The Universal Sense (20 page)

While Tomatis was a highly prolific communicator about the power of music to treat a wide variety of conditions (writing fourteen books and several thousand papers), his work suffered badly from a lack of statistical rigor. Most of his papers were clinical case studies with very limited numbers of patients, focusing on individual successes rather than trying to establish basic principles of how the treatments worked (or failed to). In fact, his failure to carry out properly counterbalanced studies and provide detailed data was the major reason he began to break away from the medical establishment.

Most attempts to replicate his results using standard scientific techniques have shown only minimal or no effect. This is in part because of the march of scientific progress. His theories about
retraining hair cell function in the cochlea have fallen by the wayside because more recent work has demonstrated that mammals, including humans, cannot regenerate hair cells. Once a certain band of hearing is lost, it stays lost; however, there have been some studies indicating that the brain recruits other frequency bands into the region that has the damage. This is why some people who have lost significant high-frequency hearing, a normal process of aging, are often unaware of the fact and are convinced that people around them are mumbling. Or, as my colleague Lance Massey (a veteran of too many nights with his ears stuck between high-powered studio monitors) said more succinctly, “I thought I could hear high-frequency tones until someone actually played some for me.” In addition, Tomatis claimed his audio-psycho-phonology (APP) could treat a remarkable breadth and range of conditions including schizophrenia, depression, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, and autism. His theory that all of these were based on failures of hearing has not been borne out by subsequent research. While such failures may underlie some psychiatric conditions, loss of hearing is not always or even usually the underlying cause. And yet there are still thousands of practitioners who utilize APP and its follow-up technique of sensory integration therapy with mixed results at a statistical level, based on a number of proponents who claim tremendous success.

You would think that with the failure of Tomatis’s treatments to show success in follow-up studies and the normal progression of scientific theories, the idea of Mozart’s music being somehow special would fade away. But then, in 1993, Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky published a study in
Nature
, one of the world’s leading scientific journals, titled “Music and Spatial Task Performance.” The study examined the relative
effect of exposure to ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K448, versus a relaxation tape or silence on thirty-six college students’ performance on the abstract and spatial reasoning part of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales test. The results of the study showed a relative increase of eight to nine points after listening to the Mozart music as compared to the other two exposures. The paper reflected results from a relatively minor study, but it did make the point that the effect was temporary and only reflected exposure to a single piece from a single composer and made no adjustments for subjects with musical versus non-musical training. Its primary claim was that there was a difference in spatial listening scoring on a standardized test after exposure to a specific type of highly structured, relatively complex music.

If this paper had appeared in some other, lower-impact journal, it most likely would have entered the literature to be occasionally cited in the context of spatial reasoning and music perception, an area that has quite a following and has made some interesting contributions to the notion of the interaction of music and mind. However, since it appeared in
Nature
, the trouble started almost immediately. In the next volume, a response to the study immediately pointed out problems with the statistics, throwing the study’s results into question. Over the next few years, studies came out both supporting and reviling the original piece, some showing that the effect disappeared if the experimenters used different intelligence tests, others highlighting the specialness of Mozart in that exposure to Beethoven did not show a similar increase in spatial reasoning. Some studies even claimed that rats would show the Mozart effect, showing better maze navigation after being exposed to his music.

And here’s where the conflict between science and popular
culture starts causing problems. The basic idea of the study, that “listening to Mozart makes you smart,” was picked up by the popular press, with the
New York Times
publishing an article claiming that since listening to Mozart made you smarter, this made Mozart the world’s greatest composer, and an article in the
Boston Globe
citing a study showing that giving your children classical music lessons made them perform better on intelligence tests (a study I have not been able to find). Articles spread throughout the emerging Internet and blogosphere, getting further and further from the original modest findings and thrusting the Mozart effect into popular culture with the same fervor that greets a new celebrity diet. The high point of the cultural adoption seemed to have occurred in 1998, with the then governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, introducing a line item in the state budget to give all children born in his state a recording of classical music to make them smarter, followed by the state of Florida passing a law requiring that state-funded day care centers play classical music, and an article in the
Houston Chronicle
reporting a mandate that Mozart be played to inmates.
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The Mozart effect has become a multimillion-dollar business. A quick examination of
Amazon.com
shows that there are almost 250 recordings (mostly for babies) based on the Mozart effect and promising to increase intelligence, heighten performance, improve concentration, and “heal the mind,” along with about 900 books on the subject. Yet almost all subsequent research has shown that there is no such effect and that you can get the same non-significant result by doing anything you
enjoy, including having ten minutes of silence (one of the controls from the first test) or listening to an excerpt from a Stephen King novel. This kind of conflict is the type of thing that makes editors’ and music distributors’ careers. Its journey from study to marketing device was even written about in a paper in the
British Journal of Social Psychology
titled “The Mozart Effect: Tracking the Evolution of a Scientific Legend.”

But it is not the kind of thing that makes scientists happy, no matter what their field. Finally the original lead author had to issue a statement that they’d made no such claim that listening to Mozart enhanced intelligence and that the effect was highly limited to certain spatiotemporal tasks, finally commenting in an article in the
New York Times
in 1999 that the money Georgia’s governor proposed spending on recordings for babies could probably be more wisely spent on music education. But as I know from personal experience, as soon as you start using terms like “spatiotemporal” in an explanation, you’ve lost 90 percent of your audience, who will go back to buying CDs with pictures of smiling babies and the words “smarter,” “happier,” and “creative” on the cover.

