How brain sees music as language.
For the better part of the last decade, Mark Kirby has been pouring drinks and booking gigs at the 55 Bar in New York City's Greenwich Village. The cozy dive bar is a neighborhood point for live jazz that opened on the eve of Prohibition in 1919. It was the year Congress agreed to give American women the right to vote, and jazz was still in its infancy. Almost a century later, the den-like bar is an anchor for the past in a city that's always changing. For Kirby, every night of work offers the chance to hear some of the liveliest jazz improvisations in Manhattan, an experience that is a bit like hearing a good conversation. “There's overlap, let the other say his piece, then you respond,” Kirby told me. “Threads are retrieved and then dropped, there can be a general mood and go on common ground.”
Musicians Brain
The idea that jazz can be a kind of conversation has long been an area of interest for Charles Limb, an otolaryngological surgeon at Johns Hopkins. So Limb, a musician himself, decided to map out what happened in musicians' brains while playing. He and a team of researchers conducted a study where a musician was put into a functional MRI machine with a keyboard, and had him play a memorized piece of music and then a fabricated piece of music as part of an improvisation with another musician in a control room. What researchers discovered: The brain of jazz musicians engaged in spontaneous improvisation with other musicians shows robust activation in the same brain regions traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax. In other words, improv jazz conversations “rooting in the brain like a language,” Limb said.
