Saliers & Patterson: Thinking Musical Thoughts

Don Saliers and Richard Patterson, Thinking Musical Thoughts

Dr. Don Saliers (William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Theology and Worship, Candler School of Theology) and Dr. Richard Patterson (Philosophy) held the second CMBC Faculty Lunch Discussion of the 2014 Fall Semester, titled “Thinking Musical Thoughts.” In addressing this theme, Saliers and Patterson focused on the question of how musicians embody expressive elements of musical pieces when they perform. As they move through a piece, musicians modulate fine and gross motor movements, attending to layers of technical details as they do so. Aside from the technical component, musicians are concerned with conveying the meaning or mood of a musical composition, and this expressive quality must imbue the playing itself. How, then, do musicians transmute the expressive mood of a piece of music into the technical execution of the notes? Moreover, how do listeners decode the emotions musicians are transmitting through their playing? Saliers’ and Patterson’s discussion of the types of strategies musicians use to communicate certain moods, along with recent research findings on the universal structure underlying music, motion, and emotion, offer some insight into these questions.

As musicians themselves, Saliers and Patterson provided examples of the cognitive strategies they and other musicians use to instill their performances with an intended expressive quality. One technique musicians use is to describe verbally what they want to convey in the musical piece, whether it is an emotion, mood, attitude, idea, or ideal. For example, musicians may articulate emotional states they want to evoke like “excitement” or “mournful sadness.” Musicians keep these verbal descriptions in mind while they monitor their playing, making subtle adjustments to stay faithful to the piece’s intended mood.

A complementary strategy is to use visual imagery that captures the mood of a musical piece. Musicians will conjure visual imagery like the opening of a flower or a foggy night in a graveyard to infuse their playing with a particular emotion. Similarly, musicians use bodily metaphors to help them transmute the mood of the music into their playing. Musicians evoke bodily metaphors like heaviness/lightness, as well as varieties of dancing—elegant, courtly, comical and drunken, etc.—to play in a style consonant with these metaphors.

How exactly do these cognitive strategies allow musicians to imbue music with specific feelings? How does the visual imagery of a flower opening, for example, transmute into the tactility with which a pianist or cellist manipulates her fingers when playing a piece of music? It may have something to do with synesthesia—a neurological phenomenon in which features of distinct bodily sensations or meaningful percepts are experienced in a fashion that seems to blend the sensory modalities. For people who experience one of the most common forms of synesthesia—grapheme-color synesthesia—letters and numbers are perceived as being tinged with a particular color. It has been argued that we all experience at least a mild version of synesthesia, in that we perceive non-arbitrary mappings between different sensory percepts, in some instances. For example, many people experience non-arbitrary mappings between certain speech sounds and visual shapes. Research has found that a majority of people select an irregular star-shaped object as matching the sound “Kiki”, and a rounded blob shape as matching the sound “Bouba” (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). It has been suggested that this phenomenon is an example of sound-vision synesthesia, and that people choose the “bouba” sound for the rounded object because the enunciation of the word requires the mouth to make a more rounded shape, whereas the enunciation of “kiki” requires the mouth to make more angular shapes.

Recent research suggests that there may also be non-arbitrary mappings between dimensions of music, movement, and emotions. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, participants were asked to create either a melody or a bouncing-ball animation that expressed a specific emotion (Sievers, Polansky, Casey, & Wheatley, 2013). The participants could adjust five sliding bars to modulate the beats per minute (of the ball or the music), the predictability of the beats, smoothness (i.e. the ball could be manipulated to be smooth or spiky, and the music could be made more or less dissonant), the step size (height of the bounce/distance between notes), and the pitch of the note/angle at which the ball leans. For each emotion the participants were asked to express (angry, happy, peaceful, sad or scared), the groups chose very similar positions for the dimensions adjusted by the sliding bars, no matter if they were assigned to the melody group or the animation group. This result replicated in a group of participants from a Kreung community in Cambodia, suggesting that music and movement may be experienced as structurally similar and reflect specific emotional states across cultures. It is unclear how these non-arbitrary mappings arose, but it may be the case that humans learned to decode emotion from the movement of other people or animals; in turn, music may exploit neural systems dedicated to perceiving subtle changes in rhythm and speed to elicit emotions.

