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Re: [The Wall Street Journal] Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music's Mystery
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[The Wall Street Journal] Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music's Mystery |
IP/Host: ---.upc-g.chello.nl July 05, 2009 06:07AM 發表文章數: 329 |
Science Journal * JULY 3, 2009
Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music's Mystery
Ancient Instrument Rekindles Speculation That Melody, Which Powerfully Affects the Brain, Was a Prelude to Speech
The discovery of the world's oldest musical instrument -- a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone -- highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm.
Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak.
All told, the researchers have found eight flutes of the same Ice Age vintage at three different caves in the region. "It is becoming completely clear that music was a normal part of life then," says archaeologist Nicholas Conard at the University of Tubingen, who led the research team. "They must have clapped and danced and sang."
Parrots dance to the beat. Sex-starved mice sing for love, new research shows. But true music, from rap to Rachmaninoff, is a unique human invention that resonates in us all, striking neural chords of memory, emotion, motor control, timing and meaning -- and transforming us in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.
"Music is biologically powerful," says neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "Every culture ever discovered has music, no matter what else they may lack."
By any measure, our brain is a music box. Yet no one knows why.
It certainly baffled Charles Darwin. In his landmark tome, "The Descent of Man," the 19th century author of evolutionary theory wrote that, "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed." Nonetheless, Darwin wasn't immune to its allure. He avidly listened to Mozart, Handel and Beethoven, even though he was partly tone deaf.
Some scientists are convinced that music is only noise, a curious but compelling byproduct of our innate capacity for speech and our penchant for pattern recognition. We hear melodies in the wind, songs in falling water and percussion in the sound of rain drops.
"Music is a way of structuring sound," says psychologist Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis, who studies the neurobiology of music. "It really gets to this underlying human desire to discover patterns in things."
Others speculate that music evolved from animal calls to convey emotional urgency before our forebears learned to communicate through the spoken word. They detect hints of music's beginnings in the soothing sing-song syllables of a mother's lullaby. In this view, harmony and regulated rhythm may have been inspired by the sounds of social life, as early humans worked in unison striking stones to make tools or grinding seeds for food.
"I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now," says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of "The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body." Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. "Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans."
Indeed, Dr. Conard and his colleagues say that the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. "The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals," Dr. Conard says.
To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. "It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life," he says. "It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds."
There is no denying its power to change our mood -- or our brain structure.
Among expert musicians, some brain areas can be up to 5% larger than in those with little or no musical training, research shows. Nerve tissue linking the right and left hemispheres of our brain is up to 15% larger among those who studied music since early childhood. Moreover, the auditory cortex of an expert musician can contain up to 130% more gray matter of neurons and synapses than someone who has never practiced on an instrument.
When we listen to music, our brain responds directly to harmony, brain scanning studies show. Listening to the classical scales and key progressions of Western music actually rewires the synapses of the human cortex, Dr. Janata and his colleagues discovered.
Music orchestrates our inner life, by activating a place in our medial prefrontal cortex region that supports our most personal autobiographical memories. There, our favorite music cues our thoughts of ourselves, the UC Davis researchers reported earlier this year. "The moment we hear a song that is familiar to us, it ramps up the amount of activity in that region," Dr. Janata says.
Every time a zebra finch hears a new song of its species, the melody triggers a cascade of biological changes in its brain, causing thousands of genes to switch on and off in sequence, developmental cell biologist David Clayton at the University of Illinois reported last month in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.
So far, however, there is no evidence that music has any place in the human genome. "It is tempting to say that music is in our genes," says Dr. Patel. "But it may be universal because all over the world it has tremendous emotional power."
Music does move us in mysterious ways. It quickens our pulse, pressing us to stamp our feet, sway or clap our hands in time. Our sense of syncopation, though, is a musical quality that we do share with other species.
