![]() Pablo Casals, the cellist and composer, says it well here: If you think about it too much, it becomes difficult. ![]() Writing a single line is deceivingly simple. Most songwriters and composers cannot explain how they create melodies. ![]() It is a chance to let go of inhibitions, let go of judgments, and create intuitively. Melody is an opportunity for songwriters to let go. "It's one thing and it's not like a speech stream or a melody stream.You can learn how to write a melody intuitively or with a nerdy, thought-out, theoretical approach. ![]() "We perceive the song as a song, right?" she says. Now that there's good evidence a song takes two separate paths through the brain, researchers will need to figure out how the brain combines those twin streams of information into a coherent listening experience, Sammler says. "Charles Darwin said the languages that we use today emerged from something that was a song-like proto-language," she says. That process is necessary to fully experience any type of sound.Īlso, the brain circuits involved probably existed before human language appeared, Sammer says. "That might be why especially prominent and especially meaningful" in cultures around the globe, Zatorre says.īut it's not just songs that require both hemispheres working together, Sammler says. And it turned out that the people decoded sounds the same way songbirds do, by separating a sound's time-related elements from the frequencies it contains, and processing the information using two different groups of specialized brain cells.Īs a result, when we hear a song, it engages both hemispheres of the brain in a way that's different than either speech or music alone, Zatorre says. The scientists played them for 49 people while an fMRI scanner monitored brain activity. "You can still perceive the melody but you can no longer tell what the speech is," Zatorre says.Īrmed with hundreds of altered song fragments, recorded in both English and French, the team set out to learn how a human brain would process these sounds. That sounds a bit like someone humming a sentence rather than singing the words. Other songs were altered to remove information about how the sound changed over time. "The speech is perfectly comprehensible, but all the melody is essentially gone," Zatorre says. Sometimes they removed information about sound frequencies, which produced a breathy voice a bit like Darth Vader's. Then the team used a computer to alter the recordings. And they created lots of a cappella songs that were just a few seconds long. To find out, the team got help from a composer and a soprano. "We thought, hey, maybe that's what the human brain does too," Zatorre says. ![]() The other detects the frequencies in a sound. One assesses how quickly a sound fluctuates over time. Studies show that their brains decode sounds using two separate measures. The study was inspired by songbirds, Zatorre says. Moreover, brain damage to certain areas of the right hemisphere can affect a person's ability to perceive music. "If you have a stroke in the left hemisphere you are much more likely to have a language impairment than if you have a stroke in the right hemisphere," Sammler says. The finding explains something doctors have observed in stroke patients for decades, says Daniela Sammler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Cognition and Neurosciences in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in the study. ![]()
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