The overlapping representations of emotion, movement, and music may help explain how musicians encode expressive qualities in their works. When musicians evoke visual or bodily metaphors, these semantic representations may directly map onto specific representations in the motor cortex, allowing musicians to modify their muscle movements in alignment with the percepts activated by the metaphors. Alternatively, the pathway may be less direct, with a mental representation of a visual image or bodily metaphor evoking a distinct emotional state, which in turn maps onto a particular pattern of activation in the motor cortex. Future research promises to provide a more fine-grained account of how expressive qualities are both successfully encoded by musicians and decoded by listeners.

Throughout their discussion, Saliers and Patterson also touched on questions concerning the degree to which conscious versus unconscious processes influence musical performance. Conjuring a visual metaphor is definitively conscious in nature, but this semantic representation may influence breathing or motor movements controlled by unconscious processes, and it is unclear how these conscious and unconscious processes interact with one another. A process that contributes to musical performance may also switch from being conscious to unconscious, depending on various factors, including the length of time a musician has practiced a piece. While a musician is still learning a piece, she is consciously attending to certain muscle movements, but this conscious attention may significantly subside as she becomes more familiar with the piece such that previously conscious processes become unconscious. However, this is a fluid and dynamic process, as musicians anecdotally report bringing more automatic processes under conscious control again—for example, when they make a mistake in a performance and must correct on the fly.

Musical ‘flow states’ are a particularly rich source for questions about the relative contribution of conscious and unconscious processes, as phenomenological descriptions and research findings suggest that consciousness is altered during this state. Dr. Saliers gave a personal account akin to a flow state in which, as he commented, “the music began to play me.” Dr. Salier’s personal experience leads him to believe the state is associated with “a cessation of conscious attention” and intensification of perception. In the psychology literature on this topic, flow states are marked by effortless and complete absorption in an activity, merging of action and awareness, and a loss of reflective self-consciousness. Research on flow states among pianists found that entrance into a flow state was accompanied by a decrease in heart rate and blood pressure and a relaxation of facial muscles, perhaps explaining the effortless quality described by those experiencing a flow state (de Manzano, Theorell, Harmat, & Ullén, 2010). Researchers propose that flow states may be associated with a transient reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex (Dietrich, 2004). Because this region is strongly involved in self-awareness and higher-level cognitive processes, reduced activity in this region during flow states accords with the phenomenological experience of diminished self-awareness and conscious attention. Because flow states are experienced as pleasant and conducive to heightened creativity, it will be interesting to see whether future research highlights strategies for more easily entering a flow state.

de Manzano, Ö., Theorell, T., Harmat, L., & Ullén, F. (2010). The psychophysiology of flow during piano playing. Emotion, 10(3), 301.

Dietrich, A. (2004). Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow. Consciousness and Cognition, 13(4), 746-761.

Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synesthesia--a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of consciousness studies, 8(12), 3-34.

Sievers, B., Polansky, L., Casey, M., & Wheatley, T. (2013). Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(1), 70-75.

Duke and Reynolds, From Rambo to Rushdie via Linklater and Lavant: Our Peanut Butter Cup Runneth Over

Marshall Duke and Daniel Reynolds, From Rambo to Rushdie via Linklater and Lavant: Our Peanut Butter Cup Runneth Over

In the first CMBC lunch talk of the 2014 academic school year, Dr. Marshall Duke (Psychology, Emory University) and Dr. Daniel Reynolds (Film and Media Studies, Emory University) discussed their recent collaboration, the joint teaching of last spring’s interdisciplinary class, “Film and the Mind.”

Bringing together psychology and film studies in an interdisciplinary approach can lead us to a richer understanding of what films—and our responses to them—disclose about the human mind. Dr. Duke began the discussion with an impassioned endorsement of consilience—a term popularized by E.O. Wilson’s 1998 book of the same name. Consilience refers to “a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation” (Wilson, p. 7). For example, researchers from a range of scientific disciplines—genetics, paleontology, biology—have arrived at similar conclusions about evolution using independent lines of research, providing converging support for evolutionary theory.

