Why Music

is Compelling:
a Gateway to the Brain
photo: Gianna Badiali

by indre vi skon tas

eing an oper a singer

and a neuroscientist, I straddle
the grey line between science
and art. Ultimately, my goal in both
domains is the sameto better
understand the human experience
and to use that knowledge to connect
with others. The goal of science is
to extract general principles about
our world. The goal of art is to use
personal experience to illuminate
what is universal. And one of the
questions that we need both art and
science to answer is why we love
music.
But to even begin to answer that
question, we first need to consider
what we mean by music. Some say
a good definition is that music is
organized sound. Others add that

I ndre Viskontas

a desire to communicate is a key

component. Still others eschew any
definition at all but agree that they
know it when they hear it. Whichever
camp you find yourself in, one
question remains unanswered: how
are music and speech different?
Diana Deutsch at the University of
California, San Diego has discovered
a series of musical illusions that defy
folk wisdom. One of her most famous
illusions is called They sometimes
behave so strangely: by repeating
one phrase in a long sentence several
times, she succeeds in transforming
our perception of the sound into
music. After listening to the
repetitions, if you once more listen
to the original sentence, it seems as
though she bursts into song when
she gets to that phrase.
The mere act of repetition turns
speech into song. This wonderful
illusion at first seems to depreciate

music, though a cynic might argue

that it explains the popularity of
many repetitive pop songs. But she
has put a finger on a simple but key
insight: repetition is found in music
across cultures and genres. In fact,
it is a good candidate for the one
universal feature that almost all
music has in common. And there are
far more repetitions in music than in
regular speech.
It almost seems too simple to explain
the power of music. And yet, those
of us working with living composers,
whose music is often unpredictable
and difficult to understand, devoid
of repetitions, reserve judgment of
a given piece until we have heard it,
or played it or even simply studied it,
more than once. Its often only after
many listens that a piece begins to
finally sound musical.
So to understand this aspect of music,
lets turn to the brain. The adult

DECEM BER 2 014 - A PR I L 2015

photo: Gianna Badiali

human brain is made up of about 86

billion cells, each of which is fairly
stupid on its own. The mind emerges
from the signals that brain cells
send to each other, and the signals
themselves are simple. A cell either
passes on the electrical impulse that
it receives from the outside world or
from another cell, or it keeps quiet,
perhaps even turning its own volume
down. The power of the brain comes
from its wiring: the connections that
these relatively simple cells make
with one another. Some cells talk
only to a few of their local neighbors.
Others send tens of thousands of
signals across vast distances. Some
are shy and keep mainly silent; others
are chatterboxes.
These connections are being formed
and reformed with every new
experience. So listening to music, and
learning to play music, shapes the
connections in your brain just as does
anything else you spend time doing.

Making associations is what the

brain is particularly good at: thats
what allows us to learn new things
and, more importantly, predict whats
to come. We want to find the pattern
in our random, chaotic world so that
we know what to do next, to eat our
next meal instead of being eaten.
Our brains have evolved to be
excellent and efficient pattern
detectors. We search for meaning
in even the most ambiguous things.
This tendency explains why you often
see faces in clouds or cliffs or other
ambiguous things. Weve adapted to
err on the side of seeing a pattern
where there might not be one, so
that we do not miss any important
connections.
And we enjoy finding these patterns.
We love solving these little puzzles,
it makes life just a little more
predictable. When we detect a new
pattern, we actually get a little surge

of enjoyment: in neuroimaging, we
see a little surge of a neurotransmitter
called dopamine, which is involved
in our experience of pleasure. And
we feel connected to the thing that
generated the pattern.
Repetition, in music, taps into our
pattern detection system. Recently, a
colleague of mine, Elizabeth Margulis,
wondered whether repetition, when
artificially inserted into a piece, can
actually make it more enjoyable. She
took music by renowned composers
Elliott Carter and Luciano Berio,
and added in repetitions. She then
asked listeners to rate the pieces in
three categories: 1) how much they
liked them, 2) how interesting they
found them and 3) how likely they
were to have been composed by a
human being, rather than a computer.
Her listeners rated the repetitionhacked examples as more likeable,
more interesting and more likely to
have been composed by a human

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artist than randomly generated by a

computer.

bit about what kind of music is destined to induce the chills.

Repetition in music, like repetition

in ritualMargulis argues persuasivelycan serve to signal intentionality. If you repeat something,
you are underscoring an important
idea or feeling, one that you intend to
communicate to whomever is listening. This recognition of intentionality
helps us understand the emotions and
ideas behind a piece of music.

