Music, Mind, and Morality
By Jon Hersey
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited version of a speech delivered at TOS-Con 2022. The written version retains the character of an oral presentation.
Let’s start with a little experiment. Listen to this short clip of music and take note if at any point you feel chills or goosebumps or the like.1
Do you feel that? That’s Merry Clayton’s background vocal on “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, and it gives me chills every time.
Music is an incredibly potent force. It can give us goosebumps; it can make us laugh; it can make us cry. It can unlock long-forgotten memories and flood us with emotions. It can transfix us, and it can activate the same reward circuits in the brain as drugs, sex, and candy.2 It can also activate the brain’s stress circuits, releasing cortisol.
Twenty-five years ago, scientists thought that our capacities for language were on the left side of the brain and those for music were on the right. But our understanding has come a tremendous way since then. According to Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist who studies music’s effects on the brain, music affects almost every area of the brain so far studied.3 After former congresswoman Gabby Giffords survived a gunshot wound to the head, she had to relearn how to speak. She did that using music therapy.4 Music enabled her to rewire her brain. Music can also increase the size of certain structures within the brain, most notably the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the left and right hemispheres. Children who play musical instruments have larger corpus callosa than those who don’t, and they do better on tests of critical thinking and creative problem solving.5 And as everybody who’s ever taken part in karaoke knows, singing—especially with groups of people—can help rid us of anxiety, depression, and feelings of loneliness. Singing in groups can release oxytocin and enhance social bonding.6
How many people woke up with music this morning? How many people worked out to music? How many people commuted with music playing in the car or in earbuds? For many, music is a near constant part of our lives. We use it to buoy our moods and to help us fall asleep at night. It’s a life-enhancing “drug,” and we’re all hooked on it.
But most of us don’t really know how or why music works the way it does, why it affects us the way it does, why we like the songs that we do. It’s the closest thing that we rational 21st-century people have to alchemy. We have our broth of Beatles with a pinch of Pink Floyd and a dash of Hendrix, and maybe some beheaded Black Sabbath bats—and that’s our stew for the day. But, for the most part, we have no idea why or how the stew works.
Nothing is wrong with that, of course, just as nothing is wrong with not knowing why, when you flip a switch, a light comes on. Like wine, you can enjoy music without having any specific skills or knowledge, which is great. That’s really fortunate for us. But as with wine—and everything else—knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you can pinpoint what you really like, figure out under what conditions that music is most effective for you, and prime the pump for ever greater musical enjoyment.
So that’s our goal for today. We’re going to tramp through various fields—music, physiology, neuroscience—all of which require a lifetime of study to become an expert. I’m no expert, but I have spent my life making and recording music. I started playing guitar at about nine. I was always fascinated with the intersection of science and sound. That led me to go to school for audio engineering, and I wound up in the music industry in Nashville, working in recording studios and on the road with bands. My hope is that I’ve learned enough over the years to serve as your guide today through some of the fascinating research that’s been done. We’ll be relying on the work of several outstanding scientists, including David Huron, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Daniel Levitin, and Nolan Gasser, whose books I heartily recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about this subject.7
So, first things first: What is music? To wrap our heads around the answer, we’ll consider what happens in our heads when we hear music.
One really important thing that happens when we listen to music is that it causes synchronous neural firing in the brain, meaning that it can cause groups of neurons to fire at the same time and rate. A poetic way to put it is that music plays the brain.
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together.” This is really important for understanding music’s effect on us and its ability to shape and improve our lives. Dr. Lee Bartel has done a lot of work in this field, and according to him, brain regions operating at different brainwave frequencies do not speak to one another. When brain regions don’t talk to one another, bad things can happen. For instance, when two brain regions involved in motor processing don’t talk to one another, people develop dyskinesia, uncontrolled movements, as with Parkinson’s. When two brain regions associated with memory don’t talk to one another, people get amnesia, dementia, Alzheimer’s.8
What music can do is help jump-start the conversation between brain regions and reverse the symptoms of such diseases, which is amazing. We just put it on for enjoyment, but it can function as medicine.
But all of that requires sound that meets certain parameters. Let’s listen to something that flouts those parameters and so makes a good foil for better understanding music. This is a mathematically devised sequence of tones used in submarine echolocation. With echolocation, the big technological problem is distinguishing between pings being transmitted and those being received. To solve this problem, mathematicians devised a sequence of tones that lacks repetition in every parameter. This is mathematician Scott Rickard introducing us to what he calls the “world’s ugliest piece of music.”9 Take a listen.
