Astute readers of this blog (those who are left) have noticed a long hiatus in posts. This has been due to medical reasons, and also because of these, most future posts for awhile will be cancer-themed. Perhaps research summarized here may help others also looking for information to help them with difficult decisions about their treatment.

But today is a biotune day. I am a huge Stephen Sondheim fan, and spent the last couple nights watching separately the first and second acts of one of his best, "Into the Woods." As a kid I worked through all the fairy tale books in our elementary school library at about the same time that other girls were working their way through all the horse books. I enjoy not only the traditional originals, but creatively reworked versions as well (which to be clear does not apply to much of anything out of Disney studios).

"Into the Woods" was constructed similarly to Sondheim's previous musical, also brilliant, called "Sunday in the Park with George." Its theme was the lonely isolationism of the driven artist, but the two acts creatively contrasted the difficulties of the art business a hundred years ago versus in modern times.

"Into the Woods" makes even more of a thematic leap between its two acts. The first act is an intertwining of several well known fairly tales into one interlocking story, in which the characters all interact with one another in clever new ways. It addresses the simple, traditional fairy tale theme of overcoming a difficult challenge (represented by having to go "into the woods"), after which the main characters live "happily ever after." Even in the brutal original versions of the Grimm tales, usually someone we are rooting for comes out on top in the end. At the end of Sondheim's first act, the convoluted plot leads us eventually to the familiar happy endings - Cinderella gets her prince, Rapunzel and her prince are reunited, Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are saved from the wolf, and Jack kills the giant by chopping down the beanstalk.

The second act, however, takes a right turn by introducing the idea that actually, there is no such thing as "happily ever after." In real life, there will continually be obstacles to overcome - and not only the relatively minor obstacles that pepper the tales in the first act, but major obstacles that force us to face intense suffering and grief head-on. After the wife of Jack's slain giant goes on a rampage, killing several of the characters, the culminating, haunting song, "No One is Alone," is sung by the remaining grown-ups to the children Red Riding Hood and Jack, to explain to them that despite the harsh realities of life, we can find a way to move on. It always made me a bit weepy from the first time I heard it twenty years ago, but it now takes on a new poignance as I head deep into the woods myself. (Here are the lyrics, with the caveat that lyrics without music are a poor substitute for the real thing.)

But the simple, final lyrics of the show are the most applicable for anyone hitting a bump in the road:

"Into the woods, then out of the woods, and home before dark."

Labels: forests, music

It's been a busy week for music - my jazz band performed three times in eight days. One tune especially satisfied the requirements of this blog quite nicely: "Inchworm." Jazz aficionados will recognize this tune as a Coltrane standard.

But I never liked the fact that Coltrane only played one of the two counter-melodies in the song, which originated from the movie musical "Hans Christian Anderson," starring Danny Kaye. The song starts as children in a school house chant addition in a rather haunting melody, which Kaye then sings against as he watches a caterpillar crawling on a plant. (See the scene on YouTube here, and the more complete version of the song with the muppets - including muppet inchworm - here.)

So, I did a new jazz arrangement that includes both melodies. In addition to the sung counter-melodies, there is a third counter-melody in the strings that I decided to add to the jazz version as well. Thus, with three saxes and two vocalists, we covered it all.

"Inchworm", by the way, is the common name for moths in the family Geometridae, of which some in Hawaii are sit-and-wait predators. But the family is cosmopolitan, and recognizable in the caterpillar because unlike other families they only have prolegs at the back end of their abdomen, resulting in their distinctive inching walk. Many species are also known as "loopers" for the same reason.

Labels: cool bugs, insects, jazz, music

Time for a rare music post, and opportunity to promote a fantastic jazz group, the Jeni Fleming Acoustic Trio. I've been lucky enough to hear them play three times in the last few years, despite not getting out much, because they are based close by, in Bozeman, Montana. Jeni Fleming is the vocalist of the group, with her husband Jake Fleming on saxophone and guitar, and with Chad Langford on acoustic bass.

The trio has two main reasons why it is great: the perfect unity of Langford and Jake, and Jeni's voice. The bass and guitar are as tight a unit as they can be, playing classic and more novel jazz rhythms. Jeni uses the solid backing to free her voice to do what it does best. Her voice is everything a jazz singer's should be - mellow, controlled, fluid, and with an expansive range, both dynamically and vertically. They win converts from the ranks of people who don't like jazz. One person I know said, "I don't like jazz, but this is great." Another was less willing to budge from his anti-jazz preferences, but admitted that he could listen to Jeni talk all day.

