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Music
Or, a lecture to soothe the savage beast
Music Basics
 What is music?
 Sound and silence temporally
organized
 Sounds of music
 Pitch, timbre, loudness
 Scale
 Sequential presentation of notes
 Fundamental = note at scale base,
bottom note of chord
 Chord
 Collection of notes played
simultaneously
Timbre and Complexity
 Harmonics
 Notes at specific intervals that resonate above a
fundamental
 Vary in loudness
 Onset, offset time
 Characteristic harmonics determine timbre
 Demo 1 - harmonic changes sound (track 53)
Harmonics change the sound, NOT the pitch
Music Physics
 Consonance
 Intervals of notes that when played
simultaneously sound good
together
 Synergistic overtones
 Dissonance
(Track 62)
 Intervals of notes that when played
together sound conflicting
 Interference pattern between
overtones
Structural Music
 Scale perception
 Western Music uses accents to structure sound
 Asynchronous western scale
 Whole step, whole step, half step, Whole step, whole
step, whole step, half step
 8 notes per scale, 16 notes available
 Causes leading tones
 Asynchronous scales
 Whole tone scale
 Chromatic (half-step scale)
 Same notes, no structure
Music Training
 Instrument specific
 Present violin or trumpet to
violinist or trumpeter (Pantev et al., 2001)
 Event related potential (ERP)
 Pattern, timing of neural response
 Unspecified region
 Instrument specific N1
 Attention related negativity of neural
response
 Larger for own instrument
Brain Changes
 Hemispheric Differences (e.g., Burton et al., 1989)
 Musical categorization
 Left or Right presentation; musician or nonmusician
 Musician = Right ear advantage; Non=Left
ear advantage
 Hemispheric specialization changes with
training
 Left brain: speech specialization, dynamic
processing;Right brain: spatial processing
 But see Zatorre (1979)
Bulk up the Brain
 Brain topography of musicians
(Gaser & Schlaug, 2003)
 Increased gray matter for
parietal areas(pianists)
 Somatosensory, motor coordination
 Multisensory combination (visualauditory-somatosensory)
 No differences in white matter
 Areas of change and magnitude
instrument specific