Earlier this year, Dr. Patel and his colleagues at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla reported that a parrot can keep time to music, readily high-stepping to a variable beat in the discotheque of its bird brain. The subject of their study -- a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball -- kept pace with the tempo in a way that dogs, cats and chimpanzees cannot. A video of the cockatoo moving to the beat of The Backstreet Boys has been viewed almost three million times on YouTube.
For the flutists of the cave, music-making was no fluke. When archaeologists made a replica of one small Ice Age flute fashioned from a swan's wing bone, they discovered they could play four basic notes and three overtones, with a range comparable to some modern flutes.
Across a thousand generations or more, they heard the scale of our beginnings.
Listen to a recording of the replica Ice Age flute at WSJ.com/Currents. Plus, Robert Lee Hotz shares recommended reading and responds to reader comments. Email him at sciencejournal@wsj.com
Recommended Reading
Archaeologists reported on the oldest known musical instrument in "New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany" published in Nature.
Psychologists at the University of California at Davis document how familiar music stirs synapses connected to personal memories in "The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories" published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Music also strikes neural chords of meaning in the brain, just like sentences, the scientists discuss in 'When Music Tells a Story' in Nature Neuroscience.
Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute found that a parrot can follow a variable tempo in "Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal" published in Current Biology.
University of Reading archaeologist Steven Mithen explores the evolutionary origins of music in "The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body."
Neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience in Music, Language, and the Brain.
Oliver Sacks writes about music and unusual brain disorders in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
Record producer and cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitan writes about why music affects us so strongly in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
这家伙的乐感比大多数的人都好
Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music's Mystery
Ancient Instrument Rekindles Speculation That Melody, Which Powerfully Affects the Brain, Was a Prelude to Speech
The discovery of the world's oldest musical instrument -- a 35,000-year-old flute made from a wing bone -- highlights a prehistoric moment when the mind learned to soar on flights of melody and rhythm.
Researchers announced last week in Nature that they had unearthed the flute from the Ice Age rubbish of cave bear bones, reindeer horn and stone tools discarded in a cavern called Hohle Fels near Ulm, Germany. No one knows the melodies that were played in this primordial concert hall, which sheltered the humans who first settled Europe. The delicate wind instrument, though, offers evidence of how music pervaded daily life eons before iTunes, satellite radio and Muzak.
All told, the researchers have found eight flutes of the same Ice Age vintage at three different caves in the region. "It is becoming completely clear that music was a normal part of life then," says archaeologist Nicholas Conard at the University of Tubingen, who led the research team. "They must have clapped and danced and sang."
Parrots dance to the beat. Sex-starved mice sing for love, new research shows. But true music, from rap to Rachmaninoff, is a unique human invention that resonates in us all, striking neural chords of memory, emotion, motor control, timing and meaning -- and transforming us in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.
"Music is biologically powerful," says neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "Every culture ever discovered has music, no matter what else they may lack."
By any measure, our brain is a music box. Yet no one knows why.
It certainly baffled Charles Darwin. In his landmark tome, "The Descent of Man," the 19th century author of evolutionary theory wrote that, "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed." Nonetheless, Darwin wasn't immune to its allure. He avidly listened to Mozart, Handel and Beethoven, even though he was partly tone deaf.
Some scientists are convinced that music is only noise, a curious but compelling byproduct of our innate capacity for speech and our penchant for pattern recognition. We hear melodies in the wind, songs in falling water and percussion in the sound of rain drops.
"Music is a way of structuring sound," says psychologist Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis, who studies the neurobiology of music. "It really gets to this underlying human desire to discover patterns in things."
Others speculate that music evolved from animal calls to convey emotional urgency before our forebears learned to communicate through the spoken word. They detect hints of music's beginnings in the soothing sing-song syllables of a mother's lullaby. In this view, harmony and regulated rhythm may have been inspired by the sounds of social life, as early humans worked in unison striking stones to make tools or grinding seeds for food.