They mix original jazz tunes (primarily Jake's), classic jazz such as "'Round Midnight" and "Garota de Ipanema" (yes, the Portuguese version), a wide range of pop tunes including "Still Crazy After All These Years" and "Time After Time", and both old and recent show tunes, such as "Somewhere" (from West Side Story) and "Stars and the Moon" (from Songs for a New World). At a recent concert, I heard a fantastic jazz rendition of "She's Leaving Home," the Beatles' classic from Sgt. Pepper's. This is the third major strength of the band - its willingness not to be limited by the original genres the tunes came from. As Jeni Fleming says herself at performances, a good song is a good song, no matter where it came from.

They are comfortable and interactive with listeners both in the more intimate setting of a bar, and onstage in a large auditorium. The only real criticism I have of their live performances, which isn't much, is that they spend a little too much time explaining the genesis of their original numbers. Because Jake and Jeni are husband and wife, some of the personal anecdotes definitely border on TMI. I'm there to see great musicians perform, not to hear their life stories. But this is a case where too much is probably better than too little, because they are humorous and establish a good rapport with the audience, making us feel as though they've let us in on some creative secrets.

Check out their music page or iTunes to listen to clips. Although recordings never do a good live band justice, Jeni Fleming's vocal ability will come through loud and clear. (Four tunes, including one of their signature originals which is highly representative of their sound, "Once Around the Sun", can be heard in its entirety on the band's MySpace page.)

One additional sideline of note: Jeni and Jake Fleming have collaborated with the family of Greg Mortenson to produce the song "Three Cups of Tea," available as an accompaniment to the book (below) about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (also based in Bozeman, Montana). Mortenson's young daughter Amira is an aspiring professional singer and sings with Fleming on the song. Some of the proceeds support the CAI, which funds school building in remote regions of middle eastern Islamic countries. The CAI is particularly devoted to providing education for both boys and girls in countries where they have previously grown up in ignorance. Although the book is padded with quite a lot of gratuitous material about Mortenson's personal life, especially early on, it is worth a read by Americans who support bombing and destruction as a means to combat terrorism.

Labels: education, jazz, music

This past weekend was the Montana state jazz festival. I didn't get to enjoy the music as much as in previous years, because I had the fam in tow, but it is always fun to play there and give my students a chance for a broader audience than they get on our small campus. Here's our mp3 of "Black Orpheus," for the more than passingly interested.

Plus, we all get the benefit of a half hour with a professional jazz educator who hones in the band's strengths and weaknesses and gives some great tips for taking our playing to the next level.

Those of us who play jazz consider it one of the purest forms of music, because of its emphasis on improvisation. It's tough sometimes to be directing students because of the difficulty of convincing beginners to go out on a limb and try something new. I used to have one trumpet player (sadly just for one year) who was a great player, but did not like to solo because she felt it had to come out sounding like Miles Davis on the first try. She's a Type A, overachieving excellent student, but performance is not like other disciplines. You cannot learn what you need from a book and do it perfectly the first time; or, even acknowledging some trial and error is necessary in fields such as molecular biology, failure is not a public exercise, and a perfectionist can accept that it will take a few tries to get it right because there are no public consequences.

Obviously I get the other type of student too, who is willing to take a risk. Those students improve a lot over time, because the only way to practice soloing is to do it there, with your whole band standing around you. About 80% of soloing is confidence, I think. Sure, we don't really want to hear you if you have no sense of rhythm or melody or don't understand jazz chord structure and scales at all, but that's the stuff everyone picks up as they go, even in the big bands in which they don't solo (that is if they are all interested in continuing to play, and are not there just because Mom and Dad made them). But all the wrong notes really start to sound wrong after awhile, and as time goes on everything you hear flows to your fingers, which start doing more and more of the right thing. Then you reach the point where "wrong" notes actually have a place in the structure of your solo.

This is why I love listening to Ornette Coleman. His solos stretch the form to its extreme, because he employs so many notes that are not in the chord changes, but fit in perfectly because of the way he sets them up. (This is not really an uncommen idea - most of the melody notes of the bridge of "Girl from Ipanema" are not actually in the chords, making it difficult to sing, but incredibly rich to listen to.) Coleman's classic album "Free Jazz," for which he is the most famous, explored the idea of improvisation in its purest form, by having two quartets play together without any structure at all for both sides of an LP. Each performer takes his solo in turn, and it is up to the other musicians to respond to what he is doing. Jazz is all about communication, which is why it is so fun to play when the band really clicks.