Drs. Duke and Reynolds created the interdisciplinary course, “Film and the Mind,” in the tradition of consilience, creating a space for inquiry at the nexus of film studies and psychology. As a metaphor for the goal of consilience, the two professors brought in a jar of peanut butter, chocolate bars, and Reese’s p-b cups, encouraging the students to begin thinking from a “Reese’s p-b cup place”—in other words, from the juncture where these two disciplines overlap. There is a historical precedent for this: two early prominent film theorists—Hugo Munsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim—studied human behavior from an interdisciplinary perspective by drawing from both psychology and film studies. Both Munsterberg and Arnheim were psychologists by trade who became interested in the novel ways film contributes to the study of human behavior. As Dr. Duke explained, Munsterberg is a well-known figure in the film studies discipline, but has been all but forgotten within the field of psychology. This underscores how far apart these two disciplines have drifted—and Drs. Duke and Reynolds believe that it is time to bring them back together.

An interdisciplinary approach that draws from psychology and films studies can be used in the viewing and analysis of films to reach a deeper understanding of strengths and weaknesses in psychological theories and concepts. For example, psychoanalysis plays a large role in the narrative of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and analyzing the film enables a greater understanding of the ways psychoanalysis has proven itself simultaneously to be both useful and limited in comprehending the inner workings of the human mind.  The protagonist of “Vertigo” is crippled by a fear of heights and attempts to overcome this fear in order to save a woman from the top of a tower. He misinterprets the actions and events around him and is unable to understand whom the woman in the tower really is, mirroring the types of misinterpretation and identity confusion that frequently arise in psychoanalysis. With this film, Hitchcock succeeds in making these core psychoanalytic constructs accessible to the viewer and illustrating their utility for understanding how the human mind works. “Vertigo” has a very tight narrative with the characters’ behavior all neatly accounted for by conscious or unconscious intentions, reflecting the psychoanalytic position that all behavior has an identifiable cause. It is Dr. Duke’s belief that this constitutes a simplistic account of human behavior.

In contrast to “Vertigo,” in which psychoanalytic theory was used to directly construct the film’s narrative, other films loosely embody speculations about psychological processes and may allow greater traction on questions about the human mind by virtue of being less rigidly constructed. “The Tree of Life” exemplifies this type of film and was viewed in the class because of its portrayal of features of human consciousness. The film follows the story of a family living in Texas in the 1950s and is framed by meditations on the experience of being alive, family relationships, and humanity’s place in space and time within the expansiveness of our cosmos. The film has a daring style, performing experiments in perception and incorporating stylistic elements that are novel and unique. For example, the film features an unexpected interlude chronicling the creation of the universe and development of biological life. Films like “The Tree of Life” make it clear that we are not simply learning about the mind by passively digesting the view of human experience that the film projects. Rather, the viewer has a range of reactions to a film, and it is in the interplay between what a film is communicating and how the viewer responds to a film where we gain insights about our own mind and the minds of others.

Because of the complexity associated with unraveling these interactions, studying film and the mind from an interdisciplinary perspective is a particularly useful approach to thinking about such topics as how absorbing watching films is. When the lights are dimmed and a film is projected on a large screen, most viewers have the experience of becoming absorbed in the film to the point that they forget there are other people around them. The literary critic Zunshine argues that in this state we allow ourselves to fully experience the moment because we are minimally self-conscious and maximally absorbed in the film. This quality allows us to strongly empathize with a film’s characters, crying when they are in despair and applauding when they are joyous or victorious. There are factors about the film-watching experience and the film itself that can modulate the degree to which we become absorbed in a film, or empathize with its characters. For example, if the lights aren’t dimmed or the film is being viewed on a small portable device, the degree to which the viewer becomes absorbed is likely diminished. Furthermore, factors like the tone of the film or how sympathetic the characters are can enhance or reduce the degree to which the viewer empathizes with the films’ characters.

Although we are capable of deeply empathizing with others, we are also embodied physical beings and retain some level of distance from others, enabling us to judge them. Dr. Reynolds contends that we likely exist at the confluence of these two states, shifting dynamically between them as circumstances change. “The Act of Killing”—another film viewed in Drs. Reynolds’ and Duke’s class—reveals the dynamic shift between states of greater and lesser empathy and judgment as we relate to the characters on screen. “The Act of Killing” is a documentary that portrays re-enactments of genocide and includes one particularly profound moment in which one of the perpetrators of the genocide realizes the horror of his acts and begins crying. The perpetrator is a very unsympathetic character that most viewers would judge as a monster, but in this singular moment of the film, the viewer is forced to reconcile this judgment with a feeling of sudden empathy for the man. By provoking this pronounced shift from a judging stance to one of empathy, the film compels the viewer to experience a moment of intense self-awareness of the dynamic nature in which we relate to others.

