The worth of a note

I once shared a house with two young women who went to the same grad school I did. At our breakfast table, one of them, Lara, would always tell me and Amber, our other friend, about her animal rescue stories. I could never forget the time she was so excited to tell us about the owl she rescued. Apparently, the owl ran smack against the windshield of a speeding car and injured its (what else) one of its big eyes. She recounted in graphic detail how she had to put back the owl’s eye, with maggots in tow, into its socket again while I tried to eat my omelet in vain (now you know why I chose to do science writing instead of doing nature rescues myself.) You think I have odd friends? Well, tell that to Daniel Levitin, former band player in the 70s who is now a neuroscientist trying to find out how our brain behaves when set to music. In his book "Your Brain on Music. The Science of a Human Obsession" (Penguin Book, NY: 2006), he tells you of someone who made an owl play the Blue Danube.

It is not so much that he made the owl play the Blue Danube but how he did it. Apparently, Levitin’s friend who was a grad student then, had this hypothesis that not only humans have this strange characteristic of filling in a missing sound (technically called a "fundamental") with what harmonizes with the rest of the music being heard; so for reasons not made known to the non-experimenting public, he chose an owl as proof. To make a long technical story short, he hooked some electrodes in the owl’s brain part that processes sounds while he played the Blue Danube with the missing notes. He found that indeed the neurons fired at the same rate as the missing notes. He then hooked these firing neurons to an amplifier and whola, as Levitin wrote, the owl’s brain went "ba da da da da, deet deet deet deet." I don’t know about you but an owl playing that famous waltz is wide-eyed proof for me that Strauss is not just for waltzing human Matildas in audacious Tattler-worthy gowns. (Note: Please do not try this at home and place electrodes in your pet’s brain and hook it on to an amplifier, especially if you are going to play inane music unless you are doing a study on torture).

In fact, this is what surprised scientists in a study they did publish in the forthcoming April issue of Nature Neuroscience, also reported in Livescience.com. They studied the effect of musical training on language learning, particularly, of Mandarin, which is set to tonal nuances. The result was that those who have had musical training learned Mandarin and caught the tonal nuances, even while watching a totally unrelated movie like Men in Black as the Mandarin words played in the background. But that was not what surprised the scientists. What surprised them was that the active part of the brain that was engaged while music helped in learning a language included the brain stem. This is surprising because the brain stem is our most primitive brain region — a structure that we share with other creatures like reptiles, responsible for regulating features like breathing, heartbeats and other things that we need not put on our "to do list" to function. We used to think that music is a "higher order" activity, located only in the parts of the brain that had to do with language and memory. This experiment showed that music is older than our own species, older than our own delusions that we started it all.

In his book, Levitin scoffs at studies that seem to say that music should always be part of the school curriculum because it helps us learn other things that are non-musical as if studying music just for itself is not worthwhile enough. I agree with Levitin. I find that it is very disappointing to look for depth in people who do not appreciate music unless to them, it is a tool to learn something else. We appreciate and learn music for itself. The minute we do a cost-benefit analysis of the role of music in our lives, whether in school or part of our national culture, we lose sight of our very souls. We do not make music in order to sell it; we can sell it because it is music, it is that invisible potion that nature composed which has the power to make your inner cogs and rivets dance to the rhythm of your life. A majestic chorale or a glorious symphony orchestra is the affirmation of our very human souls literally hanging by the note to a nature more ancient than ourselves.

Levitin, in fact, argues very strongly that music is evolutionary — that it is part of the process that we go through on our way to being human, which makes a lot more sense, because we find it, too, in other creatures whose ancestral lines we shared at different points in natural history. He contradicts the famous neuroscientist Steven Pinker that music is simply "auditory cheesecake" — something not intended by nature but a welcome by-product anyway. Levitin focuses on the way the elements of music — tone, rhythm, tempo, loudness — are featured in the courtship of many creatures as well as territorial claims or danger signals to warn each other. We need music. It does not need us for validation that it exists because sound in its many configurations which may be music to other creatures, is a main feature in the natural world.

If Levitin heard Ugoy ng Duyan composed by Lucio San Pedro and lyrics by Levi Celerio, he would describe it as music under which "the infant lives in a state of psychedelic splendor (without the aid of drugs)." That piece of music is so powerful in its ability to bring back that time when we were infants and all the sensory inputs we were getting just melded into one big sensory cradle upon which we could rest the newcomers into the world that each of us once were. That was music in its awesome ancient power to remind us that it was there long before we were ready to hear it as humans, before we could differentiate the notes, before we could arrogantly and idiotically ask "What is music worth?"

We make music because it helped us become the humans that we are. It is not a mere tool we use to learn math or language or some other subject we think is worthier of our budget. Music is an essential part of nature’s groove and it is music that brings us to getting our groove back when we lose our own humanity. To think it is a mere option in the menu in the lives of our minds is to lose touch with your ancient groove. You lose that and you lose the most ancient home you can come back to, in your own mind. If that is not "lost," I don’t know what is.

* * *

For comments, e-mail [email protected]