Music & The Mind

Courtesy jcordj66

Today, forty years ago, the legendary Rock & Blues guitarist Jimi Hendrix passed away at the age of 27. He led the genre to unprecedented heights. Countless tried to follow his path.

I missed him on the Isle of Fehmarn. We did not make it. Our mothers did not let us on the train. Three decades later, I had another chance.  We entered a bar on the 600 block of Bourbon Street one day. I believe it was Mango-Mango. I am not sure. A ragged gentleman with a big smile and a front tooth missing immediately captured our attention. He stood on a small podium, playing a white Fender Stratocaster, strung reverse, left-handed and looked like a seasoned version of Jimi Hendrix. He executed Hendrix's pieces with wonderful accuracy, filling our evening without pause. We had a splendid time.

Alas, the gig constituted nothing more than an excellent imitation. The great master himself remains unsurpassed to the day and sorely missed. Thus, Ladies and Gentlemen, let us turn up the volume and remember him with a rare rendition recorded live straight out of Wolgang's vault:

• Here is an interesting read:
  Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius
• 
  Pristine recordings, just freshly released in a collector's box set!

About Cochlear Implants & The Quality of Music

The cochlea is the receiver of sound in the inner ear. It is composed of three adjacent fluid-filled canals that coil in two and one-half windings encased in a bony shell. Sound waves set the tympanic membrane in the outer ear in vibration. The vibrations are conducted by three small bones in the middle ear to the oval window of the cochlea, stirring waves in the cochlear fluid. The waves move a membrane stretching from base to apex at the center of the cochlea. The membrane deflects hairs on sensory receptor cells nestled beneath in the organ of Corti. The hair deflections are transduced into nerve cell signals and conveyed to the brain through the auditory nerve. High pitch exerts the greatest membrane movements at the cochlea's base and low pitch at the apex. Because the auditory nerve fibers innervate the organ of Corti sequentially, each fiber is excited by a specific sound frequency.

Exposure to high volume noise may shear off sensory receptor hair. Exposure to high doses of antibiotics triggers hair cell death. The loss of sensory hair in as much as the loss of sensory receptor cells lead to early deafness. Hardening of the middle ear bones with advancing age is another common cause. Today, hearing can be restored with cochlear implants as long as the auditory nerve fibers in the cochlea remain intact. That is, wire electrodes are implanted into the cochlea. Ambient sound is recorded with a microphone. Computer algorithms transform the recording into electrical pulses that stimulate the auditory nerve fibers according to the pitch and the volume of the recorded sound. Intriguingly, the nerve cells in the brain can use the artificially generated input to interpret sound in a meaningful fashion. Through practice and optimization of the algorithms, hearing improves. The process constitutes a striking accomplishment of engineering and medicine. However, even greater achievement lies with the nerve cells in the auditory pathway. They must re-adjust their connections such that the novel sensory input can be successfully utilized.

In today's Morning Edition of National Public Radio (NPR), Robert Krulwich spoke with Oliver Sacks (pod cast) about the neurologist's latest book entitled Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. In the book, the author observes people who hear imaginary music that ensembles of nerve cells seem to generate in the auditory parts of their brains. Robert Krulwich interviews two persons described. One is a lady who lost her hearing with advancing age. Though she fell completely deaf, she reported frequently hearing pieces of music flawlessly performed loud and clear. She opted for a cochlear implant. Although she effectively regained hearing after implantation, the imaginary music persisted to emerge. The music does not bother her. In her judgment, the quality of the brain-generated pieces is far superior to the performances she hears with the implant. She must have had a keen sense of hearing and a great appreciation of music earlier in life, and the auditory inputs produced with the implant can not rival the quality of the memory trace. The great Ludwig van Beethoven managed to compose extraordinary music having fallen entirely deaf.

Addenda

• Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition has just appeared in paperback. For the occasion, NPR's Fresh Air replayed an interesting interview Terry Gross conducted with Oliver Sacks today. You can listen to the interview here (10/3/08).
• Professor Sacks explores Musicophilia in a show entitled "Musical Minds" on Public Broadcasting Service's Nova tonight (06/30/09).

Why Scientists like Artists

It is often said that Nashvillians possess two lives. One is spent on a day job to make a living. The other unfolds during the off hours, when we pursue our musical aspirations. If the music works out, we will quit our day job. I was once privileged to meet someone who was about to make this lucky transition. She was recording her first CD. Because I had never witnessed a recording session, I asked her whether I could not tag along to experience what it was like. She graciously agreed, and I ended up visiting a recording studio.

It was different from what I had expected. The location was somewhere in the countryside a forty-minute drive from Nashville. The producer worked out of his basement. Below the keyboards and mixers, I saw plenty computer equipment. The music could be heavily computer-generated. Essentially, this man was able to produce the sounds of all instruments in a band by himself, except the steel guitar. I was told that this was one rare instrument whose sound could not be synthesized to satisfaction yet. On my day, the soundtrack for the steel guitar was recorded. After that my friend sang. She was cooped up in a sound-insulated booth that doubled as the closet for the washer and the drier on other days. All afternoon, my friend repeated the same line until her voice almost broke and she needed a lolly pop to continue singing.

