Punching The Lights Out Of Do Re Mi

[koganbot]

Natalie Angier in the New York Times about why music is easier to remember than jokes are (In One Ear And Out The Other):

"The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns, and music plays into that inclination," said Michael Thaut, a professor of music and neuroscience at Colorado State University. "From an acoustical perspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented and which the brain loves to hear."

A simple melody with a simple rhythm and repetition can be a tremendous mnemonic device. "It would be a virtually impossible task for young children to memorize a sequence of 26 separate letters if you just gave it to them as a string of information," Dr. Thaut said. But when the alphabet is set to the tune of the ABC song with its four melodic phrases, preschoolers can learn it with ease.

And what are the most insidious jingles or sitcom themes but cunning variations on twinkle twinkle ABC?

Really great jokes, on the other hand, punch the lights out of do re mi. They work not by conforming to pattern recognition routines but by subverting them. "Jokes work because they deal with the unexpected, starting in one direction and then veering off into another," said Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation." "What makes a joke successful are the same properties that can make it difficult to remember."

(Warning: Article is distressingly devoid of jokes.)

Comments

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read This is Your Brain on Music? Here's a really atrociously written review from Salon.

[koganbot]

You're right about the atrocious writing. "You may feel like the songs are grabbing your heart, but what's actually going on is in your head." And you'd think that someone first name Farhad might pause before writing, "If you happened to have been born between about 1978 and 1981, there's a fair chance you count yourself an obsessive of the Southern California rock band Weezer."

But here's a passage that contrasts with what Angier wrote in the NY Times:

Music sounds exciting when our brains guess the right beat, but a song becomes really interesting when it violates the expectation in some surprising way - what Levitin calls "a sort of musical joke that we're all in on." Music, Levitin writes, "breathes, speeds up, and slows down just as the real world does, and our cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized."

(I wonder why I'm not stuck on the music of my adolescence, which was very good music, and which I use as a metaphoric touchstone, but which I spend almost no time listening to these days, preferring to hear the music of other people's adolescence.)

[koganbot]

Or maybe I'm just having a very late adolescence.

[koganbot]

Oops, I screwed up the italics. The parenthetical statement about being not stuck on the music of my adolescence is mine, not Angier's.

[koganbot]

Nor is it Farhad Manjoo's, whom I was actually quoting.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I figured.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I don't think it contrasts Angier; Angier is contending that jokes are less memorable than music, not that jokes are less pleasurable or interesting than music.

Well, adolescence is adolescence. I find that the music of other people's adolescences better expresses my experiences now than the music of my own adolescence. I do have a "nostalgia" playlist, but it isn't the music I loved back then, it's the music I merely liked -- the Top 40 hits that I remember playing out of car windows and in the background at school dances, and the artists that, for whatever reason, the 1997 graduating class of Clifton F. Barkalow Middle School decided to love en masse (No Doubt, The Beatles). All of which connect me to a time and a place, or a particular experience or emotion, but which I haven't carried forward into the present at all. I don't understand the idea that an album is "essential" because it made you FEEL THINGS in HIGH SCHOOL. So did my sophomore-year English teacher, but there isn't really a place for her in my life today.

[koganbot]

I do love this song (maybe 'cause the guy who wrote it spent some of his adolescence in the same town I did, albeit not at the same time).

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I don't think I like anything by Springsteen, really, although he and I spent our adolescences in the same town too.