OK, did you get chills or goosebumps from that? Expect that one to top the charts any day now.
This ping lacks repetition in every single parameter, and what it highlights is the fact that repetition is key to our understanding and enjoyment of music. If you think about a musical phrase or passage, the fact that it repeats, even with slight variation, demarcates a clear beginning and ending, which enables us to hear that phrase as one unit. The necessity of repetition in music helps clarify what music is; it helps us toward a definition of music.
It’s funny how this works, too. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s book is called On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, and she talks about how even a simple nonsense phrase, when repeated in a rhythmic pattern, begins to sound like music.10 For example, on the plane coming here, a flight attendant kept repeating the same phrase in a sing-song voice: “Snacks or alcohol? Snacks or alcohol? Snacks or alcohol?” The more she repeated it, the more it started to sound like music. I could almost begin to hear, in my “mind’s ear,” Kanye West rapping over it.
The point is: Repetition is key to what music is. So, at this point, I want to offer a working definition of music: Music is sound organized into audible patterns, giving rise to directly perceivable sonic entities. When we hear music, we directly perceive audible patterns. If a group of sounds is made up of mathematically devised patterns that we cannot audibly perceive, as with the submarine ping, then it’s not music. Music is comprised of patterns that we can audibly recognize.
This puts us in a better position to understand how music conveys meaning. Why is it that we have this incredibly complex auditory processor on top of our shoulders? Well, like every organ and biological mechanism that we have, its purpose is to keep us alive. When we hear a tiger crouching in the grass behind us, or a boulder rolling down the canyon in front of us, we can respond appropriately and remain alive. We can detect action in all directions.
Detecting action in our environment is an incredibly important biological function. And music leverages the same biological structures that enable us to detect action in the environment around us. This is key to understanding how music conveys meaning.
According to Professor David Berry of Converse University, music conveys action itself. This is interesting because we know, metaphysically, that there can be no action without an actor. Yet, if Berry is right, then with music, what we hear, in effect, is action apart from anyone or anything taking the action (though, as we’ll see, our brains quickly fill the gaps). We hear a stylized representation of action itself.11
If this is true, it would help explain the universal link between music and dance. We hear some sonic representation of action, and we want to complement or act it out. It would also explain why, when we let ourselves be carried along with music—close our eyes and just let it take us away—we experience something like Disney’s Fantasia: Our minds suggest entities taking the actions we hear—maybe not even full-fledged entities, perhaps just little specks of light flying here and there.
We also regularly do something like this in nonmusical contexts. Suppose you’re sitting at a desk in an apartment building and you hear a door slam. You hear steps walking down the hall, you can tell that the person is wearing high heels, and you hear a relatively high-pitched voice. Already, although you haven’t seen the entity taking the actions, the sonic representation of those actions tells you a great deal about the entity acting. From the slamming door, for instance, you know something about the psychological state of the person taking the actions, that person’s emotions and mood. You probably have an idea of what material the door is made of. The high heels indicate that the “actor” is probably female, and the pitch range of her voice confirms this. We perceive all these audible indicators of action, and from them, we’re able to discern many things about entities acting in our environment.
From here, it’s not difficult to grasp how composers could leverage this system to create stylized representations of action. A composer who wanted to convey the scene we just discussed could use percussion, maybe a kick drum and snare, to represent the slamming door and the high heels walking toward us. He could approximate the woman’s voice with a wail on the violin or maybe a clarinet.
But, of course, musicians and composers are not confined to such literal representations of physical actions. Over the centuries, they’ve devised musical mechanisms for conveying action in more and more stylized ways, for instance, condensing a twenty-minute summer storm to a few minutes, as in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. And they’ve figured out how to convey emotions and moods, which are forms of psychological action. An emotion is a lightning-fast evaluation of an experience, and moods are accumulated evaluations of a whole slew of experiences. Like other forms of action, these psychological actions can be conveyed via combinations of melody, harmony, and rhythm.
If, as Berry holds, music conveys action, this also explains how different people can hear the same sonic qualities but have entirely different evaluations. As we experience all the time, people can see the same actions or events and come to vastly different evaluations. If the team you’re rooting for in the Stanley Cup scores a goal, your evaluation and emotional response will be very different than if you happened to be rooting for the opposing team. Your evaluation of the exact same action depends on your values and your context.
