kozz -> RE: who needs other palos than bulerias? (Nov. 19 2012 6:40:33)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: NormanKliman quote:
I have noticed in the case of music, the predictable and enjoyable rhythm or groove is often a gateway to the "zone" or "groove" and I consider it a key to unlock doors in the mind. Rhythmic challenged people don't feel it and experience nothing. I agree completely. It seems that some people will never have rhythm, presumably because that part of their brain never gets activated. Maybe someone knows of some research on the subject. This is you brain on music from Dr. Daniel J. Levetin. I'll also have a few books from early 50's which were used at Philips Research when they tried to compose classical pieces in an electronic way. I've got to go diggin in the basement... From This is your brain on music: (... We don’t usually talk about groove in the context of classical music, but most operas, symphonies, sonatas, concertos, and string quartets have a definable meter and pulse, which generally corresponds to the conductor’s movements; the conductor is showing the musicians where the beats are, sometimes stretching them out or compressing them for emotional communication. Real conversations between people, real pleas of forgiveness, expressions of anger, courtship, storytelling, plan- ning, and parenting don’t occur at the precise clips of a machine. To the extent that music is reflecting the dynamics of our emotional lives, and our interpersonal interactions, it needs to swell and contract, to speed up and slow down, to pause and reflect. The only way that we can feel or know these timing variations is if a computational system in the brain has extracted information about when the beats are supposed to occur. The brain needs to create a model of a constant pulse—a schema—so that we know when the musicians are deviating from it. This is similar to variations of a melody: We need to have a mental representation of what the melody is in order to know—and appreciate—when the musician is taking liberties with it. Metrical extraction, knowing what the pulse is and when we expect it to occur, is a crucial part of musical emotion. Music communicates to us S emotionally through systematic violations of expectations. These viola- R tions can occur in any domain—the domain of pitch, timbre, contour, rhythm, tempo, and so on—but occur they must. Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic. Too much organization may technically still be music, but it would be music that no one wants to listen to. Scales, for example, are organized, but most parents get sick of hearing their children play them after five minutes. What of the neural basis for this metrical extraction? From lesion studies we know that rhythm and metrical extraction aren’t neurally re- lated to each other. Patients with damage to the left hemisphere can lose the ability to perceive and produce rhythm, but they can still extract me- ter, and patients with damage to the right hemisphere have shown the opposite pattern. Both of these are neurally separate from melody pro- cessing: Robert Zatorre found that lesions to the right temporal lobe af- fect the perception of melodies more than lesions to the left; Isabelle Peretz discovered that the right hemisphere of the brain contains a con- tour processor that in effect draws an outline of a melody and analyzes it for later recognition, and this is dissociable from rhythm and meter cir- cuits in the brain. As we saw with memory, computer models can help us grasp the inner workings of the brain. Peter Desain and Henkjan Honing of the Nether- lands developed a computer model that could extract the beat from a piece of music. It relied mainly on amplitude, the fact that meter is de- fined by loud versus soft beats occurring at regular intervals of alterna- tion. To demonstrate the effectiveness of their system—and because they recognize the value of showmanship, even in science—they hooked up the output of their system to a small electric motor mounted inside a shoe. Their beat-extraction demonstration actually tapped its foot (or at least a shoe on a metal rod) to real pieces of music. I saw this demon- strated at CCRMA in the mid nineties. It was quite impressive. Spec- tators (I’m calling us that because the sight of men’s size-nine black wingtip shoe hanging from a metal rod and connected via a snake of wires to the computer was quite a spectacle) could give a CD to Desain and Honing, and their shoe would, after a few seconds of “listening,” start to tap against a piece of plywood. (When the demonstration was over, Perry Cook went up to them and said, “Very nice work . . . but does it come in brown?”) Interestingly, the Desain and Honing system had some of the same weaknesses that real, live humans do: It would sometimes tap its foot in half time or double time, compared to where professional musicians felt that the beat was. Amateurs do this all the time. When a computerized model makes similar mistakes to a human, it is even better evidence that our program is replicating human thought, or at least the types of com- putational processes underlying thought. The cerebellum is the part of the brain that is involved closely with timing and with coordinating movements of the body. The word cerebel- lum derives from the Latin for “little brain,” and in fact, it looks like a small brain hanging down underneath your cerebrum (the larger, main part of the brain), right at the back of your neck. The cerebellum has two sides, like the cerebrum, and each is divided into subregions. From phy- logenetic studies—studies of the brains of different animals up and down the genetic ladder—we’ve learned that the cerebellum is one of the oldest parts of the brain, evolutionarily speaking. In popular lan- guage, it has sometimes been referred to as the reptilian brain. Although it weighs only 10 percent as much as the rest of the brain, it contains 50 to 80 percent of the total number of neurons. The function of this oldest part of the brain is something that is crucial to music: timing. The cerebellum has traditionally been thought of as that part of the brain that guides movement. Most movements made by most animals have a repetitive, oscillatory quality. When we walk or run, we tend to do so at a more or less constant pace; our body settles into a gait and we maintain it. When fish swim or birds fly, they tend to flip their fins or flap their wings at a more or less constant rate. The cerebellum is involved in maintaining this rate, or gait. One of the hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease is difficulty walking, and we now know that cerebellar degeneration ac- companies this disease. ...)
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