Free Radiohead's Kid A by Marvin Lin Page A

the classical establishment that shunned his work, his ear-stretching concept would later find common ground with the neurological community, one that not only underscored the fluidity of taste but also proved how physical the process of music listening can be.
    Here’s how music works: a sound is made, causing waves of vibrating air to float through space and time and penetrate our eardrums (a thin, cone-shaped piece of skin). The eardrum vibrates a few small bones, amplifying the sound on its way to the cochlea, which sits in inner-ear fluid. Here — through a complex interaction with coiled, reed-like tubes — the physical vibrations are pushed through the ear fluid, causing thousands of tiny hair cells to bend and subsequently burst with energy, sending electrical impulses through the cochlear nerve. The brain’s cerebral cortex then decodes the sound — at this point, “raw data” — based on the position of the cells that are sending the impulses, which then determines everything from pitch to dynamics. Only after our brains detect patterns from these impulses do we actually hear a sound.
    So, how then do these impulses translate into a feeling? According to neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer, if these impulses are transmitted to our brains in an even, regular meter, our minds will generally find pleasurein it, rewarding our body with a squirt of dopamine (which is also released during sex, eating, and drug use). This even meter would be reflected in consonant harmonies and steady rhythmic patterns, ones that are conventionally known as “pleasing” to the ears — you know, songs like “Fake Plastic Trees.” However, if these impulses reach our brains in a stuttered, off-kilter pattern, we will generally feel uncomfortable, as exemplified by dissonant harmonies and complex poly-rhythms, the kind of music we generally call “noisy” or “weird,” songs like “The National Anthem.”
    But it isn’t a black and white process. Apparently there is a group of neurons in the corticofugal network of the brain whose sole purpose is to figure out these more difficult, challenging patterns. And the neurons often succeed, resulting in even more dopamine production and, inevitably, more dopamine in the long run.
    The kicker? Not only do these neurons learn from new sounds, but they, as Lehrer put it on a radio show called
Radiolab
, literally adjust “in the biochemical engineering sense” to these new sounds. “If you’re letting your corticofugal network do its job, it can actually resculpt your brain and let you hear the patterns better.” In other words, not only does the brain release more dopamine with every new connection, but its actual
physiology
is altered over time, too.
    So, for those of us who found
Kid A
challenging at first but kept listening anyway, our brains were
literally
being reshaped by the music. This implies that taste is not just a psychological process, but a physical one too. And if ittakes time to listen, time for the patterns to be decoded, time for our brains to reshape, and time for our values to change accordingly, then the whole process is also inherently temporal, enabling us to more clearly see
Kid A
as a gateway to more challenging musics, to see repetition as a form of change, to put a scientific spin on T.S. Eliot’s observation that “You are the music while the music lasts.” Julian Johnson, professor of music at University of London, tackles this phenomenon cerebrally:
    Time is the constitutive dimensions of the subject, and it is for this reason that music stands in a privileged relationship to the subject. […] It possesses the potential for this function because the defining activity of music is also that of the subject — the structuring of time. […] [This] suggests neither that music is “about” subjectivity nor that its processes are analogous to those of the subject, but rather that its processes are those of the subject, and its structuring of time is thereby