Music is for idiots

[mke]

Sorry, Maestro Barenboim. Music is for idiots and Neanderthals
Terence Kealey
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspap...156563,00.html

THE SELECTION of Daniel Barenboim as this year’s Reith lecturer represents yet another homage to music as a great cultural force. As Plato said: “Music uses sound to educate the soul in virtue” and most educated persons have since concurred. To a scientist, though, music can appear as a throwback to a primeval, swampy stage of human evolution.

Consider a recent paper written by Dr Mario Mendez, a neurologist at the University of California. Dr Mendez was describing a patient who, in his fifties, had suffered a stroke that crippled his understanding of language. So, for example, the patient could not understand a simple request such as “touch your chin”. But after his stroke, the patient, who had been unmusical, discovered a passion for music, and the attending of concerts became his main activity. So deep was his newfound love of music that he would often answer Dr Mendez’s questions by breaking into song. It was as if, following his brain damage, the patient had traded language for music.

Autistic people seem to have made a related trade. The greatest determinant of musicality is pitch: the better your pitch, the more likely you are to enjoy music. And perfect pitch (the ability to sing a note to order) is rare among adults — perhaps only 1 in 10,000 has it. Yet perfect pitch is common among the autistic, as if they had traded emotional empathy for music.

And musical savants are not rare. In his book Musical Savants: Exceptional Skill in the Mentally Retarded, Leon Miller, of the University of Illinois, described 13 people who were indeed mentally retarded. Typically, their IQs and social skills were so rudimentary that they could not speak or dress themselves. But musically they were gifted, not only playing well but also composing creatively. And, typically, they had perfect pitch.

The best explanation for these unexpected findings comes from baby talk.We all, when we talk to babies, instinctively use a cootchy-coo language that is essentially musical. We do so because babies do not understand words but they do understand pitch and the other elements of song — “the melody is the message”, as Dr Anne Fernald says. Dr Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, has shown that babies respond appropriately, with smiles or frowns, to praise or admonishment when delivered in baby talk, even if the language is foreign. “What a good girl!”, delivered in French, provokes a happy smile in an English nursery.

And singing is even better. Babies are even more attentive to songs than to baby talk, and studies on mothers have shown that, in the privacy of their homes, 100 per cent of mothers — even the unmusical ones — sing to their babies because singing so effectively influences babies’ moods.

And the babies respond because, as Jenny Saffron of the University of Rochester, New York, has shown, we humans are born with perfect pitch. But babies lose their perfect pitch when language kicks in. We can see, therefore, how musical savants might arise, because intelligence and language are separate from music. So we can also see that, paradoxically, most adults with perfect pitch have had to relearn it through training.

Biologically, perfect pitch and musical composition are no big deal. Songbirds have perfect pitch and, despite their tiny brains, they can be good composers, employing many of the repetitions that characterise human music such as refrains, rhymes and reprises. So the winter wren will, from the adults around him, learn a set of songs that he will then dissect into shorter phrases to rearrange into thousands of different songs. The chocolate-backed kingfisher moves up and down its own scale, while the appropriately named music wren sings with a near-perfect scale.

And Neanderthals, too, may have had perfect pitch. In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at Reading University, argues that Neanderthals sang but did not speak, and that it was Homo sapiens’s development of language about 100-200 thousand years ago that allowed us to create the superior skills that, in their turn, allowed us to drive the Neanderthals into extinction. Thus music may not only not be of great cultural significance, it might even be an evolutionary hindrance, which may explain why babies discard perfect pitch.

Music still has its human uses, of course, but they are emotional, not intellectual. Music is certainly the food of sex, as the young understand. Geoffrey Miller, of the University of New Mexico, has examined the gender and age of the singers of 6,000 recent jazz, rock and classical albums, and showed that 90 per cent of commercial songs are produced by males, and that their peak age of production is 30 (the peak age for male success in coition, apparently). And music facilitates other drives: religions use music to sustain faith and to suspend disbelief, as do dictators — Hitler and Stalin were keen on music but Churchill and Roosevelt were largely indifferent.

