"Mozart Effect" Has A Molecular Basis 88
pingbak writes "The 'Mozart effect,' where students were observed performing better after being exposed to a Mozart sonata, appears to have a basis in reality. According to New Scientist, two researchers have found the underlying biomechanics in mice stimulated by the effect. They don't know the details why Mozart's sonatas really cause this effect, but they know where to look. Guess I'm going to have to switch Shoutcast streams now..."
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
However I'm pretty sure my performance does in fact change when I listen to Mozart. In fact I find the two best things to listen to, which seem to promote logical thinking and motivation to act, are Mozart (and similar music) and noise (like Aube).
I suspect they have different modes of operation.
Mozart's music is very well structured, like a good program, so the mind can latch on to the motifs therein and engage in the rythmn of the music without an overriding desire to get up and dance.
Noise encourages the imagination gently, by providing a relatively blank canvas, but, given decent composition, also a sense of rythmn in the sound.
I find music with lyrics is useless as an adjunct to work as the words are distracting. Most other types of music are dance-provoking.
Mozart and Noise are great!
Re:Mozart can't be that special... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a big fan of classical music myself, but I can sort of see it working. Classical music has more of a pattern to it than modern dance music. Memorizing it takes a little more mental resources, depending on the song that is. I remember listening to a well made techno remake of Beethoven's 5th. (It's from the Jaguar Game Defender 2000, you can find it here [66.102.7.104], it's Trak 8 Bonus level..) I remember listening to it and thinking about how rich it felt. I never cared for the original orchestral version but the techno one was done very artistically. It felt like it had more artistic patterns to it than my typical library of techno music.
I really can't rationalize this on a a scientific level, but there's far more to this song to appreciate than I normally run across. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if more of my neurons were firing off pulses as a result of it.
I really don't think, though, it's because it's classical music specifically. I think it just has more to do with the way the composers had to make the music back then. Writing notes down on paper. One can imagine how, during the creation of that song, they'd make the notes themselves as artistic as possible. These days, I don't think music is quite made like that. Seems to be more about making the lyrics work and attaching a few loops and beats to it to chain the words together. I think the more 'engaging' music could easily be made today, it's a matter of focusing the artist down to making art from the patterns of notes.
Or maybe I'm just on crack. I just couldn't help remembering how much I appreciated hearing that techno remix of that song after reading the article today. Lots of ideas about that.
Overly compressed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Form? Structure? What? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a composer and an on-going student of music (you never really stop learning), I feel I should comment on this.
Mozart's music may be extremely structured, but it was also innovative because of it's lack of structure. If you listen closely, you can see that Mozart would write out "improvised" sections, as his best asset was his ability to improvise just about anything. Calling a simple chord progression structure is like saying, "This pile of mud is a house."
A lot of new music, and I don't mean anything you can find on the radio, is highly structured. Minimalists, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, build their music off of a few (or many) simple rhythmic/melodic elements that are repeated.
In all honesty, there may not be any logical explanation. Have they tried other recordings of this piece? Or just one? What about some of his other piano sonatas? Or maybe Beethoven's Piano Sonata in Cminor (which was based, nearly measure by measure on Mozart's Piano Sonata in Cminor)? What about Bach? Or Haydn?
Before they can make any real conclusions, I think they have a metric butt-ton of research to do.
Re:Specifics ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm. Speaking as someone who got a Masters in Comp. Sci., I found music analysis to be almost trivial, certainly I found it much easier then my fellow musicians. In particular, I was very easily able to straddle the line between "the rules" and "the feel".
(For those who have never done it, music analysis is interesting and useful for composers and players, but there is a strong element of "post hoc" analysis to it; analysis is really more interested in exploring the effect music has and sometimes a given theory will say X is happening when a quick and critical listening will say Y is happening. In the complementary direction, you'll see musicians use things like double-flats because even though E-double-flat is "literally" D (tonal pedants need not apply), in the theoretical context it makes more sense as an E, doubly-flatted. This is almost isomorphic to the relationship between software engineering theory and software engineering, complete with the "theory uber alles!" contingent and the "who the hell needs theory?!?" contingent. I'm one of the few people in the early theory classes who correctly used a double-flat on a test.)
