I attended the India Science Festival held at IISER, Pune
January 20 and 21, 2024. One of the lectures was by Prof Alan Harvey, University of
Western Australia, titled “Why does music exist?” These are my notes from that lecture.
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| Alan Harvey's lecture at ISF pandal, Pune |
Why does Music exist? Speaker - Alan Harvey
Music is a science,not an art. Maybe we shouldn't think of
art and science as different things
How do I remember so many songs but don't remember much
prose ?
Theres something special about music, which fires the communication stream, and oxytocin is major factor. Oxytocin is involved in the plasticity of memory, which works with music in a way language alone doesn't.
The human species is the only one that sing in harmony and
move synchronised like in dances.
Music fires different regions of the brain as can be seen in
MRI scans that scrambled noise fires.
There may be an evolutionary reason why the ability for
music evolved, and we have several conjectures, but nothing has been proved.
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| A slide from Alan Harvey's lecture |
You shouldn't use the word music unless you refer to modern
music which distinguishes compositions
with song and instrument distinct from language. To call birdsong or tweets of
insects or other creatures as music is absurd.
Music is different from just poetry, even poetry with
rhythm, even poetry with pitch changes.
But scientists have not studied or recorded brain patterns based on poetry, as much as with music, and it's worth exploring.
Other Lecture Notes
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