A few in the audience for Steven Brown’s lecture “From Mode to Emotion in Musical Communication” here in Washington, D.C., last night weren’t quite ready to receive the conclusions he pitched. Instead of reinforcing our idea that music induces great emotion in the listener, he said, well, maybe we only think it does.
“Briefly stated, music is a prostitute,” Brown, director of the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, told his six dozen listeners at the Library of Congress. “Just about everything about music is extra-musical.” For example, music supports prayer and contemplation, dance and movement, story-telling, social bonding, remembering a culture’s memories, and reinforcing morality or ideas such as patriotism.
In Western societies, “we’re so accustomed to thinking about music for music’s sake,” Brown said, but that take on the art is “very rare in terms of musical history and musical culture. Most music has a connection with other things in society. It can reinforce other messages.”
But, one member of the audience asked, why does a passage in Beethoven move me to tears? And, said another, why do I hear a certain thunderous piece of music in my head when I’m angry? These are individual reactions, and true, Brown said. But they aren’t consistent or predictable across cultures or even among similar groups.
“People assume sad music will induce sadness, and it can—but it’s weak,” Brown said. The major induced effect is an aesthetic, thinking sort of response, along the lines of liking or disliking, not a deep emotion. He cited research where people listened to music then described what they thought about the music and what their mood was. Though people identified music as happy, sad, thunderous, and so on, their own moods did not change that much. “You say, ‘it sounds very sad,’ but you don’t feel sad,” he said.
“The best thing I can say about music is it works by representing the general sense of positivity/goodness or negativity/badness,” mostly by changes in contrast via scale sets, such as major and minor scale in Western music, ragas in classical Indian music and dastgahs in Persian music, said Brown, who has co-edited two books of essays, The Origins of Music and Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music.
For me, music in the concert hall or piped into my ears can direct my thinking; a certain soulful Bonnie Raitt song can take me back to the time I first heard it when I was really blue. But my reactions aren’t consistent: last week, hearing that song through my ear-buds “made” me feel bluer, but yesterday when I heard it in the coffee shop my mood didn’t change and instead I thought of the haunting harmonies. Still, I’m only halfway sold on the idea of music as merely a handmaiden; must be my Western-style “musico-centricity” showing.
The lecture was part of the “Music and the Brain” series, which is sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Dana Foundation. The next event is March 13; podcasts and some Webcasts of earlier events are also available. [this post also appears on the Dana Press blog—see more good stuff there!]
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