Music and Walking Pace

 Marching to a different tune: researchers unlock the motivational power of music

  This is the text of my article for The Conversation published there on 12 July 2013.

 “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak”, wrote William Congreve in 1697.  We take this for granted, and therefore often tend to overlook how genuinely mysterious it is that simple patterns of sound vibrations can have profound effects on our minds and bodies. This power of music to on the one hand soothe, but equally to energise, has long fascinated musicians and philosophers. Most recently, psychologists and neurophysiologists have turned their attention to music, and have sought to measure, and explain in empirical terms, how music can have so much influence our moods and levels of energy.

A Belgian study published today has shed some further light on how this might work. Marc Leman and colleagues at the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music and Ghent University analysed the effects of listening to different pieces of music on the walking speed of 18 adults.  Researchers have long known that people will synchronise their steps with the tempo of music – after all, this is why we have marching bands.  So for this study, the researchers chose 52 pieces of instrumental music with contrasting moods and styles, but exactly the same musical tempo – 130 beats per minute.

Sure enough, almost all the participants stepped in time with the music.  What was more interesting was that certain pieces of music caused the participants to walk more energetically – to take larger strides, and cover a larger total distance – while other pieces caused the opposite effect.

For the record, the piece of music that created the most vigorous walking in the study was:

Falik, Ballad of El Efe

 

While the gentlest response was to:

Monsieur Saint-Colombe, Courante

After the walking test, the participants were then asked to rate the pieces they listened to in terms of opposed pairs of adjectives: was the piece good or bad? Stuttering or flowing?  Tender or aggressive?  Soft or loud?  Unsurprisingly, the participants walked with more of a spring in their step to music rated as stuttering, loud, or aggressive, while gentler, softer, flowing or more complex music had a relaxing effect.

This effect appeared to be independent of musical genre: the list of the most arousing music included classical, techno, world music and house, while the top ten most relaxing pieces ranged from Baroque solo viol music to contemporary Korean dance tracks.  The effect also seemed to be independent of the participants own musical preferences – the music had the observed affect whether or not the participants liked that particular style or genre.  Leman and colleagues speculate that this musical effect on the vigour of physical response might happen at an autonomous or subliminal level.  This suggests several possible practical applications of the research, for instance in sports performance or physical rehabilitation.

What makes this study relatively unusual is that the researchers then analysed these objective cognitive results in terms of a sophisticated music theoretical model.  They were attempted to discover exactly what the musical features were that were associated with the arousing or relaxing effects.  Nearly 200 sonic features of each piece were analysed – the loudness of various parts music, the sharpness of the attack, the structure of the beats, the distribution of pitches and so on – and this musical analysis was then correlated with the results of the walking experiment.  Surprisingly, only a handful of features were shown to cause arousal and relaxation, and these all had to do with the regular structure of the rhythm, which musicians call “metre”.  Put simplistically, music with a march-like rhythm (“binary metre”) causes more arousal, while music with a waltz-like rhythm (“ternary metre”) causes greater relaxation.

So when you next see a batsman stride to the crease or a boxer enter the ring to the blare of aggressive, pounding motivational music, it’s more than just theatre.  There’s a genuine physiological effect at work.  And it might be that the Blues’ best chance in next week’s State of Origin decider will be to make sure the Queensland team runs out to the sound of the Blue Danube Waltz. 

Four curiosities

Here are four slightly random images that I'm posting simply because they are slightly quirky, and I am rather fond of them.  The first is the Eskimo Nebula, an example of a rather particular type of nebula called a "planetary nebula".  The name is a misnomer: these objects have nothing to do with planets.  They are the remains of stars much like our sun, that die not with a bang but a whimper.  Instead of the fate of larger stars, which end as novae or supernovae, massive explosions and/or collapse into neutron stars or black holes, smaller stars like the sun simply puff their mass out into space as a series of cosmological death-rattles.  These puffs form a sphere of gas that expands outwards from the star over thousands of years.  They appear as small coloured discs - easily mistaken for planets.  Hence the name.  This particular nebula, the "Eskimo", NGC2392, is a rich blue colour not unlike Neptune.  It's the first example of its type I have photographed.

The next photo is f the Tarantula Nebula.  This is not strikingly exceptional as an emission and diffusion nebula - the (slightly colour enhanced) red elements are glowing hydrogen, while the blue/white sections are gas reflecting the bright light of internal stars.  The one really unusual aspect of this object is that it is outside our own galaxy, in the Large Magellanic Cloud.  It's actually a massive object, and if it were in our own galaxy - say, at the same distance as the Orion Nebula - it would take up half the sky and glow as bright as the moon.

The next is an image of a real neighbour.  This is Jupiter with her four brightest moons.  Actually this is a composite of two images - no single exposure can capture the detail of the bright planet as well as the faint moons, so I had to do a bit of Photoshop jiggery-pokery.

