4. Anticipation
Note:cosa lega musica e linguaggi naturali?
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music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic.
Note:FLESSIBILITÀ
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The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music.
Note:ECCITAZIONE
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deceptive cadence.
Note:UN CLASSICO
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The Beatles’ “For No One” ends on the V chord (the fifth degree of the scale we’re in) and we wait for a resolution that never comes—at least not in that song. But the very next song on the album Revolver starts a whole step down from the very chord we were waiting to hear,
Note:ESEMPIO
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Steely Dan do it by playing songs that are essentially the blues (with blues structure and chord progressions) but by adding unusual harmonies to the chords that make them sound very unblues—for
Note:ALTRO CASO
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“Chain Lightning.”
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Miles Davis and John Coltrane made careers out of reharmonizing blues progressions
Note:TRA FAMILIARITÀ BLUES ED ESOTISMO
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(Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” is all one chord.)
Note:IMMOBILITÀ MAI ROTTA
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In “Yesterday,” the main melodic phrase is seven measures long; the Beatles surprise us by violating one of the most basic assumptions of popular music, the four- or eight-measure phrase unit
Note:UNITÀ
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In “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” the Beatles violate expectations by first setting up a hypnotic, repetitive ending
Note:FINALE A SORPRESA
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they end the song abruptly, and not even at the end of a phrase—they
Note:CccccNIENTE FADE OUT
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The Carpenters use timbre to violate genre expectations; they were probably the last group people expected to use a distorted electric guitar, but they did on “Please Mr. Postman”
Note:DISTORSIONI
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using violins (as for example, on “As Tears Go By”).
Note:GLI STONES LA BAND PIÙ GREZZA IN CIRCOLAZIONE
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as in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy,” Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” or the Allman Brothers’ “One Way Out.”
Note:APL CLIMAX SMETTERE DI SUONAR LASCIANDO IL SOLISTA
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the band suddenly starts playing at half the tempo they were before.
Note:FINALE A SORPRESA DI TANTI ROCK BLUES
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Creedence Clearwater Revival pulls out this slowed-down ending in “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”—by
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and they violate the expectations of that by coming in again for the real ending of the song at full tempo.
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The Police combined reggae with rock to create a new sound that fulfilled some and violated other rhythmic expectations simultaneously.
Note:UPTEMPO E FFTEMPO COMBINATE
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“Spirits in the Material World” from their album Ghost in the Machine takes this rhythmic play to such an extreme
Note:ASCOLTALO QUI IL BASSO DI STING
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The scales they used deprive us of the notion of a resolution, a root to the scale, or a musical “home,” thus creating the illusion of no home,
Note:SHONBERG
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lack of grounding,
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There is nothing intrinsically catlike about the word cat or even any of the letters in the word. We have learned that this collection of sounds represents the feline house pet. Similarly, we have learned that certain sequences of tones go together, and we expect them to continue to do so.
Note:IL SUONO È ecc NTERPRETATO PIÙ CHE ASCOLTATO
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statistical analysis our brain has performed of how often they have gone together in the past.
Note:LO STRUMENTO
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Life presents us with similar situations that differ only in details, and often those details are insignificant. Learning to read is an example.
Note:ANALOGIE
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An important way that our brain deals with standard situations is that it extracts those elements that are common to multiple situations and creates a framework within which to place them;
Note:SCHEMA
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The schema leads to clear expectations,
Note:DALLO SCHEMA ALL ASPETTATIVA
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Our musical schema for Western music includes implicit knowledge of the scales that are normally used. This is why Indian or Pakistani music, for example, sounds “strange” to us
Note:TONALITÀ
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We develop schemas for particular musical genres and styles; style is just another word for “repetition.”
Note:STILE
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The principal schemas we develop include a vocabulary of genres and styles, as well as of eras (1970s music sounds different from 1930s music), rhythms, chord progressions, phrase structure (how many measures to a phrase), how long a song is, and what notes typically follow what.
Note:GENERI
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Songs that we keep coming back to for years play around with expectations just enough that they are always at least a little bit surprising. Steely Dan, the Beatles, Rachmaninoff, and Miles Davis are just a few of the artists that some people say they never tire of, and this is a big part of the reason.
Note:MAI STANCHI
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Music theorists have identified a principle called gap fill; in a sequence of tones, if a melody makes a large leap, either up or down, the next note should change direction.
Note:GAP FILL
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If the melody makes a big leap, theorists describe a tendency for the melody to “want” to return to the jumping-off point;
Note:RIMBALZO
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In “Over the Rainbow,” the melody begins with one of the largest leaps we’ve ever experienced in a lifetime of music listening: an octave. This is a strong schematic violation, and so the composer rewards and soothes us by bringing the melody back toward home again,
Note:TUTTI A CASA
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Sting does the same thing in “Roxanne”:
Note:ALTRO ESEMPIO
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We also hear gap fill in the adagio cantabile from Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata.
Note:ALTRO ESEMPIO
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To delay the resolution—Beethoven was a master of suspense—instead of continuing the descent down to the tonic, Beethoven moves away from it.
Note:DELEY RESOLUTION...I MAESTRI
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What do we know about the neural basis for musical expectations and musical emotion?
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Ttttttttttt
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When you store a picture on your computer, the picture is not stored on your hard drive the way that a photograph is stored in your grandmother’s photo album.
