The Incredible power of the Music

Its helps resolve our deepest inner conflicts

Billions of people enjoy music; many feel that they can’t live without it.
Why?

It’s a question that has puzzled scientists and philosophers for centuries. 2,400 years ago Aristotle wondered, “Why does music, being just sounds, remind us of the states of our soul?”

In the 19th century Darwin tried to decipher if our ability to create music evolved by natural selection. Of all human faculties, only music seemed beyond understanding; flummoxed, he came to the conclusion that “music is the greatest mystery.”

More than 200 years ago, Kant declared music useless. And, near the end of the 20th century, celebrated psychologist Steven Pinker – also unable to comprehend its purpose – called music: “auditory cheesecake”.

A few years ago, the respected journal Nature published a series of essays about music. Their conclusion?, That it’s impossible to explain what music is and why it affects us so strongly – and that it’s not even clear if music can serve “an obvious adaptive function.”



But my recent research suggests otherwise: music is an evolutionary adaptation, one that helps us navigate a world rife with contradictions.

The crippling effect of cognitive dissonance
Music’s effect on our brains is closely related to what’s been dubbed “the greatest discovery in social psychology” of the 20th century: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the idea that people experience unpleasant feelings when they either possess contradictory knowledge, or are confronted with new information that opposes existing beliefs.

One way we alleviate dissonance is through suppressing or rejecting this contradictory knowledge.

Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes” illustrates this common human response. In the tale, the fox is distressed over the fact that he can’t reach a bunch of grapes. Even more unpleasant is the dissonance he experiences: the grapes are so tempting and so close – yet unattainable.

As a result, the fox attempts to alleviate the dissonance by rationalizing, “Oh, you aren’t even ripe yet! I don’t need any sour grapes.”



During the 20th century hundreds of experiments confirmed this common psychological response. When faced with dissonant thoughts, children, teens and adults all responded the same way: if I can’t have it, then I don’t need it.

A manifestation of cognitive dissonance is the rejection of new knowledge. Even some great scientific discoveries have had to wait decades for recognition and acceptance, because they contradicted existing beliefs that people didn’t want to surrender. For example, Einstein didn’t receive a Nobel Prize for his Theory of Relativity – now considered one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind – because it contradicted our core beliefs about space and time.

Music helps us grapple with dissonance
So if people are willing to deceive themselves or ignore new information, how has human culture evolved? After all, the foundation of culture is the accumulation of new knowledge – much of which contradicts existing knowledge.

Consider language: when language emerged in our species, every new word was a nugget of new information that contradicted an existing idea or belief. A powerful mechanism of the mind must have evolved to enable our ancestors to overcome these unpleasant dissonances that split their world, and allowed them to keep contradictory knowledge – to absorb new words rather than immediately discarding them.



Could it be that this ability was enabled by music? While language splits the world into detailed, distinct pieces, music unifies the world into a whole. Our psyche requires both.

Several experiments have proven music’s ability to help us overcome cognitive dissonances and retain contradictory knowledge.

For example, in one experiment, an experimenter gave a group of four-year-old boys five popular Pokemon toys. Playing with each boy individually, she had them rank, one by one, their preferences for the five toys. Then the experimenter told each subject that she needed to leave for few minutes, and asked him not to play with his second-ranked toy. When she returned, she re-initiated play and found that the formerly second-ranked toy was entirely ignored. When confronted with conflicting information (“I like this toy, but I shouldn’t play with it”), each boy apparently rejected his initial preference for it.

But when the experimenter turned on music when leaving, the toy retained its original value. The contradictory knowledge didn’t lead the boys to simply discard the toy.

In another experiment, we gave a group of fifteen-year-old students a typical multiple choice exam, and asked them to record the difficulty of each question, along with how much time it took them to answer each one.



It turned out that more difficult questions were answered faster (and grades suffered), because students didn’t want to prolong unpleasant dissonance of choosing between difficult options. However when Mozart’s music played in the background, they spent more time on the difficult questions. Their scores improved.

Life’s big choices become more informed
Beyond multiple choice tests, we’re constantly confronted with choices in our day-to-day lives – from the mundane (what to buy for lunch), to the major (whether or not to accept a job offer). We often use both intuition and pragmatism when evaluating complex situations, but we also incorporate emotion.

And then there are choices related to two universal themes of our existence – love and death – which are inherently steeped in contradictions.

With love, we’d like to fully trust it. But we know that to fully trust is dangerous – that we can be betrayed and disappointed. With death, one of the most difficult contradictions of all is our longing to believe in spiritual eternity and our knowledge that our time on Earth is finite.

Is it any coincidence, then, that there are so many songs about love and betrayal? Or that we are drawn to sorrowful songs in times of mourning?

The idea is that music – which can convey an array of nuanced emotions – helps us reconcile our own conflicted emotions when making choices. And the more diverse, differentiated emotions we possess, the more well-founded our decisions become. Whether it’s choosing to play with a toy or deciding to propose to a boyfriend or girlfriend, our research shows that music can enhance our cognitive abilities.

