The challenge of making a one-hour documentary programme about the activity
of listening to music at first appeared to hold about as much potential
for prime-time television viewing as watching wood warp. But Michael Howes,
who wrote and produced the programme, had previously produced both music
and science documentaries, and was determined that this mix of arts and
science could work as entertainment. He also wanted the programme to follow
the trend towards 鈥榣ive science鈥� on television: doing the experiments in
front of the camera, so that any shortcomings in theory or method would
be there for all to see.
We also had to explore ideas for turning an aural experience into a
visual one, reasoning that because psychologists have repeatedly stressed
the dynamic, constructive and above all the active nature of listening to
music, there ought to be something entertaining as well as instructive that
the cameras could be pointed at. We thought that any results worth their
salt ought to be sufficiently robust to translate out of the sound laboratory
into the real world.
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The study of how people perceive and understand music has mushroomed
over the past 10 years. Psychologists have revealed the importance of higher-level
mental processes, with implications for cognitive models and internal representation
that go way beyond the subject of music. Because of this broadening basis,
it is no longer a simple matter to decide what to include in a single programme
about listening to music. But the first point to make is that listening
is a musical activity, rather than a passive process. A high level of 鈥榣istening
performance鈥� requires complex mental skills, involving perception and cognition.
To obtain satisfaction from this exercise, listeners also rely as much on
what they know, or 鈥榖ring with them鈥� in terms of musical culture and history,
as on the musical material itself. This must be true for non-musicians as
well as musicians, and apply equally to music by Mahler, Miles Davis and
Madonna. If there are differences in people鈥檚 response to music, they are
for the most part differences of degree rather than type.
Yet it remains difficult to define what music 鈥榤eans鈥�, because a string
of notes seldome refers to anything specific in the world in the way that
strings of letters forming words do. Attempts to make direct linguistic
analogies have for the most part proved unsuccessful and arbitrary; for
example, the fact that a group of musicians might agree that a particular
string of notes means 鈥榓n ascending feeling of joyous release鈥� or whatever,
reveals more about the personal bias of the subjects and the experimenter
than about the way we understand music.
So the answer to the question 鈥榳hat does music mean?鈥� is to a great
extent philosophically imponderable. But it is not difficult to show that
people respond to music, and that different people respond in the same ways,
and often at the same point in a piece of music. A simple experiment in
this programme demonstrates this convincingly by taking a two-channel polygraph
into a jazz club to observe the changing characteristics of pulse rate and
skin conductance. Such changes are linked to altered mood states, and back
up the listeners鈥� statements that music 鈥榙oes things to them鈥� 鈥� a simple
demonstration that our observations are not just an illusion or a self-deception.
And even our brief test reveals a degree of agreement between different
people, suggesting that people can form a consensus about a musical experience.
Further support for this idea comes from an experiment to identify 鈥榤usical
hot-spots鈥�, in which 18 adults listened to an extract from Beethoven鈥檚 Pathetique
sonata. They were asked to keep their eyes closed and raise one hand when
they felt partially aroused by the music, and both hands when they felt
a more intense arousal. The results show that while a few individuals experience
arousal when others do not, there is a marked consensus at particular points
in the music. Furthermore, this consensus is not simply due to prior knowledge.
Even with unfamiliar pieces, particular forms and structures create 鈥榟ot-spots鈥�
on first hearing.
While it is probably absurd to suggest that a particular note or harmonic
grouping has any precise meaning, there are nonetheless more general mood
states that particular music evokes. We demonstrate this by asking 18 test
subjects to choose which one of six pictures they would match to the music
being played at the time. Three pieces were used: Oceans by Anthony Phillips,
Wieniawsky鈥檚 Scherzo Tarantelle, and a piece of traditional funeral gamelan
music from Java.
Two interesting observations emerged from this study. The most popular
choice for Oceans was a picture of sailing boats, in spite of the fact that
none of the subjects had heard the music before and none knew its name.
Six subjects, however, favoured a 鈥榟eavy industry鈥� scene. For the Wieniawsky,
most people selected our specially created drawing of an imaginary 鈥榮piky
object鈥�. Both these results were fairly predictable, and illustrate an appreciation
of conventional thematic forms of reference on the part of our listeners.
We also predicted the confusion created by the gamelan music, which
employs different tonal conventions. Only one person associated this music,
which traditionally accompanies Javanese funerals, with our pictue of a
funeral in Pontefract. This points to another important issue, namely the
role of culture in determining what is seen as musically appropriate to
particular events and circumstances.
