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edlarge387 karma

Hi everyone, I don't think I realized the AMA was going live immediately. Does making music make you smarter? No, not really. The Mozart effect was reported early on and gained a lot of media attention, but no one could replicate it. More recently there have been some studies that have correlated increased performance in certain kinds of tasks by people who study music. And of course, there are therapeutic applications of music.

edlarge371 karma

That's a great question. Recently we scientists have spent a lot of time researching exactly the question of the "musicality" of animals. You may have seen Snowball the dancing parrot, or Ronan the head-bobbing sea lion on You Tube. These animals appear to "get" the rhythm of music the way people do. More specifically, they can hear the beat in complex musical rhythms, like we do.

Also, the natural behavior of some animals, like rhythmic drumming of bonobos and the duetting of gibbons might be closely related to human musical behavior.

However, I do agree with you that music -- as we normally think of it --- is a human invention. Or perhaps not so much an invention as a discovery about the fundamental nature of how the brain responds to sound. That is where the theory of synchrony of neural oscillations comes in.

Our cortical simulations, essentially explain how people heat the beat in complex rhythms. Let's see if I can embed a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJPBayI9x9k. However, at a faster time scale, we believe this theory will also explain the perception of pitch, consonance and dissonance, and tonality (perception of notes in a melody as stable or unstable). We have a number of papers on tonality already, and we are currently working on pitch and consonance.

edlarge335 karma

I agree, everyone has their own musical preference! "how long does it take to change the mood by changing the tune?" I'm going to guess you mean how long does it take to change a person's mood by playing a specific kind of music. Is that right?

If that's what you mean, I think it all depends on whether or not the person is open to having his/her mood changed. We do experiments all the time in the perception of emotion -- and mood is understood by psychologists and neuroscientists as being the same sort of thing as emotion, but it just happens on a longer time scale And emotional experience is relatively short, whereas a mood can last days.

Anyway, imagine you just broke up with your lover, and you are in one of our experiments. You are horribly depressed, but I play you some music and ask whether its happy or sad. You can tell that it's happy, but it doesn't actually make you happy, you are still depressed.

But at other times, listening to happy music can actually change you mood. It is all about the interaction between the music and the intrinsic dynamics of your brain. It is going to take us a long time to sort that out scientifically.

edlarge322 karma

I have created a neural network that simulates the response to music that we can measure in auditory cortex. We visualize this response using LED lights. Yes, you could use this algorithm to visualize music on your computer screen as well. Basically, you can see a representation of what happens in your brain, in real time when you listen to music. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YIjOn-WYvM. First you can see the LED's responding to the voices, then the 6/8 meter, then the music changes to 4/4. For the first two measures the LEDs get the beat in the wrong place (as I think most people would in this music) then they finally get 4/4.

edlarge321 karma

Do you mean Autonomous sensory meridian response? I don't know of any research, but it is a fairly recent topic, and one not directly related to my research, so there may be something out there.