I suppose we could all agree that dogs know stuff. They know commands, warnings, pleasures that follow an owner’s opening a bag of treats, and foreboding trips to the vet. They can also figure out how to get to the other side of a fence, and they know who will pet them. Again, dogs know stuff. They also seem to know how to know by exploring and interacting with an environment. But dogs don’t know anything about the neurons that give them their capabilities. In contrast, we know a little, and we continue to experiment to discover more about our ability not just to know, but also to know about knowing. But do we know much about why we favor one thing over another, say type of music or speech?
Consider our very sketchy knowledge of why we choose to know what we know and appreciate. Take your taste in music or literature as an example. Why do you like what you like, and how does your brain go about the liking? More fundamentally, before you even establish a liking for one kind of rhythm or pitch or for melody or harmony, how is it that you distinguish between speech and song? I ask these questions in the context of what every generation experiences: Music and speech can be fashionable, and, like clothing, can be generation-specific. Otherwise, all English-speaking people would be listening to the music of John Dowland and speaking like Æthelred the Unready. As you know, the music you favored during your teenage years and probably still like isn’t the current favorite music of most contemporary teens.
I bring up these questions in light of my having just discovered that one of the specialized branches of the Max Planck system is the Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Now there’s a combo you won’t get at a MacDonald’s. What’s the assumption behind the institute’s existence? Empiricism and aesthetics are not just juxtaposed, but also interwoven in the fabric of knowing? Only in the modern world of specialization, eh? We divided knowledge into special branches over the centuries only to begin putting them together again, as in biogeochemistry, neurophysiology, and now empirical aesthetics.
Well, there’s more to this than your humble average guy on the street might guess.
Street reporter: “Excuse me, sir, do you think much will come of the Max Planck research into empirical aesthetics?”
Pedestrian with latte, “Huh?”
My feelings exactly. I don’t know what I would say. Com’on, at best I might think that the institute is studying what drives people to movie theaters. Surely, that’s what producers and directors of so-called “summer movies” and “holiday movies” do. There’s a formula they figured out empirically. Gotta be. Every one of those movies seems to fall into a pattern. And maybe that’s why there are 12,000 Fast and Furious and Star Wars movies: They discovered the secret aesthetic of the human brain. But that discovery and application in movies might also be why people tire when they finally grasp that they’re seeing the same thing just slightly altered. We can apply the same principle of mental fatigue to music, literature, and film. It might be why we say of some arts film, “That’s a masterpiece.”
How do we know what we like? How do we know the difference between the aesthetically pleasing and the unaesthetically repulsive? Should we rely merely on the words of critics who tell us what is good or bad, artful or inartistic, B-level or A-level entertainment? Should we follow the dictates of some philosopher of aesthetics?
Just as a little background, you should know that researchers in the Max Planck system are widespread and diverse. I just want to give a partial list of specialized institutes so you’ll get the sense of how we have devised branches of knowledge over the past two centuries. Put “Max Planck Institute for…” in front of each:
Art History
Neuroscience
Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean
Astronomy
Astrophysics
Biological Cybernetics
Biology of Ageing
Empirical Aesthetics (mentioned above)
Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Chemical Energy Conversion
Chemistry
Comparative and International Private Law
Demographic Research
Extraterrestrial Physics
Human Development
Get the idea? There are more than 50 such institutes. Germany has most of them, but you can find them in Italy, the USA, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. So, as I was saying, there are people devoted to the study of “empirical aesthetics.” Is that the science of knowing what we find pleasing? It brings up personal questions for each of us: “What makes me like what I like?” “How did I come to like what I like?” “Why do you and I like the same stuff?” “Why don’t you and I like the same stuff?” (In fact, I’m listening to the music of John Dowland on YouTube as I write this, but I’m guessing you aren’t listening to it as you read it)
Fifty plus institutes would indicate fifty specializations in knowledge. We’ve done much to separate branches of knowledge since Max Planck was born, so maybe the institute devoted to empirical aesthetics is an attempt to put knowledge back together and to understand knowledge and the process of knowing holistically.
It’s in light of this blending of specializations that I read a paper by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Leipzig. Neuroscientists there published a paper in 2012 entitled “Perception of Words and Pitch Patterns in Song and Speech.” Julia Merrill and six colleagues looked at the brain in an fMRI study to examine “shared and distinct cortical areas involved in the auditory perception of song and speech at the level of their underlying constituents: words and pitch patterns.”* Seems like a study that the people over at the Institute for Empirical Aesthetics might want to read (I don’t know whether members of various MPIs read publications from other branches). Let’s not get too involved here, but the following sentence from the conclusion will provide a sense of the study: “While the left IFG coded for spoken words and showed predominance over the right IFG in pitch processing in speech, the right IFG showed predominance over the left for pitch processing in song.” IFG? You have two just in case you’re interested. They’re in your head. Put your index fingers on your temples. Got it? Now you know where you have inferior frontal gyri. They play a role in distinguishing between speech and song; obviously from the study, the right IFG plays a role in the brain’s “creative half.”
