* NOTE: Lecture 17: MEG Decoding and RSA (video not recorded) View the complete course: ocw.mit.edu/9-13S19 RU-vid Playlist: ru-vid.com/group/PLUl4u3cNGP60IKRN_pFptIBxeiMc0MCJP
For anyone who is remotely interested in this topic I STRONGLY suggest reading Michael Spitzer's The Musical Human; an amazing accomplishment. As a professional musician, classically trained (music major in college), I was blown away by his scholarship.
29:45 The piece by John Cage is not "nihilistic". It's called 4′33″, which is 273 seconds. -273°C is absolute zero and nothing can move at that temperature, therefore no sound can travel.
What I find interesting is that there was time when a composer like John Cage could be featured on national television, whereas now we just have shows where people try to win a singing contest overseen by insulting judges. Now that's nihilistic.
nihilism = from Latin nihil 'nothing', and English -ism. You have said nothing to change the tautology that a piece of music with nothing in it is about nothing. Nevertheless, the value content of your comment is non-zero, for it illustrates sharply that Cage is a complete prat to have made a meal of such an appalling sound pun. He should never have been let out of his cage.
4'33" is a piece about duration. One of (and possibly the most important of) the aspects of music is its duration, and the divisions of duration within it.
Regarding the overlap between rhythm and pitch, it's interesting to consider that most people perceive pitch between frequencies of 20Hz and 20KHz. Rhythm in popular music is more generally between, say 80 beats per minute (BPM) and 140 BPM (there's a lot of variance between styles, of course). But if you take a percussive sound that most people would perceive as not having a particular melodic pitch, and trigger it at regular intervals, and then steadily increase the speed of the intervals, people will perceive a transformation from a rhythmic pulse at lower frequencies that we usually describe as BPM into an increasing melodic pitch as we get into the very fast frequencies that we usually measure in Hz. So from that perspective we could describe rhythm and pitch as different frequencies on the same spectrum.
This lecture is missing a huge part of the big picture. Music is also about dynamics, elapsed time, the rapidity of change in all parameters, including loudness, and the interaction between dynamics, tempo, and pitch (increases in which are each perceived in Western music as increases in intensity), which would be easily measured with the methods described, possibly with more data mining. Anyone looking at that? I didn't see anything about time and dynamics in the few slides we were allowed to see in this video. Pitch and rhythm are like paint and bricks, while dynamics and time (not tempo - time spent in transition and buildups, time to let the musical ideas sink in) are like the frame of the structure. I think these are important omissions. Likewise, phonemes and pitch are not the only two components of spoken language that convey meaning. Again, dynamics and time factors impart meaning. There is a difference between a loud voice and a shouting voice. With apologies to Esther Phillips, everything from a whisper to a scream can impart meaning, regardless of loudness. This discussion is like reducing the idea of sexual intercourse to thrusts per minute and which part goes where. There's the initial attraction, the invitation, the flutter, the excitement, the rush, slowing down and savoring the moment, allowing the buildup, then finally reaching that point where there is no force in the world that can stop the inevitable. I play in a rock band, and that's what it's like to play - on a good night anyway. I'm also a theatrical composer, and I can tell you that music functions as a language (among other things), regardless of whether it uses language machinery in the brain. It is functionally, if not physiologically, linguistic. I'm also a retired neuroscientist who would love to see a few more musician-scientists study this issue.
@Le Ed I don't expect any professor to know everything, but I do expect every professor to acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge of the subject, and the meaningfulness of any research data presented. If she can't do that while discussing more esoteric topics, she needs to get a guest lecturer or something to cover it for her. Here she used a somewhat ambiguous method (though still the best we have) to show that a small part of one brain function (a few components of speech processing) intersects with a small part of another brain function (a few components of music processing), but she does it without reference to the ambiguity inherent in her method (though maybe she covered that elsewhere in this course), and without reference to the limited set of components tested relative to the processes being discussed. That's pretty fundamental, and a professor should know that and present it as such. A small intersection of a small subset of components of each process can't say much about the generalized intersection of the processes.
Music is older than language itself. We sang and danced before we learned to speak. Spoken language is a limited form of music to express precise meanings and abstract ideas.
@@genshinsage I love this, Kenya! It makes sense to me, and it's a beautiful image of our development. I'm a scientist, so I gotta ask, do you know of evidence for this? If not, it's become my favorite hypothesis - that language developed as a specific form of music. I think it's an elegant explanation.
