ETRE Cty | SPEGAU REPORT) a BU er a eT rea Where does it come from, and why do we love it so much? Cosmic strings Hot, dense and back in businessresulting musi what the octaves, thi physical reason for this. Astring tuned to ‘middle C say doesn’t just vibrate at 261.6 hertz (hefundamental), ut alsoat multiples of the fundamental, knownas harmonics (see Diagram, page 33). In fact, all instruments produce spectrum of sounds ike this. depends at least in parton used to. But when itcomesto ace les flexible, There isa Immutable octaves ‘This could explain why thesus monkeys, who are decidedly unmusical, an nevertheless recognise simple tunes they have earned when these are moved up or down anactave ‘or two, but fail to doso when the tunes are transposed by half an octave (see “Natural rhythm’, page 29) Braun says this suggests ‘our brains are hard-wired to recognise octaves, and his own research reveals that the human, brain detects octaves event when pitch perception is disrupted. For his study, Braun enlisted the help ofa concert pianist with absolute pitch ~meaning shecan identify the pitch of any note played In solation ~and a mood-stabilising dru called carbamazepine, with the curious side effect of downshifting her perception of pitch by about asemitoneand distorting her perception of musical intervals. Even with the rug, she!nad no trouble recognising octave intervals. Braun says this shows that twonotes separated by oneor more octaves share the same neurological pathway, activating characteristic set of neurons within part of the brain called the auditory thalamus (Hearing Research, vol 210, p85). 80 while the ability to recognise octaves appears ta be innate, we learn other musial intervals in much the as children learn languages. ‘There's something liberating about knowing that our appreciation of musicisa mixture of both natureand nurture. It means that over time wecan come to enjoy sounds that we initially found offensive. Ttalso explains the long list of musicians who were once considered avant garde but are now seen 3 | Newscieti|23 Febuary2008 Cover story | Roots of music It's just an illusion Music is partly a trick of the brain. Don't believe everything you hear, says psychologist Daniel Levitin |IMAGINE that you stretch a pillowcase tightly across the opening of a bucket, and different people throw ping-pong ballsatit from different distances. They can each throw as many ballsas they ike,and as often as they like. Your job isto figure out, just by looking athow the pillowcase moves up and down, how many people there are, who they areand whether they are walking towards you, away from you or standing til This is essentially the problem your auditory system has tocontend with when ituses the eardrum as the gateway to hearing. Sound is transmitted through the airby ‘molecules vibrating at certsn frequencies. ‘These bombard the eardrum, causing it to ‘wiggle in and out dependingon how hard they bitit related tothe volume, oramplitude, of the sound) and how fast they are vibrating (related to what we call pitch). But there is nothingin the molecules that tells the ceardrum where they came from, or which lonesare associated with which object. Voices may be mixed in with other voices, or the soundsof machines, wind and footsteps, Most cof the time the input is incomplete or ambiguous. So how does the brain figure out, ‘rom this disorganised mixcure of molecules beating against a membrane, what is out there inthe world? “Most people assume that the world is just as they perceive it tobe. Yet experiments have forced researchers, including myself, to confront the reality that this isnot the case, ‘What weactually hear is the end ofa long chain of mental events that give rise toan Impression ~a mental image-of the physical ‘world, Nowhere is this more striking than in the perceptual illusion in which our brain Imposes structure and order ona sequence of sounds tocreate what we cll music. The chain of mental events begins witha process called feature extraction. The brain, ‘extracts base, low-level features from the ‘music, using specialised neural networks that ‘decompose the signal into information ahs spate time Daniel Levitin works with about pitch, timbre, spatial location, loudness, reverberant envionment, tone durations and the onset times for different rotes (and for different components of tones). Thisbottom-up processing of basicelements, ‘occurs inthe peripheral and phylogenetically older parts of ourbrains. Next comes 2 ‘process called integration. Parts of the higher brain-mostly inthe frontal cortex receive the basic features from lower brain regions and work top-down to integrate them into.a perceptual whole. 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