Making art into a science.

I was recently reading an article in NeuroReport entitled Music in minor activates limbic structures: a relationship with dissonance?. My understanding of neuroscience is very minimal so there was almost nothing in this that I could really think critically about. My understanding of music, however, is pretty damn good, and the assumptions the article seems to make about music came across as very questionable to me.

One of the main suggestions was that the level of dissonance in a melody may play a role in which part of the brain is activated when listening to music. This was an attempt at explaining why minor melodies would have a greater effect in one part of the brain than major melodies. Minor was assumed to be more dissonant than major:

Musicologically, a main difference
between major and minor mode is that minor allows for
more dissonance than major mode (711).

I’m not sure how they came up with this idea. Here’s what a C major scale looks like:

And here’s what an A minor scale looks like:

The only difference between these two scales is where you start. They literally consist of the same exact musical intervals. The article even refers to them as “modes,” a musical term that essentially refers to which note of a scale you will treat as your home base. The scale itself does not change between different modes, just one’s starting point. Somehow, the author knew enough to recognize that major and minor scales can actually be viewed simply as modes of one scale yet also came to the conclusion that minor allows more dissonance.

More vague is what’s considered dissonance. The article does mention minor 2nds as a dissonant interval at one point while talking about a chromatic scale but that’s the only mention of what is considered dissonant. We’re also talking about melodic dissonance here, too, not harmonic dissonance. Even a minor second, an interval that would sound extremely harsh if both notes were played simultaneously, sound completely innocent (to me) when played melodically. Maybe I overlooked a referenced study that they used as a basis for dissonance but I’m leery of anyone at all who claims to have scientific proof of what dissonance is. At one point in time, a perfect 4th was considered a dissonant interval to be avoided at all costs if one wished to compose beautiful music but today this interval is everywhere and no one bats an eyelash. How do we separate our cultural inclinations from empirical facts for something like this? (No really, if someone knows, please tell me.)

I think this is an inherent problem in attempting to treat art of any sort in a scientific manor. Art is extremely difficult to define and until that can be done in some sort of standardized way, science dealing with art will always have at least one foot sitting in a pool of broad assumptions.