I
recently read a fascinating book called The Math Instinct
by Keith Devlin. It’s about how humans, as well as other creatures, use math
every day without realizing they do so. Devlin tells us that we have an area in
our brains that “contains a natural number sense.” Babies develop it fairly
early. They can distinguish between, for example, two items and three items
even before they have been taught the words
“two” and “three.” As we grow and learn, our counting skills become more
sophisticated. This is because when we handle numbers higher than ones, twos
and threes, we use, to quote Devlin, “…different mental abilities located in a
different part of the brain from the number sense.” Quite a thought-provoking book,
and I highly recommend it. I mention it here because, as with many things, I
saw a connection to music, which has many mathematical elements.
Almost
everyone has an innate ability to understand simple musical elements. This
natural ability allows us to distinguish between pitches, remember and repeat
short melodies and rhythmic patterns, and to process and understand a
progression of notes. Without this ability, we would be unable to sing even a
simple song like “Happy Birthday,” sing along with favorite songs, or sing for celebration
or worship together. In fact, if we didn’t
naturally understand and process melody and rhythm, we wouldn’t even be able to
enjoy the music we listen to.
People who haven’t formally studied music are often not conscious of how musical they are, or of the mathematical elements in the music they sing or listen to. Yet unbeknownst to them, part of their brains are aware. For example, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” consists of two four-bar phrases. When you hear the first four bars, you expect to hear an answering four-bar phrase. But you don’t consciously count them; your brain does it without your knowledge.
In
Western music, these equal phrases are quite common, and if you’ve grown up
listening to Western musical patterns you learn to expect how this music should
sound. It’s like when you read rhyming poetry and the syllables don’t come out “right.”
You weren’t consciously counting them, but part of your brain must have been,
or you wouldn’t have noticed.
Of
course, not all Western music has
this balance, and some composers have used that knowledge of our innate
perception to make their music intentionally
unpredictable. Igor Stravinsky is a prime example. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeSC0vtdn3g – you only need to listen to about 30 seconds or so to get the idea)
The fact that some deliberately do this only reinforces that we have the
ability to perceive it. And to complicate matters, if you do listen to a lot of
rhythmically unpredictable music, Stravinsky might not sound as odd to you. But
most popular music, and the music of composers like Mozart and Beethoven, among
many others, has this predicable balance.
Then what happens when we take music lessons? We begin to
expand the innate skills, layering new knowledge and additional physical and
mental abilities onto what is already there. This includes things like understanding
and interpreting the melodic and rhythmic notation, consciously understanding
structure, and learning the fine motor skills required to sing or play an
instrument well. We learn to think about the patterns and analyze them, which
engages different parts of our brains, and offers us the ability to make our
music more sophisticated and to understand music with more sophistication.
Another good example of this is how we hear, learn and
process rhythm. If I clapped a simple rhythm for most people, they would be
able to clap it back to me. If I ask them how they were able to do it, they’d
say, “I don’t know, I just repeated what I heard.”
But if I wanted them to clap the rhythm and instead
showed them this:
I would have to explain
the symbolic language that represents the rhythm, and they would have to
mentally process it in a completely different way. Reading rhythmic notation, and
the notes on the staff as well, requires us to learn a language of symbols and
translate them into words and letters, and then understand how those words and
letters represent the
rhythm and the notes. This involves verbal skills and abstract thinking. Like the
math example at the beginning, judging from other research that has been done,
some of those learned abilities are located in a different part of the brain
than the innate skills.[1]
I have always felt that the greatest service I can do my
students, and myself, is to try to teach them the different skills that help
them integrate all the areas of the brain
that are involved in music processing. By nurturing the innate and developing the
learned, we can create not only the most natural music possible, but also the
most sophisticated music our intellects can achieve. The perfect blend of innate
ability and conscious thought.
[1] There
are a number of studies done with PET scans and fMRIs that show we use many
different portions of our brain to process music. For a simple overview of some
of these studies, see This is Your Brain on Music, by
Daniel Levitin.
