” 
He dropped out of college to work with alternative bands.
Producers, he noted, were able to notice impossibly fine gradations of 
quality in music. Many could identify by ear the type of amplifiers and recording 
tape used on an album.
“So I started wondering: How was the brain able to do this?” Dr. Levitin 
said. “What’s going on there, and why are some people better than others? And 
why is music such an emotional experience?” He began sitting in on neuroscience 
classes at Stanford University.
“Even back then, Dan was never satisfied with the simple answer,” said Howie 
Klein, a former president of Reprise and Sire Records. “He was always poking 
and prodding.”
By the ’90s Dr. Levitin was disenchanted with the music industry. “When they’
re dropping Van Morrison and Elvis Costello because they don’t sell enough 
records,” he said, “I knew it was time to move on.” Academic friends persuaded 
him to pursue a science degree. They bet that he would have good intuitions on 
how to design music experiments.
They were right. Traditionally music psychologists relied on “simple melodies 
they’d written themselves,” Dr. Levitin said. What could that tell anyone 
about the true impact of powerful music?
For his first experiment he came up with an elegant concept: He stopped 
people on the street and asked them to sing, entirely from memory, one of their 
favorite hit songs. The results were astonishingly accurate. Most people could 
hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent margin of error, and 
two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch, a level of accuracy 
that wouldn’t embarrass a pro.
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“When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual recording 
of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,” Dr. Levitin 
said.
It was a remarkable feat. Most memories degrade and distort with time; why 
would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because music triggers 
the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last year Dr. Levitin 
and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how.
Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. 
machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the 
music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the 
tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release 
dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense of reward.
The cerebellum, an area normally associated with physical movement, reacted 
too, responding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was the brain’s predictions of 
where the song was going to go. As the brain internalizes the tempo, rhythm and 
emotional peaks of a song, the cerebellum begins reacting every time the song 
produces tension (that is, subtle deviations from its normal melody or tempo).
“When we saw all this activity going on precisely in sync, in this order, we 
knew we had the smoking gun,” he said. “We’ve always known that music is good 
for improving your mood. But this showed precisely how it happens.”
The subtlest reason that pop music is so flavorful to our brains is that it 
relies so strongly on timbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any sound; 
it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they are playing 
the same melody in the same key. Popular performers or groups, Dr. Levitin 
argued, are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they 
create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song. That 
quality explains why, for example, I could identify even a single note of Elton John’
s “Benny and the Jets.”
“Nobody else’s piano sounds quite like that,” he said, referring to Mr. 
John. “Pop musicians compose with timbre. Pitch and harmony are becoming less 
important.”
Dr. Levitin dragged me over to a lab computer to show me what he was talking 
about. “Listen to this,” he said, and played an MP3. It was pretty awful: a 
poorly recorded, nasal-sounding British band performing, for some reason, a 
Spanish-themed ballad.
Dr. Levitin grinned. “That,” he said, “is the original demo tape of the 
Beatles. It was rejected by every record company. And you can see why. To you and 
me it sounds terrible. But George Martin heard this and thought, ‘Oh yeah, I 
can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry built on this.’
“Now that’s musical genius.”
THE largest audience that Dr. Levitin has performed in front of was 1,000 
people, when he played backup saxophone for Mel Tormé. Years of being onstage 
piqued Dr. Levitin’s interest in another aspect of musical experience: watching 
bands perform. Does the brain experience a live performance differently from a 
recorded one?
To find out, he and Bradley Vines, a graduate student, devised an interesting 
experiment. They took two clarinet performances and played them for three 
groups of listeners: one that heard audio only; one that saw a video only; and 
one that had audio and video. As each group listened, participants used a slider 
to indicate how their level of tension was rising or falling.
One rapid, complex passage caused tension in all groups, but less in the one 
watching and listening simultaneously. Why? Possibly, Dr. Levitin said, 
because of the performer’s body language: the clarinetist appeared to be relaxed 
even during that rapid-fire passage, and the audience picked up on his visual 
cues. The reverse was also true: when the clarinetist played in a subdued way but 
appeared animated, the people with only video felt more tension than those 
with only audio.
In another, similar experiment the clarinetist fell silent for a few bars. 
