You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (6 page)

External motivators tend to come first and they can be anything from a token-based reward system (for example, ten minutes on a favourite computer game at the end of each lesson) to a performance achievement (for example, an exam certificate or applause in the school assembly) or simply the smile and attention of a parent. These are all crucial in the early stages of learning when the benefits of music lessons, other than making an enjoyable sound, may be somewhat lost on a young child.

Performers who continue on to high standards will then develop their own internal motivation to practise and perform. They carry out these activities because it makes them feel good, gives them a sense of achievement and drives them to reach higher goals. This process shift from external to internal motivation is not something that you can influence directly, but it won’t happen at all without effective early
external motivation. And internal motivation is something that you can look out for and praise when you start to recognise the signs.

Practice

Effective music lessons are nothing without effective practice.
³⁴
This was the one major stumbling block that I experienced during my teaching career and one that was common in children who ended up giving up on their lessons. No effective practice between lessons means little if any progress in general. In fact, as a teacher you often find yourself having to go backwards at the start of a lesson to get to the level that you reached at the end of the last session.

We have talked about music lessons in terms of making them enjoyable (helped by choice of instrument and teacher), stimulating reward, and the transition to self-motivated, internal reward systems. The same all goes for practice. There is an additional secret to practice strategy in music – it must be ‘deliberate’.

‘Deliberate practice’ is a term that comes from the literature on the psychology of expertise.
³⁵
In musical terms deliberate practice is defined as the ability to imagine, monitor and control performance, and the use of optimal strategies to aid progress. Rather than playing or singing at the same level for a long period of time because you are good at it, repeating pieces that you can perform well already, deliberate practice requires a constant self-evaluation, focusing on weaknesses.
³⁶

Instead of playing or singing pieces from start to end, a musician should aim to develop their own strategies for identifying and correcting mistakes. One of the key factors here is the development of self-regulation.
³⁷
Musical practice that targets weaknesses and develops mental strategies of self-regulation is a better predictor of success than just the number of hours spent playing or singing.
³⁸

Another important factor in effective practice is getting a balance between formal and informal strategies. Simply repeating technical exercises over and over again is a less successful strategy than balancing this necessity with time for improvising and experimentation on the instrument or with the voice.
³⁹
By a similar notion, routine is very important for lessons and practice structure but so is the occasional surprise task or reward that can refresh interest and encourage confidence to improve further.
⁴⁰

One of the unsung heroes in the development of effective practice, and an indispensible source of that all-important external motivation for early days, is, of course, the parent/carer. Many studies of young successful musicians have pointed out that support in the home is absolutely essential in terms of encouraging regular, deliberate and effective practice.
⁴¹
Motivation to please a parent/carer can predict early progress and even once the transition to internal motivation has kicked in, many conservatoire students still report a desire to inspire pride in their elders.
⁴²

For parents/carers there has to be a degree of tough love for those occasions in the early days when a child does not want to practise as well as do their homework, as long as the child is still enjoying their instrument and lessons in general. A regularly present and consistently supportive parent/carer may not be able to advise directly on the technical aspects of playing or practice strategy but their presence is eventually worth its weight in music education gold.

Getting the most from an effective musical education requires time and effort from all the key stakeholders (child, parent/carer and teacher), especially at the beginning. A child’s enjoyment, motivation and sense of achievement with music may come from many different sources but in the early stages all these factors must be fed and encouraged by friendly and supportive adults. In time, as self-regulation,
internal motivation and effective deliberate practice strategies develop, both parents and teachers will be able to take a step back and the child will emerge with all the right sustainable tools to push themselves through their education as far as they desire.

And if they are anything like my pupil Patrick, then they will surpass your hopes and never look back. Paddy was not one of the very few who go on to become a world-class professional musician but he is a skilled guitarist and a sensitive performer with a talent for composition. The CDs and MP3s I have of him playing his own music are among my most prized possessions.

