|
5/14/97
COMMENTARY: Our musical memory may hold answers to the brain's mysteries
By BRIAN DICKINSON
ONE RECENT afternoon, seated as usual at my computer and writing away, I realized that I was paying more than casual attention to the music coming from my radio. Something had alerted me to the music - but what?
Having music going all day is one amenity of working at home. There are no co-workers to gripe. No one, hearing my music, is likely to fix me with a glare that implies, "Say there, don't you have work to do?" I can play any music I choose, and play it as loud as I like, and get no complaints.
Mostly, I leave the volume low, so as not to jolt me out of my chair. That way the music - most music - serves while I'm writing as glorified background noise. It is usually congenial, occasionally stimulating and always a key element of my home office ambience.
Now and then, though, I find myself mentally drawn away from my computer and focusing instead on the sounds emanating from my speakers. My shift of focus (from computer screen to music) can either be slow, subtle, almost unconscious, or abrupt and riveting. Either way, the jump in my attention is unmistakable. Instead of passively hearing the music, I am actively listening to it.
But I've had music going all day, more or less, and I've managed to stay focused on my writing. Why do I suddenly switch my attention from a computer screen to organized noise?.
Part of the answer may lie with our brain's capacity for anticipating the familiar. Even though we may not have heard a particular tune for many years, we heard it enough to engrave it indelibly on our memory. And we need only hear a few introductory bars to resurrect much of the piece from wherever in our memory it had lain dormant for so long.
In my case, the piece that I had heard on the radio, and that had so grabbed my attention, was Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B Minor. I recalled hearing this jewel of the Baroque on the first hi-fidelity sound system that my father had installed. I was about 15.
Among the records that we borrowed from a library to test our new apparatus was, of course, the Bach piece. I recall playing this record again and again, even following along with a score that had turned up in a bookcase.
Coming upon that Bach score, I realized that I had first listened to that music more than a decade before. I was perhaps four. On a borrowed recording machine, my father had played the flute parts from the Bach orchestral suite. He must have rehearsed often for that session, since from that early age I had the melodies embedded in my subconscious.
Anticipating the familiar is hardly confined to hearing classical music alone (or, indeed, to music generally). We undergo a similar process when driving along a once-familiar street: We know that there is a white stucco house on the next corner. I suspect that this faculty is most remarkable in classical music because of that music's complexity. And if anticipating the familiar seems wondrous in a relative musical illiterate like me, consider what an elastic memory any good musician must possess, to say nothing of a symphony orchestra conductor.
Identifying with a once-familiar piece of music is striking enough. How do we explain the ability to anticipate what chord or key change is coming in a piece that we've never heard? To me, this capacity in listening to music is amazing. Somehow, our brains need to hear a tune resolved at the end. We know what chord to expect. Any other chord leaves us hanging, edgy, dissatisfied. Why?
One reason, I suppose, lies in the mind's preference for balance and order over chaos and dissolution. The same desire is reflected in architecture, in drama, in classical painting. I suspect that this longing is instinctive rather than culture-driven. Symmetry suggests the security of the reliable. In music, we can tolerate and even relish large doses of dissonance and clamor during a piece (we are, after all, an adventure-seeking species), as long as the composer or performer returns us to an expected safe harbor at the end.
Knowing what kind of resolution to expect, our minds may leap forward in anticipation. We don't know what notes are coming next. It just seems that way.
Anticipating a certain note or chord doesn't work all the time. In fact, one of the delights in hearing music can be the unexpected, the melodic twist that surprises us and gives a piece added zing. A well-known example is Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, in which the piccolo is brought in toward the finale and is given a cheerful tune of its own, providing a delightful contrast with the stately blare of the brasses. Even after scores of hearings, I find myself anticipating that whimsical piccolo passage and welcoming its novelty.
All this dissecting of the music-brain connection might have little practical value - except for one thing. These intricate links, if analyzed, might open doors to understanding how other brain functions work.
To me, the capacity for remembering vast amounts of complex information - musical notes, hundreds of faces, details of paintings, obscure bits of data by the tens of thousands - is among our brains' most exceptional powers. Studying how the brain handles musical memory could illuminate other important areas of complex neural activity.
Brian Dickinson is the Journal-Bulletin's editorial columnist.
| 
