Just returned form completing the Ride for Heart (50K) here in TorontoMy wife had an excuse to go to a bridal shower so I did it solo this year. It’s become sort of a tradition with me to go participate in this event. out of the last 13 years, I believe I only missed one year.
Since I was on my own, I decided to bring my iPod along. Gave me a chance to get back to an audio book I had set aside. The 2.5 hour ride gave me exactly the time I needed to finish This is Your Brain on Music.
Learned an interesting fact about cognitive memory management. There are two types of memory: long term and short term or “working memory“.
Apparently working memory is limited and can normally only sustain 9 items at one time. So our brain uses “chunking” to retain more complex memory structures in working memory, thanks to knowledge retained from the past.
For example, when memorizing a phone number we “chunk” the area code as one item rather than the 3 individual digits, since we know what an area code is for say Toronto.
The book relates the hierarchical style of an organizations vs. a flat or community style. Lot’s of storytelling here including how the advanced hierarchical Aztec society was taken down easily by the Spanish by walking into each city and the killing their king. However, when they encountered the Apache Indians who were a distributed community society, it wasn’t so easy.
It then relates this to today with what’s happening thanks to the internet and entities like eMule and Skype.
… and the disruption they’ve caused in the music and telecommunication industries. The music industry successfully sued Napster out of the free P2P market, but only to be replaced by others who were lawyer proof.
Chop a spider’s head off and it dies… cut a starfish in half and you end up with 2 starfish. The benefits of a distributed neural network.
Reading the book called, “This Is Your Brain On Music” by Daniel J. Levitin.
The book dives into cognitive science to determine the effects of Music on the human brain, and why we are so obsessed with the art. It’s a wonderful read if you are a musician or a music lover. In the end its all about connections, both emotional and cognitive. Which turn out to be one in the same.
Music is pleasurable to us partly because of its predictability: e.g. rhythm. And our brain takes satisfaction in matching the assumed beat with the real one. But it also takes delights when the composer violates the pattern in an interesting way. “A sort of musical joke we’re all in on.”
Emotion is interestingly described as Motivation to Act + Memory.
“We see a body of water after wondering for hours and we feel elated. We drink and it fills us with a sense of well-being and contentment: emotions that cause us to remember where that body of water is for next time.”
So people enjoy certain songs because it reminds them of similar characteristics of other songs that stir up emotions from previous memories stored deep inside our brain. So our taste in music evolves, sometimes starting with songs like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.
Similarity in song is sometimes obvious to us. I recognized the similarities between aspects of “Creep” by Radiohead and “The Air That I Breathe” by the Hollies almost instantly.
Rihanna’s latest award winning album, “Good Girl Gone Bad” had at least a couple of hits based on remixes of previous hit songs by Michael Jackson and New Order. I’ll let you guess which ones.
But sometimes it’s not. I remember the first time being pleasantly surprised when I heard Hewey Lewis was suing Ray Parker Jr. because the song “Ghostbusters” sounded too much like “I Want a New Drug”. The songs were almost identical! But for some reason it didn’t click until that moment.
Some are skilled at recognizing these similarities (like VJ Brewskii, video below). So much so that a new art form called “Mashups” was created, where two or more songs that sound alike are mashed together. BTW, yes this is where the term Mashup originated.
Here’s another example that caught me by surprise… wonder if the similarity played a part in Snow Patrol’s big hit.
