Well, it's a conundrum.
For his first experiment he came up with an elegant concept: He stopped people on the street and asked them to sing, entirely from memory, one of their favorite hit songs. The results were astonishingly accurate. Most people could hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent margin of error, and two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch, a level of accuracy that wouldn’t embarrass a pro.“When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual recording of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,” Dr. Levitin said.
It was a remarkable feat. Most memories degrade and distort with time; why would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because music triggers the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last year Dr. Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how.
There's a wonderful anecdote in the article about the first demo tape The Beatles submitted:
Dr. Levitin dragged me over to a lab computer to show me what he was talking about. “Listen to this,” he said, and played an MP3. It was pretty awful: a poorly recorded, nasal-sounding British band performing, for some reason, a Spanish-themed ballad.Dr. Levitin grinned. “That,” he said, “is the original demo tape of the Beatles. It was rejected by every record company. And you can see why. To you and me it sounds terrible. But George Martin heard this and thought, ‘Oh yeah, I can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry built on this.’
Fascinating stuff. It's a phenomenon I'm sure we've all observed, too. I can hear the first chord of "It's a Hard Days Night," the initial bars of "Ticket to Ride," or the first bass notes of "Day Tripper" and immediately recognize the song. How about you?
Posted by Linkmeister at December 31, 2006 10:11 AM | TrackBackI can name that tune in one note...
"Pinball Wizard," "Lola," and as you mention, "Hard Day's Night," and there are a bucketful more. Interesting article.
Posted by: DXMachina at January 1, 2007 05:49 AMI stumbled across a book in the library a few days ago--"This is Your Brain on Music," by Daniel J. Levitin, and it's absolutely fascinating. Maybe I'll find out why minor chords make us sad.
OT and looking ahead, the fact that we won back both houses of Congress means--obviously--that we got rid of a whole slew of congenital idiots. That's gotta be worth something more.
And your comments for the new year doesn't seem to be working....:)
Posted by: terry in AZ at January 1, 2007 02:29 PMThanks, Terry. Somehow the comment function was closed for that entry. I wasn't drunk when I wrote it, so I haven't a clue how/why that happened. It's corrected now.
Posted by: Linkmeister at January 1, 2007 04:51 PMYou know, I wrote a paper when I was a brugeoning song writer in high-school. It was more about the responsability that song writers have, because of the profound integration that music has with the subconscious.
This was some 17 years ago and I have no clue who authored the study or what it was titled. But the research involved several different tests.
One involved playing a series of songs and asking participants to then dictate the words to two of the songs to the best of their ability. One of the songs had very clear singing, the other had heavy instruments, overwhelming the vocals. The average accuracy for the clear song was around seventy percent, while the other song was averaged at around thrity-five percent accuracy. When the subjects were then hypnotised, accuracy for both songs was even at around ninety-eight percent.
They also did tests requiring the participants to write from memory, the words of a short speach, then a short song. This test was performed with a bunch of sensors, whose purpose went over my thirteen year old head. But predictably the words to the songs came out far more accurately. When hypnotised though, while the accuracy of both improved, actually shrinking the gap, their was quite notably higher accuracy recalling the song.
I don't recall the particulars, but they also tested how the words and ideas in a song, stay with the listener for a much longer time than when they are spoken.
It was a fascinating study. . .
Posted by: DuWayne at January 3, 2007 03:29 PMYou didn't keep the paper, DuWayne? ;)
(I still have a few college ones I got As on; I tossed the rest.)
Posted by: Linkmeister at January 3, 2007 03:56 PMNo, and it was a pretty good one, for all it's teenage self righteousness. I do think it was directly responsable for my absolute distaste for musical satire and loathing of purely negative messages in music. Though I have "eclectic" tastes in music, with a lot of variation, I am afraid I am quite crotchety, about my taste in lyrics. I also still practice the utmost care when writing music - I never write a notion into a song, that I wouldn't like to see manifest in reality.
I got an A+ on that one, it was for an english class.
Posted by: DuWayne at January 3, 2007 10:06 PM