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Back in April, there appeared in the NY Times a fantastic article detailing how music affects the neurons in our brain:

Now some scientists are aiming to understand and quantify what makes music expressive -- what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.

The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool.

The author, Pam Belluck, details how music mimics movement and empathy, with a particular focus on the element of surprise:

Say the cellist Yo-Yo Ma is playing a 12-minute sonata featuring a four-note melody that recurs several times. On the final repetition, the melody expands, to six notes.

"If I set it up right," Mr. Ma said in an interview, "that is when the sun comes out. It's like you've been under a cloud, and then you are looking once again at the vista and then the light is shining on the whole valley."

But that happens, he said, only if he is restrained enough to save some exuberance and emphasis for that moment, so that by the time listeners see that musical sun they have not already "been to a disco and its light show" and been "blinded by cars driving at night with the headlights in your eyes."

Dr. Levitin's results suggest that the more surprising moments in a piece, the more emotion listeners perceive -- if those moments seem logical in context.

"It's deviation from a pattern," Mr. Ma said. "A surprise is only a surprise when you know it departs from something." The departure "could be something incredibly slight that means something huge, or it could be very large but that's actually a fake-out," Mr. Ma said.

True, indeed. Just like another component explored in the article - nuance:

Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, "bending notes in a certain way," said the singer Rosanne Cash, "holding a note a little longer."

She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, "that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills."

"You've heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold," she said. "They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you're forced to find nuance in a way you don't have to if you have a four-octave range."

Call it "the curse of technique." Far too many musicians who perform at a high technical level are defined by their technique. Their voice is their technique, which often leaves the listener cold.

But as it turns out, these studies have shown that timing is everything:

Studies found that the timing of notes was more important than loudness or softness in people's perceptions of emotion in music.

This may be a product of evolutionary adaptation, said Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University, since "a nervous system that is sensitive and well tuned to timing differences would be a nervous system that, from an evolutionary standpoint, would be more likely to escape potential enemies, survive and make babies."

Changes in the expected timing of a note might generate the emotional equivalent of "depth perception, where slightly different images going to your two eyes allows you to see depth," said Joseph E. LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University.

And musical timing might relate to the importance of timing in speech. "The difference between a B and a P, for example, is a difference in the timing involved in producing the sound," said Aniruddh D. Patel, a music scientist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. "We don't signal the difference between P and B by how loud it is."

The juice of the article comes midway, though, when Belluck snags some fantastic quotes from important musicians and producers:

Singer Paul Simon plays with timing constantly, surfing bar lines. He squeezes lyrics like "cinematographer" -- six short notes -- into the space of a two-syllable word, and will "land on a long word with a consonant at the end, so that you really hear the word," he said. "My brain is working that way -- it's dividing up everything. I really have a certain sense of where the pocket of the groove is, and I know when you have to reinforce it and I know when you want to leave it."

Musicians like Mr. Simon consider slight timing variations so crucial that they eschew the drum machines commonly used in recordings. Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal, says Stevie Wonder uses a drum machine because it has so many percussion voices, but inserts human-inflected alterations, essentially mistakes, so beats do not always line up perfectly.

And Geoff Emerick, a recording engineer for the Beatles, said: "Often when we were recording some of those Beatles rhythm tracks, there might be an error incorporated, and you would say, 'That error sounds rather good,' and we would actually elaborate on that.

"When everything is perfectly in time, the ear or mind tends to ignore it, much like a clock ticking in your bedroom -- after a while you don't hear it."

You get the sense that scientists are only at the beginning of this long journey that's attempting to break down and quantify the elements of music:

Of course, science has not figured out how to measure other elements of musical expression, including tone, timbre, harmonics and how audience interaction changes what musicians do. While there may be some consensus about what makes music expressive, performers say it is hardly immutable.

"Every day I'm a slightly different person," Mr. Ma said. "The instrument, which is sensitive to weather and humidity changes, will act differently. There's nothing worse than playing a really a great concert and the next day saying, 'I'm going to do exactly the same thing.' It always falls flat."

And that's one of the major pieces of the magic of music: every day is different and every day the musician is different. Music changes.

As Ms. Cash put it: "Some things you can break down, and some things are ineffable. Some things are just part of that mystery where all creative energy comes from. It's part of the soul. Music is an ever-moving blob of mercury."

And like mercury, music magically goes up and down.

Don't miss this very special article.

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