The Shepherd School of Music
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
All events take place in Hirsch Hall at the Shepherd School of Music
Friday, March 27
2:45 Robert Yekovich
Dean, Shepherd School of Music
Welcoming Remarks
3:00 Dr. Fred Lerdahl
Fritz Reiner Professor of Music Composition, Columbia University
4:15 Mark Jude Tramo, MD PhD
The Institute for Music & Brain Science, Harvard University, M.I.T. & Massachusetts General Hospital
“Functional Brain Organization in Relation to Emotion and Meaning in Music”
7:00 Prof. David Huron
Ohio State University
“Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music That Makes Them Weep?”
8:15 Dr. Isabelle Peretz
Co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound, The University of Montreal
“Congenital amusia (or tone-deafness): from behavior to genes”
Saturday, March 28
9:30 Dr. Jonathan Berger
Co-diretor of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts
“Projecting and Processing Ambiguity”
10:45 Dr. Gottfried Schlaug
Director of the Neuroimaging Laboratory of Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School
Singing in the Brain: Observations in healthy subjects and in patients with aphasia
1:00 Sarah Rothenberg
Artistic Director, Da Camera of Houston
"The Memory of Music"
2:15 Dr. David Eagleman
Director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine
“Hearing Colors, Seeing Sounds: The Kaleidoscopic Brain of Synesthesia”
3:30 Prof. Anthony Brandt
Associate Professor of Composition and Theory, The Shepherd School of Music
“Under Development: What Classical Music Reveals About the Mind”
4:45 Dr. Ron Tintner
Clinical Assoc. Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience Weill-Cornell Medical College at the Methodist Neurological Institute
“The Neurobiology of Rhythm and Groove”
Sunday, March 29
10-12 Panel Discussion, moderated by Dean Robert Yekovich
Brazos Bookstore book and recording sale and signing immediately after the panel discussion
Abstracts
Fred Lerdahl
Columbia University
On Tonal Motion and Force
Musicians have long referred to tonal motion and force. Here I lend substance to such references through concepts developed in my book Tonal Pitch Space. Tonal space is a multi-dimensional mental schema. Listening to a piece of music induces tonal motion through the space. Stable pitches and chords in the space exert attractive forces that affect motion and expectancy. Events move with and against attractions, creating a sense of subjective agency. Listeners experience tonal motion and force as patterns of tension and relaxation, and these patterns influence the emotional response. I illustrate these ideas with appropriate music, provide empirical evidence for them, and discuss their implications for the cognitive neuroscience of music.
Prof. David Huron
Ohio State University
Why Do Listeners Enjoy Music That Makes Them Weep?
Tearing of the eyes, nasal congestion, a constriction in your throat, and erratic breathing -- your doctor would conclude that you are suffering from a severe allergic reaction. But in special circumstances, music can evoke precisely these symptoms. How does music evoke feelings akin to sadness or grief? And why do people willingly listen to music that may make them cry? In this lecture, I review the physiological, evolutionary, and behavioral basis for adult crying. Extending the argument made in my book "Sweet Anticipation" (MIT Press, 2006), I suggest that the pleasure of musically-induced weeping arises from cortical inhibition of the amygdala, and is linked to the release of the hormone prolactin.
Dr. Isabelle Peretz
The University of Montreal
Congenital amusia (or tone-deafness): from behavior to genes
The last decade of research has provided compelling evidence that the
ability to engage with music is a fundamental human trait, yet the
biological basis of music remains largely unknown. Recent findings indicate
that a small number of individuals have severe musical problems and that
these deficiencies have neuro-genetic underpinnings. Such a musical disorder
is termed “congenital amusia”, an umbrella term for lifelong musical
disabilities that cannot be attributed to mental retardation, deafness, lack
of exposure, or brain damage after birth. Congenital amusia provides a
natural experiment—a rare chance to examine the biological basis of music by
tracing causal links between genes, environment, brain, and behavior.
Dr. Jonathan Berger
Co-diretor of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts
Projecting and Processing Ambiguity
Studies of music cognition generally presuppose a rhetorically grounded listening paradigm. However, a large repertoire of western music challenges this paradigm by introducing a prolonged incipient ambiguity or projection of vagueness, thus effecting or inhibiting the formulation of expectations and contingencies. The case of incipient ambiguity is explored in the context of performance practice, music theory, cognition, and recent research in the neural dynamics of event segmentation.