Finally, here is a fuzzy incomplete image of galaxy NGC1365 in Fornax.  For various reasons (clouds, trees, my own inexperience) I've only been able to collect 30 mins of total exposure time where it really needs about four times that much. The reason I'm posting it now is because last November a star in this galaxy (56 million light years away) went supernova.  It was quite bright last year, but is beginning to fade.  The star is still visible - it's the blue dot marked with the arrow.  The galaxy is starting to get too low in the Western sky to shoot properly - I'll image it again next year but by then the supernova will be gone.

A digital trobairitz: musical chivalry in the cyberspace age

This post is the abstract for my paper at the Annual Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia in December 2012

Recent tectonic shifts in the economics of music (and by extension, its political economy) have generated unprecedented challenges: for the music industries; for those concerned with defining and applying musical intellectual property; for the technologies of the production and distribution of music, both live and recorded;  and for the artists themselves.  It is hard to believe that it has only been a decade since Napster first made headlines as a threat to the hegemony of the CD-based recording industry.  Ten years on, not only is the music CD in the last yards of its journey towards obsolescence, it is more-or-less accepted that the battle to control (and sell) the intellectual property of recorded music as a commodity has been lost.  Social media are rapidly challenging mainstream media as the conduit for distributing, accessing, discussing, marketing and discovering music and musicians.  Recorded music is now, to all intents and purposes, free.

Photo by Brian Adams, http://baphotos.com.

Marian Call is an Alaskan singer-songwriter who is one of a cohort of emerging musicians building a career and a creative oeuvre within these new realities.  Classically trained and university educated  (she is a composition graduate from Stanford), she writes and performs songs that span genres from medieval, classical, jazz, folk/acoustic and many others.  She eschews contracts and labels - her audience base is entirely self-generated through social media and a frenetic touring schedule.  On tour she prefers house concerts to traditional venues – she will typically crowdsource venues via Twitter in advance of a tour, and rely on her supporters and followers on social media to publicize the event locally.  She is currently (Oct. ’12) touring Europe on this basis – a major logistic collaboration between Call and her supporters that she describes as “like a barn-raising”. Audiences at concerts are encouraged, but not required, to make a donation; similarly, her music is freely streamed online, and payment for the recordings are essentially a matter of honour.

Essentially, Call’s artistic and business practice diminishes or removes the notion of music as a commodity, an object of transaction. Instead, the emphasis is placed on relationships, or community – she has critiques the description of her as an indie or independent artist, suggesting that a better term is an “interdependent” artist.  In this paper I argue that this shift from music as commercial commodity to music as community catalyst has profound implications not just for the business  models of music, but for its aesthetics and semantics.  Call’s authorial voice within her music speaks and sings to and with her audience on a number of levels – literally, in the case of “Good Morning Moon” in which she sourced the chorus in the song as sound files individually submitted by her supporters.  Her music has an authenticity of expression and an imaginative range that, I argue, stems from its basis in a communicative premise that is, at root, ethical in nature – a code of musical chivalry that underpins the virtual and actual encounters on her journey as a modern-day trobairitz.

 

Music and physics – the connections aren't trivial

My ANU colleague John Rayner’s excellent recent article on the physics of music seemed to touch a nerve with the readership of The Conversation.

Although beautifully framed by the personal and anecdotal – John’s piece was subtitled “a love song” – the issues he explores about the relationship between music and physics go back to the ancient Greeks, and are as old as the disciplines themselves.

It certainly inspired me – a musicologist – to write something from the other side, to meet my scientific colleague in the middle in a speculative conversation about the parallels between our two worlds.

Musical meaning is tantalising and elusive. For most of us, music has the power to reach us profoundly and directly. The temptation is to speak of music as a language: the notion of music as a kind of “language of the emotions” is pervasive, centuries old, and nowadays has some limited empirical experimental support.

Most theoretical work now done on musical semiotics treats music as just another flavour of discourse, another language of signs; albeit one with its own special characteristics.

But this runs against an age-old notion: that music is a natural law. The medieval concept of “music of the spheres” held that the movement of the celestial bodies – what we now describe as astrophysics – was, at root, musical: the planets move in the heavens according to principles of harmony and resonance, with a set of common Pythagorean ratios governing both music and cosmology.

Indeed, we music academics are rather nostalgic for the time (in medieval universities) in which music was considered one of the four core disciplines alongside astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, and we held pride of place above the three lesser (hence “trivial”) language-based disciplines of logic, grammar and rhetoric.

Highs and lows

Physics permeates the language we use to describe music, and the concepts we use to understand it. For instance we talk about “high” and “low” musical pitch, perhaps without realising how deeply metaphorical this is.

There is no altitude to musical pitch: “high” pitches are caused by faster vibrations than “low” pitches. But we don’t talk about “fast” and “slow” music with reference to pitch (we use those metaphors for something else entirely).