A reasonable, but unprovable, explanation for musical behaviour of all
kinds is that it hs its roots in the natural world. Particular sounds common
in nature, such as the cries of animals or birds, the keening of the wind,
the beat of the sea, are seen as the bedrock from which a musical aesthetic
experience springs. Such an idea is supported by the fact that sensory components
of our auditory system respond to alarm calls 鈥� sudden sounds, the wailing
of a baby, and so forth. Consequently, music is seen as the formalisation
of these in-built or preprogrammed mechanisms, into what is loosely referred
to as a system of musical communication. From this basically evolutionary
theory comes the idea that certain types of musical response are inevitable
or 鈥榠nstinctive鈥�.
Instinct, however, has never been a satisfactory explanation for anything,
and the reality is in fact rather more complicated. Nonetheless, it is a
short step from the notion of 鈥榠nstinct鈥� to the proposition that listening
to Mozart is basically an act of communication between the listener and
the composer, with the listener abstracting from the music 鈥榯hings鈥� that
were put there because of the inevitability of the response they would evoke.
Some music therapists, for example, have attributed the calming and other
beneficial effects of music on brain-damaged children to the message put
into the music by the composer, rather than to simpler effects deriving
from soft and gentle sounds, and a caring social interaction with the therapist.
Similarly, music teachers occasionally attribute failure to 鈥榓ppreciate鈥�
Mozart to deliberate perversity or stupidity, rather than to a rational
learning process leading to the logical decision 鈥業 don鈥檛 like this stuff鈥�.
In fact, the basic culture-free aspects of music experience are quite
simkple, and have far more to do with the physics of sound than the intentions
of the composer. Thus loud sounds represent a higher energy, or more aroused
state than quiet sounds; high-frequency tones represent a higher energy
state than lower tones; and faster music represents a faster rate of information-flow
than slower music. Naturally these characteristics interact in ways that
are less easy to predict. But musical appreciation depends more on learning
and cultural exposure than on basic sensory reactions to the properties
of sound.
In The Listening we attempted to illustrate these points by using different
musical contexts and a variety of musical types. One of the most intriguing
theories of musical preference (why people like some tunes and not others)
is derived from work on experimental aesthetics, mainly in the visual arts,
but developed into a theory of music preference by David Hargreaves at the
University of Leicester. The theory has its basis in information theory,
but the important insight comes from the distinction between this conception
of 鈥榠nformation鈥� and its psychological counterpart. Fundamentally, the coding
of physical information contained in a music composition, as in information
theory, predicts very little of interest, but coding the information in
鈥榮ubjective鈥� terms predicts quite a lot. Whether a person likes a particular
piece or not depends on the information they are able to take out of it,
rather than information that is already 鈥榠n there鈥�.
People tend to prefer music which provides them with sufficient information
to be interesting, but no so much that they become overloaded. So if someone
hears a variety of pieces, ranging from the very simple to the very complex,
then their liking of the pieces will rise as complexity increases up to
a point where their own personal preferred rate of information-flow is achieved.
After this, increasing complexity will cause a decline in preference. In
theory, this produces an inverted U-shaped curve.
Unfortunately, due to the wide differences in musical experience between
individuals, experimental studies have not always revealed the perfect inverted
U predicted by this psychological theory. So it was with some trepidation
that we attempted to reproduce this effect in front of the cameras.
Our experiment involved a group of 10 long-suffering choirboys from
St Paul鈥檚 choir school. We started with the assumption that more complex
music is harder to remember and to sing back, so the chorus master鈥檚 scores
for accuracy were taken as some measure of how complex each boy found the
music. Eight weeks before, the choristers had judged their preferences for
the same tunes. In a further test the choristers selected the tune they
would most like to have carried out further studies on, and as expected,
we found that the boys chose the more complex pieces, even though the pieces
were not necessarily those they liked.
Play it again
But there is another way of manipulating subjective complexity, and
we tried that too. Playing the same piece of music over and over again tends
to lead the listener to find it progressively less complex, as it becomes
more faimilar and predictable. So some judgments of aesthetic preference
depend on how complex the material was to start with. Using an audience
of 36 members of a light operetta society we played a three-minute extract
of an opera that none of them had heard before, eight times during the course
of an evening. About one-eighth of their number were questioned after each
hearing, and when their average scores out of 10 鈥榣iking鈥� were plotted against
the number of times they have heard the extract, the graph resembled something
like the predicted curve. There was something odd about the results the
second and third times that the music was played which we cannot explain,
but otherwise these results resembled the predicted inverted U curve.
