From Anatomy of the Human Body. Image by Henry Vandyke Carter. Creative Commons 3.0.
The effect of music on the mind is a subject for constant fascination. Neuroscience has “discovered” the effects of older music on people’s minds and it’s a big deal.
Actually, you didn’t discover it.
It’s been a talking point for at least a decade. In a rather mindblowing study, a lot of older people in various states of repair were subjected to the music of their youth. These people were virtually immobile, mute and somewhat vegetative. When the music took hold, they “returned to themselves”, according to family members. You could hear the researchers’ jaws hit the ground.
Now try finding that study online. Typical shoddy distribution of high value information. Nevertheless, it happened and was otherwise studiously ignored.
The current study, “Music-Evoked Nostalgia Activates Default Mode and Reward Networks Across the Lifespan,” shows pretty similar results. The researchers have found the tracks of the response to music. They’ve also located the stimuli effects in the brain and translated it into neuro-speak.
There was also a notable dichotomy in the reaction of older and younger participants. The older people reacted more strongly.
There’s a reason for that. Depending on the vintage of the recording, older music and new music are poles apart. This isn’t folklore. It’s about musical note dynamics.
Real musical notes have specific pitches. Digitized musical notes are generally flat. Even the drumbeats are flat. They lack pitch, and it shows.
It follows that older music has more pitch and newer music less. The bandwidths of pitch tell the story. You can actually measure this on any triple indicator or simply by MHz.
Fortunately for you, I’m not going to go into murderous detail about the distinctions. Instead, I’ll just leave you this nice murderous link to the difference between acoustic and digital music to explore.
It’s pretty simple, but it’s important. The differences are amplified, excuse the pun, by recording methods. It’s a sort of ongoing departure from the core pitch of the real musical notes.
The digital notes can be made far more accurate pretty easily. The problem is the laziness and tone-deafness of the people recording these things. Things like autotune actively modify pitch, too, not necessarily for the better.
For the record, I heard Justin Bieber’s original demo tape on YouTube years ago. He’s not really a bad singer. Autotune is an option, not a necessity.
Most singers also don’t seem to know that instead of autotuning, they can just do another take and sing it correctly.
The point here for neuro purposes is that these added processes affect sound quality and therefore the reception of sound.
Even just the process of recording can and sometimes does alter pitch. In the tape days, the recording was always a bit higher than the original. It could be a quarter tone higher, for the sake of argument.
These added inputs affect the quality of sound for the receiver. It’d be interesting to make a comparison between raw music and processed music in neural responses.
Just one more thing.
The cumulative effect of music is to tune the brain.
Maybe detuning people’s brains isn’t a good idea.
Point made?