High intelligence and high articulacy can, of course, coexist with high musicality, but none of these are ethical goods, so unless we are to revere the moral examples of songbirds and dictators, we must conclude that Plato was wrong and that music does not educate the soul in virtue but, rather, in lust and superstition. And Barenboim’s claim that “making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy” may not survive scrutiny either. Wagner and Karajan would have disagreed.

[Tom Storer]

This article seems to have no thesis other than "here are a few vague thoughts one might entertain about perfect pitch."

the better your pitch, the more likely you are to enjoy music.

I doubt this. Accurately discern the workings of, no doubt, but enjoy? Everybody enjoys music. My own pitch is terrible and I just love the stuff.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

As Lieber and Stoller said, "Shake the hand of a brand new fool."

[jazzfiend]

Well now, i'm just one happy idiot!

[Sergio Zamora]

Talk about idiotic. Kealey makes some embarassingly crude and overly simplistic conclusions using only the slightest bit of information. He seems to have no grasp on the complexity of the issues he discusses, such as the nature of intelligence or evolution.

edit: on re-reading, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and allow for the possibility that he was trying to be humorous in some odd way.

[Ron Thorne]

I didn't know it was considered hip to be mindless. Guess I'm both.

[Dr Dave]

And now a few words from those eminent socio/musicologists, Jan & Dean:

I am only five years old and my baby's three
(Bom ba ba bom um dab um dab um dab um dab)
But I know that she's my girl just you wait and see
(Bom ba ba bom um dab um dab um dab um dab)
When I say I love my girl, she replies to me
(Bom ba ba bom)
Yeah

Um dab um dab um dab dab um dab um dab dab dab
Um dab um dab um dab dad um dab um dab dab
Which means to say she loves me
In baby talk
To say she loves me
Dib dib dib dib dib

[Gary Sisco]

Actually, a human infant will learn language quicker if you don't cootchey-coo and will come out smarter as well. Talking cootchey-coo teaches them to think cootchey-coo. Their little brains try to make sense of it and can't because there isn't any. They will very quickly grasp adult human language and learn to use it, too, if they are spoken to like normal humans as infants.

Music and language also use different parts of the brain, so, so what? is the real question.

Clearly the writer doesn't experience music intellectually. Shouldn't generalize about one's defects across a species, however.

I've known several people with perfect pitch. They suffered for it, in my experience, since far from all music is perfectly pitched. Makes them crazy, and they made others as well. You don't want to be in a band with one. "Your B string is sharp by a nanotone." Clearly, however, this phenomenon is more than physically based, since the pitches belong to the tempered scale. I don't know if the same phenomenon exists in other cultural environments where the tempered scale wasn't or isn't the norm. Clearly, it's at least partially cultural, however, or it's a mighty slick accident of evolution. It evolved people with perfect pitch in the tempered scale tens of thousands of years before the tempered scale existed? I doubt it.

The really incredible part is the part about how most successful singers have been male. Well, duh. First, they didn't have charts when humans were evolving. Second, there's about nothing that's been effected more by the social, particular sexism, than the music business. So scanning who's popular in the history of recording (not even a blink of the eye in species time) is entirely irrelevant.

This is the kind of "science" musing that belongs in a National Enquirer space filler.

[Frisco]

My favorite music for idiots:
'The Idiot Bastard Son" - Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention

[Tom Storer]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Clearly, however, this phenomenon is more than physically based, since the pitches belong to the tempered scale. I don't know if the same phenomenon exists in other cultural environments where the tempered scale wasn't or isn't the norm. Clearly, it's at least partially cultural, however, or it's a mighty slick accident of evolution. It evolved people with perfect pitch in the tempered scale tens of thousands of years before the tempered scale existed? I doubt it.

