Twinkle twinkle little hearts

John Powell’s Why You Love Music won’t blow your mind, but you’ll enjoy it anyway

John Powell’s Why You Love Music: From Mozart to Metallica – The Emotional Power of Beautiful Sounds is not a work of controversy and will not likely upset anyone with its various opinions. The title itself is almost a tautology: we love music because we love “beautiful sounds,” and beautiful sounds are music to our ears. Nevertheless, the book is highly amusing and informative, and makes for casual reading of a superior kind.

For the uninitiated, we are given succinct explanations of basic terms such as notes, timbre, scales and keys and so on. But there is also a narrative of sorts in Why You Love Music, if only the progressive revelation of how varied the world of music really is.

Powell, a British scientist and musicologist, begins by venturing into what might be its most sensitive area – namely our responses to music and what those responses say about our taste. This is sensitive because taste, of course, has consequences. “In the Western world, about one third of the things we do every day are accompanied by music, and for around half of that time the music has some sort of emotional effect,” Powell tells us. This is most clearly present in the background music of restaurants and stores.

Powell writes about a research project in which French and German wines – comparable in price and degrees of sweetness/dryness – were stocked on store shelves in equal numbers, but the background music was alternated. “The results were astonishing,” writes Powell. “When they played German music through the speakers, the German wine sold twice as fast as the French stuff. When they played French music, the French bottles sold five times as fast as the German ones.”

Music works its magic in multifarious ways, particularly in restaurants. “With slow music playing, people spent about an hour over their meal, but with fast music they wolfed their food down if forty-five minutes,” Powell reports. “The slow music customers also spent about one and a half times as much on drinks during their meal as the fast music diners.”

Powell extends this principle of musical influence to whole areas of personality and stages of life. Psychologists, he writes, have honed down “five basic personality traits that can be reliably measured.” They are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism ( or emotional instability). Mix and measure these traits and, Powell maintains, you get a rough idea of someone’s personality. Musical counterparts include reflective and complex music (classical, jazz, folk and blues), intensive and rebellious music (rock, heavy metal), upbeat and conventional music (pop, religious and country), energetic and rhythmic music (rap, soul and electronic).

I may have to take back what I said about Powell not being controversial, but he seems serious when he says, “It has been found that enthusiasts for reflexive and complex music are generally poor at sports, good with words, and often politically liberal.” The only difference, it appears, between fans of heavy metal and fans of J. S. Bach is that the former are usu- ally good at sports.

Some of this insight verges on the obvious, as when Powell talks about adolescents. “Music as a tool of self-definition is particularly important during our adolescent years,” he writes. “In early adolescence our musical tastes tend to be for pop, rock and dance music. In general we like our music to be defiant (of boring older people and their boring old music,) but we tend to align our preferences with those of the main pack of young teens.”

A movie such as Juno, the 2007 comedy starring Ellen Page, struck me as entirely symptomatic of this tendency. The dialogue seemed to consist mostly of characters from different age groups exchanging views on their favourite bands. The information was not so much musically as sociologically revealing.

If Powell has an agenda it is to demystify the effect of “beautiful sounds” on the human psyche, beginning with lullabies and playtime songs that characterize our first exposure to music. “All human cultures sing to their children and have done so for thousands of years.” Babies seem to prefer singing even to speech: “Songs are more predictable.” Furthermore, though all music is extremely repetitive, never is it more so than in the music of infancy and childhood.

Powell guides the reader through variations in the pattern of beautiful sounds – phenomena such as dissonance and improvisation. The latter simply means making music up as you go along, and is especially fascinating to musical novices who tend to think of it as totally free-wheeling, particularly in jazz. Powell quotes jazz great Dave Brubeck to the contrary, as Brubeck points out that there are rules for improvisation. “Just break one of the rules and you’ll never end up in another jazz session with the same guys again.”

To elucidate those rules, Powell smartly compares musical improvisation to normal human conversation. That, too, has its rules. Powell reminds us that you do not enthusiastically concur when someone laments that he or she has a bad, expensive haircut.

In conversation you also adhere to themes, as does musical improvisation, and you don’t keep inventing entirely new sentences. “We use stock phrases in speech such as ‘I’m looking forward to it’ and ‘ See you later,’ ” Powell explains. “Improvising musicians often use standard musical phrases in exactly the same way.”

Musicians in other genres have a joke that goes to the heart of the matter. “If you make a mistake,” Powell quotes, “repeat it three times and it’s jazz.” I was pleased to learn from Powell that this is indeed a cherished technique among jazz practitioners. “Repeating your mistake misleadingly confirms to the listener that you intended to play that note in the first place,” Powell writes. “You’re basically trying to pull off a con trick by saying to your audience, ‘Oh no, I didn’t make a mistake. I did exactly what I intended to do.’”

No opprobrium need attach itself to such a con job. It’s all in the service of “beautiful sounds.”