"There is a strong biological basis to the aesthetics of sound," Purves said. "Humans prefer tone combinations that are similar to those found in speech." This evidence suggests the main biological reason we appreciate music is because it mimics speech, which has been critical to our evolutionary success, said Purves, who is also director of Duke's Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program and executive director of the A*STaR Neuroscience Research Partnership at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore.
To study the emotional content of music, the Duke team collected a database of major and minor melodies from about 1,000 classical music compositions and more that 6,000 folk songs and then analyzed their tonal qualities. They also had 10 people speak a series of single words with 10 different vowel sounds in either excited or subdued voices, as well as short monologues.
This article was fun for me to read because I think it is really interesting to read about how music and speech is based on human biology. In this article there are two new studies found that the musical scales most commonly used over the centuries are those that come closest to mimicking the physics of the human voice, and that we understand emotions expressed through music because the music mimics the way emotions are expressed in speech.
I enjoyed this article very much. It's very interesting to think about how our communication (AKA speech) corresponds with music.
ReplyDeleteWow. What a great article, Alisa. Thank you for sharing it with us. A few weeks ago, Mr. Bova sent me an article showing how the letters of our alphabet are made up of shapes and lines that are easily recognizable by our brains. This music/speech thing seems to be along that same line of thinking. It's really fascinating stuff to me.
ReplyDeleteYour post is also very good. The only comment I would make is that it's a good idea to identify the people who are named in your quotes. In this case, something like:
"There is a strong biological basis to the aesthetics of sound," [research team leader Dale] Purves said.
Overall an outstanding job, though. Good work. 24/25
That actually makes a lot of sense, because a lot of time you can feel the emotion in music the same way you can feel it in speech.
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