Thus, because we constantly grapple with cognitive dissonances, we created music, in part, to help us tolerate – and overcome – them.



This is the universal purpose of music, enjoy it.

Source: Leonid Perlovsky

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The Music in the Universe

Is the Universe behaving like an instrument? Does a connection exist between jazz and physics?

In a recent book published by Dr. Stephon Alexander, he manifests that “the structure of the universe is a result of a pattern of vibration, and the universe is behaving like an instrument”. Dr. Alexander explores the modern cosmology, presenting a compelling case for vibration and resonance being at the heart of the physical structure we find around us, from the smallest particle of matter to the largest cluster of galaxies.

A professor of physics at Dartmouth College and a lifelong student of jazz, Dr. Alexander has taken on “the challenge to find an isomorphism between jazz and cosmology”. Establishing this analogy is a fascinating prospect and a tall order. Although Dr. Alexander doesn’t succeed in uncovering a profound connection between jazz and physics, or proving that they share a common shape, his report on the state of research into the structure and history of the universe — his own academic field — makes for compelling reading, as does his life story.

The son of working-class immigrants to New York from Trinidad, he was considered “slow” as a child. However, he steadfastly became glued to an inspiration sparked during a school trip to the American Museum of Natural History as an 8-year-old. There he saw a photograph of Albert Einstein posing in front of a wall of equations. Against considerable odds, he went on to get a Ph.D. in physics, and he says he was one of only three black doctoral students in physics at the time in the United States. Eventually, Dr. Alexander received tenure at Dartmouth as an associate professor of physics and astronomy. While at Dartmouth , he pursued his passion for jazz saxophone and improvisation.



Some of Dr. Alexander’s analogies to jazz feel natural. In a chapter on quantum physics, he likens the physicist Richard Feynman’s conception of the motion of a quantum particle to the way a jazz improviser may aim for a target note during a solo. In both instances, he says, all possible paths to the destination are considered before one is settled on. Later, at a jazz club, the saxophonist Mark Turner says to Dr. Alexander, “When I’m in the middle of a solo, whenever I am most certain of the next note I have to play, the more possibilities open up for the notes that follow.” This is analogous in Dr. Alexander’s eyes to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that the more one knows about the position of a quantum particle, the less one can know about where it’s going.

“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both,” Fritjof Capra wrote in his 1975 best seller, “The Tao of Physics,” which explores parallels between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism. The question that can be asked of that book and “The Jazz of Physics” is whether each subject really illuminates the other, and whether the analogy adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

Do we understand Feynman diagrams or the Uncertainty Principle any better for having seen them through the lens of improvisation? Do we better understand jazz for having compared it to quantum physics? Not really. And these are the analogies that work best. Many others feel strained, like Dr. Alexander’s idea that John Coltrane “incredibly, correctly realized that cosmic expansion is a form of antigravity,” which rests on the titles that Coltrane chose for his late-period albums, among them “Cosmic Music” and “Stellar Regions.”



Deep down, the book feels like an attempt by Dr. Alexander to understand how his passions for physics and jazz can coexist so intensely. It also elucidates that thinking deeply about music has helped him to think freely, and led him to some of his best academic research. But the connection is above all personal.

Dr. Alexander valiantly if laboriously takes us through the full history of physics, from Pythagoras to Einstein. But it is in the later chapters investigating the forefront of cosmological inquiry that his book really comes to life, even if this has little to do with jazz. Still, you are left with the feeling of having had some basic concepts overexplained while some tantalizing, speculative ones — like the left- or right-handed spin of gravitational waves, which he says interact with matter and antimatter differently and could explain the emergence of matter in the early universe — are merely touched on.

The art of analogy is a difficult one, especially when it’s being sustained for the duration of a book. In juggling, if the path of each ball from the throw to the catch is just right, the crossing of the balls in the air can create magic. But fumble one and the whole performance suffers. Dr. Alexander fumbles to often here because his writing about music is plagued by factual errors. A few examples: When a string tuned to the note C “is divided into one quarter of its length, we get an F note,” he writes, when in fact we would get a C, two octaves up.

Subsequently, in an analysis of a mandala drawn by Coltrane for Yusef Lateef, he says that in a reading of the diagram, “we get C, C-sharp, E, F and F-sharp, which is an all-interval tetrachord,” when a tetrachord has only four notes, and the all-interval tetrachord, which is asymmetric, couldn’t logically be outlined in Coltrane’s entirely symmetric drawing. A diagram purporting to show the “fivefold symmetry of the C major pentatonic scale” incorrectly implies that the interval between C and G is the same as that between E and C.



Considering Dr. Alexander’s scientific bent, it’s surprising that it is in the technical aspects of music that he falters. His more poetic ideas about music can be powerful, like his speculation “that the reason why music has the ability to move us so deeply is that it is an auditory allusion to our basic connection to the universe.” This not only feels true; it is what musicians live for.

Source: DAN TEPFER, The New York Time

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