Isn't it simply that people with perfect pitch will be able to identify pitches accurately in whatever system the culture uses to identify pitches? To identify pitches by name, you need to have learned the names as well as retain memory of the associated pitches. I'm guessing that it doesn't only work for the tempered scale, and that in places where other pitch-naming systems are used, the perfectly pitched have perfect pitch in the context of those systems.

Wikipedia says "studies indicate that absolute pitch is more a linguistic ability than a musical one" and that "perfect pitch is more common among speakers of tonal languages such as most dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese, which depend heavily on pitch for meaning."

[Vince Kargatis]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Actually, a human infant will learn language quicker if you don't cootchey-coo and will come out smarter as well. Talking cootchey-coo teaches them to think cootchey-coo. Their little brains try to make sense of it and can't because there isn't any. They will very quickly grasp adult human language and learn to use it, too, if they are spoken to like normal humans as infants.

Are there reasons you think this, Gary? It doesn't map to what I've read about linguistic processing in young human brains. Babble-sounds are very important to early processing of speech sounds and syllables (which I don't mean to imply that normal speech isn't useful also). If you have references that show that "baby talk" is bad for babies, please provide it. Otherwise I recommend trying to sound less authoritative.

[Gary Sisco]

I have read several articles about such based on scientific studies, Vince. When babies hear sounds, they naturally seek to process them and find meaning in them. Can I provide footnotes? No. Can you?

For a subjectivist, you are full of orders about how other people are supposed to sound, and sound, well, kind of authoritative in your commentary many times, including your subjectivisms. You seem to be full of advice about how others "should" render their subjectivisms. Ain't any shoulds in subjectivism. Can't be.

[Gary Sisco]

Tom -- If there are, I haven't heard of any, but I don't doubt it. If it does work that way -- perfect pitch for whatever cultural scale preference -- it would rather confirm that isn't biologically based. Homo sapiens sapiens is the same species, regardless of culture or time.

[Tom Hall]

Originally Posted by Vince Kargatis

Are there reasons you think this, Gary? It doesn't map to what I've read about linguistic processing in young human brains. Babble-sounds are very important to early processing of speech sounds and syllables (which I don't mean to imply that normal speech isn't useful also). If you have references that show that "baby talk" is bad for babies, please provide it. Otherwise I recommend trying to sound less authoritative.

I think you are both correct, but are actually talking about two different things.

Vince is talking about improvisational imitative play with babies, using exaggerated facial movements and nonsense sounds, which is common to all human cultures. No one is sure exactly why, or exactly what it's good for, but everyone thinks that it is important to human development.

Gary is referring to talking to babies/children using bizarre fake baby language, instead of normal language ("Do widdle babykins tink dat Mama go bye-bye?"). I think it's pretty clear that when trying to communicate what is going on in the world to children, it's more useful to use real language, as it helps them better understand the connections between language as it is really used and what that language represents.

(And no, I don't have footnotes).

[Gary Sisco]

Good one, Tom. You said it better than I, and it was I was talking about.

Stuff like in your first paragraph, that people do across known cultures, I normally assume is fundamental behavior on a species level (that is, built in).

Do you know anything about the question of perfect pitch and other cultures' dominant scales? That's an interesting question. I've never run into anyone who had anything but perfect pitch in tempered scale, but I haven't had the opportunity to run into many who weren't reared in an environment where that isn't the dominant scale, either.

[Tom Storer]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Tom -- If there are, I haven't heard of any, but I don't doubt it. If it does work that way -- perfect pitch for whatever cultural scale preference -- it would rather confirm that isn't biologically based. Homo sapiens sapiens is the same species, regardless of culture or time.

It seems like just the opposite to me. The perfect pitch part is recognizing and remembering frequencies so their identification is effortless--that would seem to be a common characteristic among many human beings regardless of where they are. To express your pitch recognition you then have to be able to name the pitch, and that naturally depends on learning pitch names within whatever your local musical system is. In other words the perfect pitch talent is the same regardless of what pitch organization scheme is culturally dominant.

