Re: [escepticos] Parte 1

[Francisco Perfectti <fperfect@...>]

Maria Folco wrote:

>
> Si se escucha lo suficientemente música clásica, se podrá elegir
> entre su amplia variedad de estilos lo que gusta o no, ahora bien, el
> noventa por ciento de los "escuchas" no han oido más que la medida de
> un centímetro de la punta de iceberg de lo que es la música clásica,
> luego ignora absolutamente siquiera si habrá algún estilo que le
> guste, y consiguientemente su comparación "auditiva" con una música
> eminentemente empírica y primaria como es la popular es solo la
> manifestación impúdica de un grado de ignorancia que jamás se
> permitirían en cualquier otro ámbito del conocimiento humano.
>

Precisamente hoy me ha llegado la noticia (que acompaño abajo) de que los
músicos pueden procesar la música de forma parecida a como procesamos el
lenguaje. El autor del trabajo citado opina (y dice que lo va a demostrar) que
es posible que los músicos desarrollen una forma diferente de escuchar la
música, que es inherentemente más analítica.

Saludos



http://www.nature.com/nsu/010816/010816-4.html
Musicians' brains may use language modules listening to music.
13 August 2001   ERICA KLARREICH

At a performance of Beethoven's Fifth, you could tell which audience
members were musicians - if you happened to be carrying a brain scanner.

Professional musicians use their left brain more than other people when
listening to music, a magnetic-resonance study suggests1. Musicians,
unlike others, may process music much as a language, the result hints.

When played a recording of Bach's Italian Concerto, all the study's
28 subjects showed activity in the planum temporale, part of the
temporal lobe above the ear canal that is thought to be responsible
for many auditory tasks. Non-musicians' brain activity was concentrated
in the right side of the planum temporale, but in musicians the left side
dominated.

This left-hand brain activity was most pronounced in people
who had started musical training at an early age, as well as
in those with absolute or 'perfect' pitch (the ability to identify
the pitch of a tone without hearing it in the context of other
notes).

The age correlation suggests that musical traits such as
absolute pitch are the result of childhood training, not
genetic predisposition, says Takashi Ohnishi, of the National
Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Tokyo, who led the
study.

"Musical experience during childhood may influence the
structural development of the planum temporale," he says.
"Our data suggest that absolute pitch should be acquired
through experience rather than innate ability."

"We've been discussing things along these lines for a while,
but we never believed there was such a clear outcome as
there is here," says Thomas Elbert, the neuroscientist at the
University of Konstanz in Germany who was in the news last
week for his study of chess grandmasters.

Take note

The left planum temporale is thought to control language
processing. Although absolute pitch has a verbal element -
the connection of a name with a musical tone - scientists
cannot explain why musicians should rely so heavily on a
language-processing region of the brain.

"The most simple explanation is that we learn to label tones
by names," says Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist who studies
perfect pitch at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in
Boston. The truth may lie deeper, he suggests. "There may
be underlying principles of analysis of language and music
that involve the same brain structures."

Musicians seem to process music as writers do language,
Elbert agrees. "When a composer stops creating music,
musicians say that he 'has nothing more to say'," he says.
"They use language terminology daily to describe their way
of music processing."

Whether musicians actually perceive music differently is a
question that Ohnishi hopes to probe in further studies. "It is
possible that musicians develop a different way of listening
to music, which is inherently more analytical," he says.



References

   1.Ohnishi, T. et al.Functional anatomy of musical perception in
     musicians. Cerebral Cortex, 11, 754 - 760, (2001).