Chopin's Heart

A quirky item that I pass on since I am a Chopin fanatic...From the "Random Samples" section of the 11 July issue of Science:

Frédéric Chopin died in France in 1849 at the age of 39 of what his death certificate recorded as "tuberculosis of the lungs and larynx." After his death, friends had the composer's heart removed, submerged in a jar of cognac, and placed in a Warsaw church in his native Poland in accordance with his wishes.

Now Polish scientists want to reopen the jar to see whether Chopin actually died of cystic fibrosis. Michal Witt of Warsaw's International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology has argued that Chopin had childhood symptoms matching a mild form of the genetic illness, including respiratory infections, weakness, and delayed puberty. As an adult, Chopin was slight of stature, had a hard time climbing stairs, and occasionally had to be carried offstage after concerts. "If it turned out that Chopin had cystic fibrosis, this would be very special news for all those affected with CF," Witt says.

Witt hopes to persuade Polish authorities to open the niche where Chopin's heart is stored by 2010, the 200th anniversary of his birth. "It's a good moment to check, and once we have it in our hands it's a small matter to do a CT [computed tomography] scan and DNA test," says Tadeusz Dobosz, a geneticist at Wroc aw Medical University. Poland's Culture Ministry is considering the request.

Mendelssohn piano trios....

The is the first of what will be several weekly postings of portions of the house concert at Twin Valley on 6/29/08. This is the Andante con moto tranquillo from Mendelssohn's 1st piano trio. I am playingon the Steinway B, with Sonny Enslen (cello) and Daphne Tsao (violin).

Piazolla - Otono Portena

Here is the second Piazolla tango we did at the 6/29/08 Sunday musical at Twin Valley.

Why are musical chords cheerful or melancholy?

In the current issue of American Scientist, Cook and Hayashi offer a fascinating article on the psychoacoustics of harmony perception (PDF here). Major and minor chords entered Western music during the Renaissance, when two-part harmonies were supplanted by three-tone chords. The authors argue that human responses to these chords have a biological basis, rather than being learned (the opinion of most musical theorists). Their acoustical model explains harmony in terms of the relative positions of the three notes in a triad and how their complex higher harmonics, or upper partials, interact with them. Those of you interested in science and music should check out the special Nature series of essays on this topic.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, a French composer and author, wrote his Treatise on Harmony in 1722, one of the first and most influential studies of harmony in Western music. His book noted the profound emotional difference between major and minor chords: “The major mode is suitable for songs of mirth and rejoicing,” he wrote, while the minor mode was suitable for “plaints, and mournful songs.”

From their conclusions, after the analysis section of the paper:

Now that we have a model of how listeners identify a chord as major or minor, we may take the final step and speculate as to why the acoustical valence carries an emotional valence as well. We contend that the emotional symbolism of major and minor chords has a biological basis. Across the animal kingdom, vocalizations with a descending pitch are used to signal social strength, aggression or dominance. Similarly, vocalizations with a rising pitch connote social weakness, defeat or submission. Of course, animals convey these messages in other ways as well, with facial expressions, body posture and so on—but all else being equal, changes in the fundamental frequency of the voice have intrinsic meaning.

This same frequency code has been absorbed, though attenuated, in human speech patterns: A rising inflection is commonly used to denote questions, politeness or deference, whereas a falling inflection signals commands, statements or dominance. How might this translate to a musical context? If we start with a tense, ambiguous chord—for example, the augmented chord containing two 4-semitone intervals— and decrease any one of the three fundamentals by one semitone, the chord will resolve into a major key. It will then have a 5–4, 3–5, or 4–3 semitone structure. Conversely, if we resolve the ambiguous chord by raising any one of the three fundamentals by a semitone, we will obtain a minor chord. The universal emotional response to these chords stems, we believe, directly from an instinctive, preverbal understanding of the frequency code in nature. One of us (Cook) has explored this in more detail (see the bibliography).

