I am an associate professor of music theory at the University of New Mexico, and I specialize in emotional responses to music, particularly from the biological perspective.
Current opinion in behavioral sciences, Jun 1, 2019
Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical cr... more Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical creativity is the involvement of motor regions. These regions—premotor cortex, the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and posterior inferior frontal gyrus—are implicated in higher-level capacities, such as motor sequencing and planning, rather than primary motor control, and are furthermore implicated in cognitive capacities not directly linked to overt motor behavior. Nevertheless, their consistent implication in studies of musical capacities—from perception and performance to composition and improvisation—prompts a reconsideration of the musical faculty as one that is not merely auditory, nor even primarily so, but rather one that is fundamentally auditory-motoric.
This dissertation seeks to identify the mechanisms whereby music arouses emotions. It begins by a... more This dissertation seeks to identify the mechanisms whereby music arouses emotions. It begins by asking three questions: Does music arouse emotions? If so, which ones does it arouse? And how does it arouse them? The first two questions are addressed cursorily in the opening chapters, but the majority of the dissertation focuses upon the third question. The aim of this dissertation is thus to identify the mechanisms whereby music arouses and modulates emotion. A number of such of mechanisms are identified, including: association, resemblance, speech resemblance, naturalness, and expectation. Of these, the first two are considered domain general and are thus given no further attention; the final three, however, are considered to be domain-specific and are given extended consideration, with particular emphasis being placed on Leonard Meyer’s (1956) expectation theory (and its recent revitalization by Huron [2006]). The expectation theory, however, while promising, is plagued by what is called “the rehearing problem”: if carried to its logical conclusion, the theory predicts that music will diminish in emotional impact as the listener gains familiarity with it, a prediction which seems contrary to experience. A number of scholars converged upon a solution to the rehearing problem in the mid-eighties: the musical mind, they posited, is “modular” in the manner of Fodor (1983), and affect is a product of the modular “parser” rather than of the “central processor” (or long-term memory apparatus; Jackendoff 1987, 1991). This modular solution is promising, but it demands further investigation. The ultimate aim of this dissertation is to carry out this investigation by examining the biological bases of music perception, emotional experience, and their interface. The hope is that, by investigating this interface in the biological sense, the insight gained will be of relevance to scientists and music analysts alike.
While the behavior of "being musically creative"—improvising, composing, songwriting, etc.—is und... more While the behavior of "being musically creative"—improvising, composing, songwriting, etc.—is undoubtedly a complex and highly variable one, recent neuroscientific investigation has offered significant insight into the neural underpinnings of many of the creative processes contributing to such behavior. A previous study from our research group (Bashwiner et al., 2016), which examined two aspects of brain structure as a function of creative musical experience, found significantly increased cortical surface area or subcortical volume in regions of the default-mode network, a motor planning network, and a "limbic" network. The present study sought to determine how these regions coordinate with one another and with other regions of the brain in a large number of participants (n=218) during a task-neutral period, i.e., during the "resting state." Deriving from the previous study's results a set of eleven regions of interest (ROIs), the present study analyzed the resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) from each of these seed regions as a function of creative musical experience (assessed via our Musical Creativity Questionnaire). Of the eleven ROIs investigated, nine showed significant correlations with a total of 22 clusters throughout the brain, the most significant being located in bilateral cerebellum, right inferior frontal gyrus, midline thalamus (particularly the mediodorsal nucleus), and medial premotor regions. These results support prior reports (by ourselves and others) implicating regions of the default-mode, executive, and motor-planning networks in musical creativity, while additionally-and somewhat unanticipatedly-including a potentially much larger role for the salience network than has been previously reported in studies of musical creativity.
Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical cr... more Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical creativity is the involvement of motor regions. These regions—premotor cortex, the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and posterior inferior frontal gyrus—are implicated in higher-level capacities, such as motor sequencing and planning, rather than primary motor control, and are furthermore implicated in cognitive capacities not directly linked to overt motor behavior. Nevertheless, their consistent implication in studies of musical capacities—from perception and performance to composition and improvisation—prompts a reconsideration of the musical faculty as one that is not merely auditory, nor even primarily so, but rather one that is fundamentally auditory-motoric.
