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Notes & Neuroscience: A review of Nightingale Vocal Ensemble and thoughts on rhythm by Karl Wold



About the author: Dr. Karl Wold is a musician and a neurology resident in the Mass General Brigham Neurology Residency Program. ***


Brains have a rhythm. If you’re reading this, yours is likely chugging along at about 40hz (which happens to be nearly exactly between a low E♭ and E on a piano, tuned in the standard way). And it’s the same for all of us. Well, almost. Diseases of the mind/brain can alter it. But, so long as it's healthy, our mind is keeping time. Depending on the level of arousal, the frequency changes. But when focused or thinking hard, your brain is humming (nearly) the same E♭ played by the basses to open the overture to Wagner’s Das Rheingold at the start of his Ring Cycle (not a great guy, but he could write a beautiful opera—it's worth a listen). 


This strikes me as tremendously weird. I’m relatively new to the study of the brain, but I can say with confidence that it’s an odd organ that we don’t understand all that well. There are some theories as to why these rhythms exist, such as more synchronized firing in the RAS promotes arousal, which enables us to take in and process more information. Thus, the brain works at a higher frequency for things like problem solving and memory, then slower during things when less attentive. But ultimately, these are just theories, and we don’t have a definitive explanation at this point.  

As a quick aside, there’s some evidence that stimulating the brain at around 40hz—with diverse modalities like visual, tactile, magnetic—can have an impact on cognition and could possibly help patients with diseases like Alzheimer’s. Again, the brain is weird.   

But I don’t want to dwell on the medical and scientific underpinnings of the electrical processes in our heads. I just want to step back and appreciate the phenomenon—our brains are all keeping time. Billions of neurons, pulsing to the same beat. And this rhythm, whether the actual driver of our thoughts or just some measurable side effect of the workings of the mind, has to be present for our thinking to function at its best.

In this way, the brain is a lot like music. I recently attended a performance by the Nightingale Vocal Ensemble (also excellent—worth a listen). We all watched a set of silent films as a group of six singers—also viewing the films—improvised an acapella piece in real time. A good part of me was interested in how this would actually work. No lead sheet, chord progression, melody. How could you take a set of six instruments and make a cohesive whole based on gut feeling alone? (Turns out, avoiding lyrics seems to help). But the key was rhythm. Rhythm is what held the pieces together. The notes, less important. Any note fits in a piece.  Art Tatum went so far as to say there are no wrong notes (though Thelonious Monk added that some are more right than others). Play a minor second or a tritone on a keyboard. Most of us won’t find it particularly pleasing—they don’t have that consonance we’re used to (most of us, anyway). But they’re used throughout music. What matters is their movement. Any dissonance can move towards a harmonious resolution. And it’s the rhythm that provides that movement. Without the rhythm, we’re lost. A piece becomes some jumbled mess of sound. It’s why we have conductors. Or rhythm sections. In some ways, we could rewrite Ira Gershwin’s famous lyric: I got rhythm [so] I got music. At least in this case, the one seemed to lead to the other.  

It’s all kind of wild. As I sat in the theater, I was surrounded by the sounds of six independent voices, moving through consonance and dissonance guided and grounded by a steady beat. Meanwhile, my mind, as it listened to the music and took in the purples and pale blues and movement and shadows and reds on the screen, it was keeping time, too. And whether orchestrating the firing of billions of neurons or the movement of six voices, because there was coherence in thought and song. How delightful. In this way, our minds are much like music. What a delightful thought. 

   

For more information check out:

Garcia-Rill E. Bottom-up gamma and stages of waking. Med Hypotheses. 2017 Jul;104:58-62. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2017.05.023. Epub 2017 May 26. PMID: 28673592; PMCID: PMC5557373. 

Blanco-Duque C, Chan D, Kahn MC, Murdock MH, Tsai L-H. Audiovisual gamma stimulation for the treatment of neurodegeneration. J Intern Med. 2024; 295: 146–170.

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