Steve Demorest and Steve Morrison would never have thought, when they began their careers, that someday they would be conducting a research study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). After all, they are musicians, not physicians.

But then, no one could have predicted the new tools like fMRI that would provide a glimpse into how the brain works and thus lead to an explosion of studies like their own. Researchers in a host of fields are now able to get answers to questions about how the brain is involved in everything from reading to social behavior.

Steve Demorest, standing, and Steve Morrison, foreground, watch as technologist Jerry Ortiz manipulates the fMRI equipment. Photo by Ken Fine.

So why not ask questions about music comprehension? At the most general level, that is what Demorest and Morrison are studying. “We’re looking at how people deal with music, how people understand music, what sorts of changes in their understanding of music take place through training or extensive exposure to a particular culture,” Morrison says.

Of course, the two professors —both on the School of Music faculty in Music Education—won’t be tackling all of that in a single study. Rather, they are making a beginning, with funding from the UW’s Royalty Research Fund, and hope to conduct a series of studies in this general area.

Demorest and Morrison have recruited 12 subjects—six musicians and six non-musicians—and are asking them to listen to both spoken words and music while images are made of their brains. The fMRI technique measures blood flow to various parts of the brain over time, rather than showing a static image of the brain. The blood flow indicates which parts of the brain are participating in a given activity.

Building on studies that have already been done on language comprehension, Demorest and Morrison hope to learn if there is a difference in the way the brain processes music that the individual understands versus music that is heard but not understood. Language studies, they explain, have shown that subjects respond differently when they hear their own language versus another language that they don’t speak.

Subjects in Demorest and Morrison’s study will start in a similar way—by listening to English and Cantonese. (None is a Cantonese speaker). Then they will listen to a piece of Western chamber music and a Chinese orchestral piece using the same types of instruments—strings and winds—but specific to each culture.

	The screen in the control room shows the images of the research subject's brain. Photo by Ken Fine.

“What we’re trying to find out,”says Demorest, “is whether musicians ‘comprehend’ music from their culture differently than music from an unfamiliar culture. We’re comparing those responses to language comprehension and we’re also comparing people with music training to people who have none on both tasks.”

Part of their motivation in doing the study, Demorest and Morrison say, is that there are controversies in music education over what to teach students—particularly whether it is better to train students really well in music of their own culture or to expose them to music from many different cultures. “So we became interested in how those variables are represented neurologically,” Demorest says. “We want to know what effect one or both of those variables might have on people’s neurological responses to different kinds of music.”

The kind of information they’re seeking in the study looms larger in importance all the time as scientists uncover the effects of early experiences on brain development. “Our brain isn’t set in stone when we’re born,” Demorest says. “Our brain will be shaped by our experience. So for us as music educators, the impact of training or culture on brain function, which is what in our small way we’re beginning to try to get at, is very significant because it can give us some insights into how to spend the limited amount of time we have with our students.”

The musicians participating in the study are people who make their living playing violins or violas, so they have a comprehensive knowledge of Western music. They are likely, however, to be as ignorant of Chinese music as the non-musicians. The question is, will their training as musicians help them to comprehend the music of another culture?

“Ethnomusicologists will tell you that the old saw about music being the universal language is absolutely not true, that you can’t walk into a culture and understand its music the way an insider does,” Demorest says. “Nonetheless, the music of different cultures does tend to share some external characteristics, so musicians may find it easier to make sense of unfamiliar music, though not in the same way as a cultural insider.”

Although Demorest and Morrison aren’t the first music scholars to make use of fMRI, they are among the few. They say it’s been difficult in the past to do music studies with this technique because the equipment tends to be noisy. However, innovations in the UW lab have overcome that problem, allowing high quality sound to be delivered with little interference from equipment noise.

For a future study, Demorest and Morrison would like to recruit Chinese players of a stringed instrument called the erhu to see if they would get similar results to their current study. They’re also interested in comparing people who have studied another culture’s music to those who haven’t. But right now they’re struggling to analyze the huge amounts of data they’re gathering—more than 400 megabytes for each research subject.

“This has been a very steep learning curve for us, going to the medical sciences,” Morrison says. “We’re both accustomed to working with statistical data, but not of this magnitude. We’re really grateful to the people in the imaging lab for their assistance.”

This article was adapted from an article by Nancy Wick in University Week.

[Other Research Stories in this Issue]

Why Freud Should Credit Mesopotamia

For Wasps, Bad Work Habits Can Really Bite

[Winter/Sping 2002 - Table of Contents]