Subject: Re: Dissonance with integration? From: Martin Braun <nombraun@xxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 22:04:39 +0200 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>"As I understand it, the first level of nerves from cochlea to brain are something like the telephone wires that run by my house. Do they interpret the impulses or [simply] transmit them?" Before musical information reaches the "language top" of the brain (same level as manages phonemes) the "lower machinery" has already extracted pitch, consonance, dissonance, chroma, and nearly all of the "emotional byproducts". In fact, if it was possible to black out the products of the "lower machinery" (say, by anesthesia), the "language top" of the brain would have no cue whatsoever that it was music that was in the air. "I'm not sure what would make a memory chip happy or sad." If a chip has the same life span with noise as with music, I would regard it as being equally happy with either. Just yesterday I learned that in East Germany average life span of humans has increased by six years after Communism's fall in 1989. Here the noise before 1989 was not so much an acoustic one, of course. Martin --------------------------------------------------------------------- Martin Braun Neuroscience of Music S-671 95 Klässbol Sweden email: nombraun@xxxxxxxx web site: http://www.neuroscience-of-music.se/index.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kevin Austin" <kevin.austin@xxxxxxxx> To: "Martin Braun" <nombraun@xxxxxxxx> Cc: <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 9:13 PM Subject: Dissonance with integration?