Professor links mind and musical experience

In a lecture titled “This is Your Brain on Music: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Musical Experience” yesterday afternoon in the James Stewart Theater at 185 Nassau, Levitin spoke to around 180 students and community members, addressing the connections between science and art, the development of musical experience and what music reveals about the brain.

“Music attempts to mimic the functions of the brain ... more so than speech. Music can represent the complexity of human emotion and its dynamic nature,” Levitin said.

He described humans as expert music listeners, referencing Noam Chomsky’s theory that because children learn to speak before being taught.

Levitin added that “by the age of 5, most children have internalized the rules about what chords progressions are legal or typical in their own culture’s music.”

Levitin then played music clips and asked the audience to identify the wrong note. The audience overwhelmingly found the change.

“All I did was move a note by a semi-tone, which is the smallest legal note,” Levitin said in response.

Levitin said that though finding wrong notes is easy, becoming an expert musician is much more difficult. He pointed to studies showing that expertise in most activities requires 10,000 hours of practice and countered the idea that there could be a single music gene.

Additionally, Levitin explored the neuroscience of music.

“Music involves every [brain] region that we’ve so far mapped,” he said.

Levitin’s own research has explored the relationship of expectation, such as thinking ahead as to what note will come next. Studies have found that the areas of the brain associated with movement activate when a person is listening to music even if he or she is sitting still, suggesting an evolutionary relationship between movement and music.

Levitin, a musician who left Stanford to play in a series of rock bands in the San Francisco Bay area, worked as a record producer for 415 Records, a small label, before founding moodlogic.com, the first internet music-recommendation company.

He then returned to Stanford to study cognitive psychology and is now a professor of psychology, behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University.

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“It was really interesting [to understand] how the brain responds [to music],” said Krystle Haliotis, a student from Westminster Choir College.

“One of the more interesting things he said was [about] the expectation [of sound] ... It’s one of those things that’s all over neurology,” Michael Fortner ’11 said.

The lecture was sponsored by /@rts, a monthly lecture series that combines science, technology and the arts, created by the engineering school, OIT, the Council of the Humanities, the Program in Visual Arts, the computer science department, the music department, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Lewis Center for the Arts.