@@genshinsage You don't know that. I think by all biology and history assumption, language is first, otherwise how the human race will come up with everything else? And it's not just a thing on standing with the obvious, but language is literally everything in our life, it's not just words, is gestures, looks, actions, so on. You can't just say music is older than language because even music is language. Language is more than speak
@@santiagosuarez3584 In the last 10,000 years, it is true that language has become more important to the core of human development. But it wasnt true this way before in the last 500,000 years ago. All languages have started out as a musical way of expressing emotions and intents and even gestures were a more controlled version of dancing. It is wrong to assume that music and dance are separate. This is a historical accident, not a human universal. Music and dance have always been together. Some hunter gatherer cultures have the same word for music and dance. Language and gestures slowly evolved out of music and dance over a much longer timespan. Once humans have language and gestures, it is more efficient in communicating complex ideas and dominated history ever since.
4:00 My music brain thinks of vowels as pitch related audio and consonants as non-pitch related audio (typically thought of as highs but can be lows such as plosives or B and P sounds). It’s not that vowels are connective, we just tend to inject consonants within vowel combinations. Like AL-TER (different vowels) or REA-DING (similar vowel sound). An example of a vowel combination without a consonant is O-IL or RE-AL.
Is there such thing as a neurolinguistic inference. To know what the patient is hiding, the subconscious talks with sequencing of linguistics, syntaxis.
why there was no slide shown exclusively in this video by the video editor...? its hard to see what exactly professor is presenting with all the lights in the room
Music: Consider the following: a. "IF" my theory of everything idea is correct, (and I fully acknowledge the 'if' at this time, the gravity test needs to be done to prove or disprove that portion of the TOE idea, but 'if' true), that what is called gravity is a part of the currently recognized photon (electrical field 90 degrees from a magnetic field), gravity acting 90 degrees from both the 'em' fields and is the reason 'em' has a sine wave pattern, and that the 'gem' photon is the eternally existent energy unit of this universe that makes up space and time itself (space being energy itself and time being the flow of energy), and including numbers and mathematical constants for math to do what math does in this universe, and that the 'gem' photon makes up everything in existence, including us, our consciousness, memories and thoughts, ... b. ..."THEN" music can literally caress our very inner being as we are beings of energy interacting with energy in a pleasing way when we interact with pleasing music. We become one with the music and the music becomes one with us.
This great lecture got me thinking: what if our concept of music is affecting the questions we ask and our research methods? I mean, from a brain study point of view, maybe the Papua New Guinea music sample is, after all, closer to the common Homo sapiens idea of music than, you know, The Beatles or Justin Bieber or Mozart. Modern popular / classical music with its harmony, chord structure, instruments etc is a very recent invention, a few hundred years old, compared to Homo sapiens which is 300,000 years old or more as a species. So, music in its modern form has had , I believe, zero effect on human brain evolution because it's only been here for something like 0,1% of the time of Homo sapiens. I presume the Papua New Guinea music sample was performed by a group of hunter gatherers. For most of human existence, all humans have been hunter gatherers. Agriculture and state are also modern inventions although not quite as modern as modern music. Also, "music" as a term is pretty modern. The word comes from Greek, but funny enough the ancient Greeks didn't really have a word for music, rather their word, mousike, meant "art of the Muses", so, a fuzzier / broader concept. So, maybe it's somewhat anachronistic to think that Homo sapiens has had a concept for music (ie. the idea that "what I'm hearing/producing now is music") throughout most of it's existence. Maybe that's not the case. Maybe things have been more blurry and language and music and other kind of sound production (like mimicking animal sounds which some hunter gatherer groups still do) have been seen more or less the same thing or these practices have been seen overlapping and there hasn't really been a distinct idea of music per se for the most part of human existence?
I wonder if by zapping specific neurons we can have people hear music where there isn't, same as the faces thing. Like the Scrubs episode where a patient hears everyone singing, as if her life was a musical
definitely very possible, psychedelics give a lot of insight into this stuff as what is possible to maybe emulate in the future. Probably the best we could do is make someone hear a rhythm like 4/4 in the near future
This is very possible. I'm remembering a few case studies in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat": people who have temporal lobe seizures can remember vivid scenes of their life, and some hear music they haven't heard since they were a child.
