You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (12 page)

Amusics in their own words

One lady, I will call her Pat, has been taking part in amusia trials for nearly a decade. She comes from a large family that lives in a stunning part of rural Ireland where there is a big community musical tradition. Pat’s family run a local shop that sells traditional Irish instruments and she and her siblings were taught Irish music when they were children, as well as Irish dancing. Her brother is a skilled accordion player. She, on the other hand, could never seem to get the hang of playing, singing or dancing, although she did learn to read music. She tried her best, practising for hours, but she could never seem to move up grades and was never picked for local performances.

Nowadays she would never choose to listen to music, especially in her own car, where it is talk radio or nothing. However, she has always encouraged her children to be
musical and delights in telling stories of their musical achievements. She also still enjoys visiting the traditional Irish session where music is played by friends and family in the local pub.

Pat has always been keen to understand why she is different. Why it is that, despite all her efforts over the years, musical performance and a true understanding of everyone’s fascination with musical sound is beyond her.

Like many people in her situation she was happy to learn that there was a reason for her reaction. It was not that she was stupid, not trying hard enough, or, horror of horrors, had no taste – an accusation that many with amusia face. Thanks to the efforts of people like her, who kindly offer their time for testing, we now understand that she has amusia. Her brain is different in a way that means music processing is disrupted for her. It is not her fault and she can’t help it. She is missing something that the majority of us take for granted.

One of the most common analogies that amusics use to describe their experiences is colour blindness. When I ask them, ‘What is the difference between these two tones?’ some amusics feel that the question makes about as much sense as asking a colour-blind person what is the difference between red and green. They understand that other people can probably perceive those colours in a different way to them but the clear distinction reported by everyone else is not something that is apparent to them.

One amusic told me that people often ask what her life was like without music. She said that this was the equivalent of asking a blind person what it is like to have never seen a sunrise: ‘You are asking me about something I have never known … so why would I miss it?’

Other descriptions of amusia include having a ‘Teflon mind’ for music. Often a person will describe how the sound of music does not stick around in their head long enough for them to be able to fully process or understand it. It just
slips away quickly and quietly. Alternatively, some describe it as like being handed an important piece of information and then having no idea how or where to file it away in order to be able to find it again.

During a recent conversation with an amusic lady, she described how fascinating she found it when someone played or sang music. She said that it must be like me watching another human fly around the room. Flying is not something I am personally capable of doing, so I do not associate it with the realm of possible human achievements. She feels the same way when she watches someone perform music.

Lastly I would like to relay the sentiments of another of my participants. This gentleman has always been clear with me that he does not want to be patronised or pitied for his condition; the thing that he finds difficult about amusia is other people’s reactions. He is convinced that it is especially hard for children who find music difficult and he thinks that people in positions of authority, such as teachers, should be more aware that amusia exists.

Differences in the amusic brain

The ability to make sense of musical sounds can be disrupted from the first points of perception through to musical memory,
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and even the later, most complex stages of musical interpretation and integration. One of the consequences of this varied symptomology is that it has proved relatively difficult to track down consistent markers for congenital amusia in the brain.

There has been little indication that there is anything out of the ordinary in the temporal lobes, within the main auditory areas. Where structural differences are found they tend to be higher up the music brain system in both the left and right hemispheres, in particular in the inferior (lower) frontal cortex.

One possibility is that the white matter highways of the brain are more impacted than the grey matter centres in amusia. One white matter pathway of current interest is the arcuate fasciculus (AF); you may remember this pathway from earlier in this chapter, where I discussed how it was found to be denser in musicians. Scans have shown that the AF may also be less well developed in individuals with amusia.
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As well as difference in brain structure, there are differences in the way that amusics’ brains react to musical sounds. Early brain responses, measured by EEG scans, can be ‘muted’ (smaller or delayed in time). Amusics’ brains show expected responses to out-of-key notes or notes that violate expectation but the reaction seems somehow weaker.
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Interestingly, you can sometimes get a normal brain response to a musical oddity in amusia, in the absence of conscious awareness.
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In these cases it seems like the brain spots the out-of-key note but the person remains unaware of this information. It may be that there is an abnormally high degree of disconnection between subconscious and conscious processing of music in amusia.
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This brief look at amusia shows us that so many of the musical skills that we possess, as simple as telling up from down, moving to the beat, or singing ‘Happy Birthday’, are all complex and impressive in reality. It has taken the whole of our childhood and adolescence to refine these musical skills and they are quite simply the best of any animal on the planet.

We take them for granted, just as we do the ability to read and speak. It is often only when these abilities break down or fail to develop that we see them for what they are – a truly remarkable achievement of the musician in all of us.

We have now explored the extremes of musical experience in adulthood: expertise at one end of the scale, lifelong music
difficulties at the other. That leaves the majority of us somewhere in the middle, with an interest in music and the ability to process it. The music of our lives has not impacted on our minds and bodies to the extent that it has in accomplished musicians but it has still had an effect on how we process the music around us.