The producer was working with a man who possessed the golden finger that came down on a button exactly at the point in time when the line had to be spliced into the song. My friend had to sing the line precisely the way the man with the golden finger demanded. What he asked for was so nuanced, I could hardly hear the difference. He was profoundly insistent and perfectionist about the process. My friend gave her best to deliver. After three hours, I myself imagined hearing what the man with the golden finger was aiming at. The day went by like a breeze. My friend told me afterwards that she had spent many weeks like this and was not quite finished yet. Her hard work eventually paid off with a collection of beautiful songs, opening the way into the Bluebird Cafe. In Nashville, music means business!

I am not musically versed in any respect. I am a research scientist. What struck me most about the production process was its similarity to the work I know. The beginning of any research study is an idea, that is the hypothesis. The scientist shapes the hypothesis and designs the experiments to prove or disprove it. The results provide new insights. Things may turn out different from expectation. The hypothesis will change and experimentation proceeds until a break-through is achieved.

Watching my friend at work that day, I learned that making a song adheres to the same procedure. The singer/songwriters and producers shape the tune and the lyrics of the song until they fit perfectly together and all aspects fall in place. Eventually a new song is born. In this process as much as in scientific research, experience is essential for the design of a flawless product, pure and free of contradiction. As many scientists teach, my friend became a councilor. She published a collection of interviews with successful singer/songwriters, giving advice to those who wish to pursue this career. Today, she coaches young talent to get started. You may visit her here.

Addenda

• When we listen to Bob Boilen's segment on NPR's All Things Considered entitled "Moby: One Song, Two Days, Three Versions" broadcast today, we grasp immediately that artists and scientists are striving in the same fashion to perfect a product shaped countless times in their imagination. In that sense humans seem unique. No other creature we know is able to accomplish such act of creation (05/04/10).

• It is fascinating how similar the creative process in the arts and the sciences can be. The eminent pharmacologist Otto Loewi had the idea for the experiment that would prove the existence of neurotransmitters and win him the Nobel Prize in his dreams. Keith Richards had the fundamental idea for "I can't get no satisfaction", one of The Rolling Stones' signature songs, in his dreams as well. Loewy needed to scribble notes down on a pad that he had placed on his bed stand. He had had the dream of the experiment on a prior night, but had nothing to write it down with at that time, and forgotten the details when he awoke. When the dream re-occurred, he was prepared with pad and pencil, finding his notes next morning. Richards habitually took his guitar hooked up to a tape recorder to bed and woke up one morning, finding the basic tune for the fabled Stones song recorded on the tape. Listen to this, at times mildly strained, interview with Terry Gross broadcast on National Public Radio's Fresh Air under the title "The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards Looks Back At 'Life'" today in context with Richard's just-published memoir entitled "Life" (10/25/10).

Leonardo's View

I just was reminded of the great Leonardo da Vinci the other day. A book entitled “La Musica Celata” has just been published in which the author, Giovanni Maria Pala, lays out evidence that a musical theme is embedded in Leonardo's painting of the Last Supper. That Leonardo was truly one of a kind! His drawings and paintings reflect such a keen sense of actuality and maybe more. I am a neuro-anatomist by training. I always admired realistic drawings of the human body. In my mind, Leonardo was the first modern anatomist.

I once could visit a traveling exhibit of his drawings and notes on human anatomy at the Philadelphia College of Physicians. Beside the very impressively detailed renderings of muscles and bones, drawings on the brain caught my eye. On one parchment (Fig. 5), a schema on how the brain may work was center stage. The ventricles, that is the fluid-filled cavities, were of utmost importance. In Leonardo's time, it was commonly accepted that our thoughts, our spirit, would travel with the juice in the ventricles. The nerve cells were discovered only centuries later. However, the Maestro was not going to be fooled. If you train your eye on the lower left corner of the parchment, you discover that what looks like a smudge is the faint impression of a more detailed drawing of brain structure. As if Leonardo tried to draw something as he saw it and then erased it. The other parchment (Fig. 6) shows his method of reproducing the shape of the ventricles by filling them with wax in the bovine brain. On this parchment, again the ventricles take center stage, Yet, on the right side there is another faint drawing. This time, the shape is distinct. You see a very realistic reproduction of the cerebral cortex with its sulci and gyri. Though it may seem human, it is most likely the cortex cerebri of a cow. Yes, also ruminants have a cortex with numerous convolutions. That must have caught the Maestro's eye. I can imagine that he mumbled to himself: ”Only shows the limits of inductive thinking. This proves that cortical convolutions are no key to intellect!” And all the world's cows must have agreed with a resounding:” Moo!”

If you like to see more of Leonardo's notes on human anatomy, check in a book like Leonardo Da Vinci on the Human Body. In his studies, Leonardo was constantly struggling with the unreal views of the day and with the actuality that he saw and could not help, but draw. He must have erased his impression of reality many times, because of his fear of the authorities. Dissecting bodies was forbidden. He wrote his notes on the parchments in mirror image to conceal his thoughts from the average person who may have betrayed him. But, then he could not efface his convictions entirely. In the end, Leonardo's perceptions of the brain were correct, and he stands tall today. What can we learn from this?

Trust your own eyes more than anything, particularly when the views of the day get in the way.

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