Of all the creative arts, music is one of the most iconic, with images of Beethoven, Bach, and Mo... more Of all the creative arts, music is one of the most iconic, with images of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart looming large—often quite literally—in the pantheon of western musical culture. Add to this the cults of personality that have arisen around equally influential musical creators such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Madonna, and Beyoncé, and the conclusion is inevitable: culture is massively influenced by the creative art form referred to as “music.” What, then, is “music,” and what specifically does it mean to be “creative” in music? The question is obviously a vast one and can only be addressed cursorily here. At the broadest scale, “music” could be defined as any intentional manipulation of sound patterns, typically for the appreciation of an audience. To be “creative” in music, therefore, could be defined as to manipulate sounds in ways that are novel, and thus function to influence the relationship between creator and audience. As such, creativity in music can be understood to encompass a large range of behaviors, from the obvious acts of composing and improvising to the more subtle but still “pattern-manipulative” acts of interpreting classical works, arranging and reharmonizing jazz standards, and even—as David Rosenboom has convincingly argued—simply listening to music actively and imaginatively. For simplicity’s sake, the present essay restricts this broad focus by defining musical creativity as “the generation of novel note-and-duration sequences.” In this sense, the focus is predominantly upon the acts of composition and improvisation. However, it should be noted that this definition does not apply solely to professionals and students in these fields, but rather includes virtually anyone who invents a melody—even a bird or whale—as being “musically creative.”
Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity, 2018
The question "What is musical creativity?" does not have a straightforward answer. The entire fie... more The question "What is musical creativity?" does not have a straightforward answer. The entire field of music is more-or-less creative -performers, conductors, teachers, analysts, even listeners all do important creative work. In this chapter, by necessity , I ignore these other manifestations of musical creativity, limiting my focus specifically to the generation (and modification) of novel note-and-duration sequences. This activity is common to composers and improvisers, as well as to songwriters, programmers of electronic music, arrangers, and so on. All trained musicians do it to some extent, and I take it to be the essential skill around which musical creativity is centered - although all creative manifestations in music are valuable and important.
Creative behaviors are among the most complex that humans engage in, involving not only highly in... more Creative behaviors are among the most complex that humans engage in, involving not only highly intricate, domain-specific knowledge and skill, but also domain-general processing styles and the affective drive to create. This study presents structural imaging data indicating that musically creative people (as indicated by self-report) have greater cortical surface area or volume in a) regions associated with domain-specific higher-cognitive motor activity and sound processing (dorsal premotor cortex, supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and planum temporale), b) domain-general creative-ideation regions associated with the default mode network (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and temporal pole), and c) emotion-related regions (orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, and amygdala). These findings suggest that domain-specific musical expertise, default-mode cognitive processing style, and intensity of emotional experience might all coordinate to motivate and facilitate the drive to create music. Creative behaviors are often treated as mysterious—musically creative behaviors perhaps especially. For example, the entire repertoire of Gregorian Chant is reputed to have been sung to Pope Gregory by a dove, while the Devil's Trill Sonata is said to have come to Tartini in a dream, played by the Devil himself. Creative " revelations " of this sort—often called Big C creativity 1 —are no doubt difficult to study scientifically. But everyday creative behav-iors—little c—are arguably within reach. Progress has been made in recent years toward understanding little c creative behavior from the neuroscien-tific perspective. By definition, " creativity " has been understood to refer to the production of things and ideas that are both novel and useful 1. Multiple subprocesses are believed to be involved in creative mentation, including the ability to both focus and defocus the attention 2 , to generate variations and select between them 3 , to regress to primary-process types of consciousness 4 , to search memory stores either deliberately or spontaneously 5 , and to do so using either cognitive or emotional search processes 6. One brain network that has been proposed to be especially central to creative functioning is the default mode network (DMN) 7,8. The DMN is composed of regions such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), ven-tromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), lateral temporal cortex (LTC), posterior cingulate, and inferior parietal lobule (IPL)—regions which, when a subject is not given an explicit task, tend to increase in activation relative to baseline 9. The regions of this network also tend to be implicated in a number of cognitive capacities related to creativity, such as divergent thinking 7,8 , self-referential thinking 10 , affective reasoning 6 , mind wandering 11 , and mental simulation 12. It might be expected, therefore, that creative behavior of a musical nature would also implicate the DMN. The functional imaging literature has indeed implicated the DMN in musically creative behavior—at least improvisation 13 (which, because it is instantaneous, is more easily studied in the scanner than are drawn-out processes like orchestral scoring and songwriting). Limb and Braun 14 , for instance, had professional jazz pianists improvise while in the scanner, finding that improvisation (compared with exact replication of a melody or scale) correlated with enhanced activity in medial prefrontal regions (MPFC) and diminished activity in lateral
Current opinion in behavioral sciences, Jun 1, 2019
Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical cr... more Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical creativity is the involvement of motor regions. These regions—premotor cortex, the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and posterior inferior frontal gyrus—are implicated in higher-level capacities, such as motor sequencing and planning, rather than primary motor control, and are furthermore implicated in cognitive capacities not directly linked to overt motor behavior. Nevertheless, their consistent implication in studies of musical capacities—from perception and performance to composition and improvisation—prompts a reconsideration of the musical faculty as one that is not merely auditory, nor even primarily so, but rather one that is fundamentally auditory-motoric.
