Music and our experience of reality

Jonah Lehrer has a great post on his blog about a recent paper on how we experience music. He included a passage from his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist:

Before a pattern can be desired by the brain, it must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes our auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present, it is annoyingly boring. This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. Our auditory cortex rejoices. It has found the order it has been looking for.

To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the 5th movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with--but not submission to--our expectations of order. He dissected fifty measures of Beethoven's masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven will play incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music's feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its "connotative" meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This "embodied meaning" arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. "For the human mind," Meyer writes, "such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty." And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven's established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, "is the whole raison d'etre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic."

One of my favorite classes as an undergraduate was my freshman year Introduction to Music course. My professor said essentially the same thing: that a piece of music normally ends with a note that was introduced at the beginning, and until we hear that note, there's no sense of resolution. We have the feeling of being left hanging. The paper Lehrer mentions in his book and the current research he summarizes on his blog both support that notion. It rings true for me and creates a delicious image of my brain at work: listening, looking for the pattern in the music, anticipating what comes next...

I remember a night of dancing at Pleasuredome; my friend Phil B was spinning. A man told me I danced as if I knew what Phil was going to play before he played it, and having read Lehrer's post today, I realize that something similar was at work: I'd given myself up to the intuitive dancer in my brain who was anticipating where Phil was going. My joy came both from guessing right and from being surprised, the former bringing a sense of being at harmony with the world, the latter bringing forth a smile of happiness with the novel. I remember thinking many times on the dancefloor that dancing was the continual process of controlled falling down: of lifting the body and its parts and releasing them to the pull of gravity. Not quite surrendering to the music and the environment, but not maintaining full control either. During those years when dancing ws the most important thing in my life, it was not knowing exactly what came next which made the experience so sweet.

(For more on music and how we experience it, I suggest Oliver Sacks' "The Abyss." The article explores the case of a man unable to make new memories and who only feels an integrated sense of the past, present, and future while playing music.)