Music Appreciation and the Auditory System
Have you ever come home after an exhausting day and turned on music to relax your nerves? While you are taking it easy, your auditory cortex is not. It works hard to synthesize the several musical elements of rhythm, pitch, frequency, and timbre to create a rich auditory experience.
First, a discussion of the ear physiology is needed. Vibrating air moving at different frequencies hits the eardrum which causes the middle ear's three bones to move accordingly. The stapes, one of these inner ear bones hits on the oval window of the inner ear, and because the inner ear is filled with fluid, the bulging of the oval window causes this fluid to slosh around. The round window, also in the inner ear, compensates for the increased pressure by bulging outward. The inner ear has two functions, to transduce sound via the cochlea and to maintain a person's vertical position with respect to gravity via the vestibular system (1). . But here, we will only consider the transduction of sound. The cochlea is filled with hair cells that are extremely sensitive and depolarize with only slight perturbations of the inner ear fluid. At the point of depolarization, a neural signal is transmitted and on its way to the brain. This nerve impulse travels to the auditory nerve (8th cranial nerve), passes through the brainstem, and then reaches the branched path of the cochlear nucleus: the ventral cochlear nucleus or the dorsal cochlear nucleus. The nerve signal that passes through the ventral cochlear nucleus will reach the superior olive in the medulla where differences in timing and loudness of sound are compared, and location of the sound's origin is pinpointed (1). The nerve signal that crosses the dorsal cochlear nucleus ultimately is analyzed for sound quality.
As seen in the final step of sound transduction, the information relayed by the neural signal branches and processing occurs at different sights. No consensus has been reached as to where music is processed in the brain. Most researchers agree that the different components of music are processed in different parts of the brain, as exemplified by the branching pathway of the cochlear nucleus which facilitates the separation of sound timing and loudness with the sound quality analysis. But this information is not sufficient to answer the question of where our sense of music originates.
Frackwiak has supplied a small part of the puzzle.
Karl Marx’s was a German philosopher, economist and evolutionary socialist born in Germany on May 5th 1818. His theories mostly consisted of the capitalist economic system. Marx’s attended the University of Bonn and University of Berlin. He is widely recognized for his theory of on the class system which included the concepts of base and super-structure. Marx’s theory of the class system is well exhibited by the documentary film, Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class.
Hearing allows us to take in noises from the surrounding environment and gives us a sense of where things are in relation to us. All those little folds on the outside of the ear, called the tonotopic organization, make it so sound waves in the air are directed to the ear canal, where they can be further processed. Once in the ear, the sound waves vibrate the ear drum, which tell the ear exactly what frequency it is sensing. The vibration of the ear drum is not quite enough to send a signal to the brain, so it needs to be amplified, which is where the three tiny bones in the ear come into play. The malleus or hammer, incus or anvil, and stapes or stirrup amplify this sound and send it to the cochlea. The cochlea conducts the sound signal through a fluid with a higher inertia than air, so this is why the signal from the ear drum needs to be amplified. It is much harder to move the fluid than it is to move the air. The cochlea basically takes these physical vibrations and turns them into electrical impulses that can be sent to the brain. This is...
The U.S. Navy nurtured into a challenging power in the years previous to World War II, with battleship construction being revived in 1937, commencing with the USS North Carolina . It was able to add to its fleets throughout the early years of the war when the US was still not involved, growing production of vessels both large and small. In a conflict that had a number of amphibious landings, naval superiority was important in both Europe and the Pacific. The mutual resource...
O'Donnell, Laurence. "Music and the Brain." "Brain & Mind" Magazine. 1999. Web. 24 Mar. 2010. .
Most people are familiar with the word "music", however they barely consider the definition of it. After carefully think, everyone has their own opinions on this term and it is hard to have an uniform criterion of music sounds. According to the text book, Michael B. Bakan states five propositions to define the music. The first one is about the tone and the second one talks about the music is organized in some way. The next two are claims that music is human organized and a product of human intention and perception. The last proposition argues music cannot separate from Western culture. Among these propositions, I think the music is a product of human intention and perception is most interesting and worth to discuss. So I assert that the most
Music and the Brain: Processing and Responding (A General Overview). For any individual who either avidly listens to or performs music, it is understood that many melodies have amazing effects on both our emotions and our perception. To address the effects of music on the brain, it seems most logical to initially map the auditory and neural pathways of sound. In the case of humans, the mechanism responsible for receiving and transmitting sound to the brain is the ears.
