What Is Music?

What Is Music?

From Pitch to Timbre

(Excerpt from the book This is Your Brain on Music – Science of a Human Obsession by D. Levitin)

What is music? To many, “music” can only mean the great masters— Beethoven, Debussy, and Mozart. To others, “music” is Busta Rhymes, Dr. Dre, and Moby. To one of my saxophone teachers at Berklee College of Music—and to legions of “traditional jazz” aficionados— anything made before 1940 or after 1960 isn’t really music at all. I had friends when I was a kid in the sixties who used to come over to my house to listen to the Monkees because their parents forbade them to listen to anything but classical music. Others whose parents would only let them listen to and sing religious hymns. When Bob Dylan dared to play an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, people walked out and many of those who stayed, booed. The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God. The church also banned the musical interval of an augmented fourth, the distance between C and F-sharp and also known as a tritone (the interval in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story when Tony sings the name “Maria”). This interval was considered so dissonant that it must have been the work of Lucifer, and so the church named it Diabolus in musica. It was pitch that had the medieval church in an uproar. And it was timbre that got Dylan booed.

The music of avant-garde composers such as Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer stretches the bounds of what most of us think music is. Going beyond the use of melody and harmony, and even beyond the use of instruments, these composers use recordings of found objects in the world such as jackhammers, trains, and waterfalls. They edit the recordings, play with their pitch, and ultimately combine them into an organized collage of sound with the same type of emotional trajectory—the same tension and release—as traditional music. Composers in this tradition are like the painters who stepped outside the boundaries of representational and realistic art—the cubists, the Dadaists, many of the modern painters from Picasso to Kandinsky to Mondrian.

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What do the music of Bach, Depeche Mode, and John Cage fundamentally have in common? On the most basic level, what distinguishes Busta Rhymes’s “What’s It Gonna Be?!” or Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata from, say, the collection of sounds you’d hear standing in the middle of Times Square, or those you’d hear deep in a rainforest? As the composer Edgard Varèse famously defined it, “Music is organized sound.”

This book drives at a neuropsychological perspective on how music affects our brains, our minds, our thoughts, and our spirit. But first, it is helpful to examine what music is made of. What are the fundamental building blocks of music? And how, when organized, do they give rise to music? The basic elements of any sound are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location, and reverberation. Our brains organize these fundamental perceptual attributes into higherlevel concepts—just as a painter arranges lines into forms—and these include meter, harmony, and melody. When we listen to music, we are actually perceiving multiple attributes or “dimensions.” Here is a brief summary of them.

~ A discrete musical sound is usually called a tone. The word note is
also used, but scientists reserve that word to refer to something
that is notated on a page or score of music. The two terms, tone
and note, refer to the same entity in the abstract, where the word
tone refers to what you hear, and the word note refers to what you
see written on a musical score.
~ Pitch is a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual
frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical
scale. It provides the answer to the question “What note is that?”
(“It’s a C-sharp.”) I’ll define frequency and musical scale below.
~ Rhythm refers to the durations of a series of notes, and to the way
that they group together into units. For example, in the “Alphabet
Song” (the same as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”) the notes of the
song are all equal in duration for the letters A B C D E F G H I J K
(with an equal duration pause, or rest, between G and H), and then
the following four letters are sung with half the duration, or twice
as fast per letter: L M N O (leading generations of schoolchildren
to spend several early months believing that there was a letter in
the English alphabet called ellemmenno).
~ Tempo refers to the overall speed or pace of the piece.
~ Contour describes the overall shape of a melody, taking into account
only the pattern of “up” and “down” (whether a note goes up
or down, not the amount by which it goes up or down).
~ Timbre is that which distinguishes one instrument from another—
say, trumpet from piano—when both are playing the same written
note. It is a kind of tonal color that is produced in part by overtones
from the instrument’s vibrations.
~ Loudness is a purely psychological construct that relates (nonlinearly
and in poorly understood ways) to the physical amplitude of
a tone.
~ Spatial location is where the sound is coming from.
~ Reverberation refers to the perception of how distant the source is
from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is
in; often referred to as “echo” by laypeople, it is the quality that
distinguishes the spaciousness of singing in a large concert hall
from the sound of singing in your shower. It has an underappreciated
role in communicating emotion and creating an overall pleasing
sound.

