Video on understanding music...

[mahavishnu]

http://vimeo.com/54763818
I like their conclusion. Once in a while it is important to remember it...

[Rsachi]

I agree too!
In Sanskrit they say "ahObhAva".

[vasanthakokilam]

Yup, well concluded. Sort of like in the league of what Smt. Dhanammal seemed to have quipped about the 'talking' that takes place in the Music Academy. I guess we can put them all together and say 'To play great music, you do not need to know the theory. To enjoy that great music, you do not need to understand it'.

I liked their presentation style with the motion graphics and animations. In fact, that seems to be the objective of the production with Music as the 'model' to showcase such techniques.

[sweetsong]

What a beautiful video! Thank you so much for posting this here.

[mahavishnu]

Sweetsong: Glad you enjoyed it. I thought it was very nicely put together as well.

VK: Yes, I think the animation technique was the featured aspect. Yet we value music so much, even when we don't understand some features of it explicitly.

There are many theories of why we enjoy music (to geek this out completely, contrary to the video's general message) even when we have no clue about any technical aspects of it.

Bilahari forwarded me this article from the NY times about the value placed on music by an individual (even commercial) and the reward centres of the brain. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opini ... .html?_r=1&

"Our goal was to determine what goes on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he likes it enough to buy it....And we found that neural activity within the striatum — the reward-related structure — was directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to spend. But more interesting still was the cross talk between this structure and the auditory cortex, which also increased for songs that were ultimately purchased compared with those that were not."

This article does take "value" and puts a material spin on it, which is inevitable in the west. It is also very trendy to do this, in this era of behavioral economics. But I think their findings make sense.

[Nick H]

There are other material spins, apart from money, of course --- such as the effort to go out and listen. Or even the effort to stay in and listen!

It's a sweet video, and I should love to understand the techniques used in the making of it! Why? Because art and craft will always fascinating: we'll always want to understand at least at little. However I absolutely honour the sentiment that we don't have to. It's optional!

[vasanthakokilam]

Mahavishnu, I can see why that area of neuroscience is highly sought after by advertising executives of major corporations!! It all used to be based on some rough principles gleaned from psychology but now can be based on underlying mechanism at the level of reward centers etc. The perceived value of paid-for things is interesting and it is sort of true from our own anecdotal experiences. Another dimension to this is experienced by a lot of people: the first ding on a new car is much more painful than a first ding on an older one!!

On understanding music, we of course step into that territory when we ask or think about the raga or thala of a song. All of us have to go through some 'unlearning' so we can operate at both levels: 'knowing' and 'not having to know'. Those tendencies were not picked up by us of our own volition and so it requires some de-programming. It is not easy.
Nick is probably the least contaminated among us

[VK RAMAN]

It is not important to understand music to enjoy music - well said and well presented. What do we say to those who emphasize understanding music and knowing the meaning of the lyrics is important to enjoy the music - it is ones option.

[Rsachi]

[vasanthakokilam]

Wow, excellent conception and art work Sachi.

[Rsachi]

VKM,
thanks!
Acknowledgements: PG Wodehouse, friends from Rasikas.org, IPad, Airtel 3G, Google, Snapseed app, Photogene app, Web Albums app, a good cup of coffee, a truly moving Salagabhairavi PD krithi 'Enu mADidarEnu' rendition live on DD Chandana by Vid. D. Balakrishna (veena), as I did this fingering artwork.

[mahavishnu]

excellent graphic, RSachi. That just about captures it all!

[sweetsong]

Totally spot on! I love the way this thread is developing!

[vasanthakokilam]

I mentioned in my post above

On understanding music, we of course step into that territory when we ask or think about the raga or thala of a song.

I should have probably stated it as "On understanding music, we of course step into that territory even when we ask or think about the raga or thala of a song.

I realize that is at one extreme since a vast majority of CM listeners do go to that level which is quite preliminary and may not even consider it as 'knowing music'. But we all know that is the level of knowledge that scares non-cm rasikas. Since such talk is in the air, they all think that they can get into CM and enjoy it only if they have that knowledge. This is especially true for concert attendance. Mistaken perception, definitley, but we CM rasikas help propogate that indirectly.

In the context of this thread, question to consider are

1) Can a CM rasika enjoy the music to the fullest without associating it to a raga?
2) What will we/they latch on to in terms expectations structures?' ( invoking Mahavishnu's expression from another thread )
3) When does such an expectation structure rise to the level of 'knowledge about music'?

[mahavishnu]

VK: Question 1 is beyond my pay grade. But 2 & 3 can be approached more scientifically.

Evidence suggests the expectation structure is visible in children as young as 4-5 months of age. When we measure auditory evoked brain potentials (averaged over multiple trials), we see big changes in the response to a change in a fixed pitch pattern (SRGM vs SRGP) even in very young infants. But this is happening in a pre-attentive manner, or in a way that is not accessible to conscious thought. In my opinion, the decoding is taking place at such a fundamental physical level that would suggest that "knowledge of music" is syncretic and immediate. But declarative/verbal knowledge of music (i.e. how we talk about music in the abstract) is a higher level representation is probably several stages away in the neural hierarchy.

People like Prof. Nina Kraus at Northwestern and her former student Chandrasekharan (now at UT Austin) have shown that these auditory evoked brain potentials when listening to music are manifestly less noisy and more clear in people with musical experience (especially musicians). The demonstration of this effect is extremely compelling. Some of the best science I have ever seen. I will let the video demo of it speak for itself.