Dr. Gottfried Schlaug
Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory, Dept. of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School
Singing in the Brain: Observations in healthy subjects and in patients with aphasia
I will present results of two research studies. In the first study, we examined the neural correlates of overt speaking and singing in a group of normal subjects and in professional singers. Our results suggest that a bi-hemispheric network underlies vocal production regardless of whether the words/phrases are intoned or spoken. However, singing showed additional right-lateralized activation when directly compared to speaking. When we compared normal subjects with professional singers, we found regions of additional functional activity as well as structural differences within the perirolandic region and the superior temporal lobes that correlated with the years of singing practice.
In the second study, we examined the behavioral and neural effects of Melodic Intonation Therapy in improving speech output in patients with severe non-fluent aphasia in comparison to a control intervention. Our data suggest that intensive MIT treatment leads to significant gains in speech production. These gains are maintained beyond the period of therapy by functional and structural brain changes in a right-hemispheric network.
Sarah Rothenberg
Artistic Director, Da Camera of Houston
The Memory of Music
As a concert pianist, the music that I love depends on memory. The musical forms cannot be seen, the plots can not be summarized. The landscape of music is followed by our ear blindly, and it is only the ability to remember, the unconscious absorption of musical material, that allows us to perceive a cohesive shape that gives pleasure. Within the confines of a time period that begins and ends in silence, a great piece of music carves meaning in the air. It establishes a grammar of tension and resolution. Building upon a basic concept of departure and return, western composers developed musical forms that could expand to become extended narratives. Out of nothing, a structure emerges, an invisible landscape of place with home, conflicts and wanderings; crises, doubts, climaxes and, finally, return. Through this musical language we experience metaphorically, in a microcosm of time, the trajectory that is life.
The active mind is central to this music’s greatness. The listener’s engagement is a complex mix of attentiveness and distracted daydreaming, only moments of which can be translated into words. Listening to instrumental classical music is a form of thought. The enjoyment of music demands several skills that are not valued highly or exercised in today's high-tech world: memory, patience, and powers of concentration without visual cues.
Over the past 15 years, a combination of personal passions for music and literature, as well as a desire to reach different audiences with classical music, have led me to develop performance programs involving what I call "creative synesthesia." Searching for deep connections among musical compositions, visual art and literary texts, I have found that one art form can offer "clues" into the understanding of another. People can move fluidly from the experience of reading or listening to texts, looking at visual art, to listening to music, if the juxtapositions lead them not from one place to another but towards an integrated whole. The French poet Charles Baudelaire called such connections "correspondences," and reminded the reader that in music, as in every art form, there is "a gap, a lacuna, that can be filled only by the listener." Can one listen and look at the same time? And how does exercising the skills of memory demanded by such music-- for both listener and performer-- ultimately affect one's experience of life? It may be that intense engagement with classical music offers a metaphoric understanding of the passage of time -- invariably linked to questions of life changes, aging and death-- that is increasingly at odds with the "now" orientation of contemporary culture; and that such music, contrary to common charges of obscurity and anachronism, is in fact more meaningful and necessary than ever before.
Dr. David Eagleman
Director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine
Hearing Colors, Seeing Sounds: The Kaleidoscopic Brain of Synesthesia
Imagine a world of magenta Tuesdays, tastes of blue, and wavy green symphonies. At least one in a hundred otherwise normal people experience the world this way in a condition called synesthesia. In synesthesia, stimulation of one sense triggers an experience in a different sense. For example, a voice or music are not only heard but may also be seen. Synesthesia is a fusion of different sensory perceptions: the feel of sandpaper might evoke a sensation of forest green, a symphony might be experienced in blues and golds, or the concept of February might trigger the perception of orange. Synesthetic perceptions are involuntary, automatic, and generally consistent over time. Most synesthetes are unaware their experiences are in any way unusual.
