Can you learn to love music? Surely not. It’s something you’re born with, the natural bass in your blood and rhythm in your bones (that is usually more apparent in some people than others). For years the world has thought this. Scientists in particular linked musical talent and appreciation with the physical workings of the ears and brain.
However, a study at the University of Melbourne – published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General – has found that musical harmony can in fact be learned, and is not inherent as previously thought.
As Science Alert reports, Associate Professor Neil McLachlan of the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences says that, “our study shows that musical harmony can be learnt and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds.”
Neil McLachlan found that the reason some people think “the music of some exotic culture (or Jazz) sounded like the wailing of cats, it’s simply because you haven’t learnt to listen by their rules. ” So the key to musical appreciation was in training the brain to recognise “particular variations of combinations of sounds like those found in jazz or rock.”
What does that mean? Basically listeners need to ‘learn the rules’ of particular kinds of music before they find them appealing.
The participants of the study, 66 people of varying musical talent, were tested on their ability to hear combinations of notes, and whether or not they found those combinations appealing.
“What we found was that people needed to be familiar with sounds created by combinations of notes before they could hear the individual notes. If they couldn’t find the notes they found the sound dissonant or unpleasant,” he said. If they couldn’t do so, it was more likely “they found the sound dissonant or unpleasant,” McLachlan said. Musicians were found to be more sensitive to this dissonance, or ‘mental conflict’.
“So if you thought that the music of some exotic culture (or Jazz) sounded like the wailing of cats, it’s simply because you haven’t learnt to listen by their rules.”- Prof. Neil McLachlan“This finding overturns centuries of theories that physical properties of the ear determine what we find appealing,” said McLachlan , meaning that regardless of musical ability, people in the study could be trained to better identify these combinations of notes.
McLachlan’s coauthor on the new musical study, Associate Professor Sarah Wilson notes that the research found that those who were already trained musicians were much more sensitive to dissonance than non-musicians. Essentially, if a musician has learnt a particular set of rules – classical music for example – they are going to find anything outside of that set of rules to ‘sound wrong’.
“When they couldn’t find the note, the musicians reported that the sounds were unpleasant, whereas non-musicians were much less sensitive,” Assoc. Prof Wilson said. “This highlights the importance of training the brain to like particular variations of combinations of sounds like those found in jazz or rock.”
To prove this theory the research also studied 19 people, with no musical background, who were trained over ten sessions to identify the pitch in a random selection of ‘Western chords’. Their skill in this improved greatly over the sessions, and therefore their appreciation for the chords grew.
Professor McLachlan established “that for music, beauty is in the brain of the beholder”, or more specifically in the ability of the brain to understand the beauty in a piece of music. So there is hope for the musically challenged among us yet.
It’s not the first scientific study into music that’s turned up some interesting results. Previous studies, such as this one undertaken at the University of California, proposed that people find rock music appealing because it awakens our primitive side, due to the fact that it “shares aural characteristics with the vocalizations of distressed animals [and] captures human attention and is uniquely arousing.”
Daniel Blumstein and Greg Bryant, experts on animal distress calls and evolutionary psychology respectively, found a correlation between the way music is composed and the emotional response it evokes. “What [composers] usually don’t realise,” says Bryant, “is that they’re exploiting our evolved predispositions to get excited and have negative emotions when hearing certain sounds.”
In particular they reference Jimi Hendrix’ famous use of distorted guitar at Woodstock as music that began placid but suddenly broke into distorted or jarring effects. “This study helps explain why the distortion of rock ‘n’ roll gets people excited: It brings out the animal in us,” Bryant says.
Another study, by ‘mosh physicist’ Jesse Silverberg, attempted to explain the behaviour of mosh pits, with people in these chaotic situations often exhibiting many of the same behaviours of gas particles. Silverberg even put together an interactive model to demonstrate his research, which demonstrates his study in a fun, interesting way (trust us, it’s addictive).
