Brain music

I have a friend who has sent me some excellent emails on various technical aspects of music. I posted some of his observations last year on this blog. I am trying to persuade him to set up his own blog. But in the interim here is another entry this time on some 'brain music' links I sent him.

http://www.brainmusictreatment.com/page_2_3.html
http://www.neuropsychiatryreviews.com/sep02/npr_sep02_brainmusic.html

It is possible to convert brain waves into music, but only by making conscious choices to map certain frequencies to other frequencies.  Brain waves are all in the 0 to 30 hertz range (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/SamanthaCharles.shtml)) and human hearing is in the 20 to 20,000 hertz range.  Unless brain waves just happen to have relationships that correspond to the relationships between pitches in the western major or minor diatonic scale (extremely doubtful), the creation of what most middle-class westerners would call 'relaxing' music would require quite deliberate mapping - introducing myriad unscientific and culturally skewed choices.  Isaac Newton ran into this problem when he unsuccessfully attempted to map the frequency of colours in the light spectrum to the diatonic scale (the reason we say there are seven colours in the rainbow - but that's another story).

I have assumed that they are not creating these cds in some sort of non-standard tuning (e.g. just intonation), since western culture trains us to be 'unrelaxed' by anything that is not in a major or minor diatonic scale.  

Aside from the hertz mapping and tuning problems, there is also the problem of timbre.  Brain waves have no timbre, so saying that brain music sounds like classical piano music is no more valid than saying it sounds like fingernails-on-blackboard music.  Just more culturally-conditioned middle-class western preconceptions about 'good' music being sold as pop-neuroscience.  More like pseudoscience.

Music can be relaxing and beneficial, and individuals will find some forms of music more relaxing than others - we all know that to be the case.  And there seems to be strong evidence that music has a real capacity to alter brain waves by causing the brain to synchronise with the rhythms and attempt to 'guess' what comes next, resulting in that lost-in-the-moment sensation in which the past and future momentarily cease to exist.  But this just looks like a scheme to convince people to pay hundreds of dollars for a 'custom' cd of tinkly new-age piano muzak.  I suspect that the folks buying this stuff would get just as much out a cheap new-age cd from JB.

There is an interesting post about the site on http://postevolution.blogspot.com/2007/09/brain-music-treatment-mood-organ-is.html

Enough anti-new-age ranting.  Must get back to my 87 day long piano music.