Many of us have favorite pieces of music. Over time some of that changes and one may grow to hate something one once loved. I am not sure, even now, I could bear to hear Wes Montgomery one more time, and that is because I liked his music too much, then. And some rock and roll is just now tolerable to me, after I first loved it, since when we physically remodelled our house ourselves and our one helper loved top 100 rock history loud, those months effectively coated any brain receptors I had for those pieces for years to come.
I have loved some music instantly and some of those shared a certain accessiblity. Bolero, for instance, yes, I liked it right away and still do, despite what I gather is a repute for being "easy". A certain Tchaikovsky symphony played by Horowitz in what was it, '43 or '44...
Many bits by the Stones and the Doors, although that got almost knocked ouit of whack by years worth of repetition.
Recently I instantly loved Callas singing Gluck, and Yma Sumac singing 5 or 6 things on a compilation cd.
Since I heard an old friend on the radio back in July I have gotten into a cd grabbing frenzy, when I had been rather still about music for a few years.
Among my amusing to me purchases was a cd of a Leonard Cohen album I had ruined by overplay not once but also a second copy back in the seventies. I was happy ten seconds after it started.
So... I am wondering about brain receptors on this. Trust me, my sense of well being just went whoosh upward when the first words of those simple songs in his old voice, virtually the same album, came out to the room from my wee lil speakers.
So, does anyone understand the brain physiology on this?
No, I don't. Suffice it to say that the song remembers when. Whether it was good or bad, music helps us travel in time.
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patiodog
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 07:47 am
I don't. But I've recently dumped most of our cd collection into a laptop and just let it play like a random jukebox hour after hour, and all sorts of forgotten songs float out and I hear them, out of the context of played out albums, almost as new.
(What a tortured sentence. What a great -- huge, large, vast -- question...)
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boomerang
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 08:04 am
Its been a while since I read it, so I might get it wrong, but in the book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" by the neurobiologist Sachs (Sacks?) talks about a couple of cases of "musical epilepsy". Esentially the part of the brain that stores music would be switched on by these seizures and the person would become their own radio.
I agree with panzade - music can really transport us from one time in our lives to another. How this works physiologically is an interesting question. I'm going to look around some of my brain sites and see what I can find out!
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sozobe
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 08:13 am
Interesting!
I have the mental equivalent of patiodog's random jukebox, though not nearly so reliable -- I almost always wake up with a specific song playing perfectly in my head. The song has little to do with preference, and I'll sometimes have to squint and jiggle my leg against the tempo and read things to get the damn thing OUT. If it's one I like, or even one that hits those euphoria neurons even though I don't consciously like it, it will get replayed over and over until it fades and gets raggedy.
All in my head, mind you, but the most perfect songs are the ones I haven't thought of since I last actually heard them. Then the more I replay them, the mushier and more imprecise they are, and it stays that way if I try to recall them.
There was an article about constructing a hit in the NYT somewhat recently that went into the science of this a bit -- how so many hit songs of various types share certain characteristics.
I think that as part of this, but maybe I read it somewhere else, certain kinds of music, especially low to soaring, have physiological effects. Think choirs, spiritual "uplifting" music.
The stupid stupid song "Oh Sherrie" by whatsisname from Journey had me on a physical high for the day or so that it was in perfect recall. (Certainly not one I had consciously thought of in the 20 years since I'd seen and heard it on MTV...)
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sozobe
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 08:15 am
I think you're right, boomer.
That's me, the human radio.
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patiodog
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 08:20 am
Quote:
All in my head, mind you, but the most perfect songs are the ones I haven't thought of since I last actually heard them. Then the more I replay them, the mushier and more imprecise they are, and it stays that way if I try to recall them.
Wow. That's really interesting. (To me that looks like sarcasm when it's typed out, but I assure you it's not.)
I mean, I know that the more you recount a past even the more it becomes a story and not a "true" memory -- but this is the memory of songs. Could it be that just the act of thinking about something distorts memory?
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boomerang
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 08:34 am
That IS interesting, sozobe. How old were you when you lost your hearing? How wonderful that you have an internal radio; how sad that songs get defective with overuse.
A quick search yielded these two interesting articles:
"A cognitive itch is a kind of metaphor that explains how these songs get stuck in our head," Professor Kellaris told BBC World Service's Outlook programme.
"Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch.
"The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds."
For certain, it is becoming apparent that unexpected and unsophisticated areas of the brain are sometimes involved in interpreting, writing, feeling or performing music. As some research has showed, even the visual cortex sometimes gets into the act. Hervé Platel, Jean-Claude Baron and their colleagues at the University of Caen used positron emission tomography (PET) to monitor the effects of changes in pitch. What they found—much to their surprise—was that Brodmann's areas 18 and 19 in the visual cortex lit up. These areas are better known as the "mind's eye" because they are, in essence, our imagination's canvas. Any make-believe picture begins there. Thus, Baron suggests that the brain may create a symbolic image to help it decipher changes in pitch.
I mean, I know that the more you recount a past even the more it becomes a story and not a "true" memory -- but this is the memory of songs. Could it be that just the act of thinking about something distorts memory?