Note:PC E MENTE
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stored in a file made up of 0s and 1s—the binary code that computers use to represent everything.
Note:CODICI...LA REALTÀ DIGITALIZZATA
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In the simplest case of a black-and-white photograph, a 1 might represent that there is a black dot at a particular place in the picture, and a 0 might indicate the absence of a black dot, or a white dot.
Note:ESEMPIO
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Similarly, audio files are stored in binary format, as sequences of 0s and 1s. The 0s and 1s represent whether or not there is any sound at particular parts of the frequency spectrum.
Note:AUDIO
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Of course, the computer (brain) is running a lot of fancy software (mind) that translates the code effortlessly.
Note:UN TRADUTTORE FENOMENALE
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This is what the neural code is like. Millions of nerves firing at different rates and different intensities, all of it invisible to us.
Note:NERVI FIRING
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my friend Perry Cook and I were astonished when we read an article about a man who could look at phonograph records and identify the piece of music that was on them, by looking at the grooves, with the label obscured.
Note:MUSICA E SOLCHI
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The grooves of a vinyl record contain a code that is “read” by the needle. Low notes create wide grooves, high notes create narrow grooves,
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If a person knew many pieces of music well, it would be possible to characterize them in terms of how many low notes there were (rap music has a lot, baroque concertos don’t), how steady versus percussive the low notes are (think of a jazz-swing tune with walking bass as opposed to a funk tune with slapping bass), and to learn how these shapes are encoded in vinyl.
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How can we study neural codes and learn to interpret them? Some neuroscientists start by studying neurons and their characteristics—what causes them to fire, how rapidly they fire, what their refractory period is (how long they need to recover between firings); we study how neurons communicate with each other and the role of neurotransmitters in conveying information in the brain.
Note:ANCHE IL CERVELLO HA I SUOI CODICI
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Activity from outside the brain can cause a neuron to fire—such as when a tone of a particular frequency excites the basilar membrane, and it in turn passes a signal up to a frequency-selective neurons in the auditory cortex.
Note:ATTIVAZIONE
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Generally, neurotransmitters cause the receiving neuron to fire or prevent it from firing.
Note:TRASMETTITORI
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One finding at the macro level about the function of the brain is the popular notion about hemispheric specialization—the idea that the left half of the brain and the right half of the brain perform different cognitive functions.
Note:EMISFERI
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To begin with, the research on which this is based was performed on right-handed people.
Note:PRIMO LIMITE A QS RICERCHE
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Writers, businessmen, and engineers refer to themselves as left-brain dominant, and artists, dancers, and musicians as right-brain dominant. The popular conception that the left brain is analytical and the right brain is artistic
Note:VULGATA
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We’ve found lateralization in the brain basis of music as well. The overall contour of a melody—simply its melodic shape, while ignoring intervals—is processed in the right hemisphere,
Note:MELODIA
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Musical training appears to have the effect of shifting some music processing from the right (imagistic) hemisphere to the left (logical) hemisphere,
Note:TRAINING
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Children show less lateralization of musical operations than do adults, regardless of whether they are musicians or not.
Note:BAMBINI
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Stefan Koelsch, Angela Friederici,
Note:SOTTO
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The structural processing—musical syntax—has been localized to the frontal lobes of both hemispheres in areas adjacent to and overlapping with those regions that process speech syntax, such as Broca’s area, and shows up regardless of whether listeners have musical training.
Note:DOVE...LA MUSICA NEL CERVELLO
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The brain’s music system appears to operate with functional independence from the language system—the
Note:MUSICA E LINGUAGGIO
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As reported by Oliver Sacks, Clive lost all memory except for musical memories, and the memory of his wife. Other cases have been reported for which the patient lost music but retained language
Note:CHI PERSE LE FACOLTÀ LINGUISTICHE
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When portions of his left cortex deteriorated, the composer Ravel selectively lost his sense of pitch while retaining his sense of timbre, a deficit that inspired his writing of Bolero,
Note:GENESI DEL BOLERO
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resonance imaging machine (MRI)
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RISONANZA
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(The research on the development of the first MRI scanners was performed by the British company EMI, financed in large part from their profits on Beatles records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” might well have been titled “I Want to Scan Your Brain.”)
Note:MRI...GENESI
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With fMRI I can tell that you are listening to music as opposed to watching a silent film, but we can’t yet tell if you’re listening to hip-hop versus Gregorian chants,
Note:I LIMITI
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Listening to music and attending to its syntactic features—its structure—activated a particular region of the frontal cortex on the left side called pars orbitalis—a subsection of the region known as Brodmann Area 47.
Note:ANALISI FMRI
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In addition to this left hemisphere activation, we also found activation in an analogous area of the right hemisphere. This told us that attending to structure in music requires both halves of the brain, while attending to structure in language only requires the left half.
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left-hemisphere regions that we found were active in tracking musical structure were the very same ones that are active when deaf people are communicating by sign language.
Note:I SORDI
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We found evidence for the existence of a brain region that processes structure in general,
Note:STRUTTURE
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The frontal lobes access our hippocampus and regions in the interior of the temporal lobe and ask if there is anything in our memory banks that can help to understand this signal. Have I heard this particular pattern before? If so, when? What does it mean? Is
RUOLO DELLA MEMORIA