Individual tastes and musical styles vary widely. In the West, music has changed over the centuries from styles that employed predominantly the resolved major and minor chords to styles that include more and more dissonant intervals and unresolved chords. Inevitably, some composers have taken this historical trend to its logical extreme, and produced music that fanatically avoids all indications of consonance or harmonic resolution. Such surprisingly colorless “chromatic” music is intellectually interesting, but notably lacking in the ebb and flow of tension and resolution that most popular music employs, and that most listeners crave. Whatever one’s own personal preferences may be for dissonance and unresolved harmonies, some kind of balance between consonance and dissonance, and between harmonic tension and resolution, seems to be essential—genre by genre, and individual by individual—to assure the emotional ups and downs that make music satisfying.

Valse Romantique

Debussy. Someone who listened my recording of this on YouTube asked how to get the sheet music to this piece, and as I sent them the information and listened it again, I decided to relay it on to MindBlog as a bit of relief from the more brainy stuff.

Healing and sedative effects of music.

An article by David Dobbs describes the work of musician/surgeon Claudius Conrad, who suggests that music may exert healing and sedative effects partly through a paradoxical stimulation of a growth hormone generally associated with stress rather than healing. His study, published in Critical Care Medicine:

...was fairly simple. The researchers fitted 10 postsurgical intensive-care patients with headphones, and in the hour just after the patients’ sedation was lifted, 5 were treated to gentle Mozart piano music while 5 heard nothing...The patients listening to music showed several responses that Dr. Conrad expected, based on other studies: reduced blood pressure and heart rate, less need for pain medication and a 20 percent drop in two important stress hormones, epinephrine and interleukin-6, or IL-6. Amid these expected responses was the study’s new finding: a 50 percent jump in pituitary growth hormone...The question is whether the jump in growth hormone actually drives the sedative effect or is part of something else going on.

The Evolution of Music

In the May 15 issue of Nature Josh McDermott discusses ideas about the evolution of music:

The mere presence of music in every known culture implies some genetic basis. But music varies dramatically from culture to culture, and many aspects of musical behaviour seem at best only weakly constrained by genetics. Whereas our ability to hear pitch intervals, for instance, could well be biologically rooted in the hardware of the auditory system, our emotional response to particular scales or chords seems likely to be acquired from exposure to a particular culture. Interactions between genes and environment are complex, and unravelling their contributions is not easy, but studies of music in different cultures and of musical development offer some hope.

A number of interesting music-related traits emerge in human infants with fairly minimal musical input, providing some evidence for innate constraints. Babies notice when the notes of a melody are reordered, but not when they are shifted to a different pitch range. Infants, like adults, are sensitive to the relationships between notes, which is preserved in transposition, but altered by reordering. Infants also tend to be captivated by music relative to many other stimuli. Not all music is equivalent to them — they prefer combinations of notes that are judged by adults to sound pleasing, or consonant (the perfect fifth, for instance), over combinations that are less pleasing, or dissonant (a minor second). Infants may even extract metre from music: they react when the rhythm changes from a march to a waltz.
Universal appeal

Features of music that occur repeatedly around the world despite the substantial cultural variation in music also provide clues to genetically constrained mechanisms. Lullabies seem to qualify as a rare universal — nearly every culture has a genre of music geared towards infants, and there is considerable consistency in how they sound, generally being slow, repetitive and featuring descending pitch contours. Other features that are common, if not completely universal, among cultures include the inclination to dance to music, musical metre, and the hierarchical organization of pitch, giving structural prominence to particular notes over others.

Brief Bach, and its piano and windows

A Bach two-part invention (No. 8)

Music becoming a monoculture...