The rough equivalent of your team affiliation in the realm of art is what Ayn Rand called “sense of life,” which she defined as “an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and existence.”12 We’ve all known people who are incredibly sour. It doesn’t matter how good things are in their lives. If anything goes wrong, they treat it as the norm. And we all know others who are absolutely bombproof. They might have some fluctuations in their mood, but they roll with the punches and see life as essentially positive. Any pain they feel, to paraphrase Rand, “only goes down so deep.” These two types have very different senses of life. If you think that life is a Shakespearean tragedy, that we’re all doomed to pursue dreams that we can never attain, then you will have a greater affinity to music that expresses that view. If you believe deep down that life is wonderful and that your dreams are yours to achieve, you’ll have greater affinity with music that portrays that view—and so on for every shade and variety in between.
Does this tell us, then, that some music is definitively good and some is definitively rotten? We can certainly assess two recordings and ask whether one requires more skill to compose and perform. But the standard for judging what to listen to is the same as it is for judging whether to take any other action: What to listen to depends on your life and your flourishing. The questions to ask are: Will listening to this help me flourish—or will it predispose me to thoughts and actions that are bad for my life?
I’m not suggesting that if “Baby Got Back” comes on the radio, and you start singing along, you are or will become a misogynist or a skank. I’m not suggesting that if you like the song “Last Resort” by Papa Roach, that means you will commit suicide. The first studies I know of that tried linking listening habits to behavior came out after Tipper Gore’s campaign in Congress to get parental advisory stickers on albums, and they painted a grim picture.13 But studies in the decades since largely have failed to replicate their results.14 At this point, many scientists think that these results have essentially been debunked.
In any case, statistics don’t override our free will. Regardless of any statistical link, we each have the choice and ability to determine how we will act in response to any given piece of music and the emotions it gives rise to. Along with that, we each have the responsibility to ask ourselves whether listening to this song, this album, this genre is good for our lives or bad. Each of us is alone in the driver’s seat.
But we also shouldn’t forget that what we listen to can have tremendous measurable psychological and physiological effects on us. According to Audio Technica, a company that makes high-end audio products, we spend twelve to thirteen years of our lives listening to music. If the psychologists’ observation holds that our environment can massively impact how we view the world and how we act, then we ought to think carefully about our musical friends—the artists we go to for inspiration or motivation. We want our musical friends to be saying, “yes, you can—and here’s how,” not, “no, you can’t—and here’s why.”
Consider that, from third to eighth grade, I listened to almost nothing but Metallica. I could listen to five Metallica albums back-to-back and not think twice about it. That was my thing. Every morning on the school bus, I would listen to aggressive guitars, pounding drums, and lyrics about nightmares and war. I would get to school, and what do you think would happen? If I did poorly on a test or did something embarrassing, do you think that I saw things on the bright side? What happens when you prime the pump with negatives is that you see more of them. We should consider, even beyond lyrics from which we might take inspiration or advice, the psychological and physiological effects of music. Music can alter our view of the world. Let’s do another quick experiment. Watch this video and think about what’s happening and how it makes you feel.
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OK, now let’s watch it again but with a different soundtrack. Keep in mind the same things: What do you think is happening, and how does it make you feel? Here’s the video.
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You get the idea, right? Music can alter our view of the world. This was what was happening to me on the school bus in the morning. In Rand’s words, music slants our consciousness.
But we have to keep in mind, before we go moralizing about music, that the opposite is also true. What we’re viewing, our context when we’re perceiving the world, can vastly alter the musical meaning of what we’re listening to. To demonstrate this, let’s hear the same music with a slightly different video. Again, pay attention to what’s happening and how it makes you feel.
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So, first, did the emotional meaning of that music change for you from the previous video to this one? And second, did it change for you between the beginning of this last video and the end?
The point is: The emotional meaning of music can be vastly different depending on what we associate it with. Take another example. The last time my wife and I came to Colorado, we landed at Eagle-Vale airport, and we were eager to start our adventure—except it seemed that everybody in the world was there trying to get a rental car, and we were behind them. So, we had to wait an hour, hour and a half, to get a rental car. When we finally got it, we were so excited to be mobile again and to start our adventure, and we sought out just the right song to kick things off. It was not a song that, in a normal context, either of us would even think to listen to—but it made perfect sense in the context that we repurposed it for. That song was “Freedom 90!” by George Michael. We were free again, happy to get back on the road, and the chorus of that song, in particular, took on new meaning for us within that context. Now, every time we get a rental car, wherever we travel, it’s the first song we play; we made a little tradition out of it.