This time the viewers watching the video maintained a higher level of excitement 
because they could see that he was gearing up to launch into a new passage. 
The audio-only listeners had no such visual cues, and they regarded the silence 
as much less exciting.
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This spring Dr. Levitin began an even more involved experiment to determine 
how much emotion is conveyed by live performers. In April he took participants 
in a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert — the conductor Keith Lockhart, five of 
the musicians and 15 audience members — and wired them with sensors to 
measure their state of arousal, including heart rate, body movements and muscle 
tension.
At one point during the performance Mr. Lockhart swung his wrist with such 
force that a sensor attached to his cuff went flying off. Dr. Levitin’s team 
tried to reattach it with duct tape, until the conductor objected — “Did you 
just put duct tape on an Armani?” he asked — and lighter surgical tape was used 
instead.
The point of the experiment is to determine whether the conductor creates 
noticeable changes in the emotional tenor of the performance. Dr. Levitin says he 
suspects there’s a domino effect: the conductor becomes particularly 
animated, transmits this to the orchestra and then to the audience, in a matter of 
seconds. Mr. Lockhart is skeptical. “As a conductor,” he said, “I’m a causatory 
force for music, but I’m not a causatory force for emotion.” But Dr. Levitin 
is still crunching the data.
“It might not turn out to be like that,” he said, “But wouldn’t it be cool 
if it did?”
Dr. Levitin’s work has occasionally undermined some cherished beliefs about 
music. For example recent years have seen an explosion of “Baby Mozart” videos 
and toys, based on the idea — popular since the ’80s — that musical and 
mathematical ability are inherently linked.
But Dr. Levitin argued that this could not be true, based on his study of 
people with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that leaves people with low 
intelligence. Their peak mental capacities are typically those of young child, 
with no ability to calculate quantities. Dr. Levitin once asked a woman with 
Williams to hold up her hand for five seconds; she left it in the air for a 
minute and a half. “No concept of time at all,” he said, “and definitely no math.”

Yet people with Williams possess unusually high levels of musical ability. 
One Williams boy Dr. Levitin met was so poorly coordinated he could not open the 
case to his clarinet. But once he was holding the instrument, his 
coordination problems vanished, and he could play fluidly. Music cannot be indispensably 
correlated with math, Dr. Levitin noted, if Williams people can play music. He 
is now working on a study that compares autistics — some of whom have 
excellent mathematical ability, but little musical ability — to people with Williams; 
in the long run, he said, he thinks it could help shed light on why autistic 
brains develop so differently.
Not all of Dr. Levitin’s idea have been easily accepted. He argues, for 
example, that music is an evolutionary adaptation: something that men developed as 
a way to demonstrate reproductive fitness. (Before you laugh, consider the sex 
lives of today’s male rock stars.) Music also helped social groups cohere. “
Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it 
years ago,” he said.
But Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard known for his defense of 
evolutionary psychology, has publicly disparaged this idea. Dr. Pinker has 
called music “auditory cheesecake,” something pleasant but not evolutionarily 
nutritious. If it is a sexual signal for reproduction, then why, Dr. Pinker 
asked, does “a 60-year-old woman enjoy listening to classical music when she’s 
alone at home?” Dr. Levitin wrote an entire chapter refuting Dr. Pinker’s 
arguments; when I asked Dr. Pinker about Dr. Levitin’s book he said he hadn’t read 
it.
Nonetheless Dr. Levitin plugs on, and sometimes still plugs in. He continues 
to perform music, doing several gigs a year with Diminished Faculties, a 
ragtag band composed entirely of professors and students at McGill. On a recent 
December afternoon members assembled in a campus ballroom to do a sound check for 
their performance that evening at a holiday party. Playing a blue 
Stratocaster, Dr. Levitin crooned the Chris Isaak song “Wicked Game.” “I’m not a great 
guitarist, and I’m not a great singer,” he said.
But he is not bad, either, and still has those producer’s ears. When “Wicked 
Game” ended, the bass player began noodling idly, playing the first few notes 
of a song that seemed instantly familiar to all the younger students 
gathered. “That’s Nirvana, right?” Dr. Levitin said, cocking his head and squinting. “
 ‘Come As You Are.’ I love that song.”