Behind the Universal Language
Friday, June 12, 2009
Does people's response to music have a biological basis or is it shaped by our culture? We pose that question to two experts today: Dr. Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist, musician and Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University; and Dr. Laura-Lee Balkwill, a psychologist at the Music Cognition Lab of Queens University in Canada.
Comments [3]
John asked us for examples of incomprehensibility. OK, one brief one.
In Hmong singing, the melody is one choice a singer makes, and the text is completely different. One can put a text with any message (happy or sad, lament or love) to any melody. I was recording a singer once who started the song before she realized she had not chosen the topic yet and had to start all over again. The melody does not communicate any emotion in that tradition; it is the words and enunciation of those words.
I cannot believe how quickly a culture can go backwards! I admit to being a cultural relativist, but this isn't a matter of preference. THe evidence demands it.
Now John has invited all these Western-biased psychologists on the show to give results of heavily slanted research that proves the assumptions. Circular logic, friends!
It has been well over 100 years that anthropology has concluded, unambiguiously, that the only thing "universal" about music is related to physiology.
But if Dr. Jamshed and Dr. Laura-Lee are still with us, I have two examples of research design that will demolish the ethnocentrism of your current research questions.
1. Compare a lullaby with a widow's lament. Keep the culture, language and recording context the same. Then, play the two examples for complete outsiders to the culture and have them figure out which is which.
2. Compare music of pageantry (ceremonial entrance of the King, beginning of a major religious event, etc) with the height of a funeral, such as a cremation. Keep social class and instrumentation constant.
I have had MANY personal experiences with exactly these sorts of non-universals. I am in Thailand, where northern Thai funeral music does not sound somber in the slightest. Well, to me at least. Its "sadness" for Thai people is, I believe, an associated emotion; they remember being sad when they heard it. The sadness is not in the music!
Let me repeat. Any claim to "universality" in music will, upon more careful thinking, be seen to be a function of either physics or biology.
Catriona Morrison of the University of Leeds is doing really cool research about music and memory/the brain via the work of the Beatles. Suggests that culture can shape our brains --and that art can boost our biological functions
http://www.more.com/2025/5338
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