This dissertation seeks to identify the mechanisms whereby music arouses emotions. It begins by a... more This dissertation seeks to identify the mechanisms whereby music arouses emotions. It begins by asking three questions: Does music arouse emotions? If so, which ones does it arouse? And how does it arouse them? The first two questions are addressed cursorily in the opening chapters, but the majority of the dissertation focuses upon the third question. The aim of this dissertation is thus to identify the mechanisms whereby music arouses and modulates emotion. A number of such of mechanisms are identified, including: association, resemblance, speech resemblance, naturalness, and expectation. Of these, the first two are considered domain general and are thus given no further attention; the final three, however, are considered to be domain-specific and are given extended consideration, with particular emphasis being placed on Leonard Meyer’s (1956) expectation theory (and its recent revitalization by Huron [2006]). The expectation theory, however, while promising, is plagued by what is called “the rehearing problem”: if carried to its logical conclusion, the theory predicts that music will diminish in emotional impact as the listener gains familiarity with it, a prediction which seems contrary to experience. A number of scholars converged upon a solution to the rehearing problem in the mid-eighties: the musical mind, they posited, is “modular” in the manner of Fodor (1983), and affect is a product of the modular “parser” rather than of the “central processor” (or long-term memory apparatus; Jackendoff 1987, 1991). This modular solution is promising, but it demands further investigation. The ultimate aim of this dissertation is to carry out this investigation by examining the biological bases of music perception, emotional experience, and their interface. The hope is that, by investigating this interface in the biological sense, the insight gained will be of relevance to scientists and music analysts alike.
While the behavior of "being musically creative"—improvising, composing, songwriting, etc.—is und... more While the behavior of "being musically creative"—improvising, composing, songwriting, etc.—is undoubtedly a complex and highly variable one, recent neuroscientific investigation has offered significant insight into the neural underpinnings of many of the creative processes contributing to such behavior. A previous study from our research group (Bashwiner et al., 2016), which examined two aspects of brain structure as a function of creative musical experience, found significantly increased cortical surface area or subcortical volume in regions of the default-mode network, a motor planning network, and a "limbic" network. The present study sought to determine how these regions coordinate with one another and with other regions of the brain in a large number of participants (n=218) during a task-neutral period, i.e., during the "resting state." Deriving from the previous study's results a set of eleven regions of interest (ROIs), the present study analyzed the resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) from each of these seed regions as a function of creative musical experience (assessed via our Musical Creativity Questionnaire). Of the eleven ROIs investigated, nine showed significant correlations with a total of 22 clusters throughout the brain, the most significant being located in bilateral cerebellum, right inferior frontal gyrus, midline thalamus (particularly the mediodorsal nucleus), and medial premotor regions. These results support prior reports (by ourselves and others) implicating regions of the default-mode, executive, and motor-planning networks in musical creativity, while additionally-and somewhat unanticipatedly-including a potentially much larger role for the salience network than has been previously reported in studies of musical creativity.
Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical cr... more Across the neuroscientific literature, a surprisingly consistent finding in studies of musical creativity is the involvement of motor regions. These regions—premotor cortex, the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and posterior inferior frontal gyrus—are implicated in higher-level capacities, such as motor sequencing and planning, rather than primary motor control, and are furthermore implicated in cognitive capacities not directly linked to overt motor behavior. Nevertheless, their consistent implication in studies of musical capacities—from perception and performance to composition and improvisation—prompts a reconsideration of the musical faculty as one that is not merely auditory, nor even primarily so, but rather one that is fundamentally auditory-motoric.
Of all the creative arts, music is one of the most iconic, with images of Beethoven, Bach, and Mo... more Of all the creative arts, music is one of the most iconic, with images of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart looming large—often quite literally—in the pantheon of western musical culture. Add to this the cults of personality that have arisen around equally influential musical creators such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Madonna, and Beyoncé, and the conclusion is inevitable: culture is massively influenced by the creative art form referred to as “music.” What, then, is “music,” and what specifically does it mean to be “creative” in music? The question is obviously a vast one and can only be addressed cursorily here. At the broadest scale, “music” could be defined as any intentional manipulation of sound patterns, typically for the appreciation of an audience. To be “creative” in music, therefore, could be defined as to manipulate sounds in ways that are novel, and thus function to influence the relationship between creator and audience. As such, creativity in music can be understood to encompass a large range of behaviors, from the obvious acts of composing and improvising to the more subtle but still “pattern-manipulative” acts of interpreting classical works, arranging and reharmonizing jazz standards, and even—as David Rosenboom has convincingly argued—simply listening to music actively and imaginatively. For simplicity’s sake, the present essay restricts this broad focus by defining musical creativity as “the generation of novel note-and-duration sequences.” In this sense, the focus is predominantly upon the acts of composition and improvisation. However, it should be noted that this definition does not apply solely to professionals and students in these fields, but rather includes virtually anyone who invents a melody—even a bird or whale—as being “musically creative.”
Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity, 2018
The question "What is musical creativity?" does not have a straightforward answer. The entire fie... more The question "What is musical creativity?" does not have a straightforward answer. The entire field of music is more-or-less creative -performers, conductors, teachers, analysts, even listeners all do important creative work. In this chapter, by necessity , I ignore these other manifestations of musical creativity, limiting my focus specifically to the generation (and modification) of novel note-and-duration sequences. This activity is common to composers and improvisers, as well as to songwriters, programmers of electronic music, arrangers, and so on. All trained musicians do it to some extent, and I take it to be the essential skill around which musical creativity is centered - although all creative manifestations in music are valuable and important.
Creative behaviors are among the most complex that humans engage in, involving not only highly in... more Creative behaviors are among the most complex that humans engage in, involving not only highly intricate, domain-specific knowledge and skill, but also domain-general processing styles and the affective drive to create. This study presents structural imaging data indicating that musically creative people (as indicated by self-report) have greater cortical surface area or volume in a) regions associated with domain-specific higher-cognitive motor activity and sound processing (dorsal premotor cortex, supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and planum temporale), b) domain-general creative-ideation regions associated with the default mode network (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and temporal pole), and c) emotion-related regions (orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, and amygdala). These findings suggest that domain-specific musical expertise, default-mode cognitive processing style, and intensity of emotional experience might all coordinate to motivate and facilitate the drive to create music. Creative behaviors are often treated as mysterious—musically creative behaviors perhaps especially. For example, the entire repertoire of Gregorian Chant is reputed to have been sung to Pope Gregory by a dove, while the Devil's Trill Sonata is said to have come to Tartini in a dream, played by the Devil himself. Creative " revelations " of this sort—often called Big C creativity 1 —are no doubt difficult to study scientifically. But everyday creative behav-iors—little c—are arguably within reach. Progress has been made in recent years toward understanding little c creative behavior from the neuroscien-tific perspective. By definition, " creativity " has been understood to refer to the production of things and ideas that are both novel and useful 1. Multiple subprocesses are believed to be involved in