Yet why would a set of pressure oscillations that are mathematically related be music to our ears at all? And is it really true for everyone? McDermott surveyed three hundred people and found that the number of years they spent playing an instrument correlated significantly with how much they preferred consonance over dissonance. If most ears like order, musically trained ears love it.
“There’s this long debate over whether this is innate or learned from culture,” McDermott says. “And it’s kind of remained unresolved, in part because it’s very hard to do the right kind of cross-cultural studies.” Which is exactly what Tom Fritz was attempting to do.
The Mafa in the remote villages were wary of Fritz. He was an outsider with a bizarre request, completely irrelevant to life in the Mandara Mountains. “For the first three weeks, nobody would participate in my experiment,” Fritz says. He tried to ingratiate himself and get to know people, which meant consuming “all of these weird millet beers you have to drink if you go and introduce yourself to people.” The beer, filled with organisms that a German gut wouldn’t ordinarily encounter, poisoned him, but when he tells the story, it doesn’t sound as if he minded too much. In addition to drinking the beer, Fritz also learned to play Mafa flutes.
The way Fritz describes it, the Mafa’s skepticism eventually melted into amusement. They “decided I was some weird nerd who was engaged in doing completely useless things, like sitting around in a room and not having his own field, but at least seemed not to be dangerous.” The Mafa agreed to participate in his experiments. Working with a translator, Fritz asked his participants to listen to recordings of Mafa music and Western piano melodies. He wanted to know whether the Mafa heard emotional content in music and whether their musical preferences matched those of Westerners.
Fritz says that the response to the piano was mixed. Some listeners didn’t like the piano, generally. There were two types of listeners: “the innovative listener and the conservative listener. The innovative listener, when he listens to something he never heard before, he might say, ‘I’ve never heard something like that before, but it sounds really nice.’ Whereas the conservative listener would rate anything he hadn’t heard before as unpleasant.”
This may also be a cross-cultural truism: some people expect music to sound a certain way, and when it proves to be something else, they find it unpleasant. In the Mafa’s case, the foreign sound of a piano is so out of place that some listeners didn’t bother to decide between consonant and dissonant. It was all dissonant to them.
It’s hard to keep in mind the number of novelties that were built into Fritz’s experiment. None of the participants had heard recorded music before, let alone Western music, let alone a piano. Headphones were alien. “Of course, the listeners were surprised to hear Mafa out of the headphones,” Fritz says. “Often, they would turn around and look behind them. Later, they laughed about it and said that at first, they were a little bit scared.”
Fritz needed a way to ask his listeners to match a song with a feeling: to do this, he presented the listeners with three photos of a woman. She is smiling in one. She looks sad in another and scared in the third photo. The idea was to have the listeners point out the sad face for sad tunes, the happy face for happy tunes, and so on. “It was the first time, at least for some of them, to see printed-out versions of faces,” Fritz says. “Some people were very surprised to see a flat face like that.” In fact, Fritz had to exclude several participants because they didn’t recognize the printed faces as having any emotional symbolism. A frown didn’t symbolize a sad person to some of the Mafa.
Fritz concluded in a paper published in Current Biology that for the Mafa, traditional flute music doesn’t evoke a range of emotions at all.{32} “For them,” Fritz says, “all of their music is somehow happy because all of the music is associated with certain rituals. And even if you have to bury someone, it’s still happy music because the music is there so people forget their grief for a while. Their music can do without emotional expressions.”
Yet—and this is really intriguing—most Mafa whom Fritz tested heard different emotional content in the Western piano melodies that he played for them. Compared to the Germans whom Fritz studied, Mafa listeners varied more widely in matching emotions with the tunes—but overall, both the German and the Mafa groups performed above chance level. Pieces in a major key were rated as happy; upbeat tempos were also more likely to be associated with the smiling face. Indefinite-mode and low-tempo pieces were more likely to be rated as sad and minor keys as scary. “One thing that I really want to know is how the Mafa can do it,” Fritz wonders. “How can they decode those emotional expressions in the music they have never before listened to? What is it that they understand in this? Is it something that goes deeper—something that maybe relates to more abstract patterns of emotional expression that occur in different art forms, maybe even in visual art?” It’s an interesting question.
The German group and the Mafa group both preferred consonant pieces to manipulated dissonant versions—these were consonant pieces that had been changed so that their frequencies were out of sync, as in McDermott’s study. Fritz and his colleagues wrote that typical Mafa comments were: “You shouldn’t let children play the flutes,” or “I know this, this is from the people of the Gouzda village. I really don’t like how they play the flutes.”
Fritz’s studies suggest that the preference for consonance (or an aversion to dissonance)—at least, in terms of harmonic order—isn’t only a Western thing. Fritz may have an explanation: “I’m quite positive that this relates to the organization of our auditory pathway.” He’s now looking at how brains process these consonant and dissonant pieces of music. “I find very interesting effects in the auditory pathway,” says Fritz. “The consonance seems to be processed more readily than the dissonance.”
The suggestion that humans prefer ordered sounds bears on the question of why we dislike other sounds. Take fingernails on a chalkboard, for example. In that screech, the frequencies are random; there is no order.
9. Breaking the Rules
Just finding the Language Research Center (LRC) at Georgia State University can be annoying. It’s off a two-lane road in a somewhat undeveloped suburb of Atlanta. There’s no sign out front, just an ordinary black mailbox with white letters on the side indicating the address.
Turning into the driveway, you are welcomed by a barbed wire–topped fence with a gate. Again, no sign, only a call box mounted to the left of the gate. If you’re expected, the person who answers the call box will open the gate. From there, you proceed along a driveway that runs through a copse of trees. After a quarter mile or so, you arrive at a second barbed wire–topped fence with another call box. Once again, if you are expected, someone inside uses a remote control to open the second gate. Now it’s a short drive to a low-slung building with a small parking lot off to the side. The front door of the building is locked, but Sarah Brosnan has the key.
Brosnan is in the psychology department at Georgia State, and she does some of her experimental work at the LRC. The high security is necessary because of threats from animal rights extremists who think that any research with animals is unacceptable, even the benign sort of behavioral research that Brosnan conducts. Some of the more radical animal rights groups have seen fit to firebomb the houses of researchers who use animals in their experiments—thus the locked doors.