Biased by listening

I can prove that you have learned a lot just from listening to music, because it has biased your brain.

By adulthood most of us have had decades of experience of only one musical culture: in my case, Western tonal music. I have learned the structures and rules of that musical style in the same way that I have learned the structures and rules of my native language, to the extent that I don’t need to think in order to understand and appreciate the sound. By comparison, when I listen to the music of another culture (for example, Javanese gamelan or Japanese hōgaku) that follows different rules and structures, I see the downside of my exclusive learning. On first hearing a new form of music you and I are as lost as if we were listening to a person speaking in a foreign tongue.

Scientists at the University of Washington have studied why we struggle when we first listen to music from other cultures. The situation is not hopeless, luckily, as people are capable of working out musical structures within unfamiliar music over time by just listening, in the same way that we can start to pick up the basics of new languages. This idea has been tried with a variety of cultures measured against the experience of traditional Western tonal music, including traditional Indian and Chinese music, as well as unfamiliar European styles such as Finnish folk songs.
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There are a few things that the majority of world musics seem to share. A recent study of music listening in adult
Congolese Pygmies found that both they and Western students reacted to the same simple emotional triggers in music like timbre and intensity. This result suggests there are some basic universals in world music communication that we can rely upon most of the time.
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Apart from this however, there is a very strong bias in the way that we interpret crosscultural music, which is based on our own understanding. The Pygmies in the above study showed fewer overall emotional responses to Western music compared to Western students. People are also less able to remember music from an unfamiliar culture.
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Finally, the brain shows an atypical response when listening to music from other cultures, reflecting the fact that we have to work harder to think about the sounds and are not so capable of understanding what might happen next.
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All of this adds up to an ‘enculturation effect’ in adult music listeners. The fact that we can’t instantly derive expectations for unfamiliar musical styles also means that typically we won’t initially like what we hear.

Bimusical brain

Enculturation may somewhat limit our first impressions of cross-cultural music as adults but we can learn about more than one culture at once while we grow up. Some of you out there may have a ‘bimusical brain’.

People who are fairly equally exposed to different musical cultures during childhood and adolescence appear to develop different musical systems and patterns of brain activation compared to people who only really hear one kind of music. This is not like hearing half classical and half hip-hop – genres from within the same culture – as these will mostly use the same musical building blocks. To have a bimusical brain you need to be exposed to music that evolves from a different set of rules.

Patrick Wong and colleagues have been studying brain responses of people who were brought up listening to both Western and Indian music.
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The researchers scanned the participants’ brains while they listened to both types of music and compared the responses to those of mono-musical people, who had only heard Western music while growing up. The bimusical people showed more complex patterns of brain activation suggesting, in particular, that their emotional reactions to music are unique and have been shaped by their bimusical heritage.

Everything we see in the research about our cultural response to music tells us that we have become biased by what we learn as children. Plus, intuitively, we all think that it is easier to learn an instrument as a child than it is as an adult. This does not mean, however, that we can’t learn music as an adult, either a new instrument or how to listen to the music of another culture. While there is some truth to the idea of critical periods in music listening where learning is easier, there is little truth in the idea that you must be young to pick up a new musical instrument or style.

Music learning, extraordinary and ordinary

There are tales of musical brilliance achieved in adulthood in extraordinary circumstances, which give enticing clues about the power of music learning as adults. In his book
Musicophilia
, Oliver Sacks tells the story of a man who trained himself to be a concert-level pianist as an adult after a freak accident. This gentleman was hit by a lightning strike, a life-threatening accident which left him with remarkably few after-effects other than a sudden addiction to music where previously he had shown comparatively little interest. As well as upping his music consumption massively, he set about training himself to play the piano, and achieved concert-level standard in an incredibly short period of time. He became devoted to music and obsessed with music learning.

A similar tale was recently reported in the UK press: a 39-year-old man was left with serious concussion after diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool. Before the injury he had played in a few bands as a teenager but never really devoted much time to music. Now he has been diagnosed with acquired savant syndrome, meaning he has developed high levels of musical ability and technique (including composition) where there were no previous indications of such skills. He states, ‘It’s as if my knock on the head unlocked something latent, or enabled me to use some part of my brain I simply couldn’t access before.’
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Our brains’ party trick of plasticity means that we are born lifelong learners. We don’t need a bolt of lightning or a blow to the head to be able to learn how to play music, sing or compose; we can do the unlocking ourselves. It will take longer and may be more hard work but I am pretty sure it is a lot less painful!

One of my favourite books on this matter is
Guitar Zero
by Gary Marcus, a psychologist who decided to take on the goal of teaching himself to play the guitar as an adult and analysed the experience from the viewpoint of a scientist.
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It is an engaging and fundamentally hopeful story of how anyone can pick up musical skills at any age if they are prepared to put in the effort and consistently challenge themselves to reach new heights. Your plastic brain is there for the moulding.