Unfortunately, at my school, it is difficult to keep students in the jazz band for longer than a year or two, so they never get the chance to see themselves really improve, and see how this connection works among musicians used to playing with each other. There tends to be a high-school mentality here that music is uncool and partying is really where it's at - all but one of my 8 or so freshmen that started the year dropped out within a few weeks, and this mentality clearly played a role. It's a shame of course, because understanding the fundamentals of music is a basic part of a liberal arts education, and because training in music is something that is much easier to keep with you throughout your life - which is what tipped the balance for me to become a biology, rather than music, major. It worked out, because I'm going strong in both fields, and realized I have only scratched the surface of what I could do in both of them.

The infinite possibilities of jazz make the same tune exciting to play over and over. Even when you have the head of the tune mastered, you can always stretch a little and try something new on your solo, with the rest of the band trying it right along with you.

Labels: education, jazz, music

In my last post I explored my own thoughts about this question. This second part is a mini-review on the science that has been done in this area.

There is actually quite a bit of scientific literature on the intersection of music and language in the brain - a Web of Science search on "music brain language" produced over 600 citations, a sample of which I skimmed.

The overall gist of the papers is that there is quite a bit of overlap in brain regions that are activated during language vs. music processing, but these areas are by no means congruent. In fact it was amusing to me that many authors appeared to be arguing either that language and music matched up well, or that they did not, and both "sides" had plenty of evidence to support their case. Both music and language are complex, with several components, and the similarity between processing seems to depend on what components are compared.

Excerpts from the abstract of the first example (Brown et al., 2006. Music and language side by side in the brain: a PET study of the generation of melodies and sentences. European Journal of Neuroscience 23:2791-2803):

Parallel generational tasks for music and language were compared using positron emission tomography. Amateur musicians vocally improvised melodic or linguistic phrases in response to unfamiliar, auditorily presented melodies or phrases...Direct comparisons of the two tasks revealed activations in nearly identical functional brain areas, including the primary motor cortex, supplementary motor area, Broca's area, anterior insula, primary and secondary auditory cortices, temporal pole, basal ganglia, ventral thalamus, and posterior cerebellum. Most of the differences between melodic and sentential generation were seen in lateralization tendencies, with the language task favouring the left hemisphere. However, many of the activations for each modality were bilateral, and so there was significant overlap...

Thus the tasks of improvising a sentence (something we all do several hundred times a day) and improvising a melody (something only a subset of us do regularly) were clearly related but not identical. I assume they used amateur musicians in order to make it easier for the subjects to improvise a melody, but anyone really could do this (even if they hummed random notes that were "ungrammatical" compared to their sentences), so I wish they had done a group of nonmusicians as well, to see if there are any differences. If so, it would suggest (although obviously not prove) that experience affects musical processing.

Vuust et al. (2006. It don't mean a thing ... Keeping the rhythm during polyrhythmic tension, activates language areas (BA47). Neuroimage 31:832-841) examine a specific feature of music, especially common in jazz music - the use of a counter rhythm on top of the main rhythm of a piece - on processing of the music:

...We here demonstrate that Brodmann area 47, an area associated with higher processing of language, is activated bilaterally when musicians tap the main pulse in a polymetric context where the music emphasizes a counter meter. This suggests that the processing of metric elements of music relies on brain areas also involved in language comprehension. We propose that BA47 is involved in general neuronal processing of temporal coherence subserving both language and music.

So it appears that the rhythm associated with music and the rhythm associated with language could be related, as far as our brains are concerned. Rhythm in language is not something I have previously thought much about, but it is certainly part of the package. One reason early computer voices sounded so mechanical was the lack of cadence to the spoken word. This seems to be something that is variable not only among languages but among dialects - accents (e.g. the many accents that exist just in the U.S.) are not only about word pronunciation, but the rhythm of speech as well. So I found this result very interesting.

Slevc, and Miyake (2006. Individual differences in second-language proficiency: Does musical ability matter? Psychological Science 17:675-681) start from the question: why do some people pick up second languages so much easier than others? They hypothesize musical ability affects second-language acquisition, much as it apparently affects first-language skills such as reading in children. "Musical ability" was measured using something called the Wing Measure of Musical Talents (taken from Wing, H.D. 1968. Tests of musical ability and appreciation: An investigation into the measurement, distribution, and development of musical capacity (2nd ed.). London: Cambridge University Press). There is no attempt here to distinguish innate from learned musical ability, so the term means simply some combination of the two.

They found, essentially: "Although the link may be restricted to L2 [second language] phonology, individuals who are good at analyzing, discriminating, and remembering musical stimuli are better than other people at accurately perceiving and producing L2 sounds." The connection to musical ability is specifically the ability to reproduce the sounds associated with a foreign language (all the subjects were Japanese who began speaking English after age 11). The authors are quick to point out that musical ability is not essential for good second language acquisition, but it appears to facilitate it.