David Huron writes an interesting essay in the May 22 issue of Nature noting the fact that as millions of musical recordings have become available over the web, there has been a

...collapse in the diversity of musical minds. A Nigerian group might sing in Yoruba, but the harmonies are thoroughly Western. Native American Navajo singers make valiant efforts to preserve their traditions, but to the trained musicologist, their singing bears the unmistakable imprint of Western scales. The casual listener hears a wealth of variety; the musicologist detects a rapidly spreading monoculture — albeit expressed in many forms.
...Linguists know how fast languages disappear. Musical cultures may be an order of magnitude more fragile. It will be many centuries before the whole world speaks Mandarin. Meanwhile Western music has swept the globe faster than aspirin. Robust musical cultures remain in China, India, Indonesia and the Arab world, but even in these regions, most people are thoroughly acquainted with Western music through film and television. Less robust musical cultures are disappearing rapidly or are showing deep infiltration by Western musical foundations. Many have already disappeared. There remain only a few isolated pockets, such as the highlands of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya.

A Chopin Nocturne...

Chopin Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2, recorded on my Steinway B at Twin Valley.

Tones of Ancient Greece

I found this brief commentary from "Random Samples" in the May 16 issue of Science so interesting that I wanted to pass it on in its entirety:

The strings of a helikon, a gadget invented by Ptolemy to probe musical scales, sounded last week for the first time in almost 2 millennia at the University of Cambridge in the U.K....Andrew Barker, a musicologist at the University of Birmingham, U.K., built the instrument from a description in Harmonics, Ptolemy's 2nd century treatise on the mathematics of music. Ancient scholars considered the study of harmonics vital in understanding the mathematical rules that they believed governed the universe. He unveiled it as part of Cambridge's Science of Musical Sound Project.

Barker says the 1-meter-long wooden instrument with eight metal strings allows scientists to test "complete scales constructed on the basis of mathematical principles." The helikon creates different pitches with a calibrated sliding bridge, which can be inserted diagonally to shorten strings to different lengths. Strings can also be moved crosswise to raise or lower the range of pitches. Barker, who showed how the adjustments produce different intervals when the gadget is plucked, admits that it's not designed for musicmaking. Still, he says he was delighted that it worked at all.

Cambridge historian Torben Rees, a professional jazz singer, called Barker's presentation "a fascinating account of ancient thinking concerning harmonics." Music, he says, was regarded as "the sensible expression of the order of the cosmos. This conception of the universe … was essentially the birth of mathematical physics."

Some Chopin to start the week...

I'm warming up to do some recordings this spring and summer.... this is Chopin's Nocture Op. 9 No. 1

For a calm start to your week... some Debussy

Here is a second version (posted April 23, 2007) of the Debussy Reverie I initially put on YouTube Aug 29, 2006). I'm amazed that the first version has had ~90,000 viewings, and the second (made in response to comments on the first version) has had ~8,000.

Release of creativity by frontotemporal dementia

An article by Sandra Blakeslee describes FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, through which some patients have become gifted in landscape design, piano playing, painting and other creative arts as their disease progressed. The composer Ravel composed “Bolero” in 1928, when he was 53 and began showing signs of this illness with spelling errors in musical scores and letters. The structure and repetition of this musical piece is mirrored by the graphic shown here, an image of a migraine by Anne Adams,a bench scientist with FTD who became drawn to structure and repetition. Enhanced artistic abilities arise when frontal brain areas decline and posterior regions take over. Injury or disintegration of dominant inhibitory frontal cricuits appears to release or disinhibit activity in other areas. The result of compromising one part of the brain can be to induce other parts to remodel and become stronger.

