How musicians deceive our expectations so that a melody evokes vivid emotions

Some songs do not bother us even after dozens of auditions. Daniel Levitin, an American neuroscientist and former music producer, argues that this kind of love causes a departure from the usual pattern. It captivates our brain, making the composition interesting and catchy.

It is the connection between the brain and music that is the focus of the scientist's new book, On Music: The Science of Human Obsession with Sound. It was published in Russian by the publishing house Alpina Non-Fiction. With his permission, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from the fourth chapter.

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When I come to a wedding, I don't cry because I see the bride and groom surrounded by family and friends and imagine how long the newlyweds have to go. Tears come to my eyes only when the music starts playing. And in the movies, when the characters are reunited after a difficult test, the music touches me again.

It is an organized set of sounds, but organization alone is not enough, there must also be an element of surprise, otherwise the music will turn out emotionally flat, as if written

robot. Its value to us is based on our ability to understand its structure - in spoken or sign languages, a similar structure is grammar - and to predict what will happen next.

Knowing what we want from the music, composers fill it with emotions, and then consciously either satisfy these expectations or not. The awe, goose bumps and tears that music evokes in us are the result of skillful manipulation performed by the composer and performers.

Perhaps the most common illusion, a kind of salon trick, in Western classical music is false cadence. A cadence is a chord progression that evokes a distinct expectation and then closes, usually with a resolution that pleases the listener. In a false cadence, the composer repeats the same chord progression over and over again until he finally convinces us that in the end we will get what we expect, and then at the last moment, it turns on an unexpected chord - within the given key, but with a clear feeling that it is still not over, that is, a chord with incomplete resolution.

Haydn uses false cadence so often that he seems obsessed. Perry Cook likened false cadence to a circus trick: illusionists first create expectations and then deceive them, and you don't know how or when this will happen. Composers do the same.

The Beatles' song For No One ends on an unstable dominant chord (fifth steps in the given key of B major), and we are waiting for permission, which we will never see, at least in this song. And the following composition in the album Revolver ("Revolver") begins a whole tone below the chord that we expected to hear (in A major) that gives incomplete resolution (in B major), causing a kind of middle feeling between surprise and liberation.

Creating expectations and then manipulating them is the very essence of music, and there are countless ways to do it. Steely Dan, for example, plays essentially the blues (the compositions have a blues structure and chord progression), adding unusual harmonies to the chords that make them sound completely non-bluesy, like the song Chain Lightning. lightning"). Miles Davis and John Coltrane have made their careers on regharmonized blues sequences, giving them a new sound - partly familiar to us, partly exotic.

The solo album Kamakiriad (Kamakiriad) by Donald Feigen of Steely Dan has one song with blues or funky rhythms, in which we expect a standard blues chord progression, but for the first minute and a half, the song sounds on only one chord and does not move anywhere from this harmonic position. Aretha Franklin's song Chain of Fools has just one chord.

In Yesterday, the main melodic phrase is seven measures long. The Beatles surprise us by violating one of the main expectations of popular music - that the phrase will last four or eight bars (in almost all songs in pop and rock music, musical ideas are divided into phrases just like this length).

On I Want You / She’s So Heavy, The Beatles shatter expectations with a hypnotic, repetitive ending that seems endless. Based on our experience of listening to rock music, we expect the song to finish smoothly, with a classic fade-out effect. And the musicians take it and abruptly cut it off - not even in the middle of the phrase, but in the middle of the note!

Carpenters break expectations with a tone that is not typical of the genre. This is probably the last band that we expect from an overloaded electric guitar, however it is used in the song Please Mr. Postman ("Please, Mr. Postman") and some others.

The Rolling Stones were one of the toughest rock bands in the world at the time - just a few years before. did the opposite trick, using violins, for example, they can be heard in the song As Tears Go By. tears"). When Van Halen was the newest and coolest band in the world, they surprised fans by performing a heavy metal version of an old and not very popular song You Really Got Me by The Kinks.

Musicians often break expectations in terms of rhythm as well. The standard trick in electric blues is that the music picks up speed, picks up steam, and then the whole group falls silent and only the vocalist or lead guitaristsuch as the songs Pride and Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughn, Hound Dog by Elvis Presley or One Way Out by The Allman Brothers Band.

The classic ending of an electric blues song is another such example. For two or three minutes she charges with a steady rhythm, and then - bam! From the chords, it seems that the inevitable resolution is about to come, but, instead of rushing towards it at full speed, the musicians suddenly start playing twice as slow.

Creedence Clearwater Revival doubles down on our expectations: in Lookin 'Out My Back Door, the musicians slow down first - and By the time the song was released, such an “unexpected” ending had already become quite familiar - after which they break expectations again, returning to the original tempo and completing the composition in it.

The Police have built a career out of breaking expectations in terms of rhythm. The standard rhythmic pattern in rock music is based on strong first and third beats (they are denoted by the kick of a bass drum) and a backbeat with snare drum beats on the second and fourth beats. Reggae (the most prominent representative of the genre is Bob Marley) feels twice as slow as rock because the kick drum and snare drum sound half as often for the same phrase length.

