http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/...s-to-your-mind
By Oakland Ross
Feature Writer
It looks like a stylized human eye, and it’s called a fermata.
When placed above a musical note on a page of sheet music, this curious little symbol indicates to singers or players that they may hold that particular note pretty much as long as they please.
The result can be gorgeous, deeply surprising and yet somehow inevitable.
If the tone is especially high or very low or produced with conspicuous intensity, it might well qualify as a “money note,” a somewhat crass term for a wonderful sound that was coined by Canadian music producer David Foster.
At the time, he was working with Barbra Streisand, she of the mighty lungs and origami-like articulation.
If music were a drug, then money notes would be illegal.
This is a story about some of the amazing things that music does to your mind, perhaps never more so than at this festive time of year, when songs seem to find us everywhere.
“We evolved as a musical species,” says Takako Fujioka of the Rotman Research Institute, who is exploring music as a form of therapy for elderly stroke victims in Toronto. “Do animals do music?”
It seems they do not.
“Songbirds have great songs,” says Fujioka. “But animals from monkeys to dogs all prefer silence if they have a choice.”
They don’t know what they’re missing.
PART ONE: JOY A MYSTERY TO SCIENTISTS
Of music’s nearly countless pleasurable effects, few are more potent than those auditory orgasms called money notes.
When Streisand or someone like her lends her vocal cords to such a sound, the effect is not only emotional, it’s physical. You get shivers up and down your spine. The hairs stand up at the back of your neck.
“What happens has to do with millions of synapses in your brain,” says Mervon Mehta, executive director for performing arts at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music. “There are certain things that happen in our brains when certain chemicals are released.”
Those chemicals are known as endorphins — a.k.a. endogenous morphine — a group of natural substances that block pain and promote bliss. Their release can be triggered by physical exertion, laughter, love-making — and music.
“We’re drawn to money notes because that’s what we want to hear,” says Ranil Sonnadara, a researcher at the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind in Hamilton. “The brain says, ‘Wait a second . . . ’ It’s that extreme satisfaction.”
Think of Cèline Dion suddenly switching keys in the third verse of My Heart Will Go On, a sonic effect that temporarily transforms normal human brain tissue into sugar pie.
That’s amore — and money — all in one.
This, or something like it, has been going on for centuries, and probably much, much longer.
Many experts believe that humans developed music well before they got around to language. For eons, people did not talk to each other — they sang. This may partly explain why music plays such a pervasive role in all human societies today. It’s genetic.
And it’s the money notes that seem to matter most of all.
David Foster may have invented the term, but the phenomenon has been familiar for years, as much a feature in classical music as it is nowadays in pop.
“Anything by (Richard) Wagner is pretty heavy on money notes,” says Sonnadara, speaking of the German composer who died in 1883.
Bel canto opera of the mid-19th century often featured arias with explosive high Cs or other equally stirring effects designed to fill the theatres. Both Handel and Bach made liberal use of techniques that would qualify nowadays as money notes.
Music also has an extraordinary ability to evoke memories, which may explain why songs such as Christmas carols tend to become so closely associated with annual traditions.
When we sing Silent Night, we are not merely crooning a beautiful melody. We are remembering every Christmas we have known.
There may not be an evolutionary advantage in that, or even a money note, but it definitely enriches the season, giving multiple hearts all the more reason to go on.
“Without music,” says Mehta, “our civilization wouldn’t have survived as long as it has.”
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