The Musical Mind: Neural Tuning and the Aesthetic Experience

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511499722.012

10 - The Musical Mind: Neural Tuning and the Aesthetic Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009

Oliver Vitouch

Edited by

Paul B. Baltes ,

Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz and

Frank Rösler

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Oliver Vitouch: Affiliation:
Professor and Chair of Cognitive Psychology University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Paul B. Baltes: Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin
Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Frank Rösler: Affiliation:
Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany

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Summary

ABSTRACT

Music is a human universal. Still, a persuasive evolutionary explanation of its adaptive value is missing. In its refined forms, music can be paradigmatically seen as an exaptation or spandrel, serving no immediate survival or reproductive purpose in a “l'art pour l'art” fashion. Simultaneously, musical training is a model case for neural plasticity, with extended perceptual and motor skills having their morphological and functional imprints on the neocortex. This chapter exemplifies how music shapes the brain – from the early development of absolute pitch, to macroscopic changes in cortical specialization, to “strong experiences with music” and their supposed substrates. These phenomena can only be properly understood from the interplay of evolution, culture, and ontogenesis.

A HUMAN UNIVERSAL

In 1977, humans sent two spacecrafts, the Voyagers, into different angles of deep space. Aboard each vessel was, apart from technical gear, a small collection of human artifacts. Part of the collection was graphical, including a drawing of a woman and a man (greeting with his open palm) and a drawing representing the position of the Earth within our solar system. The other part was tonal, including a golden disk containing human speech and 27 tracks of music, such as a Glenn Gould recording of the C major Prelude and Fugue from Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2. Obviously, the team of scientists in charge found music to be an achievement sufficiently characteristic of our species to be put into an “information basket” about Homo sapiens: “Hi, we are humans living on earth, we have sexual dimorphism, we greet, speak, draw, construct, research, and we play Bach.

Type: Chapter
Information: Lifespan Development and the Brain
The Perspective of Biocultural Co-Constructivism
, pp. 217 - 236

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511499722.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

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