Consonance and disonance. I think it depends on what you class as music. to me it if you include the term that music must be enjoyed. than those of us in the west may have learned to dislike dissonance because we have learned to not like that sound. where as people who haven't heard of music probably just see music as sound with (I assume they recognise that sound with rythm is probably music) and maybe they just see it as a sound. Not a phenomena to enjoy but just to observe, I feel they are probably indefferent to it. But maybe if they were accustomed to feeling good while listening to sounds, and making that form of activity. and maybe seeing examples of people reacting bad to bad sounding sounds such as those of us with specific music taste means it creates neurons for us to associate music as something that is good or bad, not just something to observe and then throw away, i.e we are not indifferent to it. we may be picky. and maybe our pickiness for what we enjoy to listen to is so intense that listening to something that is the opposite of such produces or elicits negative feelings from us. I assume we built the system to detect bad music or bad sounds perhaps on a neural level to do with how frequency of sound may affect frequency of the brain activity in terms of consciousness and overall workings of the brain.
about the problem of testing newborn's responses to music but not being able to find out if it was innate or learned - what about testing children who were born deaf and become hearing through an operation?
I Imagine Nancy challenging her class with the semi-rhetorical question 'can you think of a better experiment?' and one over-eager undergraduate waving arms while moaning 'me, me, me,' but when pointed to for an answer having no better reply than the truthful literal 'no.'
The specific methodology might yield evidence to support or refute her hypothesis, some day, but a lot more work needs to be done to establish any real meaningfulness to it right now. We have machinery to visualize incredible things, but we have no clue how to give meaning to what we see. It's not that her methods are bad. It's just that she thinks her methods give her evidence to support her conclusions. As of right now, they don't. She has connected two pieces of a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle and acts as if she's solved it, or a substantial chunk of it. She hasn't. That's ok. Science has to start somewhere. But she is not representing her work as the modest contribution to the field that it actually is. This is how people talk when they have a book to sell on Oprah.
@@beenaplumber8379 As they say, opinions differ amongst the masters. For laypeople like myself, we are satisfied with the good doctor's credentials and presentation.
@@jamesduggan7200 That is why you are and will remain vulnerable to questionable claims. You have no idea when someone with credentials is lying, or simply mistaken. If all you need are credentials, I can show you the Earth is flat, and that we never went to the moon. Do you want to be vulnerable to that? At every research conference I've attended, presenters (myself included) always discuss the weaknesses of their conclusions, and whenever anyone offers criticisms, the first thing we do is thank them for their criticism. Criticism helps in the search for truth, and it often gives the scientist more work to do. (It's not an attack... usually.) What you are witnessing in this and other lectures of hers is academic irresponsibility. She is not being honest about her conclusions. She is inflating their importance. Her data do not support her conclusions, which she is presenting as sound, and in at least one other lecture by her, she uses her feeble data to make unfair and harsh, even bigoted statements about people with autism. She is irresponsible. The "good" doctor's credentials look good on paper, but what she's doing with them is reprehensible. I find it telling that she has so many supporters ready to defend her when she's actually done very little for a professor at her time in her career. She's done fMRI mapping studies. So? My brother's been doing that since the early 90s. In her lectures she attributes meaning to her data that isn't supported. (Yeah, I have credentials as a neuroscientist too.) That's bad, but I guess she's tenured. She's nobody special, but she seems to have an elevated public profile. That should raise a few red flags, doesn't it? Even for someone who's not a neuroscientist? When someone makes a scientific claim, don't just accept it. The first thing they teach you in any graduate research program is academic skepticism. Everybody has credentials. Pay attention to what they say and what the evidence says. Credentials do not enhance truth. People make mistakes, people have biases, and for whatever reason, people want their data to seem important. Credentials do nothing to prevent that.
@@jamesduggan7200 My goal is not to persuade you, but to show you there are alternatives to your vulnerability. What you do with those alternatives is your business. I'm a teacher and a scientist. That's what I do. My preference is to have a society of educated people who think critically without having to appeal to authority. Good luck.
8-10% of males (and ~0.1% of females) have some degree of color blindness as well, so the total number is about the same. Only think of the consequences in our world of not recognizing components of music vs. not distinguishing a red light from a green light, which is the most common color-vision problem.