Watch: http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvo ... ration.php

[rshankar]

Mahavishnu, isn't there data (noisier perhaps) that expectation structure may be evident even in neonates using readouts like HR, and not AER?

[mahavishnu]

Ravi, you are right. Neonates can detect or induce a beat reasonably well. It is only a matter of time before someone can demonstrate this in melody as well.

However, the earliest recognition of known melody has been shown in 2 month old infants by my colleague Dr. Laurel Trainor at McMaster. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19206833 They followed it up with AER studies as well.

However, for the expectation structure to develop some cultural input is required. For example, children exposed to Gamelan music in Indonesia show stable brain potentials for tone sequences (and non-standard intervals) that many other cultures would find discordant.

One theory is that we are born with everything and we lose things we don't use. An example of this is Japanese children who show /l/ vs /r/ distinction clearly when they are pre-linguistic but lose this representation as they start talking in the natural linguistic environments. Fascinating!

[vasanthakokilam]

Thanks Mahavishnu. That demo at the Northwestern link you provided is quite amazing. If neuron firing pattern has a wave structure that is similar to the sound waves, now I can see how musical memories are formed and recalled. It may all be analog.

[mahavishnu]

I like the analog analogy
The amazing thing is that evoked neural responses to music happen at the brainstem level (even before the signal hits the auditory cortex)! So, it is very "low-level" processing if you want to use another computer metaphor. So, the brain of a trained musician can encode the signal almost in real time.

The other amazing thing that Dr. Kraus's group has discovered that this music-induced plasticity is almost permanent. Exposure to even a small amount of musical training can result in almost permanent changes to the brainstem and this neural response, to the extent that even older adults who have hearing loss show this sophisticated level of encoding.

Not sure if this similar phenomena have been shown in older adults with memory loss, but perhaps Ravi would know this literature...

[arasi]

Just landed here. Sachi's eagle had already landed (a good one, Sachi!)

Very interesting stuff--even for moi, the unlettered or the one who isn't 'contaminated' much (Spring cuckoo, quite a strong word there!).

Which brought to mind Bradbury's Farenheit 451 (?)

All right, let's raise the temperature again and call it detoxification and I'm sure Ravi, CML and their ilk would go along with that expression.

Well, the scene where the books are burned was heart-wrenching. Still, book 'unlearning' was the thing. Brutal as it seemed, was it meant to open our eyes and see beyond books, learn without them?

How in this technological age the scene will not have the same chilling effect! "Go to your kindles and googling!" would have taken all the drama out of it!

Back to the topic:

Mahavishnu,
All very educative (you got me there! It's about unlearning, isn't it?).

VK,
I can answer the first question in your post #14.

Yes, it is possible to enjoy the music to the fullest when you hear it with not a clue about the rAgA. If it appeals to you a great deal, you give up the guessing game in seconds and follow this new track. If it happens to fascinate you, you perhaps like it even more--without knowing its name at all.
Every time you hear it again (now you know its name!), you will still have a bit of the sweet memory of hearing it for the first time. Of course, when your neighbor is puzzled about the rAgA in a future concert when it is sung, the pleasure of recognition of it makes you tell her the name of it!

So, not losing the child-like wonderment in us is precious. A bit of knowledge to go along with it doesn't hurt!

Mahavishnu,
This from an
older adult
heading
for
memory
loss

[arasi]

While you guys are taking a break from the thread with all your work load to tackle, here's a diversion. Divert it to Rasika's poetry thread if you wish



Music, Books and More
---------------------------

Toss up the books with all your might--
See if they will come down, gravity playing--
Or adhere to the ceiling, like plasticine--

Retrieve them, read them day in and day out--
What sticks, like plasticine, isn't the printed words--
But the malleable thoughts and ideas they give us--
At least, that's what stays and sticks with us to the end--

Books alone don't serve--learning is a life thing--
Living, loving, yes, music too it seems, and a mind
Which grows, but with a heart which is aware of
A child's enchanted realm of endless wonders...

[vasanthakokilam]

Excellent thoughts, Arasi.

It is quite astounding how little of what we read we retain and relate to later, but we remember thoughts, ideas and events that happened long time back that have a strong emotional connection either positive or negative. I have this memory of the song 'sakala kalA vANiyE saraNam tAyE' from a very young age, probably 6 or 7. I have forgotten all the context around it. May be someone sang this on a vijaya dasami day. Obviously, I did not know anything about raga let alone kedaram. It is not even any pleasant experience of any significance, just a musical memory. I bet it is mixed up with something emotional at that time, and that is why it is still there. There is so much else that is forgotten from such an young age.

On the issue of enjoying CM when we do not know the raga.. I agree the right thing to do is to shut down all that knowledge stuff and get into the music. But it is difficult. That is especially true of a long alapana where there is nothing except the raga and melody. At least when the song starts, there are so many other things to latch on to.

But an interesting thing happens to me on occasion with such alapanas. Yeah, I go through some initial attempts to fit it into some ragas I know but when that utterly fails, I give up that effort. One of two things can happen: It is boring since that un-relatableness is too much. But If conditions and moods are right, occasionally I give up all that attempt to understand the music using past references and just take in the music on its terms. It is quite an enjoyable experience. I guess that is the state of enjoying CM without understanding anything about it.