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience research provides insight into how the experience of empathy and judgment may be instantiated at a neural level. Mirror neurons are so-named because they fire both when an individual initiates an action and when an individual observes another initiating the same action. In effect, activity in mirror neurons does not meaningfully discriminate between the action of self and the action of others, leading researchers to hypothesize that these neurons play a role in empathy. The mirror neuron system may function in parallel with neural systems that support our sense of self. For example, research suggests that the medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and temporoparietal junction may promote self-reflection and a sense of physical embodiment. The brain may be capable of toggling between these neural systems, allowing fluid transitions between judgmental and empathetic states.

An interdisciplinary approach is, however, not without its challenges. At the culmination of the talk, Dr. Reynolds discussed one of the challenges of attempting an interdisciplinary inquiry—namely, the differences in what defines ‘rigor’ between different disciplines. Different disciplines have different standards and interdisciplinary inquiries inevitably require the examination of those differences. But Dr. Reynolds maintains that as you start thinking from a place of consilience between disciplines, you can converge on a ‘hybrid rigor’ by bringing rigor from both disciplines to bear on new inquiries. He champions a consilience approach because it can be a transformative experience. Drs. Duke and Reynolds ultimately felt the “Film and the Mind” class was a success and the students were able to transcend their traditional disciplinary boundaries, developing a more informed and broader perspective in the process. Dr. Duke’s concluding thoughts returned to E.O. Wilson’s book on consilience, arguing Wilson’s point that as we continue to explore interdisciplinary approaches, we will ultimately find that there is a unified body of knowledge in the world.

References

Wilson, E. O. (1999). Consilience: The unity of knowledge (Vol. 31). Random House LLC.

Freeman and Wallen, Gender Matters in the Academy?

Carla Freeman and Kim Wallen, Gender Matters in the Academy?

The first CMBC lunch talk of the spring semester brought together Dr. Carla Freeman (Anthropology; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University) and Dr. Kim Wallen (Psychology, Emory University) to discuss the issue of gender and the academy. The (intentionally) ambiguously titled talk gave rise to a fruitful conversation on a variety of topics.

To highlight the differential representation between men and women in the academy, Dr. Freeman shared data from a recent two-volume diversity report conducted by Emory from 1998-2008. The report shows that while the number of women on the faculty at Emory has increased, a greater concentration of women is found in lower rank positions, such as non-tenure track, lecturer, part-time, etc. By contrast, there are fewer women in tenure-track, tenured, and full professorship positions. Additionally, the study found that women’s representation clusters around certain fields, such as dance and women’s studies, while men appear in greater numbers in physics, and computer and political science. The latter fields are, of course, much better remunerated and hold a different status.

Meanwhile, the general trend at Emory, as at other universities—both nationally and internationally—indicates that education is becoming feminized. For example, 57 percent of incoming undergraduate freshman at Emory are female. In light of this development, Freeman chose to focus her remarks on the interesting implications surrounding the feminization of education and the academy. For Freeman, the issue concerns not just the statistical breakdown among men and women and the fields into which they fall, but more importantly how certain cultural attributes of femininity get mapped onto higher education itself. That is, how do genres of academic work and knowledge production become imbued with gender and what are the implications of this process? Moreover, how does value get ascribed to certain kinds of gendered attributes?