creative mentation, including the ability to both focus and defocus the attention 2 , to generate variations and select between them 3 , to regress to primary-process types of consciousness 4 , to search memory stores either deliberately or spontaneously 5 , and to do so using either cognitive or emotional search processes 6. One brain network that has been proposed to be especially central to creative functioning is the default mode network (DMN) 7,8. The DMN is composed of regions such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), ven-tromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), lateral temporal cortex (LTC), posterior cingulate, and inferior parietal lobule (IPL)—regions which, when a subject is not given an explicit task, tend to increase in activation relative to baseline 9. The regions of this network also tend to be implicated in a number of cognitive capacities related to creativity, such as divergent thinking 7,8 , self-referential thinking 10 , affective reasoning 6 , mind wandering 11 , and mental simulation 12. It might be expected, therefore, that creative behavior of a musical nature would also implicate the DMN. The functional imaging literature has indeed implicated the DMN in musically creative behavior—at least improvisation 13 (which, because it is instantaneous, is more easily studied in the scanner than are drawn-out processes like orchestral scoring and songwriting). Limb and Braun 14 , for instance, had professional jazz pianists improvise while in the scanner, finding that improvisation (compared with exact replication of a melody or scale) correlated with enhanced activity in medial prefrontal regions (MPFC) and diminished activity in lateral
Music is frequently employed, in the laboratory as well as the cinema, to portray and arouse fear... more Music is frequently employed, in the laboratory as well as the cinema, to portray and arouse fear. The neurological structure most commonly associated with fear is the amygdala, and the amygdala is frequently implicated in studies of musical emotion. But not all fears are amygdala-based, nor are all amygdala-based emotions of the “fear” type. Through analyses of laboratory stimuli, Erdmann and Becce’s corpus of early film music, passages from Verdi’s Requiem, and a sequence from the film Jaws, this essay explores both what scary music is in the structural sense and what it does when it encounters the amygdala. The argument is that fear is a messy concept in its mapping onto both music and neural structures like the amygdala. A different manner of affective analysis is envisioned, in which musical structure and affect-associated brain regions are mapped directly onto one another, eliminating the messy middleman of folk-psychological concepts like “scariness” and “fear.” On this (admittedly speculative) model, affect can still be investigated as a contributor to musical experience, but in a potentially more precise, less impressionistic way.
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What, then, is “music,” and what specifically does it mean to be “creative” in music? The question is obviously a vast one and can only be addressed cursorily here. At the broadest scale, “music” could be defined as any intentional manipulation of sound patterns, typically for the appreciation of an audience. To be “creative” in music, therefore, could be defined as to manipulate sounds in ways that are novel, and thus function to influence the relationship between creator and audience. As such, creativity in music can be understood to encompass a large range of behaviors, from the obvious acts of composing and improvising to the more subtle but still “pattern-manipulative” acts of interpreting classical works, arranging and reharmonizing jazz standards, and even—as David Rosenboom has convincingly argued—simply listening to music actively and imaginatively. For simplicity’s sake, the present essay restricts this broad focus by defining musical creativity as “the generation of novel note-and-duration sequences.” In this sense, the focus is predominantly upon the acts of composition and improvisation. However, it should be noted that this definition does not apply solely to professionals and students in these fields, but rather includes virtually anyone who invents a melody—even a bird or whale—as being “musically creative.”
What, then, is “music,” and what specifically does it mean to be “creative” in music? The question is obviously a vast one and can only be addressed cursorily here. At the broadest scale, “music” could be defined as any intentional manipulation of sound patterns, typically for the appreciation of an audience. To be “creative” in music, therefore, could be defined as to manipulate sounds in ways that are novel, and thus function to influence the relationship between creator and audience. As such, creativity in music can be understood to encompass a large range of behaviors, from the obvious acts of composing and improvising to the more subtle but still “pattern-manipulative” acts of interpreting classical works, arranging and reharmonizing jazz standards, and even—as David Rosenboom has convincingly argued—simply listening to music actively and imaginatively. For simplicity’s sake, the present essay restricts this broad focus by defining musical creativity as “the generation of novel note-and-duration sequences.” In this sense, the focus is predominantly upon the acts of composition and improvisation. However, it should be noted that this definition does not apply solely to professionals and students in these fields, but rather includes virtually anyone who invents a melody—even a bird or whale—as being “musically creative.”