These attributes are separable. Each can be varied without altering the others, allowing the scientific study of one at a time, which is why we can think of them as dimensions. The difference between music and a random or disordered set of sounds has to do with the way these fundamental attributes combine, and the relations that form between them. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they give rise to higher-order concepts such as meter, key, melody, and harmony.

~ Meter is created by our brains by extracting information from
rhythm and loudness cues, and refers to the way in which tones
are grouped with one another across time. A waltz meter organizes
tones into groups of three, a march into groups of two or four.
~ Key has to do with a hierarchy of importance that exists between
tones in a musical piece; this hierarchy does not exist in-the-world,
it exists only in our minds, as a function of our experiences with a
musical style and musical idioms, and mental schemas that all of
us develop for understanding music.
~ Melody is the main theme of a musical piece, the part you sing
along with, the succession of tones that are most salient in your
mind. The notion of melody is different across genres. In rock music,
there is typically a melody for the verses and a melody for the
chorus, and verses are distinguished by a change in lyrics and
sometimes by a change in instrumentation. In classical music, the
melody is a starting point for the composer to create variations on
that theme, which may be used throughout the entire piece in different
forms.
~ Harmony has to do with relationships between the pitches of different
tones, and with tonal contexts that these pitches set up that
ultimately lead to expectations for what will come next in a musical
piece—expectations that a skillful composer can either meet
or violate for artistic and expressive purposes. Harmony can mean
simply a parallel melody to the primary one (as when two singers
harmonize) or it can refer to a chord progression—the clusters of
notes that form a context and background on which the melody
rests.

The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the importance of relationships between elements, also exists in visual art and dance. The fundamental elements of visual perception include color (which can be decomposed into the three dimensions of hue, saturation, and lightness), brightness, location, texture, and shape. But a painting is more than these—it is not just a line here and another there, or a spot of red in one part of the picture and a patch of blue in another. What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.

Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow (the way in which your eye is drawn across the canvas) are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they ultimately give rise to perspective, foreground and background, emotion, and other aesthetic attributes. Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integrality, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process. And as in visual art, music plays on not just what notes are sounded, but which ones are not.

Miles Davis famously described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of a canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects. In Miles’s case, he described the most important part of his solos as the empty space be- What Is Music? 17 tween notes, the “air” that he placed between one note and the next. Knowing precisely when to hit the next note, and allowing the listener time to anticipate it, is a hallmark of Davis’s genius. This is particularly apparent in his album Kind of Blue.

To nonmusicians, terms such as diatonic, cadence, or even key and pitch can throw up an unnecessary barrier. Musicians and critics sometimes appear to live behind a veil of technical terms that can sound pretentious. How many times have you read a concert review in the newspaper and found you have no idea what the reviewer is saying? “Her sustained appoggiatura was flawed by an inability to complete the roulade.” Or, “I can’t believe they modulated to C-sharp minor! How ridiculous!” What we really want to know is whether the music was performed in a way that moved the audience. Whether the singer seemed to inhabit the character she was singing about. You might want the reviewer to compare tonight’s performance to that of a previous night or a different ensemble. We’re usually interested in the music, not the technical devices that were used. We wouldn’t stand for it if a restaurant reviewer started to speculate about the precise temperature at which the chef introduced the lemon juice in a hollandaise sauce, or if a film critic talked about the aperture of the lens that the cinematographer used; we shouldn’t stand for it in music either.

Moreover, many of those who study music—even musicologists and scientists—disagree about what is meant by some of these terms. We employ the term timbre, for example, to refer to the overall sound or tonal color of an instrument—that indescribable character that distinguishes a trumpet from a clarinet when they’re playing the same written note, or what distinguishes your voice from Brad Pitt’s if you’re saying the same words. But an inability to agree on a definition has caused the scientific community to take the unusual step of throwing up its hands and defining timbre by what it is not. (The official definition of the Acoustical Society of America is that timbre is everything about a sound that is not loudness or pitch. So much for scientific precision!).

What is pitch? This simple question has generated hundreds of scientific articles and thousands of experiments. Pitch is related to the frequency or rate of vibration of a string, column of air, or other physical source. If a string is vibrating so that it moves back and forth sixty times in one second, we say that it has a frequency of sixty cycles per second. The unit of measurement, cycles per second, is often called Hertz (abbreviated Hz) after Heinrich Hertz, the German theoretical physicist who was the first to transmit radio waves (a dyed-in-the-wool theoretician, when asked what practical use radio waves might have, he reportedly shrugged, “None”). If you were to try to mimic the sound of a fire engine siren, your voice would sweep through different pitches, or frequencies (as the tension in your vocal folds changes), some “low” and some “high.”