Freeman noted that the feminization of certain fields within academia parallels a similar development in the global economy, where many industries have moved from manual production to knowledge production. As an example of this shift, Freeman cited the progression of clerical work and teaching, which began in the 19th century as largely masculine vocations. Over time, however, these professions became more populated by women and, as a result, became lower paid and lower status. Freeman therefore encouraged us to think about the academy as a workplace in which the labor we perform is increasingly feminized. This involves not only parsing out the difficulties facing women vis-à-vis men, but also questioning what it means to understand the work itself as “feminine.” According to Freeman, “feminized labor” includes a growing emphasis on  “emotional labor,” work that hinges upon qualities thought to be naturally associated with femininity, such as nurture, care, and consideration. If emotional labor, as opposed to material labor, is traditionally associated with “feminine” skills, how does this affect our perception of teaching and scholarship as areas that include elements of emotional labor? Freeman noted that at just the moment in which service industries are recognizing the critical importance and value of emotional labor, some analysts are arguing that this form of work is becoming de-gendered. Specifically, they seek to reconceptualize emotional labor as being gender-neutral. For her part, Freeman found this move ironic and potentially troubling. She suggested the alternative possibility of simultaneously acknowledging the importance of emotional labor within academic work, especially that of a residential academic campus, and retaining an understanding of the feminine underpinnings of these skills. This position has been adopted, to some extent, by businesses, which increasingly value emotional skills for the rewards they garner in the marketplace. In thinking about gender in the academy, Freeman returned to the question: what are the implications of disavowing the importance of gender as we move to an increasingly immaterial enactment of labor, especially in the academy?

Dr. Wallen opened his remarks with the provocative question: why does the academic pipeline leak women? As a psychologist and educator, he has witnessed a huge rise in female graduate students over the course of his career. Despite the progress made on this front, the increase has not translated into a commensurate number of academic careers, especially in tenure-track positions. For example, of the 11 female Ph.D. recipients Wallen has supervised, most were hired as post-docs, but only 33 percent ended up in academic positions. Why does this happen?

In addressing the question, Wallen suggested that women experience a greater gender load than do men. Gender load, comprised of four factors, affects the likelihood of women leaving academia. First is the issue of gender discrimination, which, while not absent from today’s academic climate, Wallen considered the least substantial factor. The second factor is gender awareness. That is, the cost of being aware of the degree to which one’s gender has consequences. Wallen suggested that whereas men proceed through life without thinking about their gender—or why it may be responsible for this or that outcome—this is a more significant factor for women. Third, the cost of reproduction disproportionately affects women more than men, and academia in general is inflexible when it comes to taking time off to raise children. The fourth factor concerns the range of occupations that each gender regards as viable. Wallen suggested that women often choose not to continue pursuing academic careers, whereas men feel more socially constrained in terms of options and expectations. He viewed this as the most important factor, arguing that the broader range of occupational choices contributes significantly to women leaving the academy. Therefore, the pipeline may be “leaking women” simply because academia is not all that appealing, and while men put up with it, women find it easier to imagine alternative life paths. If so, perhaps the task for the academy is to change how attractive it is to everybody, but especially to women.

A number of issues were raised in the discussion following the talks. Some participants were quick to highlight the progress made by women entering traditionally male-dominated fields, notably in medicine. Conversely, historically feminized professions, such as nursing, are witnessing an increase in men. Yet, even as women’s representation has improved in the field of medicine, there is a further bifurcation along gendered lines, namely between prestigious specialty fields that are overwhelmingly male, and family doctors that are mostly female. Other participants pushed back against the claim that the university is largely free of gender discrimination. They pointed to the gendered politics involved in serving on committees, and even teaching M/W/F classes, as opposed to Tu/Th classes. Still others problematized the very notion of choice when it comes to women “choosing” alternate career tracks.

The conversation shifted to discussing the structure of the academy itself, returning to the issue of how the academic pipeline is designed. There was general agreement that the academy is largely hostile towards work-life balance, and that this circumstance affects both genders. Women (or men) who opt to take time off in order to start a family are not as competitive when they return to apply for jobs. This points to a general flaw in the design of the academic system. While it seems clear that changes are needed to facilitate the successful transition back into the academy after a short leave, it is not obvious what the path forward requires in terms of generating new policies.

Overall, a professorship entails three main spheres of responsibility: teaching, research, and service. Freeman and others pointed out that work related to the service category is valued significantly less than the others, and argued that this situation encumbers women to a greater degree than men. By contrast, research is highly valued and rewarded in the university setting and beyond. Wallen stated that selfishness is a quality that is rewarded in the academic marketplace; to the extent that an individual is service-oriented, he or she will pay a price, regardless of gender. Despite the uncertainty concerning how to effectively address these structural problems, it seems clear that the academy needs to confront the issue of how to better remunerate unseen works of service, such as advising and serving on committees. These remain issues and questions that academia has yet to systematically address in concrete ways.