Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

I break off from the traditional summer silence to flag up some interesting tests related to Simon Baron Cohen’s* recent book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain.

There are four tests:

• Systemizing quotient test (my own score 21)
• Empathy quotient test (my own score 48)
• Autism Spectrum quotient test (my own score 15)
• Mind in the eyes test (my own score 28)

The first three take the form of choosing how much you agree with a given statement: definitely agree; slightly agree; slightly disagree & definitely disagree. The 4^th test involves looking at a pair of eyes, through the letter-box, as it were and then choosing which of four given emotions is being expressed.

In all four tests my score fell into the category where “most women score.” This did not surprise me and I imagine that most people employed in the people industries would score similarly. Why not try them? The overall results (with colour coded gender divide) for over 150,000 participants so far can be seen here (slow link - patience required).

I first came across this topic in an article in New Scientist which suggested that reading fiction might develop social skills.

* cousin of Sacha Baron Cohen aka Ali G and Borat

My ears pricked up this morning at the mention of the Street Vibe Festival of Sound which takes place today in London’s The Scoop. The idea of the event is to highlight the appeal of science through music and other arts. The short report on Radio 4’s Today included efforts by Stephen Mesure (Director of The Creative Science Consultancy) and South African percussionist and composer, Eugene Skeef to produce music from carved instruments. The most convincing of these was a carrot built on the whole tone scale.

The report grabbed my attention, not because I plan to race down to London to take part, but because I have been thinking along similar lines. Discussions are to be opened up in a school I visit with a view to pupils and staff playing a more active role in assemblies. The possibilities for cross curricular links seem huge and I see music as being able to play a big part e.g. music & maths; music & science; music & languages – in addition to the more obvious pairings like words & music or music and dance.

The idea which immediately sprang to mind is a piece based on the harmonic series – the physical and mathematical reality which underpins the evolution of Western harmony and instruments over the last 1,000 years. Yes, start small – that’s my motto.

One of the bonuses of keeping this blog is that searching for useful hyperlinks – such as the one for the whole tone scale (above) leads me to interesting resources for pupils. From the same source come this short, interesting video about chord construction.

Got a spare 15 minutes? Would you like to take part in a national, online survey about how people listen to music? The mission of Feeling Sound Musiclab is to test how we perceive music – and also to gauge the nation’s favourite chord – the result of which will be used to commission a new piece of music.

Why not read about the project, about the staff involved or take the test?

What constitutes the perfect voice? Is it totally subjective or can the ingredients be isolated and described objectively?

According to research carried out on behalf of Post Office Telecom it is possible to be very precise about this. Perhaps not surprisingly, the research was carried by two people who can count music among the many strings on their bows:

• Andrew Linn – lecturer in linguistics and phonetics at Sheffield University, and accomplished organist
• Shannon Harris -sound engineer and keyboard player with, among others, Lily Allen and Rod Stewart.

Shannon Harris, speaking to James Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today described the research procedure. Fifty unknown voices were played to participants and the common traits of favoured voices noted:

1. good bass frequency response – between 35.5Hz and 12.2 KHz
2. a delivery speed 160 words per minute – with a gap of 0.5 sec between phrases
3. an intonation contour which goes downwards! (take note, fans of AQI/HRT – no not that one, the other one*)

This information proved sufficient to synthesise the perfect male and female voice, both of which can be heard here.

Presumably to give these findings some popular meaning, well known voices featuring some or all of these were listed. They included:

• Judi Dench
• Michael Gambon
• Mariella Frostrup
• Alan Rickman
• Jeremy Irons

You’ll note the complete absence of national/regional accents and also of context. Would dozens of orators using RP or SBS be suitable in the Scottish Parliament or Welsh Assembly? Would Alan Rickman make a convincing drill sergeant? Could Juni Dench comfortably MC a Hip-Hop festival?

James Naughtie asserted - correctly in my view - that what people were looking for was a voice, reading with understanding and meaning. In the context of teaching, an individual teacher’s delivery would surely change depending on where in the 3-18 continuum they were placed.

It seems clear that the voice was being regarded as an de-contextualised instrument. No composer would cite any single instrument as the perfect one without knowing the setting and the emotional intention. The harpsichord is not a great instrument for marching to war and bagpipes are rarely booked for dinner jazz.

*Stephen Fry consigned Australian Questioning Intonation aka High Rising Terminal to Room 101 on BBC 2. Interestingly the researchers report that this sound suggests a lack of confidence. Viewed thus, it is not surprising that is is mainly the domain of teenagers for whom fitting in and confidence are big issues. Contrastingly, David Crystal, a prolific writer on language, considers that AQI is favoured by young people as it sounds inviting and inclusive and because, generally, young people are more interested in meeting new people and making new friends than older people whose family and social networks are perhaps happily in place.

This simple, interactive tiredness test might be an interesting thing for staff and pupils alike - courtesy of one of my favourite places to visit - The Wellcome Collection

How loud is a decibel? This interactive site will give you some idea. What noise levels are endured by members of orchestras? This site has some interesting and detailed information. New European Union industrial (sic) legislation stipulates that employers must provide protection where noise levels in the workplace exceed 85 dB . This has brought about the phenomenon of bespoke ear plugs (paragraph 21) and some interesting technology (paragraphs 22 & 23). The issue of problematic noise levels has led to pieces being dropped from concert programmes.