I'd guess that dissonance-intolerance is based not on perfect pitch itself but on the perfect-pitch-enhanced recognition of imperfections in tuning within a learned system. But I'm guessing. It would be interesting to know if perfect-pitch individuals in India, for example, are put off by the lack of hard and fast pitch identifications in Indian music, where there is no tuning fork. Everybody has to be in tune with each other, but not compared to an external standard.

[Gary Sisco]

Interesting. Could be. I guess it would be more of a memory thing than anything else and of course that would be bio based (unless trained but I'm far from certain that perfect pitch could be trained, though something close is possible from training, habit and memory).

Strangest thing to me about Indian music isn't the lack of an origin-point pitch standard (even the tempered scale doesn't really have a fixed one, as A can equal different frequencies from orchestra to orchestra). It's that they have an equivalent of an octave (can't remember it's name right now) and everyone agrees how many intervals makes one up -- but not what the intervals are! I don't know if there could be perfect pitch in a system where there's an agreement about the number of intervals but not what the intervals themselves might be. Who knows.

I think music is clearly bio based in humans, being transcultural, as it is in other animals but, like everything human, I think the same is radically effected by the social and cultural.

I completely reject the guy's claim that music isn't appreciated intellectually, however. It is, I know, from my own experience, as I am more than able to appreciate musical things on an intellectual level that don't necessarily resonate with me emotionally. Beethoven is one example. I can understand his music intellectually and understand the same way why people who dig it dig it, but it does nothing much for me on an emotional level. Intellectually I understand it structurally and understand why so many people have found beauty in that structure, but emotionally, perhaps it's too far out of my cultural framework, but to me it sounds bombastic and melodramatic. I can't get with it. But I can appreciate and understand it intellectually and I'm positive I'm not alone.

There is also the more complex issue, which is that there are many, and again I'm one, who can find beautry and be emotionally moved *by* intellectual understandings. It's never an either/or thing with humans; they are too complex a thing for the binary.

Perfect pitch can interfere with relative pitch, so a tbone player that possesses pp once told me.

I don't see how memory has anything to do with having perfect pitch, seems like memory would have more to do with relative pitch. Perfect just is, and it could be an internal point of reference for relative pitch? That could be good as long as you don't confuse the two.

[Gary Sisco]

Perfect pitch wouldn't be possible at all if you couldn't remember the sound of the exact sound of the pitch, so clearly it's partly memory, as of course is also relative pitch. So far as intervals go, both would require memory to recognize one in the first place when heard again. Perfect pitch or no, you have to hear something at least once to be able to recognize it again, and to recognize it again, it would have to be remembered. You think evolution anticipated the tempered scale by hundreds of thousands (millions, actually) years -- by some sort of freak accident?

I don't understand how you connect the initial mental reception of hearing sounds with memory. Now, identifying those sounds is something else, that's where learning and memory enter the picture. Whether you "hear in perfect pitch" or are tone deaf has nothing to do with the initial task of picking up the sound waves, unless one is deaf. Perfect pitch[and tone deafness] is unprocessed sound, before memory enters the picture, to form relative pitch.
All I'm saying is there is a mental reception of sound that may be in pp (which falls into line with the theory that babies may be born with pp). That there is the reception of sound before memory kicks in to determine the actual pitch/tone.

[Tom Hall]

Lots of info here...

http://www.perfectpitchpeople.com/links/

[Gary Sisco]

But you'd not know about pitch at all until the next time you heard and identified the same one -- as opposed to any other sound -- and therefore memory plays an obvious role.

Perfect pitch or not, you can't identify a pitch the first time you hear the sound as all pitches, perfectly heard or no, exist in relation to each other. That's what makes them pitches. You'd not know a B-flat from any other until the second time you heard one.