Music for general development

At the beginning of this chapter we looked at the evidence for the Mozart effect and concluded that passive exposure to music (listening alone) is unlikely to result in significant improvements to IQ or cognitive skills. I would like to end the chapter by making clear that I do not mean to say that music activities have no benefit for children. There are a number of areas in development where engagement with music that falls short of formal training can play a substantial positive role and promote learning about the world.

Engaging with music is not limited to learning how to play an instrument or sing. In recent years I have been lucky enough to be involved in a research project with a pre-school active music class provider in the UK. These types of sessions are becoming more common all over the world. The classes do not aim to teach children a specific instrument or voice skills, although they often involve singing. The musical activities and games that these classes involve are largely for pleasure without any aim of improving performance.

Classes such as these provide a fun atmosphere for socialising with other children, teach songs that can help simple
behavioural routines (such as going to bed or brushing teeth), and communicate social skills, such as turn-taking, imitation and bonding. Because they often involve moving to music or playing drums, the classes also promote motor coordination, synchronisation and development.

Music is not an essential component for all these cognitive, social and motor developmental processes. There are many cultures in the world that do not use anywhere near as much music in the early stages of a child’s life as we do in Western society and this fact does not seem to impair their children’s development. Probably the most important role of music in these kinds of music activity classes is as a facilitator: music creates an environment where the rules of social interactions are framed in a simple and engaging way.

Music is not the only way to do this, of course, but it is often an enjoyable way. The reason it tends to be fun is that children react well to music. This harks back to what we discussed in Chapter 1 about their natural attraction towards musical sounds. And a happy, engaged child makes for a happy, engaged parent, a situation which is likely to promote learning and stimulate bonding for both.

Laurel Trainor and her colleagues conducted some of the first studies to systematically investigate the effects of active music participation classes. In their first study
⁴³
they assigned six-month-old infants to either an active musical class or a similar class where the children just listened to music (the Baby Einstein™ CD series) and occasionally played along (the ‘passive’ group). The theory was that the active music classes featured a greater amount of social interaction and participation in music-making and that these two factors are beneficial for development.

All the classes were weekly and one hour long. The musical teachers from each group were blind to the nature of the experiment and classes took place both within lower- and
middle-class socioeconomic areas. After six months of classes, the children were measured on sensitivity to musical structure and expression. The active class kids showed higher levels of sensitivity to pitch and rhythmic structure than the passive class kids, although no group differences were found in reactions to musical expressivity.

The researchers then looked at brain development using EEG (the swimming cap with the wires again). Before training, the infants from the two groups did not differ in their responses to piano tones, but after the six months of classes, the active group kids showed stronger and earlier responses to musical tones than the passive group kids.

Finally, the researchers looked at social development using the Infant Behaviour Questionnaire. Once again there were no differences before the classes started but after six months the active class showed less distress to novel stimuli, more smiling and laughter, and were easier to soothe than those who had taken part in the passive group.

Overall, it appears that the more active music classes helped to boost the development of many cognitive and behavioural characteristics that could reasonably be related to the nature of the lessons. It is interesting to see, however, that not all musical skills were improved in the active class (reactions to musical expressivity). Some types of musical learning in children seem to carry on regardless of the type of engagement they encounter.

This final important point from the music class study is one on which I would like to conclude this chapter. Musical engagement in childhood exists on a continuum: from passive listening to active engagement, informal playing and singing through to formal music lessons and training. All of this exposure to music influences the way that the brain and behaviours develop, just in different ways and by different degrees.

Musical listening is an important part of our childhood, not because it makes us smarter, better readers or faster socialisers but because we learn about music itself, a process known as musical enculturation.
⁴⁴
When we are young children we do not understand what music is all about, any more than we understand our native language. We need to be exposed to these uniquely human sounds and their structures over a period of years in order to be able to comprehend and respond to them.