According to this article a pipe band, playing at full volume outdoors, peaks at 122 dB. Is it possible musically to arouse national pride at 85dB? In 2005 I attended the Pipefest in Holyrood Park, where 10,000 pipers and drummers broke the Guiness World Record for simultaneous playing. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators seated on the grass. At the sound of so many pipes starting up many people leapt to their feet - fuelled by raw emotion.

You can hear a report on the topic of musicians’ noise-at-work on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House (fast forward to 48 minutes in). It features the bitter irony of the EU anthem consisting of a theme from the Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven – who, by the end of his career, was profoundly deaf.

I once played in a band at a 50^th birthday party in The Johnny Cope, Prestonpans. The venue had in place a traffic light system of noise awareness:

• green = well within limits
• amber = getting near the upper limit – keep a lid on it
• red = you’ve overdone it – at which point the power would be cut for 30 seconds or so – it’s a situation you’d want to avoid.

The limit was breached only once. We were on a break, and a kissagram dressed as Tarzan had just entered the room.

Interested in language? Shouldn’t every teacher be? Got a spare 8 minutes? Ever wondered what Forensic Linguistics is all about? You can hear a very interesting interview from Radio 4’s Word of Mouth about how language (including texting style) can betray incongruities with the claimed age, gender, social class & native language of the user and how evidence for real life cases (much more serious than copying homework) was gathered. Dr. Tim Grant, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at Aston University explains how here (until Tue 13th at 16:00).

Very similar skills and processes are used to determine the composer of an unidentified instrumental piece of music. Details of instrumentation, national style, harmonic & rhythmic language, division of octave etc. are often unconsciously processed, allowing the listener to pin down the historical period, country of origin and, in many cases, the individual musical signature(s).

In last night’s edition of Horizon, entitled How Your Memory Works, neuroscientist Dr. Donna Addis of Harvard University showed MRI scans highlighting similarities in brain activity when volunteers were either reflecting upon the past or imagining the future. It would appear that these two areas are sufficiently related to provide an axis of time along which we enjoy freedom of movement. As if to corroborate the findings, one of programme’s other subjects, suffering from considerable memory impairment, turned out to have little vision of the future.

Of all the time arts (music, performance poetry, dance, mime, film, theatre, animation) instrumental music is perhaps the one which relies most heavily upon this axis, as narrative thrust cannot be helped along by language, image, location etc. I should imagine, awareness of the axis is heightened when one progresses from appreciation to performance and, perhaps, eventually to musical arrangement & composition. Midway through a crescendo, for example, a performer ought to have some idea of the beginning and end volumes. The feeling of inevitability wrought by composers into the arrival of the big tune is often organically achieved by seeds sown earlier in the work and (unconsciously) noted by the listener. Beethoven and Sibelius are both famed for their rigorous attention to this aspect of form.

Does the study of music simply employ this axis or is it able to enhance it in any way? If indeed possible, is enhancement necessarily a good thing? Would it be possible to prove music’s role in this area? Is there any current research into this area?

It’s not really news, I know, but it’s always good to see reaffirmation of the benefits of exercise on learning and the brain - like the article in today’s Independent. One aspect I hadn’t seen articulated quite so directly concerns the role exercise plays in reducing aggression. Perhaps that explains why, almost without exception, martial artists seem to be amongst the least aggessive people around. Much of the article concerns the work of Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, John Ratey, author of a book entitled Spark and a related blog.

Why should religious music be of interest to our largely secular society? BBC 4’s Sacred Music, presented by Simon Russel Beale, visited Notre Dame de Paris to show how two innovations of the 12^th Century Notre Dame School underpin what has since come to be known as western classical music.

Members of early music specialist choir, The Sixteen and their director Harry Christophers, demonstrated music’s journey from homophonic (Int 2 concept) plainchant (H Music concept) to polyphony (Int 2 concept). Their lively, committed performances, which maximised the acoustics of Notre Dame’s Gothic architecture made it possible to believe that contemporary listeners would have experienced something of the vitality of the Punk revolution in the 1970s. This fresh approach was pioneered by Léonin and developed by his successor Pérotin.

Aside from the obvious connectivity between music and architecture, the links between music and science (notably physics) were explored. Composers, deciding which notes would best fit those already present in the setting of the plainchant would choose intervals (an Int 2 concept), in order, from the harmonic series i.e. 8ve, 5th & 4^th. Although the triad had not yet become the building block of Western harmony, the foundations of the genre had been laid.

Musicologist, Helen Deeming, enthusiastically outlined the possibilities afforded by the second innovation of the time, the development of musical notation. Although the words of the liturgy were written, the associated music was taught by rote and memorised. This meant that, were a new setting to be sent to another cathedral city, a singer, familiar with the music, would have to tag along to coach the choir. Now, the music could be sent and realised from afar.

There remain three more episodes of this promising series. Here are links to details of all episodes, an overview of the series and a reflection on the place of sacred music in a secular world.

Overview of the series

The four episodes: The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina And The Popes; Tallis, Byrd and The Tudors; Bach And The Lutheran Legacy

Richard Langham Smith, Head of Music at the Open University, writes eloquently on Sacred Music in a Secular World.