But is there any underlying basis to the idea that exposure to music can have a positive effect on task performance? Because of the way science works, most studies have continued to use the particular Mozart piece from the original study. There have been some interesting studies showing that while there is no real measurable effect on intelligence, listening to this particular sonata and Piano Concerto No. 23 seemed to reduce seizure-like activity in the brains of epileptics (although there is no indication that it had any beneficial effects in terms of reducing the severity of actual symptoms).

There have been several studies showing that listening to
Mozart’s music in the background while carrying out visual tasks produces increased neural synchronization in what is termed the gamma band. The gamma band is a collective neuronal response observed in EEG studies from 25 to 100Hz (usually around 40 Hz) that is emphasized not only during music perception but also during attentional processes and which has been implicated in what is called “the binding problem,” the poorly understood underlying basis for integration of all brain activity into consciousness. There are literally dozens of sites in the brain that are responsive to music (Mozartian and otherwise) or even individual elements of musical stimuli and are also implicated in task-related behaviors. At a basic level, there is a greater tendency for pitch and musical processing to occur in the right hemisphere (of right-handed people, anyway), the cortical hemisphere that is more commonly involved in spatial and emotional processing. Specifically, while ventral (lower) projections from the primary auditory cortex seem to be involved in the identification of specific features of sounds such as pitch and absolute duration, dorsal (upper) projections from this area carry information about changes in frequency over time and may have links to motor systems, making them critical for not only perception but also tasks that require precisely timed motor behavior, such as the performance of music, dance, or even general locomotion. This may underlie some of the observed efficacy that music therapy seems to have on motor-related disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. And while there have been clinical studies demonstrating that it is possible to separate out pitch perception from rhythm perception, neural imaging studies that have examined the auditory region of the temporal lobe of the brain have not consistently identified any specific location underlying identification of musical tempo.
What has emerged in many studies is that areas involved in the perception of musical timing are also deeply tied to motor behavior, including the cerebellum, which plays a role in fine motion coordination; the basal ganglia, which are important in both voluntary and procedural learning behaviors; and the supplementary motor area, which is involved in the planning of motor behavior.

None of these findings means that Mozart knew some neuroscientific secret that he incorporated into his music. The predominance of Mozart’s music in many studies is based on two things. First, scientists tend to cluster around stimuli that have shown an effect in previous studies (it also lets them cite previous work in their own). Second, Mozart’s music (as well as that of Bach and other late Baroque through early classical composers) tends to be based on relatively simple repeated double phrases or three-part forms with simple interval structure (compared to contemporary music) and non-overlapping tempo (what’s called “long-term periodicity”). In addition, the music was written to be performed on analog instruments—in other words, it was to be played at tempos manageable by human performers. So the music of Mozart (and other composers of similar style) may activate broadly overlapping neural structures that help with spatial, attentional, motor, and other processes.

In short, it’s not the specific composer, genre, key, consonance, or rhythm of the music that may have an effect on a person; it’s the fact that embedded in the music, whether heard or played, are the underlying rhythms and processes that drive the brain in day-to-day behavior. As Robert Zatorre, one of the leading lights in neuroscience research in music and the brain has pointed out, “The continued interactions of musicians and scientists will be important, as the study of music and
neuroscience is
mutually
revealing.” As we bring more and more technologies and ideas to bear on the twin processes of understanding music and understanding the mind, highlighting the biological aspects we can explain and hypothesizing about those we can’t, we can approach a sort of “tipping point” for acoustic awareness—how your mind is shaped, and sometimes manipulated, by sound.

Chapter 7
Sticky Ears: Soundtracks, Laugh Tracks, and Jingles All the Way

One of the first things you have to think about when you start a career in science is whether your focus is going to be on basic or applied research. People who want to do basic research are those who like puzzles—they pick a specific problem and want to solve it. Those who are interested in applied research tend to want to see their work help solve some real-world problem. But the wonderful thing about such a universal field as sound perception is that even the most obscure aspect can end up having real-world applications. It’s just a question of what part of the world you’re improving, whether it’s using the psychophysics of audiograms and critical bands to develop the MP3 compression algorithm or doing detailed recordings of the environment around someone’s head to create surround sound systems. But our most powerful research tools for auditory science are not fMRIs or EEGs—they are our ears and our brains. And there is a very long history of applying auditory principles to things in our everyday life to get directed emotional or attentional responses from listeners.

One of the most common large-scale formats for controlling
emotional responses is movies. Aside from the kind of blasé educational films we are forced to watch in school, almost all films, TV, video games, and other multimedia are about directing attention and inducing an emotional response in the audience. While the first films were developed around 1880 by Eadweard Muybridge, an experimental photographer known mostly for his pioneering work in analyses of animal and human locomotion, the first films shown to a general audience were presented in 1893. They were totally silent. If you have access to a film library showing some of these very early silent films, watch them and try to figure out why they come across as kind of flat.
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The complete lack of sound removes some essential underlying drive, which is why theaters started adding live musical accompaniments almost immediately, ranging from live piano players in small houses to pipe organs in the larger ones. Once movies became a serious industry, original scores were often created to be performed by entire orchestras as a real-time soundtrack for the film, starting with Joseph Carl Breil’s score for D. W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation
in 1915 and, arguably, culminating in Gottfried Huppertz’s score played for the premiere of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
in 1926.
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