The point is that music can change our view of the world—and our view of the world, including what we happen to be viewing when we hear a piece of music, can change our view of the music. It goes both ways.
So, we can debate who’s better: Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan; The Beatles or The Rolling Stones; Mozart or Beethoven; Eminem or Jay Z; Louis Armstrong or the Benny Goodman Trio. And it’s good to consider the reasons for our own and other people’s artistic preferences. Maybe we’ll find something that we didn’t know we were missing. But we should also be conscious of the fact that the purposes for which people listen to music, the things they associate with that music, the things that attract them to it, often are uniquely individual—and we ought to honor that uniqueness both for ourselves and for others.
Whatever you listen to, there are some great scientific finds that can help you get even more out of it. So, let’s talk about developing your musical mind and ways to increase your enjoyment from listening to music.
Why do so many of us experience “thrills and chills” when we hear Merry Clayton’s incredible background vocal on “Gimme Shelter”? David Huron has proposed that music leverages what he calls “the biology of pessimism.” It’s better, biologically speaking, to respond to one thousand false alarms than it is to miss one actual instance of danger. Music leverages this basic fact by violating our expectations. Evolutionarily speaking, having our expectations violated is always bad, because failing to predict something means we might get eaten or have a rock fall on our heads. When we hear something we don’t expect, especially with emotionally alarming qualities, such as the distress signaled by the high pitch and cracking of Clayton’s voice, our bodies ready us for potential danger. Sometimes, we brace for pain by releasing endogenous opiates. All of this happens within milliseconds, and it’s what Huron calls our “reaction response.” This unfolds in the faster and more primitive brain structures.15
But the same information is also processed by our slower, more evolutionarily recent brain structures, leading, milliseconds later, to what Huron calls our “appraisal response,” which, in the case of music, tells us that we’re not in any real danger. The net result is that we’re flooded with opiates without actually experiencing the pain they were intended to counter, and we enjoy it.16
So, the more music we can find that violates our expectations, the more often we can experience this effect. Further, when you increase the volume, you increase your physiological arousal level, which increases the likelihood of experiencing that chill sensation. Plus, the colder your listening environment, the more likely you are to feel that chill response. So, to increase the prevalence of the thrills and chills response, seek out more new music, listen louder, and make your listening environment a little chilly.
Musical pleasure also follows what’s called a Wundt curve, a bell-shaped curve, whereby pleasure increases with exposure, peaks, then tapers off.17 Scientists don’t know exactly why, but they know that this is statistically true, and most of us have experiences that support this. When we first hear new music, typically, it’s not our favorite. Then, after a few more listens, we may begin to really enjoy the piece. But, over time, we wear out that pleasurable effect, and it loses its impact.
Huron proposes that the reason for this is that, as we listen, we increase our predictive accuracy of how that song will unfold.18 So, for instance, when we hear Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” we can perfectly air-drum that epic drum fill. We’re just jamming along with the music; we’re at peak performance, or peak predictive accuracy, and it feels wonderful. But, of course, with repeated listens, the challenge dissipates, and with it, the thrill. So, what do we need to do to prolong musical enjoyment? Something some of us probably do without really thinking about it: Just as you begin to know a song intimately, set it aside for a bit. Getting some distance can help prolong the love affair with that piece of music.
Another thing to note is that, typically, that pleasure curve tends to be longer for music that’s more complex. One of my favorite pieces of music is called The Way Up by Pat Metheny. It’s a roughly sixty-minute jazz composition divided into four parts that flow seamlessly from one to the next. In terms of rhythms and orchestration, it’s one of the most complex and beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Despite the fact that I’ve listened to it dozens of times, I still get chills from it, and it still moves me immensely. Mind you, the entire curve tends to be longer for more complex music, so it may also take more repeated listens to reach peak pleasure. But the rewards stretch out for longer. So, seek more variety to find more peaks, and try to include works that really stretch you as a listener.
Another thing we can do is actively bolster our anticipation. The mere thought of a delicious cupcake we plan to eat can whet the appetite, and there’s a parallel when it comes to music. We can whet our musical appetites by thinking about a song or our favorite parts of it—“envisioning” it, hearing it in our “mind’s ear,” anticipating the pleasure—before we sit down to listen.
