We hear even within the womb,and we cannot shut our ears as we can our eyes.All sound at all times has to be interpreted by our brains and to do this we have evolved an exquisitely complex set of systems.A team in Canada led by Sandra Trehub,a child psychologist at the university of Toronto,has discovered just how precocious our musical skills are by rewarding these budding critics for finding wrong notes.
As early as six months old,babies display highly developed abilities to recognize musical structures.Sandra Trehub suggests that music and language sound very similar early on because babies simply hear the intonations of the voice.
So even in our earliest stages of development,sound has a special significance for us.Newborn babies clearly respond better to particular voices and the tonal and rhythmic qualities of stories with which they they are familiar suggesting that musical significance precedences verbal.
The subtlety of the response,even at this early stage,is shown by the fact that newborns respond better to recorded voices if the recordings were made with an infant present.The infant can pick up on the special intonation of an adult talking to a child.
Sandra Trehub also argues that such innate,or at least very precocious,musical skills suggest that our biology has given us an evolutionary advantage.
Compare this to the family life of reptiles.Reptiles do not mother their children-indeed,once hatched,baby reptiles may be seen as lunch rather than family!Reptiles also lack the brain structures that connect sound to emotion.We may say that because reptiles do not have dependant children they have not evolved the calls and cries that reinforce such relationships.The 'dialogue of dependency' is one of the reasons for nurturing music at an early stage,preferably pre natal, as a means to eventual individuation through shared internal expectations.The mother is not attempting to pre-empt the place of language,but,in the words of Karl Stern,psychiatrist:- "The vast dark universe of the 'meaningless which exists outside the world illumnated by logic becomes one meaningful structure once we have introduced certain formulative but tentative premises...Before we form concepts,before we think in words,and before we begin to think in logical abstractions,we go through an 'infantile' phase in which the universe of our mind consists of sensation and imagery.The connection between that preconceptual rock bottom and that upper layer of logical conceptual thinking is mysterious.But it is not unfathomable".
Music,properly presented;is the catalyst of language,the bedrock of perception.
We all tend to accept music as a package deal.We just hear a tune and remember it,and take it for granted that we can do these things.It's only when we lose a specific skill,and suddenly the whole system falls apart,that we realise the appreciation of music requires incredibly sophisticated organisations within the brain.
Psychologist Isabelle Peretz of the university of Monteral is studying the very tiny number of people who suffer from 'amusia'-the loss of their musical faculty as a result of spefic brain damage.One patient cannot even recognize the 'Marseillaise'(though she is french) or 'happy birthday'.Peretz says the apparently simple ability to recognize 'happy birthday' just by the tune requires at least ten systems of the brain.
This patient's situation shows how specifically her loss is confined to the musical domain,since her speech organisation and understanding of language is intact,as is her ability to interpret enviromental sounds and recognize familiar voices and musical instruments.
The patient also has a severely impaired short term musical memory.If she hears certain notes and then totally dissimilar ones,she is unable to say whether they match or not.Yet remarkably,although she has lost her ability to recognize even the simplest structure in music-its intellectual aspects-she is still fully alive to the emotional content.
Zatorre acknowledges the truism that listening to music involves the whole of the brain.Nevertheless if specific brain areas can be identified as responsible for specific musical functions,the neurological nature of of musical response may be revealed.
Using PET scans Zatorre first compared the effects of tonal music as against bursts of 'unmusical' noise of similar length.'Tonal music elicited clear responses in the right temporal lobe-associated with emotion and meaning.
Subjects were also asked to ,even though not professionally trained musicians,to imagine they were listening to music.Although the activity was less marked,similar patterns of response occured in the right temporal lobe.This surprising result should not be glossed over:
Neurologists now believe that we experience the world by means of a constant interplay between our internalised expectations (based on previous experience) and a monitoring through our senses of the actual events unfolding around us.
A well balanced ,healthy,flexible and imaginative mind can cope creatively with events as long as they stay within tolerable limits.Gross external trauma,such as shock,hysteria or amnesia,can create a breakdown by overloading the brain system and internalised 'expectations'.Even fairly average events can be overwhelming for those whose 'aural' inner reference points are out of synchronisation with the risks presented by the 'sensous' world.
Philosophers have argued since time immemorial about whether 'reality' is internal (subjective) or external (objective).Zatorre's work suggests ground for the hypothesis that 'reality' may be an interaction of both.
Another question follows hard on the heels of Zatorre's observation of music associated activity in the occipital (visual) area.This area is theoretically only associated with visualisation,BUT MUSIC STIMULATES IT EVEN WHEN OUR EYES ARE CLOSED....
One theory is that all imagination (internally evoked events) involves visualisation.We may feel this to be true,but science has yet to discover why.
The real point is this:-does one have to have an 'out of body experience' in order to visualize?The best muscians would apparently contradict this hypothesis.The very real tension within any framework which presents 'enhanced abilities' of any kind,at the expense of the immediately sensual (that which can be perceived through the five senses without the crutch of 'altered states'),is basically at war with itself.
It is the task of the competent musician to reconcile the unspoken with the apparent.
Music, Maths and Intelligence