Why Robots Love Music (Part 1)

The media have been eagerly reporting on advances in brain research and genetics, in part because everyone is hungry for scraps of good news. In a larger sense these areas of science are also immensely confident and hopeful. They are the finger posts to a future without disease, a time when age-old mysteries about human nature will be explained once and for all. I recently saw a television report on neurologists investigating the mystery of music, why it exists and how we respond to it.

My reaction to this report came in two parts: fascination at the ingenuity of the research and frustration that it's taking knowledge down the wrong path. Let me fill in both.

Researchers at McGill University in Toronto have been hooking up subjects as they listen to music. As one would predict, various parts of the brain light up in response to music, and through MRIs and other forms of brain imaging, it's been determined that music creates its own pattern of response. Raw input that reaches the auditory center in the cortex, responsible for interpreting all sounds, gets scattered to specific locations where rhythm, tempo, melody, timbre, etc. are separately processed in a matter of milliseconds. The prefrontal cortex even compares the music you are hearing now to music you expect to hear from past experience. By comparing the two, your brain can be surprised by something it never expected to hear, and further this can be a delightful surprise or a distasteful one.

All of this extremely complex communication between tiny areas of the brain goes on unconsciously, but without it, music would be just random noise. You may claim that your feel music in your soul, your heart, your gut. In fact, your total response is neurological. The research also shows that the brain gets "hard wired" in childhood according to what system of music you are exposed to. A Chinese baby's brain develops specific connections that respond to Chinese harmony, thus leading to its enjoyment. A baby born in the East, exposed to Western harmonies, is hard wired to enjoy that system but not the Chinese, and vice versa. Finally, the researchers could take a musical performance and gradually change it via computer software to see if the brain notices any difference. As the music became more mechanical and less personal, for example, the brain often didn't notice any difference until the change was glaringly obvious. This might explain "tin ears" and other, subtler abilities to detect the finer points of musical style.

All of this is moderately fascinating. It mostly corroborates things known to common sense and ordinary observation already. A million-dollar MRI machine wasn't needed to tell us that our brains respond in various ways to music, or that one person's response isn't the same as another's, or that Chinese music generally grates on Western ears. But the promissory note is a big one. As with so much brain research, we are told that these are early days. Give the scientists time and they will unravel everything about music. In particular, they will answer why music developed in the evolutionary scheme of things to become encoded in our genes. Apparently every age, going back as far as history is measured, has contained some form of music. Why did evolutionary forces favor this behavior as a survival mechanism? Between them, brain researchers, geneticists, and evolutionary biologists will provide a definitive answer in the foreseeable future.

In the next post I'd like to argue why this whole scheme of looking at music is wrong-headed and will yield no answers that get near the truth. The current connection between music and the brain is useful only if the listener is a robot with a robotic brain. That's exactly the model being used here, and no amount of passing fascination makes it anything but what it is: inhuman to the core.

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