The faint din of low-frequency brainwaves
I’m embarking on a project that entails reading through a selection of the many popular nonfiction books on music and the human brain. Bio-determinism is *so back*, you guys!
Most of the literature is out to prove that the grammar and aesthetics of pop (yes, pop) music are part of a genetic package we’ve inherited from our late, great homonid ancestors.
The thing is, I’m not sure that this is Big Science getting all knowledge-bully on art; after all, music has been the bearer of that Platonist/Hallmark-card banner of universal meaning since our well-evolved brethren of the Enlightenment severed the formal distinction between Art and Science. If anything, Big Science has tended to affirm cultural clichés by taking them for hypotheses, and I suspect the neuroscience of music is out to discover that oft-proclaimed “universal language” in our genetic code.
To me, bio-science has more to offer in the way of explaining the experience of sound than enshrining our cultural aesthetics in genetic eternity. One thing I’ve always been especially curious about is the obvious difference between physiology and experience. For example, I’m always perplexed by the idea that listening to music through headphones at high volume can damage your hearing even if you’re in an environment where the music only becomes audible at an elevated volume. When you’re in the subway, say, and the surrounding noise of a passing train makes it impossible to hear the music in your headphones at its normal volume, you turn it up to make it audible against the outside noise. The total volume of the train and the additional decibels are working together — balefully — on the eardrums, but the music doesn’t actually *hurt* your ears at all the way it would hurt them if you kept the music at that high volume after the train has passed and the station is quiet again. The difference between physiology and experience here is the difference between what *damages* your ears versus what *hurts* them, i.e., what is physically painful to experience; pain is an experience or symptom of physical damage that is somehow subject to camouflage.
3 years ago