Creating Musical Variation

Here is a clip from a very interesting perspectives piece on approaches to creating musical variation, by Diana S. Dabby in the April 4 issue of Science:

In the 21 letters that Mozart wrote to his friend Michael Puchberg between 1788 and 1791, there exist at least 24 variants of the supplication "Brother, can you spare a dime?" Mozart ornaments his language to cajole, flatter, and play on Puchberg's sympathies. He varies his theme of "cash needed now" in much the same way an 18thcentury composer might dress a melody in new attire by weaving additional notes around its thematic tones in order to create a variation. Such ornamentation could enliven and elaborate one or more musical entities, as can be heard in the Haydn F Minor Variations (1793) (mp3 file of theme, mp3 file of variation). The Haydn represents one of the most popular forms of the 18th and 19th centuries--variations on original or borrowed themes. Yet myriad variation techniques existed besides ornamentation, including permutation and combination, as advocated by a number of 18th-century treatises. More recently, fields such as chaos theory have allowed composers to create new kinds of variations, some of which are reminiscent of earlier combinatorial techniques.

In a broad context, variation refers to the technique of altering musical material to create something related, yet new. Recognizing its importance to composers, the 20th-century composer and teacher Arnold Schoenberg defined variation as "repetition in which some features are changed and the rest preserved". He wrote numerous examples showing how a group of four notes, each having the same duration, can be varied by making rhythmic alterations, adding neighboring notes, changing the order of the notes, and so on (see the figure, panels A to C). Changing the order of the notes reflects the 18th-century practice of ars combinatoria. Joseph Riepel advocated a similar approach (see the figure, panel D).


Figure - Idea and variations. Variation techniques illustrated by Schoenberg, Riepel, and a chaotic mapping example. Schoenberg offers numerous ways to vary a given four-note group, shown in the first measure of each line. (A) Rhythmic changes. (B) Addition of neighboring notes. (C) Changing the original order. (D) One of many examples given by Riepel of ars permutatoria, a branch of ars combinatoria, where six permutations of the notes A B C are given (15). Note that Riepel writes above the staff the German musical spelling of the notes so that "B" translates to B-flat. (E) The first measure of a Bach prelude (pitches only) followed by the first measure of a variation generated by the chaotic mapping.

A bit of piano...

I thought I would punctuate the stream of 'serious' posts with a paste from my piano recordings, this being "Three Fantastic Dances" by Shostakovitch:

A fiery piano performance...

This makes me cringe..... On March 8, pianist Yosuke Yamashita donned a fireproof suit and played a burning piano on a beach in Ishikawa prefecture. The improvised jazz performance went for about 10 minutes until the flames rendered the piano silent.

Watching musical improvisation in the brain

Limb and Braun have done a fascinating functional MRI study of brain activity changes distinctively associated with improvisation in professional jazz pianists (compared to production of learned musical sequences). They suggest that a pattern of focal activation of the medial prefrontal (frontal polar) cortex, along with extensive deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions, may reflect a combination of psychological processes required for spontaneous improvisation, in which internally motivated, stimulus-independent behaviors unfold in the absence of central processes that typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance.

The patterns they observe suggest cognitive dissociations that may be intrinsic to the creative process: the innovative, internally motivated production of novel material (at once rule based and highly structured) that can apparently occur outside of conscious awareness and beyond volitional control.

You can check out the experimental paradigms used and also listen to audio samples of the musical excerpts provided in supporting information.

Three-dimensional surface projection of activations and deactivations associated with improvisation during the Jazz paradigm. Medial prefrontal cortex activation, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deactivation, and sensorimotor activation can be seen. The scale bar shows the range of t-scores; the axes demonstrate anatomic orientation. Abbreviations: a, anterior; p, posterior; d, dorsal; v, ventral; R, right; L, left.

Super Bowl preliminaries....the anthropoligist from Mars

The description in the header of this blog includes the phrase "and random curious stuff." Well....this post qualifies. I show you one of the videos used Sunday to warm patrons up for the super bowl orgy at my happy hour bar. "Macho Man", the Village People. Watching this did make me feel like Oliver Sacks' anthropologist from Mars.

More Retro Video

After last week's Disco flashback, I can't resist giving you a little more nostalgia (this ought to make you cringe)... The Partridge Family's "I think I love you" from their popular sitcom in the early 1970s.