So, even before you consider what you like or don’t like in music or literature, you might want to consider how you know you are listening to music or to speech. Well, according to A. D. Patel, the timing you recognize in music has a stricter periodicity than the timing you hear in speech: “there is no evidence that speech has a regular beat, or has meter in the sense of multiple periodicities.”** You perceive a regular metric in music but don’t perceive the same for speech because it is heterometric.*** Of course, you might want to argue that some languages seem more “musical” than others, but that’s a topic for another fMRI. More germane to the discussion here is that beyond the basic distinction a brain recognizes between song and speech is the question of quality or aesthetics, that is, the distinction between “good” and “bad” music or speech.
You have brain parts that can distinguish between speech and song. But why do you like different music from your teenage relatives? Is there something in you that says, “I know what makes music or speech aesthetically pleasing?” How did you come by that knowledge? Mere habit, or, rather, enculturation?
If we assume that tastes in music and language are acquired tastes, the offshoot question about how we know what we know becomes how do we come to like what we like?
Apparently, we’re getting close to understanding how our brains know speech from song. One more time: “The IFG was involved with a differential hemispheric preponderance depending on whether words or melodies were presented in song or speech. The results suggest that the left IFG shows relative predominance in differentiating words and melodies in speech (compared to song) whereas the right IFG (compared to the left) shows predominance in discriminating words from melodies in song.”* Okay, I get it. I can distinguish between speech and song by rhythm and pitch. But I still don’t know why I like what I like or whether or not my right IFG is the chief determinant in my preference for one kind of music over another. I don’t know whether or not my left IFG tells me that John Updike could write melodic prose. Nor do I know whether a musical or opera appeals to an audience because it perfectly merges right and left IFGs.
I really don’t know much about how I know or appreciate, do I? How about you? I might have to rely on someone at one of the many Max Planck institutes to discover what I don’t know about myself.
*Merrill, Julia, et al., Perception of Words and Pitch Patterns ij Song and Speech, Frontiers in Psychology. 2012; 3: 76. Published online march 19, 2012, doi: [10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00076] . Accessed November, 27, 2018.
**Patel A. D. (2008). Language, Music, Syntax, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press.
***Brown S., Weishaar K. (2010). Speech is heterometric: the changing rhythms of speech. Speech Prosody 100074, 1–4.
Consider our very sketchy knowledge of why we choose to know what we know and appreciate. Take your taste in music or literature as an example. Why do you like what you like, and how does your brain go about the liking? More fundamentally, before you even establish a liking for one kind of rhythm or pitch or for melody or harmony, how is it that you distinguish between speech and song? I ask these questions in the context of what every generation experiences: Music and speech can be fashionable, and, like clothing, can be generation-specific. Otherwise, all English-speaking people would be listening to the music of John Dowland and speaking like Æthelred the Unready. As you know, the music you favored during your teenage years and probably still like isn’t the current favorite music of most contemporary teens.
I bring up these questions in light of my having just discovered that one of the specialized branches of the Max Planck system is the Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Now there’s a combo you won’t get at a MacDonald’s. What’s the assumption behind the institute’s existence? Empiricism and aesthetics are not just juxtaposed, but also interwoven in the fabric of knowing? Only in the modern world of specialization, eh? We divided knowledge into special branches over the centuries only to begin putting them together again, as in biogeochemistry, neurophysiology, and now empirical aesthetics.
Well, there’s more to this than your humble average guy on the street might guess.
Street reporter: “Excuse me, sir, do you think much will come of the Max Planck research into empirical aesthetics?”
Pedestrian with latte, “Huh?”
My feelings exactly. I don’t know what I would say. Com’on, at best I might think that the institute is studying what drives people to movie theaters. Surely, that’s what producers and directors of so-called “summer movies” and “holiday movies” do. There’s a formula they figured out empirically. Gotta be. Every one of those movies seems to fall into a pattern. And maybe that’s why there are 12,000 Fast and Furious and Star Wars movies: They discovered the secret aesthetic of the human brain. But that discovery and application in movies might also be why people tire when they finally grasp that they’re seeing the same thing just slightly altered. We can apply the same principle of mental fatigue to music, literature, and film. It might be why we say of some arts film, “That’s a masterpiece.”
How do we know what we like? How do we know the difference between the aesthetically pleasing and the unaesthetically repulsive? Should we rely merely on the words of critics who tell us what is good or bad, artful or inartistic, B-level or A-level entertainment? Should we follow the dictates of some philosopher of aesthetics?
