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Notes: 2 / 1 year ago from coolemucke
Recently, I found this video on the coolemucke.tumblr blog. A piece from Sigur Rós, titled Ára Bátur. Well, the reason I posted this on my Music and Neuroscience blog is, that I got shivers down the spine immediately as he started to sing. At around 7min 10sec the piece becomes even more moving, with the dynamic going up and the children choir entering. Emotional response to music seems always something mysterious to me. Why is there some music so emotional and others not and why do some people have shivers down the spine with a specific piece and others not. Blood and Zatorre (2001) investigated this phenomenon using fMRI and could should, that during the “shivers down the spine experience”, the same brain reward regions are active as during sex. For me it seems, that songs, I get emotional chills from, have obviously a high (positive) valence, but are not arousing at all. Some further suggestions for articles about this topic which are worth reading are below.
Literature:
Stefan Koelsch: Towards a neural basis of music-evoked emotions (Trends Cog Sci, 2010)
Blood & Zatorre: Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated with reward and emotion (PNAS, 2001)
(Source: coolemucke)
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Notes: 1 / 1 year ago
Neuroaesthetics asks: what are feelings…?
Last week Friday I attended the first public discussion forum in a series called “Dialog at the interface of the Neurosciences and the Arts and Humanities”. An event designed to help the interdisciplinary communication between Arts and Science. For me personally, this is something I am doing all the time as a researcher in Neuroscience of Music. Anyway, there still seems to be a great need in learning from each other.
The event has been moderated by Gerd Scobel, a well known science and culture journalist; Invited speakers have been Hans Belting (former Professor at the Institute for Art History and Media Theory at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe) and Semir Seki (Professor for Neuroaesthetics) from University College of London. As stated in the title, the podiums discussion dealt with the question, what are aesthetic feelings through the looking glasses of each discipline and further what can each discipline learn from one another.
Gerd Scobel started the discussion with a obviously fairly simple, but interesting question: “What is an image?”. This initial questions followed a “quasi-discussion” of Zeki and Belting. In retrospect, the discussion was rather bizarre and unbalanced; Zeki explained for different scenarios how the brain (probably) works and Belting was just there, more engaged in asking questions, than given his own viewpoint. Finally it seemed, that Zeki was very much interested in learning from Arts, while Belting did not really care and was rather afraid, of a demystification of his worldview.
The idea of bringing together Science and Arts seems rather promising and interesting, but it is obviously pointless, if both sides have not the intention to learn from each other. However, talking helps, so I am looking forward to the next CIN dialog. Maybe about Music and Neuroscience??
Literature:
Belting, Hans: Likeness and Presence: History of the image before the Era of Art. Chicago University Press, 1997..
Zeki, Semir: Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for the Human Happiness. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
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1 year ago
the worms are gone…almost
It’s been a while since the last post. Since then, I finished my MSc thesis, which deals with the structural aspects of songs that get stuck in your head, aka earworms. You can find slides for our talk, given at the SysMus10 conference in Cambridge, below. It gives you an overview about the science behind earworms and our results. The project is still ongoing and any help is appreciated. Find more information: http://earwormery.wordpress.com/. It only takes 10 minutes to do the survey. If you don’t have so much spare time or if you have already done the questionnaire, please spread the word!!!
Friday the 12th of November I started with my PhD at the University of Tübingen (Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology), now working on the project „Neural mechanisms of singing: sensorimotor integration for vocal control”. A reserach project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation). Previous work in our group focused on experience-dependent changes in professional opera singers. Again, you can find relevant literature below. More information about related issues will be posted here soon. I am going to try to do a weekly update.
Literature:
Finkel, S. and Müllensiefen, D. (2010). Involuntary Musical Imagery - Investigating Musical Features that Predict ‘Earworms’. Talk given at the Third International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus10), University of Cambridge, 14th of September, 2010.
Kleber, B., Veit, R., Birbaumer,N., Gruzelier, J., & Lotze, M. (2009). The brain of opera singers: experience-dependent changes in functional activation. Cerebral Cortex.
Kleber, B., Birbaumer, N., Veit, R., Trevorrow, T., Lotze, M. (2007). Overt and imagined singing of an Italian aria, NeuroImage, 36(3), 889-900.
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Notes: 3 / 1 year ago from joshuafryWhy music is good for you: Nature News
(via joshuafry)
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1 year agoGoldsmiths Earworm Survey
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