Massively helpful in this regard is building your musical memory. Musical memory is something not often talked about, but we’ve all experienced one of its unwelcome effects: “earworms.” An earworm is a chorus or a few lines of a song that get stuck in your head. That section just keeps repeating and repeating. This phenomenon depends on musical memory. But beyond such annoyances, musical memory is a skill that we can build, a sort of mental muscle. Regardless of where you start, it’s possible to strengthen that muscle—often to a surprising extent. And the greater your musical memory, the greater your ability to hear music in your mind’s ear, to anticipate what’s coming, to relive it, and to get more out of it.
In fact, musical memory and vivid musical imagery—including the ability to imagine music you’ve never heard before—are hallmarks of the musical mind.19 Think about Beethoven, for instance. He wrote some of his greatest music when he was deaf. How did he do that? He had built up an incredible musical memory and vivid musical imagery such that he could imagine music in his mind’s ear even though he could hear almost nothing.
We can all take advantage of greater musical memory to get more pleasure out of music. So how do we increase our musical memory?
Tip #1: Learn in chunks. Most of us listen to music track after track, which is fun and rewarding. But if we want to bolster our musical memories, we should occasionally take a different approach: Listen to thirty seconds or so of a song, pause, and try to hear that section back in your mind’s ear as vividly as you can. The reason this can be helpful is that musical memory relies on what’s called echoic memory, which is extremely short-term memory that is easily overwritten by the next thing that you hear, especially when your musical memory is fairly weak.20 So if you’re just starting out in your quest to build your musical memory, start with small chunks and work your way up.
Tip #2, which is kind of a variation of this, is what I call “sitting with a song.” Listen to one song, press pause, and let it reverberate in your mind’s ear. Try to hear it from beginning to end as vividly as you can. Imagine you were stranded on a desert island, and you could never listen to music again. How vividly could you hear your favorite music in your mind’s ear? Imagine being able to hear it in such lifelike detail that if someone rerecorded it at a slightly different tempo or pitch, you could immediately tell. If you sit with the song, you can start building that ability, and the payoffs can be profound.
These first two tips have to do with making our minds more impressionable. Another tactic is to make the impressions themselves more impressive. Tip #3 is: Get great sound. Invest in a good sound system. I could talk about this subject all day long, and I’m happy to make suggestions to those who reach out to me. Thankfully, today, it’s possible to get pretty spectacular sound on even a modest budget. I recently bought a turntable, some vinyl, and some decent bookshelf speakers all for less than $600. The switch to analog has been amazing. I’ve been hearing parts in songs that I never even knew were there, vocal harmonies, and drum fills panned across the whole stereo range. It’s incredible. And the more impressive are your musical impressions, the easier they are to remember.
Last, tip #4 is: Link music to specific experiences. My wife is my adventure partner, and every time we go on a trip, we try to pick some new music that will make a good soundtrack for the places we’re visiting and the things we’re doing. It doesn’t have to be literally new, as in just came out last week; it merely has to be new to us. What happens is that the music enhances the experience, and the experience enhances the music. When I think of places we’ve traveled, the music we listened to while there comes to mind; and when I hear that music, those places, and our experiences there, come to mind. The two are mnemonically linked, so to speak, in my memory. Linking music with specific experiences can be a great boost to one’s musical memory.
You can also vary this by picking up music from your surroundings wherever you travel. We did this recently. We had an amazing dinner in Italy, and part of the reason it was so amazing was because the chef put as much thought into the ingredients of the atmosphere—including the music—as he did the ingredients of his food. All night long, I was saying, “Hey Siri, what song is this?” I cataloged the entire playlist we heard that night, and now half a world away, we can relive it.
One more variation of this: If you go to a great concert, take down the setlist or, afterward, go to setlist.fm and find it. Then rebuild that playlist in your music library so you can relive that night. I like to take down setlists on my phone because then I can take notes about stories and jokes the artist told between songs, about the instrumentation, and anything else exciting or meaningful that happened.
So, there you have some tips for building your musical memory and for generally getting more value out of music.
Music is an incredibly potent life enhancer. Explore the musical landscape, find new peaks, live your best life—and do it to a great soundtrack. And remember, music is the friend you turn to when things get tough, the friend you call on to celebrate your wins. So, choose friends that will help cushion your fall, not push you down—friends that will improve your life and help you live it to the fullest.