Jaak Panksepp, an Estonian-born

(were practically neighbors! as my
mother would say) neuroscientist
in Washington state has studied
and written about this phenomenon
for decades, with an influential
study published in 1995 showing
that, contrary to our intuition, we
get the chills when we listen to
sad music, rather than music that
makes us feel happy. A solo line,
often in the soprano register (lucky
for me), emerging from a denser
musical texture most often caused
his subjects to experience the chills.
He also found that women are more
likely than men to get goosebumps
when listening to music.
He has
since gone on to suggest that the
experience of chills evoked by music
is related to the distress that we feel
when we are separated from someone
we love and that this response
has perhaps evolved to encourage
mothers to respond to their crying
babies. Its easy to imagine many
of the most memorable musical
passages as separation calls: Whitney

Some argue that the most pleasurable

experience we can have when listening to music is to get the chills; that
sublime feeling that shivers down
your spine and raises the flesh on
your arms. Scientists love the fact
that peak musical experiences give
us the chills because, unlike many
subjective experiences, they have a
measurable component. We can track
the physiological changes that accompany this feeling. That means that we
dont need to rely on unreliable humans to tell us that they are being
moved. We can just slap on a bunch
of sensors on a listener and see it for
ourselves. As a result, we know a fair

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Houstons version of Dolly Partons

I Will Always Love You," the guitar
solo in The Eagles Hotel California,"
the Vocalise" by Rachmaninoff, or
Barbers Adagio for Strings" to name
just a few. The solo instrument, on a
simple melodic line, emerging from
a thicket of other sounds evokes that
sublime feeling.Blood and Zatorre,
neuroscientists at McGill University,
used neuroimaging to explore the
parts of the brain that are activated
during the experience of the chills
evoked by music. They report that the
same brain regions involved in other
pleasurable activities, such as eating
or having sexthe orbitofrontal
and ventromedial prefrontal cortex,
the striatum and the midbrain, for
exampleare also involved in this
experience.
When we compare parts of the brain
that were active with and without
chills, we see that the chills set off
the dopamine system. But dopamine,
depending on where it is released,
has many different effects. If its
released in the front of your brain, it
helps you track whats important in
the environment. In the midbrain, it

photo:
Gianna
Badiali
DECEM BER 2 014
- A PR
I L 2015

gives you pleasure. In a third region,

it helps you initiate and control the
movement of your body. And when
it comes to music, it seems that all of
these parts play a role.
But for now, lets focus on the
pleasurable part. In a follow-up
study, the authors measured just
how much and when the dopamine
was released in our pleasure centers.
Zooming in on two regions, the
nucleus accumbens, which is active
when we get a hit of pleasure, and the
caudate nucleus, which tracks aspects
of the environment that are likely to
lead to a pleasureable experience, the
scientists found that before the chills
came online, the caudate showed
a boost in activity that seemed to
anticipate the rush of dopamine that
hit the nucleus accumbens at the peak
of the chills. What can we make of
this information?
To answer that question, we need to
consider what makes a good story.
What creates suspense? In order to
generate suspense, we first need
to anticipate a particular outcome.

Then we wait for that outcome to

happen. Our minds are very efficient
at predicting the future (remember
our propensity to look for patterns?)
and we are intensely interested in
doing so. The same strategy is used in
music: we enjoy surprises, but we find
stories or music difficult to relate to if
we have no clue what could happen
next. The ending is not why we listen
to music, or tell each other stories. Its
the journey that we enjoy.
So the better a composer or performer
can set up the expectation of reward,
essentially building and drawing out
the tension, having first established
a detectable pattern, the more likely
they are to give their listeners a shot
of dopamine and the accompanying
feelings of pleasure.
Ultimately, a growing body of
evidence is showing that music helps
us connect to each other, and if a
listener is not engaged, the pleasure
he might feel is diminished. In one
more study, scientists played pieces
of music composed by Schonberg and
Webern, two composers whose music

is largely atonal, and told subjects

that the pieces were either composed
by a human being or a computer.
The authors found no differences in
the emotional valence that listeners
attributed to each piece, but they did
report that they thought more deeply
about what the composer was trying
to express when they were told that
music was composed by a human.
When listening to the pieces that
listeners thought came from the
minds of other humans, they engaged
parts of the brain involved in
assigning intentions to others; what
we call theory of mind. This type of
thinking is at the core of our ability
to empathize with each otherand
many of us musicians would argue
that music is about communicating
emotions, thoughts and experiences
that arent easily expressed using
language. So as we strive to
understand why music is compelling,
both from artistic and scientific
points of view, we just might also
learn a few things about how we are
able to connect with one another.

Dr. Indre Viskontas is a neuroscientist and opera singer, straddling the line between science and art. She is a Professor of
Science and Humanities at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she is pioneering the application of neuroscience
to musical training, and an adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco. She is also the principal investigator of The Ensemble Project, designed to explore the relationship between music and empathy. She has published more than
35 empirical articles and book chapters related to the neural basis of memory and creativity. She is the founder and director of
Vocallective, a vocal chamber music ensemble, and Opera on Tap: San Francisco, a chapter of the nation-wide organization whose
mission is to create a place for opera in popular culture. A passionate science communicator, Dr. Viskontas co-hosted Miracle
Detectives, on The Oprah Winfrey Network. In 2014, The Great Courses released her best-selling 24-lecture course 12 Essential
Scientific Concepts, and her next course, Brain Myths Exploded, is slated to be released in 2016. She currently co-hosts Inquiring
Minds, a popular science podcast, is a sought-after public speaker, a frequent contributor to MotherJones.com, an editor of the
journal Neurocase and a frequent performer of opera and chamber music.
i n dr ev i skon tas. c om

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