The main rhythm of reggae is characterized by syncopated guitar, that is, it sounds in the intervals between the beats, which we count: one - and - two - and - three - and - four - and. Since the drums beat out the rhythm not on every beat, but after one beat, the music acquires a certain laziness, and syncope gives it a sense of movement, directs it forward. Police have combined reggae with rock and created a completely new sound that simultaneously satisfies some expectations of rhythm and destroys others.

Sting often played innovative bass lines, avoiding the clichés of rock music, in which the bassist plays the downbeat or in sync with the bass kick. As Randy Jackson, an American Idol judge and one of the best session bassists, told me back in the 1980s, when they worked in the same recording studio, Sting's bass lines were not like anyone else's and would not fit into any other song. In the composition Spirits in the Material World ("Spirits in the material world") from the album Ghost in the Machine ("The Ghost in the Machine") these tricks with rhythm reach such an extreme that it is already difficult to say where the strong share.

Modern composers like Arnold Schoenberg have completely moved away from the idea of ​​expectations. The scales they used deprive us of our understanding of resolution and tonic, creating the illusion that music cannot "return home" at all and remains drifting in space - this is a kind of metaphor existentialism XX century, or composers wanted to create contrary to the canons.

This kind of scale is still used in movies, when we are shown someone's dream, to create images of an unearthly world, as well as in scenes under water or in outer space to convey sensation weightlessness.

Such characteristics of music are not directly represented in the brain, at least in the initial stages of processing. Brain constructs his version of reality, based only partly on what it actually is, and partly on how he interprets the sounds we hear, depending on their role in the musical system.

Similarly, we interpret the speech of others. In the word "cat", as well as in its letters separately, there is nothing inherent in the cat itself. We have learned that this set of sounds means a pet. In the same way, we have learned certain combinations of notes and expect them to be combined that way in the future. When we think that sounds of a certain pitch and timbre should connect or follow each other, we rely on a statistical analysis of what we have heard before.

We will have to abandon the seductive idea that the brain contains an accurate and strictly isomorphic view of the world. To some extent, it contains both information distorted as a result of perception and illusion, and in addition, it itself creates connections between disparate elements.

The brain builds its own reality for us, rich, complex and beautiful.

The main evidence of this point of view is the simple fact that light waves in the world differ. only one characteristic - wavelength, and our brain at the same time considers color as two-dimensional concept. The same with the pitch: from a one-dimensional continuum of molecules vibrating at different speeds, the brain builds a rich multidimensional space of sounds of different heights with three, four or even five dimensions (according to some models).

If our brain completes so many dimensions to what actually exists in the world, this may explain our deep reaction to correctly constructed and skillfully combined sounds.

When cognitive scientists talk about expectations and their violation, they are referring to an event that is contrary to what it would be reasonable to predict. Obviously, we know a lot about different standard situations. In life, every now and then we find ourselves in circumstances that differ only in details, and often these details are insignificant.

One example is education reading. Our brain systems for feature extraction have learned to recognize the invariable qualities of letters. alphabet, and if we do not look closely at the text, we will not notice such details as, for example, font. Yes, it is not very pleasant to read sentences that use multiple fonts, and besides, if each word is typed in our own way, we, of course, will notice it - but the point is that our brain is busy recognizing signs like the letter "a", and not fonts.

The important thing in the brain's processing of standard situations is that it extracts from them the elements that are common to many cases, and adds them into a single structure. This structure is called a schema. The diagram of the letter "a" includes a description of its shape and, probably, a set of memories of other similar letters that we saw and which differed in writing.

Diagrams provide us with the information we need for many particular cases of everyday interaction with the world. For example, we have already celebrated someone's birthdays many times, and we have a general idea of ​​what these holidays have in common, that is, the scheme. Of course, the birthday scheme will be different in different cultures (like music) and among people of different ages.

The schema creates clear expectations for us, and also gives us an understanding of which of these expectations are flexible and which are not. We can make a list of what we expect from birthday. We will not be surprised if not all of them are implemented, but the fewer items are completed, the less typical the holiday seems. In theory, there should be:

• a person who celebrates a birthday;
• other people who came to the holiday;
• cake with candles;
• present;
• holiday dishes;
• party hats, pipes and other festive attributes.

If this is a celebration for an eight-year-old, we can also expect to see children's entertainment and animation there, but not single malt whiskey. All of the above, to one degree or another, reflects our birthday celebration scheme.

We also have musical schemes, and they begin to form in the womb, and then they are finalized, corrected and otherwise supplemented every time we listen to music. Our schema for Western music involves tacit knowledge of the scales that are used there.

This is why Indian or Pakistani music, for example, sounds strange to us when we first hear it. It does not seem strange to Indians and Pakistanis, and still does not seem strange to babies (at least, it sounds no more strange to them than any other).

This may seem obvious, but music seems unusual to us only because it does not correspond to what we have learned to perceive as music.

