5 ms·

Musical components important for the Mozart K448 effect in epilepsy

101 points by lnyan 5y ago

marmaduke 5y ago
While this is cool, two critical points are (a) why no spectral analysis of K448 to determine what parts of the music are responsible for the effect and (b) IEDs are suggestive of the brain region primarily responsible for seizure onset but the jury is still out if they can be used as sole criteria.
- gnramires 5y ago
  If the emotional connection mentioned in the paper is correct, then the actual structure of the piece would dictate its effect, not a simple harmonic content -- although the Fourier Transform is bijective, so if you took into account details in phase I guess you're right.
- Bud 5y ago
  I would doubt that a spectral analysis would be revealing, or indeed, of any use whatsoever. After all, such an analysis would vary from performance to performance, or even between recordings of the same performance. It would seem more likely that the musical contents would somehow be the relevant factor, although this is speculative, of course.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  It’s probably not in the spectrum. It’s probably in those flowing mildly syncopated arpeggios.
- hex4def6 5y ago
  I guess there's plenty of ways to tease apart the mechanism. I'd start by changing speed, try various frequency shaping (eg, squashing the treble), a version done in MIDI with pure tones rather than wavetable), try midi with wavetable, but with successively bigger changes to the tone, try playing various subsections on repeat, etc.
  - est31 5y ago
    Yeah I've sometimes helped debug issues in the Rust compiler. People would come with a piece of code that made it crash or something. One task is to minify the example as much as possible. You start by commenting out as large components as possible, but need to watch out that nothing depends on the commented out code in a way that is detectable at compile time. So you remove piece after piece and finally end with a minimal example that reproduces the issue. In complex projects with lots of dependencies you often start out with large dependency trees and somehow have to reduce it. Sometimes it's easier to reduce something, sometimes it's harder. I guess here it's analogous when one wants to find the "core" part of the music that helps with epilepsy. Maybe one can try to vary it in a way that the effect is even larger.
aw1621107 5y ago
Absolutely fascinating! Really curious what the underlying mechanism is. Also found this bit particularly interesting: > Apart from one other composition—Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Major (K545)—the therapeutic properties of K448 could not be replicated with other musical stimuli. Stimuli previously tested were other Mozart compositions, Beethoven’s Fur Elise, and a string version of K448.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ordu 5y ago
  I had epileptic seizures due to a trauma. I felt them coming and learned how to stop them from occurring. A few years I was taking a medication, and every few weeks I had to deal with a feeling of a coming seizure. So I ended with a hypothesis that brain needs new stimuli to stop seizure. It needs something new coming, so it would be forced to change current activity from those crap it is trying to do now to something else. I was young and stupid, and my first seizure was in some way hand-made: a feeling of coming seizure was mysterious for me then, and I decided to explore it "scientifically". I learned how to strengthen it, and I was doing it for some time. The trick was to concentrate on any stimulus, to pick something "constant" from a sensory input and to shrink my attention to just that element of sensory input. Though "constant" it not in a physical way constant, in a mind's way: it feels constant, but in reality it is just highly predictable. So my hypothesis about K448 is this is surprises at work. It somehow follow music laws, but you never know what happen next. Voices sometimes go along, then they go different ways. Is it one voice? Or two? Or five? Would it be trill in the end of phrase, or some straw arpeggio? When music will become loud, when soft? This music holds attention of listener and so it guides mind processes externally. Though, it is just a wild guess based on an anecdotal data about epilepsy and single listening of K448. I invented "surpriseability" of a piece of music just now, and I didn't try to listen some other piece of music to compare its "surpriseability" to those of K448.
  - sdwr 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing! How did you direct yourself away from seizing? Was there one moment where they stopped completely, or was it a gradual improvement? I heard an anecdote about how the actor Danny Glover willed himself out of having seizures. Looking it up, epilepsy.com says they stopped "for reasons unknown", which seems interesting. I can see a community of people who haven't managed to escape from a negative bucket not wanting to believe it's possible. I've also heard of research into brain implants that disrupt seizures before they start, which sounds similar to what you're saying (but more invasive). My uncle has suffered from (trauma-related) epilepsy for a long time. He's been to lots of specialists but nothing has worked. I wonder if there's anything he can do mentally to grab onto the edges of the experience and divert it. IMO, when it comes to medicine, people can be too willing to trust the experts, and give up their own agency/internal feedback in the process.
ufhghfggf 5y ago
Quality performance of K448: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIItKRaP2vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIItKRaP2vc
- nbzso 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVPgJ2f5bd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVPgJ2f5bd4
  - 8bitsrule 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iePyP2HOr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iePyP2HOr8
    - nbzso 5y ago
      This is also great, but I personally like more subtle and emotional rendition of Alicia de Larrocha / André Previn. In classical music performances the ultimate mastery is in the subtle differences, but as rule of thumb more emotional and human performances combined with clarity and precision are always better.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  I tried to find a meantone tempered version of K448 but was unable to. For those unaware, our contemporary tuning system for the piano, Equal Temperament, is a somewhat recent invention. It came after Mozart. There are dramatic differences if Mozart is played on the historically accurate Meantone tuning. For a sample see [0], although note that the cheerful final passage is believed to have been composed post mortem by someone else. [0]: https://youtu.be/lzsEdK48CDY?t=700 https://youtu.be/lzsEdK48CDY?t=700
anthk 5y ago
Maybe related (PDF): https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20G.%20Rhythms%20of%20the%20brain.pdf https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20... Rhythms of theBrain No, not music related, but frecuency. And maybe, waves.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anthk 5y ago
Now I'd love to see that tested with Frank Zappa, for example with One Size Fits All.
conistonwater 5y ago
> Stimuli previously tested were other Mozart compositions16, Beethoven’s Fur Elise19, and a string version of K44810. Why would you not test other things too? Are there not enough of these IED episodes, or you have to wait around for too long for them to happen? Beethoven had piano sonatas, a lot of them, and Rachmaninov had some compositions for two pianos. There were composers around Mozart's time that wrote music in a similar style. Can people with these IED episodes test this theory for themselves using some music on their phones?