(Then again, to be fair, I'm one of the rare comp. sci. types able to navigate theory and practice easily, so I'm probably an odd bird anyhow.)
What would be interesting would be to qualify various music genres along various lines and see which qualifications match their observations. Mozart was a genius and his music is like no other, but I can't think of any single attribute he holds a monopoly on (though the combination is unique, IMHO). A lot of "concept albums" share some of the off-beat regularity and interest in themes, for instance, though they obviously differ from Mozart in more ways then they are in common.
It's about the symmetry (Score:4, Interesting)
This statement is misinformed.
While Mozart was born in the same year that Bach died, there was no stylistic relationship between them. It wasn't until much later in his life that Mozart even discovered the works of Bach. Even in his day, Bach was considered old fashioned, and was very much "out of style".
While Bach looked back to the old contrapunctal methods of structuring a piece of music, Mozart (and his contemporaries) were involved with largely homophonic music written in the Sonata form. In terms of texture, music from the classical common practice (including Mozart) consists of a melodic subject, and an accompaniment, whereas textures in Bach's music relies heavily on imitative counterpoint.
My thinking has always been that if the "Mozart effect" actually has any basis, it's in the structure of the melodic phrasing: antecedent consequent.
In classical common practice, melodic phrasing usually followed the convention of an Antecedant phrase (often moving harmonically from the region of tonic to dominant), followed by a Consequent phrase (often harmonically moving from dominant to tonic). This creates a very strong sence of symmetry. To pick a tune probably everyone here is familiar with, think of the opening phrases (or any other for that matter) from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
It is this powerful effect of aural symmetry that I suspect has the most profound effect on our minds. It also typifies classicism in every sence: reason, order, symmetry.
BTW, I really find no basis for the all-too-common assertion of the link between mathematics and music. Composers (excepting people like Stockhausen perhaps) do not conceptualize music in mathematical terms. There is a relationship in that both music and mathematics have a symbolic notation, and that one can describe anything using mathematics, but that's about it.
Re:It's about the symmetry (Score:3, Interesting)
It's too bad you posted AC, as this could have been an interesting discussion. Never-the-less...
You quoted all but my last sentance, in which I state that the relationship between mathematics and music are that a) music and math use a symbolic notation, and b) you can describe anything using math. Note that I am making a distinction here between describing music mathematically and the way a composer actually conceives of music.
You mention that since one finds symmetry in Mozarts phrasing, he must have conceived of his musical ideas in mathematical terms. This is nonesence. If that's the basis of asserting the relationship between music and math, why don't people commonly insist on the same link between math and the visual arts? Classicism was keen on symmetry in all the arts, not just music. This hardly means, however, that artists conceived of their subjects in mathematical terms.
I assume you are refering to the ancient Greeks and their discovery of the ratios that describe the natural harmonic series.Yes we are aware of the theoretical contribution, but this hardly consitutes classical Greek musical practice. In fact, what's left of the fragments of Greek music hardly suggests that it was mathematically obsessed or conceived.
Well good for you and Stockhausen. The problem with the vast majority of that kind of music, is that it's very interesting theoretically, but it's not terribly musical and usually rather uninteresting to *listen* to. Don't get me wrong, this kind of stuff interests me a great deal, but I find that with most of these kinds of works, they are better appreciated in the abstract, rather than their implementation. An example of the contrary would be Ligeti's piano etudes -- there is certainly an abstract basis underpining the etudes, perhaps mathematically conceived in terms of the mechanism he wanted to compose out, but the etudes themselves are consumately musical, and once the *framework* was conceived, the rest was purely musical.