We carried out a similar test in front of the cameras for a very different
kind of music: a disco audience of 58 people aged between 10 and 30, who
were asked to dance eight times during the course of a day to a piece of
heavy metal music, again that none of them had heard before. Their average
鈥榣iking鈥� scores, when plotted against the number of times they had heard
the track, revealed a clear inverted-U shape, although nothing like the
height of a chart-topping single.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect we tackled was the abstraction of
tonal centres by means of 鈥榠nternal templates鈥�. Several studies have convincingly
revealed that the identity of the tones in a piece of music and an appreciation
of the size of the intervals between notes becomes possible only after the
listener has abstracted the 鈥榯onal centre鈥� of the music. Once this is achieved,
the listened knows where 鈥榙oh鈥� is, and hence the identity of other tones
in the scale. At this point, the music starts to sound 鈥榤usical鈥� and is
perceived in a way which is psychologically different from the perception
of sets of random tones. To achieve this, however, the listener must possess
some sort of internal template based on the modes prevalent within a particular
musical culture.
In Western music the major scale forms the basis for such a psychological
template, with its characteristic spacing of the notes of this scale system.
In previous studies, psychologists have inferred the properties of such
a template from painstaking experiments involving recognition and reaction
time. Our problem was that while this is a cornerstone of modern theories
of music cognition, films about people waiting for things to happen and
then pressing a button do not add up to compelling viewing. So we attempted
something quite new.
We called once again on the services of our St Paul鈥檚 choristers, who
were asked to listen to a tune being played and sing the signature note
or the whole scale that it had been played in, and then sing the tune back
from memory. The tests did show that these templates are specific to a culture:
the choristers could easily identify the signature note of the scales of
tunes played in the Western scale system and sing back the same tunes from
memory. But when a Javanese gamelan player was substituted for their piano-playing
chorus master, their ability to sing the intervals of one of the Javanese
pentatonic scales was matched by their inability to sing the simple tunes
being played to them. And when the gamelan player was replaced by a clarinetist
playing the 12-tone music of Luciano Berio, the experiment had to be abandoned
amid chaotic laughter.
The importance of a learned cultural template that is derived from the
modes available within a culture is thus nicely illustrated. The reason
why non-European music may seem untuneful and unsatisfactory (or 鈥榣ess well-developed鈥�)
to Western ears thus derives from the fact that the listeners have not brought
with them the learnt templates that make musical listening possible within
that culture, rather than because of some inadequacy in the music.
The programme also explores the ways in which the expressive aspects
of music are heightened by visual cues and social situtions, rather than
being a sole function of auditory input. For the most part these illustrations
work well enough, as well as adding colour and a sense of context to the
overall programme, with one exception. A well-documented effect shows that
people think more highly of a piece of music if they believe it to be by
a respected composer, and even musicians have been shown to play with fewer
errors when they are confronted with a new piece by a respected composer
rather than by someone new or unkown.
This effect was one of the aspects of the programme that we thought
we could rely on. We chose a pice of music and attributed it alternately
to Wagner and to the little-known contemporary composer Gersdorf (acutally
a small town in Germany), and produced some wonderfully tongue-in-cheek
programme notes to support these claims. Yet the effect simply failed to
materialise during the tests involving our light operetta society audience,
for reasons that remain unclear. But in a series of questions that required
the listener to award marks for both 鈥榣iking鈥� and 鈥榪uality鈥� for the opera
extract they had heard, there was a small trend towards awarding lower marks
for 鈥榪uality鈥� than for 鈥榣iking鈥� among those who thought it was written by
Gersdorf, and a significant trend towards awarding higher marks for 鈥榪uality鈥�
than for 鈥榣iking鈥� among those who thought it was by Wagner. The extract
was actually from The Queen of Sheba by the Austro-Hungarian composer Goldmark.
Despite these aberrations, however, the main intention of the programme
鈥� to suggest that musical experience has more to do with the knowledge and
culture of the listener than the raw materials of the notes, sharps, flats,
modulations and bar lines from which the music is constructed 鈥� remains
more or less intact. There are no musical absolutes, even though a limited
number of physiognomic aspects of sound probably cross some cultural boundaries.
The stuff of music lies primarily in the people who listen to it, rather
than in inherent properties of the noises made by orchestras or bands. Consequently,
if we believe that we can communicate the highest levels of human creativity
to the rest of the Universe by beaming Beethoven into the Galaxy and beyond,
we are probably labouring in vain 鈥� and our gamelan player would have no
greater success either. After all, the greatness of Mahler generally fails
to survive a trip to Brixton, and the greatness of Jimi Hendrix fails equally
to survive a trip in the opposite direction.
John Davies is professor of psychology at the Centre for Occupational
and Health Psychology at the University of Strathclyde. He was the consultant
to The Listening, which will soon be broadcast on Channel 4 television.
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