I speak music
When I have to say what languages I do speak, now I include music.
So much of what we are, our thoughts and the expression of our cultural identity is mixed with the original soundtrack of our lives, with that melodies we whistle and the songs stuck in our ears when going to bed. But is even more. It is about explaining ourselves in that language, make it vehicle for saying what we cannot say by any other way.
Under the heat of a jam session or immerse in the quietness of the composition process, I have even doubted what is my native language.
Similarities between music and language are easy to point: both are complex voluntary actions creating stimulus among humans, both music and language are encoded regarding rules of internal coherence and framing. We are able to express our inner world by using melodies and rhythms. And depending on our experience, we are able to cope with (and love) more and more complex music: kids start with fairy tales and 3-chords songs; some of them will end the journey on Julio Cortázar and Béla Bartók.
During several years, the study of music as a language domain has become of interest in the field of brain sciences. But just recently our ability to measure (and even to regulate!) the activity of the live brain has allowed to understand how the musical stimuli are embodied and processed, what are the rules and meanings that emerge, and what are the main differences between the brains of speakers and non-speakers of music.
In the last 20 years, for example, we went from recognising syntactic rules in the structure of music pieces to the understanding of their ability to produce symbolic extra-musical experiences (as the patriotic sense when the national anthem sounds at the stadium, or the reminiscence of a certain aroma while listening that adolescence romantic song). And more interesting, it has been documented that a musical phrase can contextualise and even make predictable a word presented later, exactly as it is observed with spoken language.
We know that because when a surprising message arrives, it leaves a trace in the brain activity, known as event-related potential N400 (erp N400). This electro-encephalographic signal, discovered in the early 80s by Prof. Marta Kutas, is not produced after general unexpected stimulus, but more specifically, when coherence rules of the content are violated. A classic example is the incongruence between a spoken phrase and its final word: “I just had a really nice coffee, flavoured with… DOG”. Then, finding that, for example, a progression of diminished and minor chords followed by the word “PARTY” is able to elicit an erp N400 is completely mindblowing.
Apparently, our brain is able to mix oral and visual modalities of language, and using music as one more domain, smoothly compatible with others.
Recently, a Chilean group published an interesting article showing that similarities between traditional language modes and music are not limited to the presence of an N400, but the synchrony patterns that emerge under cognitive processing of language and music tasks exhibit important common aspects. Volunteers were exposed to a spoken phrase or a musical sequence followed by a word in a screen, some pairs being coherent and others very weird. They analysed the brain activity through EEG while the subjects answered by pressing a button whether the pair was coherent or not (Barraza et al. 2016. Brain & Language. 152:44–49). This study for first time explore how our brains not only detects semantic violations, but also encodes conscious sense of continuity between music, text and spoken words, as different modalities of a common phenomenon.
What is really exciting is thinking music as more than an additional alphabet, but a completely new dimension of language, as signs, writing and orality. Probably we have always intuited that music is the shaping force of the people and each culture has been moulded by the beat of its own rhythms. The beat of the citizens builds up the city. The songs going out the windows, the voices that sing along the anthem of their times. It’s thundering to think in music shaping our brains, mediating our access to the native tongue and, by this mechanism, determining the entire universe of our traditions.
A group of neuroscientists at Pisa university faced the question exploring how a musician responds when exposed to two different words, one per ear, at the same time. Most of the people recognise more easily the word played close to the right ear (aka right-ear advantage), which is consequence of the specialised areas of the brain in decodification of language (for example Wernicke’s area) being significantly more developed in the left hemisphere. This time, scientists compared trained musicians and control subjects of the same age (Sebastiani y Castellani. 2016. Arch Ital Biol. 154(2–3):59–67), finding that in musicians the right-ear advantage was significantly attenuated. Moreover, musicians frequently understood and registered both words, even if they were in a completely invented language (or if the words were nonsense). These results show that probably oral language brain areas are more equally developed in both hemispheres of people systematically exposed to music immersion, giving an advantage in decodification of simultaneous stimulus in both ears.
It makes sense. Music is lot of times about separating and re-integrating different phrases, said by different instruments, different colours and tessituras of the voice. In musical language, superposition of phrases does not generate confusion. On the contrary, it enriches and widens the global message, and probably this is the main strength of music, its more advantageous aspect: the ensemble of the diversity, the polyphony of messages that makes emerge something bigger that the sum of its parts.
Circulating music is passing a message. Not just sensorial stimulation, but a different language. And even more, the expression of a particular identity, the pulse of a culture, the tradition speaking itself from mouth to mouth and song to song, shaping the bodies of the interpreters and carriers, making our voices. And shaping our listeners, as well. Making them echoes of a message conceived to propagate itself, to keep sounding into others.
(Spanish version of this work is published in Sonosapiens.cl: http://www.sonosapiens.cl/yo-hablo-musica/)
