Johnny Cash damage hits in A major are so different that ring of fire G minor. The tonal dissonance between the chords is, ahem, minor: it’s just that the third note is lowered to a flat. But this change could fundamentally change how the song sounds and how it conveys feelings. In their new book Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to MusicDr. Larry S. Sherman, professor of neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University, and others. Dennis Pleas, professor of music at Warner Pacific University, explores the fascinating interplay between our brains, our instruments, our audiences, and the music they create together.

Extracts from Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music Larry S. Sherman and Dennis Pleas, published by Columbia University Press. Copyright (c) 2023 Columbia University Press. Used by agreement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Minor Fall and Major Rise: Sorting Minor and Major Chords

Another function of areas of the secondary auditory cortex has to do with how we perceive different chords. For example, part of the auditory cortex (superior temporal sulcus) seems to help distinguish between major and minor chords.

Remarkably, from there, major and minor chords are processed by different areas of the brain outside the auditory cortex, where they are assigned an emotional meaning. For example, in Western music, minor keys are perceived as “serious” or “sad” and major keys as “bright” or “happy.” It’s a wonderful reaction when you think about it: two or three notes played together for a short period of time without any other music can make us think “that’s a sad sound” or “that’s a happy sound.” People all over the world have this reaction, although the tones that evoke these emotions vary across cultures. In a study of how the brain responds to consonant chords (marks that sound “good” together, such as middle C and E and G over middle C, as in the opening chord of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” ), the subjects played consonant sounds. or dissonant chords (notes that sound “bad” together) in minor and major keys, and their brains were analyzed using a method called positron emission tomography (state of emergency). This method of measuring brain activity is different from the fMRI studies we discussed earlier. A PET scan, like fMRI, can be used to monitor blood flow in the brain as a measure of brain activity, but it uses tracer molecules that are injected into the subject’s bloodstream. Although the approach is different, many of the caveats we mentioned for fMRI studies also apply to PET studies. However, these authors reported that minor chords activate an area of ​​the brain involved in reward and emotion processing (the right striatum), while major chords cause significant activity in an area important for integrating and making sense of sensory information from various parts of the brain. brain (left middle temporal gyrus). These results suggest the location of pathways in the brain that contribute to feelings of happiness or sadness in response to certain stimuli, such as music.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy (or Sad): How Composers Manipulate Our Emotions

While major and minor chords on their own can evoke “happy” or “sad” emotions, our emotional response to music that combines major and minor chords with a specific tempo, lyric, and melody is more complex. For example, an emotional connection to simple chords can have a significant and dynamic effect on the mood in song lyrics. In some of his lectures on the neuroscience of music, Larry, working with singer, pianist and songwriter Naomi LaViolette, demonstrates this point using Leonard Cohen’s widely known and beloved song “Hallelujah”. Larry introduces the song as an example of how music can influence the meaning of lyrics, and then he plays upbeat ragtime, mostly major chords, while Naomi sings Cohen’s lyrics. The audience laughs, but also finds that the lyrics have much less emotional impact than when they are sung to the original slow music with a few minor chords.

Songwriters use this effect all the time to emphasize the emotional meaning of their lyrics. The study of guitar tablature (a form of notation for guitar notes) has explored the relationship between major and minor chords in conjunction with lyrics and so-called emotional valence: in psychology, emotions considered to have a negative valence include anger and fear, while emotions with a positive valence include joy. The study found that major chords are associated with higher valence lyrics, which is consistent with previous research showing that major chords elicit more positive emotional responses than minor ones. Thus, in Western music, the combination of sad words or phrases with minor chords and joyful words or phrases with major chords is an effective way to manipulate the feelings of the audience. The opposite action can at least confuse the meaning of the words, but it can also bring complexity and beauty to the musical message.

Manipulative composers seem to have been around for a long time. Music was an important part of ancient Greek culture. Although today we read such works as Homer Iliad another Odyssey, these texts were intended to be performed with instrumental accompaniment. The surviving texts of many works include details of the notes, scales, effects, and instruments to be used, and the meter of each piece can be deduced from the poetry (such as Homer’s dactylic hexameter and other epic poems). Armand D’Angour, Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford, has recently recreated the sounds of ancient Greek music using original texts, notation and reproduced instruments such as the aulos, which consists of two pipes with two reeds played simultaneously by one performer Professor D’Angour organized concerts based on some of these lyrics, resurrecting music that hasn’t been heard in over 2,500 years. His work shows that the music then, as now, used major and minor tones and time signatures to emphasize the emotional intent of the lyrics. Simple changes in tones elicited emotional responses in the brains of the ancient Greeks just as they do today, indicating that our recognition of the emotional value of these tones was part of how our brains responded to music in ancient times.

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