[bigtiny]

Originally Posted by Vince Kargatis

Are there reasons you think this, Gary? It doesn't map to what I've read about linguistic processing in young human brains. Babble-sounds are very important to early processing of speech sounds and syllables (which I don't mean to imply that normal speech isn't useful also). If you have references that show that "baby talk" is bad for babies, please provide it. Otherwise I recommend trying to sound less authoritative.

Vince....sure you recognize the distinction between "coochey-coo" and "babble sounds" ! =:-)

bigtiny

[Tom Hall]

This article makes a pretty interesting case for the evolution of music in humans being the result of sexual selection...

http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/music.htm

[Tom Storer]

Originally Posted by jazzbluescat

Perfect pitch[and tone deafness] is unprocessed sound, before memory enters the picture, to form relative pitch.

I'm not sure I understand you. As I understand perfect pitch it means effortlessly recognizing the pitch of a sound. If you play an A, everyone who isn't deaf immediately hears the same tone. If you have perfect pitch, you know that it's an A and not something else--which you can only do by a process of identification through memory (hence people with good if not perfect pitch might also recognize it as an A). I, on the other hand, will hear an A and have no idea what note it is. I think when you say perfect pitch is unprocessed, you're saying the identification part happens spontaneously and doesn't depend on practice or a conscious learning process. However, it does depend on memory in the same way that when you recognize the color red you're remembering that the color you're seeing is called "red."

Someone who has perfect pitch but has never been taught the names of notes will not be able to say whether it's an A or not. Someone who was born and raised in the Florence, Colorado supermax prison, and never exposed to any music at all, might have perfect pitch but would be unable, the first time he or she heard an A, to say if it was an A or if it was sharp or flat.

All I'm saying is there is a mental reception of sound that may be in pp (which falls into line with the theory that babies may be born with pp). That there is the reception of sound before memory kicks in to determine the actual pitch/tone.

You hear a sound, you recognize it in relation to other sounds you have already heard--that's memory. Then there's more memory involved in actually naming the pitch. If you play me a note on the piano, then wait a couple of minutes and play me another neighboring note, I won't know if it's the same note you just played a couple of minutes ago or not. If you play a note considerably higher or lower, I'll recognize at least that it's higher or lower--by memory. A person with perfect pitch, who presumably has heard all audible frequencies, recognizes each note, always. I guess it's like having a photographic memory for frequencies.

[groover]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

I've known several people with perfect pitch. They suffered for it, in my experience, since far from all music is perfectly pitched. Makes them crazy, and they made others as well. You don't want to be in a band with one. "Your B string is sharp by a nanotone."

I play with a couple of guys who admit they don't quite have perfect pitch, but a very highly developed sense of relative pitch. I frequently hear comments like that directed towards the other guitar player. Luckily, I play bass, and the human ear is less sensitive to bass frequencies. I never get criticized for my tuning, just for playing too many notes.

[Dennis Gonzalez]

...the better your pitch, the more likely you are to enjoy music...

I have perfect pitch, as do my kids, and we all 3 hate music!

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

.....I guess it's like having a photographic memory for frequencies.

That's what I'm driving at in a nutshell. Pp is just a way that raw, unprocessed sound is received; it doesn't even have to be known that it's sound, isn't in the case of an infant. The tempered scale and good relative pitch are learned and/or processed, for lack of a better term, sounds by man for pleasantness and usefulness. Don't ask me why the tempered scale sounds better than the perfect scale.

[Tom Storer]

We don't really disagree, then, except that I still say memory is a part of perfect pitch. Perfect pitch involves recognizing where a sound stands in the spectrum of sounds, and you have to have an existing memory of that spectrum or you couldn't place the pitch anywhere. Perception itself is a processing of physical stimuli, so as soon as you perceive a tone your brain has already been processing it. The difference between a perfect-pitcher's perception and mine is that the memory-related positioning of the tone in the spectrum of tones doesn't happen for me.

[mke]

Has anyone followed the links Tom Hall provided? According to this article, attributing note names to pitches is an extremely minor subset of what perfect pitch is about.