By the age of five, children are taught to recognize chord sequences in their musical culture - they form patterns. We also have schematics for different musical genres and styles. Style is just a synonym for repeatability. Our circuit for a Lawrence Welk concert has accordions but not overloaded electric guitars, but the circuit for a Metallica concert is the other way around.

Dixieland's circuitry for a street festival includes stomping, incendiary beats, and unless the musicians are joking (and playing at funerals) we don't expect to hear dark music in this context. Schemes make our memory more efficient. As listeners, we recognize what we have already heard and can determine exactly where - in the same piece or in another.

Listening to music, according to theorist Eugene Narmour, requires the ability to remember only that the notes sounded and knowledge of other pieces of music that are close in style to what we are now we hear. These recent memories will not necessarily be as vivid and detailed as the presentation of the just played notes, but they are necessary in order to place the work that we hear now in some context.

Among the main schemes that we build, there is a dictionary of genres and styles, as well as eras (for example, music of the 1970s sounds different than music of the 1930s), rhythms, chord sequences, an idea of ​​the structure of phrases (how many measures are contained in one phrase), the duration of songs and which notes are usually followed by which follow.

For a standard popular song, one phrase is four or eight measures long, and this is also an element of the scheme that we have taken from popular songs of the late 20th century. We are thousands of times heard thousands of songs and, even without realizing it, included this structure of phrases in the list of "rules" concerning the music we know.

When a seven-bar phrase sounds in Yesterday, it surprises us. Despite the fact that we have heard Yesterday a thousand or even ten thousand times, we are still interested in it, because still destroys our schema, our expectations that are ingrained in us much more firmly than the memory of this particular compositions.

The songs that we hear over and over again over the years continue to play with our expectations and always surprise us a little.

Steely Dan, The Beatles, Rachmaninov and Miles Davis - this is just a small list of musicians who, as they say, you never get tired of, and the reason is largely in what I said above.

Melody is one of the primary ways composers manage our expectations. Music theorists have established a principle that represents the filling of the gap. If the melody makes a big jump up or down, then the next note should change direction. A typical melody has many ups and downs, and steps along adjacent notes in a scale. If a melody makes a big leap, theorists say that it tends to return to where it jumped up or down.

In other words, our brain expects that it was only temporary and that the next notes will bring us closer to the original point, or harmonic "home".

In the song Over the Rainbow, the melody begins with one of the biggest leaps we've ever heard in life - an entire octave. This is a strong violation of the scheme, and therefore the composer rewards and calms us, turning to "home", but not returning to it: the melody really decreases, but only by one scale step, and thus creates voltage. The third note of this melody fills in the gap.

Sting does the same in the song Roxanne: he jumps about half an octave (by a clean fourth) and chants the first syllable of Roxanne's name, and then the melody drops again and fills interval.

The same happens in the adagio cantabile from the Pathetique Sonata Beethoven. The main theme rises and shifts from C (in the key of A flat, this is the third degree) to A flat, which is an octave higher than the tonic, or “home,” and then rises to B flat. Now that we have risen from "home" an octave and a whole tone, we have one way - back "home". Beethoven really leaps a fifth down and lands on the note in E flat, a fifth above the tonic.

In order to delay the resolution - and Beethoven always skillfully created tension - instead of making a downward movement towards the tonic, he again leaves it. Having conceived a leap from high B-flat to E-flat, Beethoven contrasted two schemes: a scheme for resolving into the tonic and a scheme for filling the gap. Moving away from the tonic, it fills in the gap created by jumping down and falls approximately in the middle of it. When Beethoven finally brings us "home" after two bars, the resolution seems even sweeter and more pleasant to us.

Now consider how Beethoven plays with the expectations of the melody in the main theme of the last movement of the Ninth Symphony (the ode "To Joy"). Here are her notes:

(If you find it difficult to follow the notes, try singing the words: "Joy, unearthly flame, heavenly spirit that has flown to us ...")

The main melody is just the notes of the scale! And this is the most famous, overheard thousands of times and the most used sequence of notes that can be found in Western music! But Beethoven manages to make it interesting because he violates our expectations.

The melody begins with an unusual note and ends with an unusual note. The composer begins with the third degree of the scale (as was the case in the Pathetique Sonata), and not with the tonic, and then gradually raises the melody, moving up and down. When he finally comes to the tonic - the most stable note, he does not linger in it, but again raises the melody to that the note we started with and then goes down again, and we expect the melody to enter the tonic again, but this is not going on. He stops at D, the second stop of the scale.

The piece should resolve itself in the tonic, but Beethoven keeps us where we least expect to be. Then he repeats the whole motive again and only the second time justifies our expectations. But now they are even more interesting because of the ambiguity: we are like Lucy, who is waiting for Charlie Brown Characters in the Peanuts comic series created by Charles Schultz. , we wonder if he will take away the permission ball from us at the last moment.

“On Music” is a great opportunity to learn more not only about the music itself, but also about our brain. The book will help us understand why we like certain melodies, how composers create masterpieces and what is the role of evolution in all this.

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