Re: Can we talk about spirituality in music?

People have been batting around the emotional reaction to music
concept for well over a century, and the findings are pretty well
established.

An early US study polled some 20,000 people - an extremely large
group, about 10 time larger than the biggest sampling done these days
- to determine how people viewed the emotional state of certain test
pieces of music. There was something along the line of 80-85%
agreement.

Being an early survey, the sample was somewhat culturally homogeneous,
but later surveys - with a much more reasonable data body - have
concluded that most people will come up with the same emotional "read"
on a piece of music, even if the musical example is not a part of
their culture. (The one study I remember along these lines surveyed
western listeners as to the emotional content of Asian shadow puppet
play music, and their emotional responses lined up similarly with the
earlier monster study that may have contained cultural bias.)

Equally interesting is the density of brain activity and the number of
brain sectors devoted to sound and musical reception, encoding and
decoding. There is not just one sector of the brain involved in the
process, there are at least three hardwired areas that process
incoming sound, not even counting the cognitive centers which work on
sound interpretation. All of the sectors cross communicate with one
another, and sound is stored in fairly short continuous 'clips' -
probably no more than 8 or 16 bars per brain byte. It's then up to the
cognitive processes, memory and whatever internally derived sense of
structure and narrative to allow us to remember things in order and in
context.

.

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