Peretz (2006. The nature of music from a biological perspective. Cognition 100:1-32) agrees with me:

Paradoxically, the musical capacity appears to be fully developed in only a minority of humans who can make music. Becoming a proficient musician requires thousands of hours of practice and, in most case, explicit transmission. This is often taken as an argument against the notion that the musical capacity is innately determined. If genes were responsible for the human musical capacity, then everyone should be able to engage in musical activities. In fact, everyone does. Nearly everyone can carry a tune (Dalla Bella, Gigue`re, & Peretz, submitted) and move to music. The problem arises from the association of music-making with an elite of professional musicians. What is usually forgotten is that music is meant for the ears of the majority. Everyone from all walks of life and all cultures is musical to some extent. Unless they are tone-deaf, all humans exhibit a precocious inclination for music. In short, music appears as natural as language is.

But what about those tone-deaf people we all know? More from Peretz: "...there are cases of musically inept individuals who have normal language and intelligence. As noted, these individuals exist and are commonly called tone-deaf...The selectivity of the musical disability is remarkable. These tone-deaf individuals can have above average language skills, and may speak several languages without accent... However, they are unable to sing, dance or recognize music, despite formal training. This condition is termed congenital amusia...illustrating exceptional isolation of musical modules in the developing brain."

This and evidence from brain-damaged people suggests that language and music are indeed quite separate in the brain, at least for some people. I suspect that the separation or overlap is variable among people; the brain is well known to be plastic in its regional specialization. People with disabilities for certain senses are known to co-opt the brain regions normally responsible for processing those senses for other tasks, such as the processing of the remaining senses.

My conclusion from my snippet of light research is that language processing and music processing are largely overlapping yet different tasks; that musical functionality is present in nearly everyone at birth, and that proficiency in music is probably due to practice. If we all practiced music skills as much as language skills, it might not be a world of Mozarts, but it might at least be a world of Salieris. We might indeed have better language skills as a consequence of exercising the relevant parts of our brains that much more.

Labels: brain, humans, music

I have thought some over the years about what makes some people music composers and others not. Obviously some sort of interest in music is a prerequesite, but is interest or ability in music truly innate? It is certainly assumed to be by many people. We love to use the word "talented" to describe someone who is good at something most people aren't good at. But supposedly - it is at least an urban myth - it rankled Michael Jordan a bit when people referred to him as talented at basketball, because what he certainly had was a great work ethic. Even knowing that, I believe most people would assume that Jordan was somehow predisposed to be good at basketball, and his work ethic is what made him great. And we all probably know people who seem so uncoordinated that no matter how much they were to practice, they would have no hope as basketball players.

These observations make it tempting to believe a certain amount of ability in specific areas such as athletics, mathematics, and music is innate. I am not so sure, however. I, for example, am a very committed amateur musician. I play several instruments and am a composer. But I hesitate to assume that any of this is due to "innate" ability. Why? Because I have very strong evidence to the contrary. I have a tape of a friend and myself playing clarinet and saxophone together in the sixth grade, when we had both been playing about a year. It is one of the most horrifying sounds you can imagine - we are close to a half-tone off in pitch, and we are clearly oblivious to this.

Ability to hear differences in pitch, then, clearly is at least partly learned, because I learned it, after being hopeless at it early in my music career. What about composition, though?

Music has always seemed to me very much like a language. If they are analagous, then all speaking humans are composers, because we rapidly composed new sentences every time we speak. Some of these may require editing to become more coherent, but in general we are able to get our point across quite well. Why should music be any different? Notes can be thought of as words, and we already use the term, "musical phrase," and music has a grammar, a syntax, which varies among cultures as do languages. In my mind the main difference is that language is an essential part of the social human experience, so it is important for our language ability to develop at a very early age. Music can be important in many cultures as well, never so much as language. So, those people who are interested in music usually develop their ability in it later than language. But as we can learn a second language later in life, we can learn the language of music too.

Everyone has interests, and things they are good at. I always wondered though, which comes first? Although interests and skills are clearly overlapping, are they congruent? Did I pursue extensive training in music and become good at it because I was interested in it, or was I interested in it because I was already good at it? I tend to think the former.