I think all of our our neutrons fire in a sequence that is in xcoirdinance with some kind of internal rhythm. I hypothesise the higher the rate of vibration, if controlled well, the sharper or more focused perhaps someone may be. I think rhythm could account for movement as we prepare for a movement (we think about it) before we do it most of the time. If it is not involuntary of course. Rhythm to me would mean perhaps every 0.002 seconds the neutrons fire allowing you to create the movement faster if if you have neurons that fire every 0.000002 seconds. that is to say the delay between you having a thought and then completing the action is a meaning on rhythm. that is to say perhaps subconsciously before you thought about making that thought, your subconscious thought of the thought and fired the neurons. those with better rythm would of had more repetitions of those neutrons firing perhaps allowing for more refined neurone selection and efficiency when the action is in conscious awareness and (i.e action potential reaches threshold and action Is seen). I am seeing music and rhythm going together as rhythm allows you to expect the next beat in the music. If I am playing football while listening to music I may play in accordance with the beats in the music, that is to say I make my movements in time with the beats. the metronome this keeps me on allows me to have a refined movement as I know when im going to make my movement and can spend the rest of my time preparing for the next beat. without that I may move to an internal rhythm, maybe keeping to this rhythm, or not sophisticatately changing the tempo in fine Mattert may lead to discordance and perhaps negative outcomes in the motor outcome motor output.
that is to say to force a movement you are not in your internal rhythm (which I hypothesised being a rhythmic time diminsion that neurone fire per second or per millisecond probably with how fast neurone fire. (maybe further). ) would mean your neuron fire might be delayed for when you wanted the action to happen. or perhaps if not delayed, it could be unco-ordinated, as you don't have that fine control that you would have with electrical output coming through it. I'e I assume perhaps not enough electrical charge would be held .
perhaps rhythm could be seen in cognitive ability as perhaps I higher rate of rhythm could allow for more cognitive functions to happen per time elapsed. for example in 5 seconds. someone could have a level of consciousness or rhythm of 0.0002 which (every 0.00002 seconds ur neurons fire) allowing you to perform a cognitive function every 0.00002 seconds. that means in 2 seconds you have 0.00002/2 = 'x'. you would have x number of cognitive abilities or tasks that could potentially be completed by you. this could mean more clarity if it is vision, or perhaps the ability to read more stimuli in the environment, or sharper senses if this is picked up by any of the secondary systems.
I am suggesting this high rate of vibration or frequency could be a model or mathematics for sensitivity. because I assume sensitivity to be the ability to clearly distinguish and detect the difference between similar items and to detect small amounts of items and perceive them. if someone has a higher rate of sensitivity/rythm, they would have a higher rate of neurons firing, perhaps every 0.0000000002 seconds their neurons are firing. so every 0.000000000002 (apologies if the 0's aren't equal, it is my intention) that person's body can detect or compute a new cognitive component. If we take this one step further and say they can detect a change from the last stimulus in the time frame before and they're selects of time are fine (i.e every 0.00000002 seconds they get an updated version of computed processing of the external environment for example). Perhaps that allows them a greater sensitivity to detect change as they have a bigger overall component that builds up the picture that is to be computed by the mind.
this would also of course have to depend on the sensory system the person has. i.e their ability for only a small change in electrical gate to create threshold and detect or be aware of the sensation.
Interesting, but she's not really across 20th century music, and admits she is not musical herself. It would be more accurate to refer to her topic as "Melody" rather than "Music". It is ironic that the list of sounds used in mapping the audio brain regions would themselves make a fine piece of musique concrete.
does rap or reggaeton counts as music? It's the biggest music industry market for more than 30 years. Is music now an intellectual tool that regresses human evolution?
@@Dr.Z.Moravcik-inventor-of-AGI Oh, silly me, I forgot about quality, Please share it with us, so we can finally base everything right on top of it and make things right. This is what we've all been waiting for!
Consider that modern science claims that atoms and molecules vibrate, and that humans are made up of in part atoms and molecules. Sound is vibrating air waves. Everything in existence made up of atoms and molecules has it's own 'musical' sound, it's own vibratory frequency.
52:10 Correction: music is not distinctively human. Neither is language. whoever thinks that is a narcissist. God did not create Nancy in his own image.
@@m.ayhanbaloch9641 your comment reminds me of what a Muslim friend once came up with during one of our frequent discussions on theology; he said passionately: "You're talking about science, but I'm talking about facts!!". If Nancy is your god to you, then follow her faithfully and believe her blindly. Since you mention biology, are you aware you are 60% fly and 40% banana?
@@m.ayhanbaloch9641 She had better be talking about philosophy, because none of that is factually known. Science is a philosophical process, not a set of facts.
Any proof for that? She opened the lecture by talking about this escusivity, how animal brains don't seem to respond to music except when it has a specific function for them. Do you have any study to show your point? Else I'll trust the professional.
harmony in music is pleasurable for the same reason that harmony in anything (eg human relations) is pleasurable. It's a matter of having one's expectations met, of anticipated patterns being realised.
Is there any reason why the speaker raises every utterance? It's grating on the ear and detracts from what looks like fascinating content. Can anyone link me to a transcript? ;-)