Synesthesia comes in many varieties, and having one type gives you a high chance of having a second or third type. Experiencing the days of the week in color is the most common manifestation of synesthesia, followed by colored letters and numbers. Other common varieties include tasted words, colored hearing, numberlines perceived in three dimensions, and the personification of letters and numerals. We will concentrate here on musical forms of synesthesia, wherein pitches, chords or instrument timbres trigger the experience(s) of colors, textures or shapes. Synesthesia is the result of increased cross-talk among sensory areas in the brain, like neighboring countries on the brain’s map with porous borders.
Synesthesia has fascinated laypersons and scientists alike with its array of sensory amalgamations, but only recently has it been appreciated how the brains of such individuals yield surprising insights into normal brain function. Synesthesia is far more common than originally thought, and far more important scientifically than a mere curiosity. Evidence suggests that we are all synesthetic––but the majority of us remain unconscious of the sensory fusions going on our brains. After illustrating synesthesia in its wild variety of forms, I will show how my laboratory studies these experiences in the brain, using tools from genetics to advanced neuroimaging.
Anthony K. Brandt
Associate Professor, The Shepherd School of Music
Under Development – What Classical Music Reveals About the Mind
Most of the world’s rich traditions of music involve cyclic structure: A main idea repeats in its entirety, either identically or with variations. This predictability makes the music ideal for social situations and group improvisation. Western classical music introduced an important innovation: A musical statement could be broken into smaller fragments and re-assembled into new forms—a process termed development. Classical music’s structural flexibility makes it a particularly rich resource for understanding how we think: Whereas cyclic structure is well equipped to represent a “state of mind,” development strengthens music’s capacity to narrate a “train of thought.” This talk will illustrate how music with development reflects our mental life and might offer insights into formative cognitive features and the elusive connection between thought and feeling.
Dr. Ron Tintner
Clinical Assoc. Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, Methodist Hospital
The Neurobiology of Rhythm and Groove
Rhythm is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events. Rhythms can be characterized in terms of the parameters of tempo and meter there but can often be decomposed into short but more more complex motives or “grooves.” These grooves can form the driving forces of musical compositions. Keil and Feld (“Music Grooves”, 1994) distinguish between the” narrative” and “groove” streams in music and how they are differentially emphasized in various musical traditions. By analogy, the nervous system is in fact organized in hierarchical “rhythmic pattern generators.” These aforementioned grooves may act as facilitators for social interaction. In this talk, we will consider the underlying biology of rhythm and groove and how these can facilitate movement in normal people and those having neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
Mark Jude Tramo, MD PhD
The Institute for Music & Brain Science, Harvard University, M.I.T. & Massachusetts General Hospital
Functional Brain Organization in Relation to Emotion and Meaning in Music
Functional Brain Organization in Relation to Emotion and Meaning in Music Mark Jude Tramo, MD PhD The Institute for Music & Brain Science, Harvard University, M.I.T. & Massachusetts General Hospital When we experience the beauty of music created by Professors Yekovich, Brandt, and colleagues here at the prestigious Shepherd School, there is no sound in our brains — that is, no acoustic energy carried or generated by brain cells. All acoustic information striking our eardrums is transformed into neural information represented by patterns of electrical activity — strings of 0's and 1's whose bits vary depending on the pitch, loudness, duration, consonance, and timbre of each note, harmonic interval, and chord. Neural information about music is conveyed from the organ of Corti in the inner ear to the brain by 105 auditory neurons and, after processing by millions of brainstem neurons, reaches the 108 neurons in the great cerebral hemispheres devoted solely to the processing of information in the auditory sensory modality. These auditory cortex neurons in the temporal lobes make 1011 first-order connections and innumerable nth-order connections with each other and with multi- and supra-modal neurons in the temporal, frontal, and parietal lobes and subcortical regions. Electrochemical signals generated by modality-specific, multi-modal, and supra-modal neurons in this widely-distributed neural network give rise to our perception of and emotional responses to music. This lecture combines knowledge about neurophysiology and functional brain anatomy accrued over two centuries of empirical work in Neurology, Systems Neuroscience, and Cognitive Neuroscience with insights into musical aesthetics and semiotics contributed by Psychology, Philosophy, Musicology, and Music Theory to formulate a model of functional brain organization as it relates to humans' universal capacity to apprehend emotion and meaning in music.