101 points by lnyan 5y ago

While this is cool, two critical points are (a) why no spectral analysis of K448 to determine what parts of the music are responsible for the effect and (b) IEDs are suggestive of the brain region primarily responsible for seizure onset but the jury is still out if they can be used as sole criteria.

gnramires 5y ago
If the emotional connection mentioned in the paper is correct, then the actual structure of the piece would dictate its effect, not a simple harmonic content -- although the Fourier Transform is bijective, so if you took into account details in phase I guess you're right.
Bud 5y ago
I would doubt that a spectral analysis would be revealing, or indeed, of any use whatsoever. After all, such an analysis would vary from performance to performance, or even between recordings of the same performance. It would seem more likely that the musical contents would somehow be the relevant factor, although this is speculative, of course.
spoonjim 5y ago
It’s probably not in the spectrum. It’s probably in those flowing mildly syncopated arpeggios.
hex4def6 5y ago
I guess there's plenty of ways to tease apart the mechanism. I'd start by changing speed, try various frequency shaping (eg, squashing the treble), a version done in MIDI with pure tones rather than wavetable), try midi with wavetable, but with successively bigger changes to the tone, try playing various subsections on repeat, etc.
- est31 5y ago
  Yeah I've sometimes helped debug issues in the Rust compiler. People would come with a piece of code that made it crash or something. One task is to minify the example as much as possible. You start by commenting out as large components as possible, but need to watch out that nothing depends on the commented out code in a way that is detectable at compile time. So you remove piece after piece and finally end with a minimal example that reproduces the issue. In complex projects with lots of dependencies you often start out with large dependency trees and somehow have to reduce it. Sometimes it's easier to reduce something, sometimes it's harder. I guess here it's analogous when one wants to find the "core" part of the music that helps with epilepsy. Maybe one can try to vary it in a way that the effect is even larger.

