The Hindu Business Line : Sweet anticipation

It seems, living in Chennai as I do, that I have exhausted all possible answers to questions regarding my peculiar plight in the otherwise agreeable, not-so-hot December season.

Friends and relatives who call me or meet me at home in the evenings wonder what I am doing there when the whole city is abuzz with music and dance in the sabhas. However strong my alibi is for my absence from these kutcheris, quest ioners say “tut, tut” in commiseration.

Just when I was wondering about what drives people to enjoy music, particularly in groups, when the same can be savoured in the comfort of one’s own home-theatre, digital-surround-sound ambience, I was rewarded with a plausible answer in Christmas edition of The Economist.

The article “Why Music?” traces the biologists’ efforts in unravelling one of the strange attributes of humanity in developing an “all-singing and all-dancing” culture and exploring why making and listening to music is now a big part of modern economy.

Cited there is the statistic that the average American teen spends one-and-a-half to two hours a day listening to music.

When I look around here at my contemporaries in Chennai, come December, they spend almost the entire day, once their morning ablutions are taken care of, at concerts, consuming music in the halls and food at the stalls.

Social bonding

That singing is a pre-requiste in natural selection for reproductive success, a la Darwin, was quite clear to me as most of us in my generation had passed through the rites of “ bride-seeing,” when it was mandatory for the girl to sing for the prospective alliance partner and his family.

Additionally, what interested me is the amusing deduction that the same people congregating in the same Sabha evening after evening could be explained as something similar to grooming among monkeys for group selection and group bonding.

It seems that the same monkeys and apes would meet to clean each others pelt, not so much keep their fur pristine but do it for social cohesion, expression of solidarity and commitment to the group.

Enjoyable expectation

Peter Cariani, a neuroscientist, however, strikes a discordant note to the laboured explanations from evolutionary biology on the main question of “why music”.

He states that music impresses a temporal patterning of neural events on our brains, making them similar to the rhythms of bodily processes (breathing, walking, marching, leaping, running, sighing) or masks out other internal patterns that dominate our minds, giving us release from our immediate cares.

Music that engages cognitive interest by creating expectations and violating them (e.g. a ragam-thanam-pallavi ) operates, according to Peter Cariani, using the same dopamine-based, predictive reward systems — tension is built up through uncertainty (dissonances), and relieved by confirmation (consonances, return to predictability).

“These mechanisms that music engages are phylogenetically very primitive… every animal needs to predict the immediate future based on the immediate past”. Never mind the science behind it.

What makes music enjoyable — be it in concert hall or through one’s own earphones — is the psychology of expectation or, in the delightful phrase used by David Huron of the Centre for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University, ‘sweet anticipation’.

(The author is former Member, Ordnance Factories. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

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