ArtsScience: In the Crosscurrents
David Bashwiner PhD ’10, University of Chicago
Music Theory and Neuroscience
Sept. 6, 2010
David Bashwiner
(Photo by Chris Strong)
I wrote my dissertation (Bashwiner 2010) on music’s capacity to arouse emotion (see also Bashwiner, forthcoming). I did so because I had been composing music for films, and I was struck by music’s capacity to influence film meaning. In seeking to understand this effect, I came to believe that music influences meaning in film by modulating the viewer’s emotional state as he/she tries to make sense of onscreen drama. I thus determined that to understand music’s influence upon film meaning, I first needed to understand its influence upon the emotions.
Does music arouse emotions? Skeptical philosophers continue to argue that it does not (Kivy 2002, Zangwill 2004), but neuroscientific data suggests that it does. The same regions of the brain that are activated by food, sex, and drugs, for instance, are activated by pleasurably familiar music (Blood and Zatorre 2001). Permanently dissonant music activates the amygdala region, linked throughout the scientific literature with fear, anger, and other high-salience emotions (Koelsch et al. 2008). And even for those not enculturated in the Western musical tradition, minor and dissonant sounds are more readily associated with negative emotions, major and consonant sounds with positive emotions (Fritz et al. 2009). Consonant and dissonant chords even appear to be processed in different brain regions (Blood et al. 1999; Pallesen et al. 2005). Music thus appears to have some automatic emotional effects-which may even be universal, and thus innate.
What does this mean for the discipline of music theory and analysis? In my view, we have come a long way with regard to understanding the syntax of musical structure, but when it comes to understanding musical “semantics”-including emotion and meaning-we are still somewhat in the dark (see also Neumeyer 1991). We tend to attribute semantic effects to high level mechanisms, such as association, resemblance, and even propositional inference. I would posit that, in each of these scenarios, while high-level processing may be active on the surface and even be at the forefront of musical experience, the root causes of emotion and meaning may lie far deeper. Such root causes, I posit, include the most basic properties of sounds, which are frequently if not consistently ignored in musical analysis-loudness, roughness, suddenness, periodicity, and so on. Such phenomena produce notably biological effects in listeners, including startle responses, attentional shifts, and changes in hormonal and neurotransmitter levels. Neuroscience can track such changes, and such changes are in turn likely to induce altered states of musical processing. Musical experience, while undoubtedly cognitive, is also biological, physiological, hormonal, and emotional. Musical analysis should find a way to account for this bodily aspect in addition to-and of course in interaction with-its mental aspect.
However intuitive these statements may seem to the reader, they are discordant with traditional musical analytical practice, and they contradict whole traditions of philosophical reasoning. Thus to make such claims, I stood on shaky ground unless I could base them in a knowledge source that was not strictly introspective/humanistic. My turn to neuroscience thus allowed me to make claims that were relevant to a humanistic discipline but which were difficult to support by purely humanistic means. It is in such ways that the humanities and sciences can work productively together to generate knowledge that is relevant to both fields but is not necessarily in the purview of either.
David Bashwiner is currently an Assistant Professor in Theory and Composition, Department of Music at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Bibliography
Bashwiner, D. 2010. Musical Emotion: Toward a Biologically Grounded Theory. PhD diss., University of Chicago. ProQuest (AAT 3408503).
Bashwiner, D. Forthcoming. Lifting the Foot: The Neural Underpinnings of the ‘Pathological’ Response to Music. In B. M. Stafford, ed., A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities-Neurosciences Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Blood, A. J., R. J. Zatorre, P. Bermudez and A. C. Evans. 1999. Emotional Responses to Pleasant and Unpleasant Music Correlate with Activity in Paralimbic Brain Regions. Nature Neuroscience 2, no. 4: 382-7.
Blood, A. J. and R. J. Zatorre. 2001. Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, no. 20: 11818-11823.Blood et al 1999
Fritz, T., S. Jentschke, N. Gosselin, D. Sammler, I. Peretz, R. Turner, A. Friederici, and S. Koelsch. 2009. Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music. Current Biology.19: 1-4. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.058
Koelsch, S., T. Fritz, and G. Schlaug. 2008. Amygdala Activity Can Be Modulated by Unexpected Chord Functions During Music Listening. NeuroReport 19, no. 18: 1815-19.
Kivy, Peter. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Neumeyer, D. 1991. Film Music Analysis and Pedagogy. Indiana Theory Review 11: 1-27.
Pallesen, K. J., E. Brattico, C. Bailey, A. Korvenoja, J. Koivisto, A. Gjedde, and S. Carlson. 2005. Emotion Processing of Major, Minor, and Dissonant Chords: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study. In The Neurosciences and Music II: From Perception to Performance, edited by G. Avanzini, L. Lopez, S. Koelsch, and M. Majno. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol 1060, pp. 450-3. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Zangwill, N. Against Emotion: Hanslick was Right about Music, British Society of Aesthetics 44, no. 1 (2004): 29-43;