It’s hard to imagine that listening to music is a complex skill but it is, in the same way as listening to your friend talk is a skill. We don’t think of these things as difficult; mostly because we can’t really remember what it was like not to be able to do them. A child, however, is learning about the nature of both of these complex sound systems (language and music) through every single exposure. In the case of musical enculturation they are learning about the rules of melody and rhythm construction, performance expression and style that are common to their musical world.

The building blocks of musical understanding, constructed quietly and behind the scenes in a child’s mind as they hear music, form the basis for their development of individual tastes, preferences and reactions to music that will become very much a part of who they are as a person. Some of that person’s individual tastes in music might come as quite a surprise to their parents when the child hits the next stage of their development – the adolescent years.

So let’s leave childhood for now and move on to the teens and early adulthood, and talk about how the music of this unique period shapes our musical future as well as influencing our personal and social development.

Chapter 3

Music for adolescent years

‘There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music’

JOHN KEATS

Like many people I have rather sketchy memory of what it really felt like to transition from a child to an adolescent. I don’t recall the day I certainly left my childhood behind but I remember the hallmarks of my adolescent life: my first crush on TV and in life (David Duchovny and a boy called Keith), my first heartbreak, my first and only real argument with my loving father, my brilliant first car (a sixteen-year-old silver Nissan Micra that I named Ruprect
¹
) and my first long, lost summer.

More importantly I remember the soundtrack to each of those experiences. Keith has a song, as does Ruprect, and the boy who broke my heart. I can’t hear ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence None The Richer without being taken right back to that long fantastic summer that I spent running through the sweetsmelling yellow oilseed fields at the back of my village with one of my best friends, Owen. Ah, to be fifteen again …

By the time we reach our teens some of us have had musical training and some not, but just about everyone is still learning about the world through music. Our childhood spent overhearing musical sounds has been well spent as we can now easily listen to multilayered complex rhythmic and pitch structures with minimal effort such that the lyrics, chords and
instrumentation wash over us, stirring up the teenage whirlwind of emotions, anxiety, confusion and excitement – not to mention hormones.

Music, by association and absorption, is becoming part of us. In this chapter we will see that the music of our teenage years and early adult life comes to frame a great deal of our musical future and identity in later adulthood.

In this period of life we first start to regularly use music as a tonic, a kind of self-mediation. We learn about the music that makes us feel good and the music that makes us feel terrible, and we begin to experiment with emotions through music.
²
Music also mirrors and perhaps even helps to shape the development of our personal and social identity. Through these and other processes that we will discuss in this chapter, the music of this unique life period becomes heavy with nostalgia and, as a consequence, is thought by many people to be the very best music of their life.

Music for moods and emotions

Before we dive into the murky world of adolescence let’s talk briefly about how music is connected to our moods and emotions, as this is an important factor when thinking about adolescence.

It will come as no surprise that mood and emotion regulation is consistently identified as one of the main reasons that we listen to music: survey after survey and test after test, music psychologists report on the influence that music can have on our feelings of happiness, sadness, excitement, peace, and so on. One study reported that an average 64 per cent of everyday music listening in a two-week period was associated with emotions.
³
In my life it is more.

Some of the most highly cited scholars in this area (there are many, so apologies that I can’t include everyone) include Tia DeNora,
⁴
Alf Gabrielsson,
⁵
David Hargreaves and Adrian
North
⁶
who have all collected large amounts of data exploring the effect of music on mood and emotion as we go about our everyday lives as well as in our peak moments.

The ultimate encyclopaedia of research into music and emotion was compiled in 2010 by Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda: the
Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications
. This is a huge book by any standards; I do not use the word encyclopaedia lightly. I often place this compendium on my desk if I feel an immediate need to look scholarly. It is a super read even though it is very dense, and much of this chapter draws inspiration from its pages.

The existence of many large, well-known studies tells us that there have been decades of research in this area carried out by some of the best in the business. This gives us a rich base with which to explore the effects of music on one of the most moody and emotional times of our lives: our teenage years through to early adulthood.

