July 9, 2008
Don't Cry For Me, R2D2
Musicians can breathe a sigh of relief: Computers don’t do as well when performing music at eliciting an emotional response. That’s the conclusion of a study published today in the journal PLoS ONE.
Researchers in Germany and the United Kingdom played selections from piano sonatas by Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert to 20 listeners, while monitoring their brains’ responses by electroencephalogram, better known as EEG.
Volunteers who listened to recordings of professional pianists showed more emotional activity of the brain than did those who listened to recordings made by computer.
“Our results suggest that musicians actually tell us something when they play,” said Stefan Koelsch, who led the work, in a prepared statement.
Mr. Koelsch is a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. The institute is in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach spent much of his life and composed many of his best-known pieces.—Lila Guterman
Posted on Wednesday July 9, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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didn’t we already learn that from Star Trek the Next Generation when Data was learning to play jazz?
— matt Jul 10, 09:48 AM #
This is a case in which access to grant money for research has overrun good sense.
I would appreciate never hearing again how terrible world hunger is, when money is going to fund this kind of “I have to have a research project to get money so I can stay in this cushy job” foolishness.
— 2B Jul 10, 10:17 AM #
Are musucians surprised? NOOOO! ;)
— Steve Jul 10, 10:25 AM #
There is an old essay by Cronbach I believe where he discusses how many studies seem obvious, frivolous, and wasteful AFTER-THE-FACT even though the results could have easily gone either way BEFORE-THE-FACT and if people were asked to predict results the predictions would be evenly split. There are literally hundreds of studies like this but particularly in the social sciences as humans have 20-20 hindsight and all sorts of of interesting result filters (i.e., biases). I do not believe that the results of this study was such a no-brainer and this musical “Turing” tests suggests that there are tactic components of music performance not attended to by theorists nor are they captured in music performance software. What the nature of these tactic components are is not clear nor is how they are conveyed and processed. This fact raises many important questions about the nature of speech and dialogue also and what exactly is being lost in must on-line communication and instruction as opposed to live classroom interaction.
So called no-brainer studies often raise interesting and puzzling questions as well as establish certain events as facts that were not established as facts before the study was done.
— vinnie Jul 10, 10:48 AM #
Vinnie makes very important points about the value of all kinds of research, and those regarding not being able, not being able, in principle, to judge the value of outcomes and findings before the fact. This research did not cut into $$‘s or mind-power available either for the study of world hunger or for efforts to relieve it. And we can’t focus on, say, world hunger alone, nor even focus on all of the terrible ills afflicting the world and human populations, and do no research in other fields of human interest until all the ills are fixed. For one thing, that will be never. And in the interim, what, we let progress in human knowledge simply end?
— Well said Jul 10, 11:37 AM #
Actually, this study DOES make an important step towards a better treatment of diseases, because it investigates how responses of the vegetative nervous system (innervating, e.g., the skin, which was investigated in this study) can be systematically influenced by music. The aim here is to gain a better understanding about how we can develop more systematic music-therapeutic applications for numerous diseases!
— Stefan Jul 16, 03:34 AM #