A Crash Course in the Neuropsychology of Music (Part I)
Peter Cariani
Wed Jan 19, 07:30-09:30pm, E25-119
Enrollment limited: first come, first served
Limited to 50 participants.
Participants welcome at individual sessions (series)
A Crash Course in the Neuropsychology of Music"
Part I: What we hear - structural aspects of music
These two lectures provide an overview of the current state of the neuropsychology of music.
In the first lecture we will introduce basic questions, such as what is music? What are the many psychological and social functions that music fulfills? We will then take a look at the basic auditory qualities that music utilizes: loudness, pitch, timbre, consonance, harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, the time sense. Basic Gestaltist mechanisms group together sounds with harmonic structure, sonic events having similar qualities, and repeating sequences of events (chunks). We will survey the respective uses of these auditory qualities, groupings, and patterns in music and examine some of the auditory and general brain codes and computations that may subserve them.
Contact: Joseph R Stein, E25-518, 452-4091, jrstein@mit.edu
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A Crash Course in the Neuropsychology of Music (Part II)
Peter Cariani
Wed Jan 26, 07:30-09:30pm, E25-119
Enrollment limited: first come, first served
Limited to 50 participants.
What are the neural bases for music's psychological functions? Sequences of sonic contrasts create expectancies, violations & reconfirmations that are experienced as tensions/relaxations. Music engages brain circuits associated with emotion, pleasure, temporal prediction/reward, and semantic/syntactic processing. Developmental studies suggest newborns have basic music percepts (pitch, melody, harmony, rhythm) not acquired through learning. Comparative studies suggest that musical species are vocal-mimics. Evolutionary psychologists see music faculties as adaptations or nonadaptive by-products of language.
However, music has hard-to-explain, diverse effects: cognitive interest; emotion/mood/arousal/motivation control; dancing/exercise/motoric engagement; meditation/trance/sleep; analgesia; mnemonics/nostalgia. Instead, music may speak the "language of the brain" by structurally coupling to brain circuits, imposing repeating temporal patterns not unlike those of normal bodily & mental activities. Temporal patterns may be essential to central neural codes. Like other artificial means of inducing pleasure, taking direct structural control of our brains becomes its own reward.
Contact: Joseph R. Stein, E25-518, 452-4091, jrstein@mit.edu
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