[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Trainor_Laurel1.jpg” caption=”Laurel Trainor, professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind. File photo. “]Music is one of the characteristics that defines us as a species and is therefore of interest to a wide variety of scientists. Nature magazine is currently examining what music is about by publishing a series of nine essays on science and music.

In one of these essays, Laurel Trainor, a professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, Faculty of Science, and director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM), explores the neural roots of music.

Trainor asks to what extent do the structure of our ears and neuronal networks in the auditory system constrain what types of music are possible. She also questions whether understanding how the auditory system works can explain why “the melodies of Gustav Mahler, the driving rhythms of Igor Stravinsky or the dissonances of John Adams make these modern composers popular today, whereas the music of some others is rarely heard.”

Trainor argues that certain emotional responses to music have deep evolutionary roots, such as fear responses to low, loud sounds. And that some near-universal features of music — such as the distinction between consonance and dissonance, and the use of scales comprising a small number of notes per octave — derive from our biology.

Trainor also summarizes evidence that she and other researchers have collected in the lab indicating that experience with particular musical styles, particularly early in development, narrows what musical structures are comprehensive to people and what musical structures are preferred.

This learning aspect can help explain why new and innovative music can sound outrageous to one generation, but tame to another — why Stravinski's ballet The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premier and why Beethoven's Third Symphony was incomprehensible to critics of the time.

“The flexibility of our auditory system and its dependence on learning enables us to invent different musical structures, and allows musical tastes to change with familiarity and experience,” said Trainor. “What has not changed recently is our evolutionary inheritance, the structure of our sensory organs, our basic encoding of information and our visceral responses to features of sound that unleash the emotional power of music in our lives.”

In her lab, Trainor has studied the development of both rhythm and pitch in music. Her studies are of interest to diverse groups of people, as evidenced by keynote addresses over the last year to the Society for Music Theory, the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity, the Suzuki Society of the Americas, and the International Conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.

“Dr. Trainor's experience as both a respected scientist and a trained musician has had a significant influence on the auditory research occurring at McMaster and this in turn has influenced research around the world,” said John Capone, dean of the Faculty of Science.

For more information about Trainor's research, visit psycserv.mcmaster.ca/ljt/research.htm.