Anticipation: The Marriage of Music and the Mind

The Fourth in a Series

Pan & the metamorphosis of Pitys.

If anyone was an expert on anticipation it had to be PAN. While he was a lover of the nymphs, they are reported to have often fled from his advances. Could it have been his off-putting half-man, half-goat appearance?

The nymph Pitys was one object of PAN’s desires. She fled to escape his advances and was then transformed into a fir tree. After this episode PAN was reported to have said “Here on the sacred pine tree shall I hang my tuneful pipe.” Not exactly the outcome he had been hoping for. 

Back in the early 1970s singer-songwriter Carly Simon released her second studio album “Anticipation” and its title track, reportedly written in 15 minutes, relates to Simon’s state of mind as she waited to go on a date with Cat Stevens. Luckily, the date must have been a success as Carly’s fate most certainly was not that of Pitys!

The song was written with a formula using verses followed by a refrain:

We can never know about the days to come.

But we think about them anyway, yay.

And I wonder if I’m really with you now.

Or just chasing after some some finer day.

Anticipation, anticipation.

Is making me late.

Is keeping me waiting.

The hit song broke convention because the refrain is not repeated after the last stanza:

And tomorrow we might be together.

I’m no prophet and I don’t know nature’s way,

so I’ll try and see into your eyes right now.

And stay right here because these are the good old days.

So what makes for memorable and enjoyable music, at least from the standpoint of the way that we as humans process the music? Neuroscience is starting to provide some answers. 

The New York TImes reported when pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamines.

But what may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase.

Daniel Levitin

As Daniel Levitin (right) puts it in his best-selling book 'This is Your Brain on Music' - "Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brains impose structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music."

Wired UK noted last year that listening to music evokes an intangible emotional reaction, but the neural basis of this reaction is complicated. Pitch, melody, rhythm and other components of music are all processed by various areas of the brain, and how it all fits together has (so far) remained mysterious.

IS THERE ONE PLACE IN THE BRAIN WHERE MUSIC IS PROCESSED?

Despite attempts to locate a 'music processor' in the brain, no one neural population -- an 'ensemble' of nervous system cells -- has been identified that could respond selectively to music as opposed to speech or other noises.

Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds selectively to sounds that people typically categorize as music, but not to speech or other environmental sounds.

“It has been the subject of widespread speculation,” says Josh McDermott, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

McDermott continued “One of the core debates surrounding music is to what extent it has dedicated mechanisms in the brain and to what extent it piggybacks off of mechanisms that primarily serve other functions.”

The MIT study used a new method designed to identify neural populations from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Using this method, the researchers identified six neural populations with different functions, including the music-selective population and another set of neurons that responds selectively to speech.

THE ROLE OF MUSIC AND HUMAN EVOLUTION 

What is clear is that music – pitches separated by normalized intervals occurring according to recognizable intervals in time – rests on a feature of the brain with which we are born. This suggests an evolutionary value to music, perhaps beyond holding together the social order of a small tribe for survival.

It would not be surprising if we discovered over time that music, broadly construed, is fundamental to mating, child-raising, the propagation of moral and cultural codes, our political order, our sense of beauty, and at some level our language.

Take away our capacity for discriminating rhythms and note intervals, and we may be close to being crustaceans again.

BACK TO THE ANTICIPATION

It starts with auditory cortex – the part of the temporal lobe that processes auditory information in humans and other vertebrates - where musical information is likely being processed. This region of the brain can be active when we imagine a tune.

This area of the brain can encode the abstract relationships between sounds – for instance the particular sound pattern that makes a major cord, regardless of the key or instrument. Other studies show distinctive responses from similar regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of sounds, or in a cord progression. It’s something like when you hear a musician play a wrong note – which can be easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar piece of music.

As the NY Times observed “These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical information over our lifetime, creating templates of the statistical regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental representations of the music we’ve heard.”

Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate these predictive mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us, perhaps even with something better, akin to Carly Simon’s recording of “Anticipation” or even Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor.