Brain

[shermarama]

I'm reading "This Is Your Brain On Music" by Daniel Levitin at the moment, and it's taking me a while. In many ways it's a good book, and it's right down my street in terms of interests; it's a bloke who was a musician and record producer who started a second career as a neuroscientist, looking into how the brain processes music. Unfortunately the style is a bit wooden, and there are some stupid things in it that are irritating me. He's obviously been told or decided that he should put lots of analogies in, to make it more accessible to non-scientists, but some of the analogies are weak or even unhelpful. Talking about consciousness, he says that the brain assembles a current idea of the state of things from lots of components, individual assessments of what's happening carried out by different bits of the brain compiled into one overview. That's fine, but the analogy is that it's like a child building a fort out of Lego bricks. And really, it isn't; a child who wants to build a fort knows what he wants it to look like and picks bricks that fit in with the idea, rather than assembling all the blocks he's got and seeing what he gets. And even if the analogy was right, did we need one there? Was anyone going to not get that without an example of some physical components being assembled? And in the bit I've just read this lunchtime, another stupid thing - he says that brothers and sisters share 50% of their genes, while identical twins share 100%. That's not totally wrong, but it's not explained and therefore it's lazy and misleading. It's usually taken as read that humans share 99.9% or something of the same genes and of the variable ones that are left, you share a certain number with your brothers and sisters, depending on exactly which genes were on which chromosome and which ones you got and which were common anyway, and that number averages out to be 50%. I can see why for the sake of brevity you might miss out the explanation but someone who didn't know it already might find themselves wondering about the thing with sharing 99% of our genes with chimps and get quite confused. So it's not wrong but it makes me wonder what else in the book he might have explained lazily, something to do with neuroscience that I don't know enough about to question. I've learned all sorts of interesting factoids from this book, but which of them can I trust?

One idea I'm right behind, which keeps coming up again and again and fits with motivations of my own, is that interesting music is often about the small subtle changes. Why is Superstition by Stevie Wonder such absurdly good song? At least in part, it's because it's being played by a real drummer who is altering the exact placing of emphasis and the exact sound the drums make on every single round of the beat - not a lot, just a bit, but enough for our brains to detect it and keep hearing the drum beat as a new thing every time, making it a fresh and living thing. This is something you can either do with state-of-the-art electronic equipment, painstakingly tweaking programmed instruments to give them some sort of life, or you can play in real time on a real instrument once you've put the many, many hours of practice in to have that much expertise in playing it, or you can take the option so much modern music does and ignore that and make music that's half-dead. And really, I'm still much more interested in putting in the practice and playing real-time, living music than either of the other two options. Even practice is so much more rewarding than trying to make a program sound un-dead, never mind playing in front of people. Which is yet another reason I really need to find another band again...

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Yes! I completely agree with you about this being the reason most modern music feels dead. Music has to be done in real time by people*, otherwise it feels like talking to a mannequin.

*even if it's electronica - it sounds better if the artist has paid attention to and put themselves into the seconds when things happen, not just said "ok, 20 bars of that, then do this"

[shermarama]

There's a certain amount of electronica that's still very clearly making music, as in messing around with all the components that can be messed around with to make music interesting, and that's fine by me. It's just that it still takes time and expertise and you can tell when something's been churned out with little thought, whether it's electronica or anything else. That's kind of the good message in this book, really - it points out that our brains are massively good at discerning all sorts of features of music, and if we like or dislike something, it's probably for a good reason, whether we're conscious of it or not.

[toby-on-tour.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, it's Stevie himself playing drums on Superstition.

Youtube throws up several videos of him playing drums:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFCyjB75cjs

I agree about the small subtle changes being, in part, what makes music interesting. I have a book of James Brown rhythm section transcriptions and I programmed some of the drum patterns onto my mac and the difference it made if you varied the emphasis on the hits (as denoted in the transcription) was quite revealing.

[shermarama]

See, this is it; there are no shortcuts. Either you have to get good at patiently editing things off-line, or you have to get good at doing them real time, and I reckon I know which one's more fun.

[toby-on-tour.livejournal.com]

Yes. To be fair (to me) I was just tinkering with the programming to see how much of a difference it made. I'm really not a fan of technology driving music when I'm doing stuff and tend to use it more as a metronome.

Drum machines have their uses (there's a great Midnight Oil track where the drummer bounces off the drum machine, and Kate Bush has made good use of them) but they're either good as something to fight against in a track or as an effect (e.g. Prince and the Linn Drum that had some unique sounds and a oddly human swing to it).

[purplegril.livejournal.com]

I was completely unaware that people do stuff by computer, then try to 'humanise' it. That hurts my brain and makes me cry inside.

It would seem to me that it's pretty obvious that having something played imperfectly by a human being would be interesting and nice to listen to than not. Pfft.

[shermarama]

It's not even that it's imperfect by accident - a skilled drummer will vary things just a little bit, and get lots of slightly different sounds out of one drum or cymbal. This was why I was so doggedly against someone in the Live Music Society here at UCL, who was trying to set up practice rooms for bands with an electric drum kit to keep the noise down. You just can't get the same range of noises out of a triggered electric kit as you can a real one, and if I want to practice I want to play my real instrument, not a limited fake version of it.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Yes! Exactly. You wouldn't expect a violinist to be satisfied with a binary violin.

[drummygirl.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed that book!

But not being a scientist I didn't pick up any inaccuracies - thanks for letting us in on them!

[shermarama]

It's certainly an interesting book, on lots of fronts. And I don't get the impression the mistakes are malicious - he's not trying to mislead, he's just not quite explaining some things properly. Mind you, I've been paper-editing this week so I've got my particularly picky hat on at the minute.