Was Mozart a born composer? It certainly seems that way. He was already composing by the time he was six. But would he have become a great composer had he had limited exposure to music in his infancy to toddlerhood? My theory is that naturally, our brains are all a little bit different in how they develop in utero, and strengths and weaknesses are probably there early on and affect our later choices. But from the moment of developmental differentiation in the embryo, our environment has an influence, and it becomes impossible to truly distinguish genetic differences from developed ones (although as we learn more and more about human genetics some differences will become clearer). Our experience affects brain development, which further directs our experiences. All the fMRIs in the world won't be able to tell us what in the brain was there to begin with, and what has developed as a result of our experience.

So my belief is that people in general are born with the same basic tool set, and the vast majority of people could compose music if they are set off in that direction early on. Humans universally understand the rules of language, and respond to music. If you can write a sentence, you can compose music.

As a postscript, a mathematics professor I know believes exactly the same thing about mathematics. In fact he would probably argue that mathematics is more fundamental to human existence than music, and thus mathematical ability can be taught more universally than musical ability. There are a host of reasons that it has become a point of pride with people (mostly Americans?) to be bad at math, that are beyond the scope of this blog (as are the consequences of this). It's OK to be bad at music or sports, too. No one is proud of being unable to read or write however. Is this because language really is fundamentally different from these other skills? It's tempting to say so, but I'm still not entirely sure.

(go on to Part 2)

Labels: brain, humans, music

A reader sent me to this website for Healing Music Enterprises, which means I can have two whole posts in a row dealing with music and biology. I decided to delve into a little light reading of the relevant scientific literature.

A search on "music AND health" in Web of Science yielded 306 hits. Most of these were not actually on this specific topic, but I did skim a few review papers:

Hilliard, 2005. Music Therapy in Hospice and Palliative Care: a Review of the Empirical Data. eCAM 2:173-178.

Daykin et al., 2006. Music and healing in cancer care: A survey of supportive care providers. The Arts in Psychotherapy 33:402-413.

Pothoulaki et al., 2006. Methodological issues in music interventions in oncology settings: A systematic literature review. The Arts in Psychotherapy 33:446-455.

I personally was amazed to find a whole journal (The Arts in Psychotherapy) devoted to this topic. But, given the proliferation of narrowly focused journals in recent years, I suppose it isn't really that surprising. What was also not surprising to me was how little these papers had to say. As I have aluded to before, the bar is set very low for medical studies, but apparently for "arts in psychotherapy" there isn't a bar at all. Most studies were apparently case studies, which have notoriously nonexistent scientific validity. Others had a lot of obvious biases. I would have been impressed by the ability of these authors to say absolutely nothing in 5-10 pages, but all the psychologists I know seem to be trained well in that skill.

The good news is that if you believe in this enough to fork it over to someone to tell you what music to listen to in order to make you feel better, you probably will feel better. It's not as if you can do a blind test, so people don't know they are receiving music therapy. This is called the placebo effect, and it also explains the multibillion-dollar supplement industry, which is delighted to take to the cleaners those of you who think there is a magic pill for perfect health and happiness. It's certainly an appealing idea. Throughout history, many a fortune has been made on patent medicines (in fact, I am a beneficiary of one myself, 4 generations removed). Most people probably don't make a connection between that and the current supplement boom, because snake oil salesmen are assumed to be a thing of the past, before we had all this science and technology to tell us the truth. But I believe the Age of Science has actually caused these industries to expand, multiply and go global, because one can always find or conduct weak or bogus but scientific-sounding 'studies' to support whatever claim one finds it convenient to promote. It is especially easy for a 'science' built on case studies - the favorite tool of shysters past.

The better news about music therapy is at least it presumably won't cause cardiac arrest, or double vision, or your innards to turn to goo (unless your music of choice is Kenny G, which I'm sure I read somewhere has been determined to cause massive brain hemorraging in rats). The same is not necessarily true of the hundreds of compounds pushed by the supplement industry.

But music seems to have more theraputic validity (perhaps because I'm a musician) than my absolute favorite "wellness" experience, Healing Touch. A club I was in while living in Hawai`i put on a health fair as a fundraiser once (several of our members were health professionals). One member got her Healing Touch crew together to give free "massages." When I got a chance I went over for my eagarly anticipated massage... and was greeted by several people humming and fluttering their hands around my body, a couple inches from the surface. It turned out there's not actually any "touch" involved, they just massage your aura or something. (If you are dying to know more, click the link above - there's a hootful of "testimonials.") I must admit now though that it did turn out to have some theraputic value to me after all, because I was ready to bust a gut laughing; the drawback was I was in serious danger of internal bleeding from holding it in. So weighing the pros and cons, it was probably too risky a procedure to undergo again. Next time I'll just try some Coltrane.

Labels: health, music