Musical clues to values fundamental to psychosocial system sustainability

Freedom, Democracy, Justice: Isolated Nouns or Interwoven Verbs? (Part #11)

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Especially intriguing in relation to the dynamic nature of values is recent work on comprehension of music and its organization in the human brain. The brain as an organ, and the organ as a musical instrument, are together elegantly suggestive of a fruitful metaphor for the "organization" of sustainability -- provided the organ can be "played".

Music has of course long been recognized as a vehicle for the expression of values. The following text is reproduced from Comprehension of Requisite Variety for Sustainable Psychosocial Dynamics: transforming a matrix classification onto intertwined tori (2006).

The relation of music to the functioning of the brain is a theme in the cognitive neurosciences [more]. Research by Petr Janata et al (The Cortical Topography of Tonal Structures Underlying Western Music, Science, 13 December 2002, 298. 5601, pp. 2167-2170) has indicated that knowledge about the harmonic relationships of music is maintained in the rostromedial prefrontal cortex providing a stronger foundation for the link between music, emotion and the brain. The melody used experimentally was crafted to shift in particular ways through all 24 major and minor keys. The relationships between the keys, representative of Western music, create a geometric pattern in the form of a torus (see Petr Janata, Music Mapped to the Torus, 2005, and torus dynamics movies).

The piece of music moves around on the surface of the torus offering a means of determining the pure representation of the underlying musical structure in the brain. The work clarified the mapping of melodies in the brain, as it varied from one occasion to another suggesting that the map is maintained as a changing or dynamic topography. This dynamic map may provide the key to understanding why a piece of music may elicit different behaviours at different times [more more] (see also Robert J. Zatorre and Carol L. Krumhansl, Mental Models and Musical Minds, Science, 13 December 2002: 298. 5601, pp. 2138-2139). Of particular interest was the role of any such mapping in the memorability of favourite tunes.

The torus may be used as a representation of harmonic space. A piece of music moves around in this space [more]. The results of psychoacoustic experiments by C L Krumhansl and E J Kessler (Tracing the dynamic changes in perceived tonal organization in a spatial representation of musical keys, Psychological Review 89(4), 1982, pp. 334-368) of the inter-key relations of all major and minor keys can be represented geometrically on a torus -- as shown by Benjamin Blankertz, Hendrik Purwins and Klaus Obermayer (Constant Q Profiles and Toroidal Models of Inter-Key Relations -- ToMIR, 1999) in the following image

Geometric representation of the inter-key relations of all major and minor keys (derived from psychoacoustic experiments by Krumhansl and Kessler)

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