Keys on the left of the piano keyboard strike longer, thicker strings that vibrate at a relatively slow rate. Keys to the right strike shorter, thinner strings that vibrate at a higher rate. The vibration of these strings displaces air molecules, and causes them to vibrate at the same rate—with the same frequency as the string. These vibrating air molecules are what reach our eardrum, and they cause our eardrum to wiggle in and out at the same frequency. The only information that our brains get about the pitch of sound comes from that wiggling in and out of our eardrum; our inner ear and our brain have to analyze the motion of the eardrum in order to figure out what vibrations out-there-in-the-world caused the eardrum to move that way.

By convention, when we press keys nearer to the left of the keyboard, we say that they are “low” pitch sounds, and ones near the right side of the keyboard are “high” pitch. That is, what we call “low” are those sounds that vibrate slowly, and are closer (in vibration frequency) to the sound of a large dog barking. What we call “high” are those sounds that vibrate rapidly, and are closer to what a small yip-yip dog might make. But even these terms high and low are culturally relative—the Greeks talked about sounds in the opposite way because the stringed instruments they built tended to be oriented vertically. Shorter strings or pipe organ tubes had their tops closer to the ground, so these were called the “low” notes (as in “low to the ground,”) and the longer strings and What Is Music? 19 tubes—reaching up toward Zeus and Apollo—were called the “high” notes. Low and high—just like left and right—are effectively arbitrary terms that ultimately have to be memorized. Some writers have argued that “high” and “low” are intuitive labels, noting that what we call highpitched sounds come from birds (who are high up in trees or in the sky) and what we call low-pitched sounds often come from large, close-tothe- ground mammals such as bears or the low sounds of an earthquake. But this is not convincing, since low sounds also come from up high (think of thunder) and high sounds can come from down low (crickets and squirrels, leaves being crushed underfoot).

As a first definition of pitch, let’s say it is that quality that primarily distinguishes the sound that is associated with pressing one piano key versus another.

Pressing a piano key causes a hammer to strike one or more strings inside the piano. Striking a string displaces it, stretching it a bit, and its inherent resiliency causes it to return toward its original position. But it overshoots that original position, going too far in the opposite direction, and then attempts to return to its original position again, overshooting it again, and in this way it oscillates back and forth. Each oscillation covers less distance, and, in time, the string stops moving altogether. This is why the sound you hear when you press a piano key gets softer until it trails off into nothing. The distance that the string covers with each oscillation back and forth is translated by our brains into loudness; the rate at which it oscillates is translated into pitch. The farther the string travels, the louder the sound seems to us; when it is barely traveling at all, the sound seems soft. Although it might seem counterintuitive, the distance traveled and the rate of oscillation are independent. A string can vibrate very quickly and traverse either a great distance or a small one. The distance it traverses is related to how hard we hit it—this corresponds to our intuition that hitting something harder makes a louder sound. The rate at which the string vibrates is principally affected by its size and how tightly strung it is, not by how hard it was struck…….

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Can Music Transform Your Brain? With Dr. Daniel J. Levitin

What effects does music have on the brain? In this video, neuroscientist Dr. Daniel J. Levitin dives into the world of music and cognition. He outlines how his book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine explores ways that music can be used to boost immune systems and help treat conditions including depression and multiple sclerosis. He also explores the hormones the brain releases when listening to music, from the soothing prolactin triggered by sad music, to the bonding oxytocin release we experience when listening to music as a group. He emphasizes how learning music can change your brain for the better by increasing the connection between the right brain and the left brain, thus boosting problem-solving capabilities!

Dr. Daniel Levitin is the James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University and Founding Dean of Minerva University in San Francisco. His research addresses fundamental questions in auditory memory, musical structure, and the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry of musical experience. He is the author of five consecutive bestselling books: This Is Your Brain On Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, Successful Aging, and A Field Guide to Lies. His forthcoming book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine, will be available this August. As a musician (saxophone, guitar, vocals, and bass), he has performed with Mel Tormé, Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash, Sting, Renée Fleming, Victor Wooten, Neil Young, and David Byrne. He has produced and consulted on albums by Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, and has been awarded 17 Gold and Platinum records.

Daniel Levitin: Music as Medicine