And yet, the notion of musical altitude makes sense if we think about the energy states of the music. If, as in the excerpt below from Puccini’s opera Tosca, we listen to a soprano sustain a top B flat (as at 2:40 into the recording below), we are aware that she is sustaining a high-energy state, which must eventually relax.

The pitch seems invested with the kinetic energy required to produce it (of course, in Tosca’s case she has a literal encounter with the force of gravity, but that’s quite another story).

Singers, wind and brass players expend energy to reach “altitude”, while string players, keyboardists, guitarists and all the rest work no harder for the high notes than the low.

Yet, perhaps because of the centrality of the human voice to all music, this idea of fighting against musical “gravity” is ubiquitous, whether in a Paganini violin concerto or a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo, as per the video below. In music, as in physics, what goes up must come down.

And it doesn’t come down just anywhere. Most systems of musical organisation have a fixed point of reference – a pitch that functions as an attractor, pulling the music towards it.

In Western music, we call this the “tonic”, and most people, regardless of their level of formal musical training, can hear and sing the note to which the music is “pulling”. This idea of gravitational or magnetic attraction to a pitch was arguably the single most important characteristic of Western music between 1600 and 1900, and much music thereafter.

This may be a characteristic of Western music, but in other cultures' musics, the idea of a point of attraction is often even more powerful, as in the example below from Classical Indian music.

Not all music has a tonic, a fixed point of reference – in 1908 in Vienna Arnold Schoenberg famously departed from the principle with the “atonal” concluding movement of his second string quartet (as per the video below), thereby heralding a new and controversial musical age.

By coincidence, three years earlier, across the border in Switzerland, Albert Einstein had thrown the world of physics into disarray by similarly demolishing the idea of a fixed point of reference, in a paper on electromagnetism that described what later would become known as the Special Theory of Relativity.

Questions and answers

It’s worth observing that language has nothing resembling this notion of gravity or attraction: to understand this principle in music the metaphors must come from physics.

There are other concepts that bridge the disciplines in the same way. Balance and symmetry are also ideas that are fundamental to musical structure, and that seem to have more of a physical than a linguistic origin.

In classical music, perhaps the most common phrase structure is often described informally (and somewhat puzzlingly, to me) as “question and answer” – or more formally, as “antecedent-consequent” – two phrases that complement each other structurally, as in two phrases that make up just the opening eights seconds of Mozart’s Sonata in C KV545 (below).

There’s no question that rhetoric plays a role in shaping the way in which these two phrases echo each other. But on a structural level, there is an identity that seems almost mathematical in nature.

The two phrases are in balance: their (gentle) energies are complementary; their shapes are an image of each other; they are like two sides of an equation.

Time and memory

For me, the most important parallels between music and physics happen on a more philosophical level.

The late musicologist Jonathan Kramer started his book The Time of Music with the observation that small children play with blocks and toys to learn the fundamental concepts of space; by contrast, by singing and clapping, they play with music to learn about time.

There is something profound about the way in which music can accelerate, retard, bend and colour our sense of time’s passing. We can sit in a concert hall or opera theatre for an hour and hear 90 different people make thousands of noises on bits of wood, metal and flesh, and yet walk away with the impression we have heard one thing – a symphony, or an opera.

Music joins up time, and allows us to hear time as patterned and organised. These patterns allow us to predict the future – we listen in anticipation: that a melody will come to rest, or a harmony will move in ways that make sense to us, wordlessly.

Music is also a powerful stimulus of memory – overhearing a piece of remembered music can instantly rekindle long-forgotten memories.

It is much easier for most of us to memorise a song (words and all) than it is to memorise a poem. Music is a tool for grasping the order and sense between what has happened in the past, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future.

And to me, that sounds suspiciously like a definition of physics.

Threat and survival

Sadly, there is one last way in which music and physics are currently bedfellows. Worldwide, both disciplines are under threat at universities. In America and the UK, several physics departments have closed or are in danger.

Music education no longer receives government funding at UK universities, and in Australia recent controversies at ANU and Edith Cowan are symptomatic of the fact government funding for music is problematic.

pfly

And the provision and quality of music and physics education in our secondary schools, crucial to support and enable undergraduate study, are always competing with the demands for more and more literacy and numeracy in the curriculum.

There is not yet a crisis – at least, not at the high end: it remains, at least for the moment, sexy enough in policy terms to fund the elite practitioners.

The select few physics virtuosi who will discover whatever comes after the Higgs boson, or their musical equivalents who will perform the Queen of the Night aria at the Sydney Opera house or Covent Garden, still capture both the public imagination and the public purse.

But the opportunities for students to study fundamental and abstract ideas – such as music and physics – as part of a liberal arts education that supports a civilised and educated society are becoming fewer and fewer.

John Rayner was right to call the relationship between music and physics a love song. Let us just hope it’s not also a swansong.

Further reading: This is a love song: the physics of music and the music of physics

Jonathan Powles does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.