At this point I should say a brief word about the difference between ‘mood’ and ‘emotion’. Many of the same words can be used to describe both an emotion and a mood, like ‘happy’, ‘sad’, and ‘angry’. The generally accepted difference is that an emotion has a clear trigger, something tangible or a thought that induces a change in our state. Emotions also tend to be short lived. So a nice piece of dark chocolate at the end of a long day can trigger happy emotions for me that may soon dissipate after the treat is gone. A mood, by contrast, does not need to have a trigger; we can all wake up in a happy mood with a bounce in our step for no particular reason. Plus a mood can last.

What is emotion and why does it happen? According to the James–Lange theory, proposed way back in the 1890s, emotions are a result of the way we interpret our bodily reactions. For example, if we are surprised by a lion (hopefully not too common an occurrence for you) our physiology changes
as a result of chemicals triggered by our brain and released in our glands, and the subsequent reaction of our autonomic nervous system. Our pulse races, we begin to sweat and our breathing becomes shallow. This is all part of a well-tuned evolutionary response to danger as our body prepares optimal conditions for ‘fight or flight’. William James and Carl Lange proposed that emotions like fear were a result of our head trying to make sense of what was happening to our body.

The James–Lange theory is convincing on first read and there is certainly a component of bodily reactions in our moods and emotions. It is hard to imagine being really frightened without the racing heart and cold sweat – such sensations are why people go on rollercoasters and watch really scary films. However, the James–Lange theory turns out to be too simplistic in reality to explain all emotional reactions. Not all our emotions have a bodily response and many of them overlap (our hearts race for many reasons) but we don’t regularly confuse our emotions. On top of this, emotions can be experienced before the onset of a full bodily reaction.

Despite these issues, aspects of the James–Lange theory are important because they help us understand why our teenage years are hyper-emotional, as our body undergoes a vast number of uncontrollable hormonal changes in a short period of time. This fact, combined with the first exposure to so many emotionally charged situations (first love, leaving home, financial freedom) means things are bound to get rocky and that emotions will be all over the place at times. No wonder it is at this stage of life that we start to explore different ways to modulate, control and enhance our emotions and moods. For many people, this is the time when music really comes alive.

There are many theories as to how music influences our emotions
⁷
and regulates our moods: in fact, current understanding is that there are at least six different psychological
mechanisms
^*
that are responsible for triggering emotion-like states in music.
⁸
I don’t intend to go into too much depth about these debates and mechanisms (the music and emotion encyclopaedia does that far better than I ever could) but it is useful for us to summarise some of the main theoretical players here:

Musical mirror

Plato was perhaps the first to note that aspects of music mimic the sounds that we make in different emotional states. When we are happy we talk faster, in a higher pitch and with bigger leaps in sound, whereas when we are feeling sad we talk slower, in a lower register and with not much vocal movement. If you map out the characteristics of happy and sad music they look very similar. Patrik Juslin and Petri Laukka
⁹
conducted a thorough examination of a range of different emotions and found many similarities between the sounds we make normally with our voices and the sounds we hear in emotionally matched music.

Expectation

In the 1950s the composer and author Leonard B. Meyer gave a series of lectures where he outlined his theory as to why music is emotional. He said that we have expectations as we listen to music – we expect the next note to go down or up or for a phrase to end in certain ways. Our expectations are based on the enculturation of music that we talked about at the end of the last chapter, which happens through normal exposure to musical sound.

According to Meyer, composers are aware of these expectation effects (they sense them as well) and they both satisfy
and thwart them in order to trigger different emotions. This theory was later expanded by Ray Jackendoff and Fred Lerdahl as part of their seminal work,
A Generative Theory of Tonal Music
,
¹⁰
and was most recently explored in the award-winning book
Sweet Anticipation
by David Huron.