Just as a little background, you should know that researchers in the Max Planck system are widespread and diverse. I just want to give a partial list of specialized institutes so you’ll get the sense of how we have devised branches of knowledge over the past two centuries. Put “Max Planck Institute for…” in front of each:
Art History
Neuroscience
Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean
Astronomy
Astrophysics
Biological Cybernetics
Biology of Ageing
Empirical Aesthetics (mentioned above)
Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Chemical Energy Conversion
Chemistry
Comparative and International Private Law
Demographic Research
Extraterrestrial Physics
Human Development
Get the idea? There are more than 50 such institutes. Germany has most of them, but you can find them in Italy, the USA, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. So, as I was saying, there are people devoted to the study of “empirical aesthetics.” Is that the science of knowing what we find pleasing? It brings up personal questions for each of us: “What makes me like what I like?” “How did I come to like what I like?” “Why do you and I like the same stuff?” “Why don’t you and I like the same stuff?” (In fact, I’m listening to the music of John Dowland on YouTube as I write this, but I’m guessing you aren’t listening to it as you read it)
Fifty plus institutes would indicate fifty specializations in knowledge. We’ve done much to separate branches of knowledge since Max Planck was born, so maybe the institute devoted to empirical aesthetics is an attempt to put knowledge back together and to understand knowledge and the process of knowing holistically.
It’s in light of this blending of specializations that I read a paper by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Leipzig. Neuroscientists there published a paper in 2012 entitled “Perception of Words and Pitch Patterns in Song and Speech.” Julia Merrill and six colleagues looked at the brain in an fMRI study to examine “shared and distinct cortical areas involved in the auditory perception of song and speech at the level of their underlying constituents: words and pitch patterns.”* Seems like a study that the people over at the Institute for Empirical Aesthetics might want to read (I don’t know whether members of various MPIs read publications from other branches). Let’s not get too involved here, but the following sentence from the conclusion will provide a sense of the study: “While the left IFG coded for spoken words and showed predominance over the right IFG in pitch processing in speech, the right IFG showed predominance over the left for pitch processing in song.” IFG? You have two just in case you’re interested. They’re in your head. Put your index fingers on your temples. Got it? Now you know where you have inferior frontal gyri. They play a role in distinguishing between speech and song; obviously from the study, the right IFG plays a role in the brain’s “creative half.”
So, even before you consider what you like or don’t like in music or literature, you might want to consider how you know you are listening to music or to speech. Well, according to A. D. Patel, the timing you recognize in music has a stricter periodicity than the timing you hear in speech: “there is no evidence that speech has a regular beat, or has meter in the sense of multiple periodicities.”** You perceive a regular metric in music but don’t perceive the same for speech because it is heterometric.*** Of course, you might want to argue that some languages seem more “musical” than others, but that’s a topic for another fMRI. More germane to the discussion here is that beyond the basic distinction a brain recognizes between song and speech is the question of quality or aesthetics, that is, the distinction between “good” and “bad” music or speech.
You have brain parts that can distinguish between speech and song. But why do you like different music from your teenage relatives? Is there something in you that says, “I know what makes music or speech aesthetically pleasing?” How did you come by that knowledge? Mere habit, or, rather, enculturation?
If we assume that tastes in music and language are acquired tastes, the offshoot question about how we know what we know becomes how do we come to like what we like?
Apparently, we’re getting close to understanding how our brains know speech from song. One more time: “The IFG was involved with a differential hemispheric preponderance depending on whether words or melodies were presented in song or speech. The results suggest that the left IFG shows relative predominance in differentiating words and melodies in speech (compared to song) whereas the right IFG (compared to the left) shows predominance in discriminating words from melodies in song.”* Okay, I get it. I can distinguish between speech and song by rhythm and pitch. But I still don’t know why I like what I like or whether or not my right IFG is the chief determinant in my preference for one kind of music over another. I don’t know whether or not my left IFG tells me that John Updike could write melodic prose. Nor do I know whether a musical or opera appeals to an audience because it perfectly merges right and left IFGs.
I really don’t know much about how I know or appreciate, do I? How about you? I might have to rely on someone at one of the many Max Planck institutes to discover what I don’t know about myself.
*Merrill, Julia, et al., Perception of Words and Pitch Patterns ij Song and Speech, Frontiers in Psychology. 2012; 3: 76. Published online march 19, 2012, doi: [10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00076] . Accessed November, 27, 2018.
**Patel A. D. (2008). Language, Music, Syntax, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press.
***Brown S., Weishaar K. (2010). Speech is heterometric: the changing rhythms of speech. Speech Prosody 100074, 1–4.
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