That's certainly what it seems like with the songs, anyway. It's like making xerox copies -- copying the copy -- and resulting degradation. Like, the first time I think of the song, it's the original/ copy #1 -- quite good. Then the next time, it's a copy of the copy. The next time, it's the copy of the copy of the copy. And on. ("Copy" is one of those words that start to look wrong -- is that really how you spell it? -- when you type a bunch of 'em, but I digress.)
Anyway, that has some interesting implications, doesn't it? Memory is just a sham, I tell ya.
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sozobe
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 08:53 am
Cool about the mind's eye and pitch, boomer. Huh.
I started to lose my hearing when I was 13, fluctuated all over the dang place, pretty much leveled off (profoundly deaf = can't hear nothin') by the time I was 18.
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patiodog
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 08:57 am
Are the songs that play in the morning songs that you used to hear a lot (i.e., hits, songs in TV commercials), or did just one or a few hearings get the song in your head?
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cavfancier
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 09:16 am
I don't know myself, but I have heard many times that the brain stores all memories, good and bad, and they can be triggered by a variety of outside stimuli, including music, even if buried or 'forgotten'. I get these feelings often going through old albums and cassettes (cassettes!! Remember those?) that I didn't realize I still owned. Once I see them though, floods of memories come back to me, including the context of why I bought the albums, the tunes themselves...it's a pretty amazing journey through the past.
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sozobe
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 09:17 am
Hmm.
"Oh Sherrie" booted out whatever was there (the copy-of-copy-of-copy version, too...hmph), and I usually forget them pretty quickly. So it's hard to say. There have definitely been jingles. (A while ago it was an Apple Jacks jingle -- "Apple Jacks, Apple Jacks, cinnamon toasty, apple tasy, Kellogg's Apple Jacks!")
I don't think I could have heard "Oh Sherrie" too often -- certainly wasn't my taste at the time. But I don't think there are many things I heard once -- I'll be arbitrary and say at least 10 times.
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patiodog
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 10:04 am
Little anecdote...
When I was in high school I was in a (very very bad) band. The guy who wrote the songs and played guitar was a guy I'd known since we were little kids; we went way back. We pretty much learned to play together. He played by ear almost exclusively. I had had a few piano lessons when I was a kid (and I had a crappy ear), so I played by theory.
Anyway, a couple of years after I went off to college we were back together over a break, picking out some tunes, and we played one he'd written when he was 16 or so. One of the changes included a transition from a C major to an E major -- which is strange, and it'd taken me some thought way back in the day to figure out lines to play over it. I remember very definitely that this was the original chord change.
Only now, he played it with a transition from C major to E minor -- which is easier, it makes more "sense" theoretically, but it's not how the damn song went. I commented on the alteration, and he denied it vehemently. There was no way he'd ever played it like that, he would never write a song with that transition -- it just wasn't his style. We went back and forth, 'round and 'round on this for a while, and never resolved it. I hadn't given the song any thought for years, and I know (I know, damn it) that I remember it just how it was. He, on the other hand, had played it for years, morphed it -- probably when he got a few pointers from somebody who knew about these things called "keys" -- and the end product was it as it had always been.
Er, so that's the story...
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panzade
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 10:12 am
right dog.
The C triad contains these three notes-C E G and the E minor contains these three notes-E G B. As you can see, the common notes are E and G . But when you play an E Major chord the triad is E G# B. The G# note in the E chord is more jarring after the C chord. Huh?
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cavfancier
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 10:21 am
Hey, at least he didn't throw in any half diminished 7th chords.
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patiodog
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 10:24 am
Yeah, I ended up emphasizing the half step rise (G to G#) in the right hand and the half step drop (C to B) in the left hand. Which is why I remember...
But the point is that he had made the change without even being aware of it, and had revised his memory so that he always remembers playing a minor chord there.
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panzade
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 10:25 am
Yeah, I forgot the point. I do that a lot.
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sozobe
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 10:27 am
Another one, just now -- I was going to comment on how MTV is closely tied up in remembering songs, visual cues -- and how the song jumped into focus again when I was talking about this and suddenly got a clear image of Steve Perry (that's who it was) belting out "wro-ong", two syllables, and his adam's apple jumping, and hearing it perfectly, the slight stadium echo of it. But then looked up the lyrics, and the word "wrong" doesn't appear in the song. :-?
Probably was thinking of this:
""And I should've been gone"
(I was thinking "And I musta been wrong")
"Go-one" instead of "wro-ong." But I was SURE 5 minutes ago.
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panzade
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Mon 9 Aug, 2004 10:37 am
Fascinating Soz.
I like to lurk around the misheard lyrics site. Here's an example:
The real lyrics were:
Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques,
Dormez vous? Dormez vous?
Sonnes les matines. Sonnes les matines.
Din-don-din, din-don-din
But I misheard them as:
Farrah Jacques, Farrah Jacques
Gourmet food, gourmet food
Saute me some tuna, saute me some tuna
mmm mmm good, mmm mmm good
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