How can different types of music affect people’s emotions? Music has many different ways to affect people. In some ways, it is good for the body both physically and mentally. In other ways, people think it is nice to listen to. More detailed, music has personalities, which can express what people feel. There are many observations involving different ways to express human emotions. Emotions are very interesting things, especially when they involve music. Music can have many personalities, affect people’s emotions, and be used as therapy.
Brain Stem Reflexes refer to a process where an emotion is induced by sound or music because the fundamental acoustical characteristics of the sound or music are received by the brain stem which signals a potentially urgent and important event. Sounds that are sudden, dissonant, loud, or have fast temporal patterns induce arousal or feelings of unpleasantness in the listener (Berlyne 1971; Burt et al. 1995; Foss et al. 1989; Halpern et al. 1986). These responses show the impact of auditory sensations (music as sound in the most basic sense). Our perceptual system is continually scanning the immediate surro...
Both of these approaches have been brought to bear on the brain mechanisms underlying musical imagery, and we’ll address each approach in turn. Lesion studies of musical
Marx's economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labor theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx's prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism (Wolff, 2003).
Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany in 1818 to a Hirschel and Henrietta Marx. Due to much anti-Semitism, Hirschel changed his name to Heinrich and left his Jewish faith to become Protestant. Later on, while Marx attended Bonn University to study Law, he mainly socialized and increased his debts. When Heinrich found out about Marx’s debt, he agreed to pay off his debt on the condition that he transfers to Berlin University. After Marx transferred to Berlin University he became serious and dedicated to working hard on his studies. A lecturer known as Brüno Bauer, a strong atheist whose radical political ideas made him a well-known figure with the police. Bauer first introduced Marx to G.W.F. Hegel, a well-known author and philosopher at the University of Berlin. Marx inevitably became infatuated with Hegel’s theories thus, becoming radically political. After Heinrich passed, Marx had to become independent and earn his own living by becoming a university lecturer. When Marx finished his doctoral thesis at the University of Jena, he hoped Brüno Bauer would be able to aid him in obtaining a teaching post; however, Bauer was dismissed in 1842 for being an outspoken atheist and couldn’t help Marx.
The brain is a very powerful organ, no doubt. It tells your body how to react and what to do. But what happens when you listen to music? How does your brain react? Let’s take a look.
When we listen to music a number of things occur: we process sound through the auditory complex, an artist’s movement through the visual cortex, dancing and other rhythmical movement through the cerebellum. The Motor Cortex also enables movement such as foot tapping or hand clapping. Our Hippocampus stores our experiences through music and enables musicians to remember musical pieces. Finally, the Amygdala allows for emotional reactions to music. Because music is a combination of our different senses, we as individuals can process things differently and naturally we will like some genres more than others. Music is one of th...
The ear is looked upon as a miniature receiver, amplifier and signal-processing system. The structure of the outer ear catching sound waves as they move into the external auditory canal. The sound waves then hit the eardrum and the pressure of the air causes the drum to vibrate back and forth. When the eardrum vibrates its neighbour the malleus then vibrates too. The vibrations are then transmitted from the malleus to the incus and then to the stapes. Together the three bones increase the pressure which in turn pushes the membrane of the oval window in and out. This movement sets up fluid pressure waves in the perilymph of the cochlea. The bulging of the oval window then pushes on the perilymph of the scala vestibuli. From here the pressure waves are transmitted from the scala vestibuli to the scala tympani and then eventually finds its way to the round window. This causes the round window to bulge outward into the middle ear. The scala vestibuli and scala tympani walls are now deformed with the pressure waves and the vestibular membrane is also pushed back and forth creating pressure waves in the endolymph inside the cochlear duct. These waves then causes the membrane to vibrate, which in turn cause the hairs cells of the spiral organ to move against the tectorial membrane. The bending of the stereo cilia produces receptor potentials that in the end lead to the generation of nerve impulses.
Music has incredible effects on the brain and body! Ever since the beginning of time, music has been around. It can influence the way a person thinks and behaves, and also social interactions. Teens are more susceptible to this (Revatto 1). Music can be used in therapy by helping people with depression, and can even be a more natural way to heal the body (“How Music...” 1). In some cases, songs and melodies can help or make diseases worse. Music is a powerful thing and can affect your brain and many other things in your body in numerous ways.