Deep brain stimulation

We must not leave the brain out of this discussion. Many of the complex appraisal reactions from recognition of emotion in music and calculations of musical expectations rely on the higher centres of the brain such as the frontal cortex. However, evidence from Valarie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre suggests that peak emotional music, music that we associate with ‘chills’ down the spine, can also trigger responses in the much older and subconscious areas of our brain which are closer to the emotion centre, or amygdala, and reward systems.
¹¹
These brain responses appear to be much earlier than those which we could associate with a conscious evaluation, suggesting that some music can touch us very deeply although we do not yet fully understand why.

‘Darling, they’re playing our tune’

I love that this term in used in the scientific literature, firstly by John Booth Davies back in 1978.
¹²
This phrase captures the sense that music can be emotional because we attach emotion to it as it makes connections within our life memories. This is also known as the effect of nostalgic familiarity.

These piggybacking music memory emotions can be both happy and sad, and very powerful. I can’t listen to Ray Charles sing ‘Take These Chains From My Heart’ very often – it is my heartbreak song. If you just listen to the music then it should be a happy song as it has all the ingredients of a happy musical structure. But then there are the lyrics, the aching way it is sung by Ray Charles and, most importantly, the image in
my head of my first love walking away from me, as fresh and raw as if it had happened yesterday.

I listened to this song many times in the days after he left, hence it became a strong part of that memory. Many years later, the visual memory of that day is not that upsetting; the music, however, opens the floodgates.

Emotional memory attachments are often formed most strongly during adolescence. Our emotions are all over the place and anything that can help settle them or even exaggerate them in an attempt to reach a cathartic resolution is bound to have an appeal. It is at this time that many of us come to appreciate that music is a comparatively safe option for emotion and mood expression and regulation compared to some of the other substances on offer. So we start to experiment and the result is a pair bonding between us and the music that touches us.

I should point out before I go any further that music is not necessarily used in this way by all adolescents. I certainly used it this way, without understanding how or why at the time, and I know many people who have had similar experiences. My partner on the other hand navigated his teenage tempests by getting lost in the world of Spanish classical literature and he maintains that music was, by comparison, not that important for his emotional development. While music is not a teenage tonic for everyone, it is enough of a universal agent to trigger a significant scientific literature of its own, so is worth our while trying to understand why it is so popular and effective.

Adolescent experiments with music

It should come as no surprise that adolescents who listen to music do so for a significant proportion of their time and consider it to be a very important part of their life. A ten year old but substantial UK survey of music listening in this age
group put the figure at between two and three hours every day
¹³
. My guess is that this figure is much higher nowadays thanks to a substantial increase in personal control orientated music technology in the last decade.
¹⁴

Music listening is a popular method for emotion and mood regulation in adolescence
¹⁵
and younger people use music for this reason more than adults.
¹⁶
In these years we are still learning how to regulate physical and mental state; unfortunately we have to learn these skills quickly as developmental changes put sudden demands on us to grow up. Some studies put the age of fifteen as a turning point in the use of coping strategies, including music listening, to self-regulate
¹⁷
– that fits in nicely with my strong personal memories of the song ‘Kiss Me’ during my long, lost summer.

Suvi Saarikallio has devoted many years to studying music for adolescent state regulation. Her research confirms that regular listening for mood and emotion regulation is both deliberate and unconsciously motivated, and that some of it is really quite effective.

In 2007
¹⁸
Saarikallio carried out a large study aimed at categorising the psychological meaning of music for adolescents. She conducted a meta-analysis, essentially a study of lots of other studies. This type of analysis allows scientists to synthesise findings from different labs to determine the consistent results, thereby locating the strongest effects. Saarikallio noted four main functions of music:
identity
,
interpersonal relationships
,
emotion
and
agency
.

Agency
describes gaining a sense of control, competence and self-esteem from music listening.
Emotion
describes how young people use music to both express and learn about emotional reactions, especially negative types, in what Saarikallio calls a ‘safe and acceptable expression of difficult, violent, or disapproved thoughts and feelings’. We will discuss
identity
and
interpersonal relationships
in the next section.