aw1621107 5y ago

Absolutely fascinating! Really curious what the underlying mechanism is. Also found this bit particularly interesting: > Apart from one other composition—Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Major (K545)—the therapeutic properties of K448 could not be replicated with other musical stimuli. Stimuli previously tested were other Mozart compositions, Beethoven’s Fur Elise, and a string version of K448.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ordu 5y ago
I had epileptic seizures due to a trauma. I felt them coming and learned how to stop them from occurring. A few years I was taking a medication, and every few weeks I had to deal with a feeling of a coming seizure. So I ended with a hypothesis that brain needs new stimuli to stop seizure. It needs something new coming, so it would be forced to change current activity from those crap it is trying to do now to something else. I was young and stupid, and my first seizure was in some way hand-made: a feeling of coming seizure was mysterious for me then, and I decided to explore it "scientifically". I learned how to strengthen it, and I was doing it for some time. The trick was to concentrate on any stimulus, to pick something "constant" from a sensory input and to shrink my attention to just that element of sensory input. Though "constant" it not in a physical way constant, in a mind's way: it feels constant, but in reality it is just highly predictable. So my hypothesis about K448 is this is surprises at work. It somehow follow music laws, but you never know what happen next. Voices sometimes go along, then they go different ways. Is it one voice? Or two? Or five? Would it be trill in the end of phrase, or some straw arpeggio? When music will become loud, when soft? This music holds attention of listener and so it guides mind processes externally. Though, it is just a wild guess based on an anecdotal data about epilepsy and single listening of K448. I invented "surpriseability" of a piece of music just now, and I didn't try to listen some other piece of music to compare its "surpriseability" to those of K448.
- sdwr 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing! How did you direct yourself away from seizing? Was there one moment where they stopped completely, or was it a gradual improvement? I heard an anecdote about how the actor Danny Glover willed himself out of having seizures. Looking it up, epilepsy.com says they stopped "for reasons unknown", which seems interesting. I can see a community of people who haven't managed to escape from a negative bucket not wanting to believe it's possible. I've also heard of research into brain implants that disrupt seizures before they start, which sounds similar to what you're saying (but more invasive). My uncle has suffered from (trauma-related) epilepsy for a long time. He's been to lots of specialists but nothing has worked. I wonder if there's anything he can do mentally to grab onto the edges of the experience and divert it. IMO, when it comes to medicine, people can be too willing to trust the experts, and give up their own agency/internal feedback in the process.

ufhghfggf 5y ago

Quality performance of K448: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIItKRaP2vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIItKRaP2vc

nbzso 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVPgJ2f5bd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVPgJ2f5bd4
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iePyP2HOr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iePyP2HOr8
  - nbzso 5y ago
    This is also great, but I personally like more subtle and emotional rendition of Alicia de Larrocha / André Previn. In classical music performances the ultimate mastery is in the subtle differences, but as rule of thumb more emotional and human performances combined with clarity and precision are always better.
srcreigh 5y ago
I tried to find a meantone tempered version of K448 but was unable to. For those unaware, our contemporary tuning system for the piano, Equal Temperament, is a somewhat recent invention. It came after Mozart. There are dramatic differences if Mozart is played on the historically accurate Meantone tuning. For a sample see [0], although note that the cheerful final passage is believed to have been composed post mortem by someone else. [0]: https://youtu.be/lzsEdK48CDY?t=700 https://youtu.be/lzsEdK48CDY?t=700

anthk 5y ago

Maybe related (PDF): https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20G.%20Rhythms%20of%20the%20brain.pdf https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20... Rhythms of theBrain No, not music related, but frecuency. And maybe, waves.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

anthk 5y ago

Now I'd love to see that tested with Frank Zappa, for example with One Size Fits All.

conistonwater 5y ago

> Stimuli previously tested were other Mozart compositions16, Beethoven’s Fur Elise19, and a string version of K44810. Why would you not test other things too? Are there not enough of these IED episodes, or you have to wait around for too long for them to happen? Beethoven had piano sonatas, a lot of them, and Rachmaninov had some compositions for two pianos. There were composers around Mozart's time that wrote music in a similar style. Can people with these IED episodes test this theory for themselves using some music on their phones?