"I believe that before we evolved language, our communication was more musical than it is now," says cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen at the University of Reading in England, author of "The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body." Unlike Darwin, Dr. Mithen is convinced that music was crucial to human survival. "Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans."
Indeed, Dr. Conard and his colleagues say that the ability to create musical instruments reflects a profound mental awakening that gave these early humans a crucial edge over the more primitive Neanderthal people who lived in the same epoch. "The expansion of modern humans hinged in part on new ways of storing symbolic information that seemed to confer an advantage on these people in competition with Neanderthals," Dr. Conard says.
To Dr. Patel, music-making was a conscious innovation, like the invention of writing or the control of fire. "It is something that we humans invented that then transformed human life," he says. "It has a profound impact on how individual humans experience the world, by connecting us through space and time to other minds."
There is no denying its power to change our mood -- or our brain structure.
Among expert musicians, some brain areas can be up to 5% larger than in those with little or no musical training, research shows. Nerve tissue linking the right and left hemispheres of our brain is up to 15% larger among those who studied music since early childhood. Moreover, the auditory cortex of an expert musician can contain up to 130% more gray matter of neurons and synapses than someone who has never practiced on an instrument.
When we listen to music, our brain responds directly to harmony, brain scanning studies show. Listening to the classical scales and key progressions of Western music actually rewires the synapses of the human cortex, Dr. Janata and his colleagues discovered.
Music orchestrates our inner life, by activating a place in our medial prefrontal cortex region that supports our most personal autobiographical memories. There, our favorite music cues our thoughts of ourselves, the UC Davis researchers reported earlier this year. "The moment we hear a song that is familiar to us, it ramps up the amount of activity in that region," Dr. Janata says.
Every time a zebra finch hears a new song of its species, the melody triggers a cascade of biological changes in its brain, causing thousands of genes to switch on and off in sequence, developmental cell biologist David Clayton at the University of Illinois reported last month in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.
So far, however, there is no evidence that music has any place in the human genome. "It is tempting to say that music is in our genes," says Dr. Patel. "But it may be universal because all over the world it has tremendous emotional power."
Music does move us in mysterious ways. It quickens our pulse, pressing us to stamp our feet, sway or clap our hands in time. Our sense of syncopation, though, is a musical quality that we do share with other species.
Earlier this year, Dr. Patel and his colleagues at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla reported that a parrot can keep time to music, readily high-stepping to a variable beat in the discotheque of its bird brain. The subject of their study -- a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball -- kept pace with the tempo in a way that dogs, cats and chimpanzees cannot. A video of the cockatoo moving to the beat of The Backstreet Boys has been viewed almost three million times on YouTube.
For the flutists of the cave, music-making was no fluke. When archaeologists made a replica of one small Ice Age flute fashioned from a swan's wing bone, they discovered they could play four basic notes and three overtones, with a range comparable to some modern flutes.
Across a thousand generations or more, they heard the scale of our beginnings.
Listen to a recording of the replica Ice Age flute at WSJ.com/Currents. Plus, Robert Lee Hotz shares recommended reading and responds to reader comments. Email him at sciencejournal@wsj.com
Recommended Reading
Archaeologists reported on the oldest known musical instrument in "New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany" published in Nature.
Psychologists at the University of California at Davis document how familiar music stirs synapses connected to personal memories in "The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories" published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Music also strikes neural chords of meaning in the brain, just like sentences, the scientists discuss in 'When Music Tells a Story' in Nature Neuroscience.
Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute found that a parrot can follow a variable tempo in "Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal" published in Current Biology.
University of Reading archaeologist Steven Mithen explores the evolutionary origins of music in "The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body."
Neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience in Music, Language, and the Brain.
Oliver Sacks writes about music and unusual brain disorders in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
Record producer and cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitan writes about why music affects us so strongly in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
这家伙的乐感比大多数的人都好
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2009 06:46AM by mimizorro.
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Re: [The Wall Street Journal] Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music's Mystery
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