Many Voices, but Do We Hear?

Does rap music cause sexually aggressive behavior? Can babies--or maybe even your pets--recognize melodies? Does elevator music soothe your soul or empty your pockets?

Music and Science Information Computer Archives (Musica), an international database headquartered at UC Irvine, can help answer thousands of such questions.

“There’s obviously not a lot of research for music as compared to language,” said Norman Weinberger of UCI’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, who is the co-founder and scientific director of Musica. “Yet infants, for instance, are born with music as well as language capacity. They have musical competence, they can follow musical contours. . . . But the music isn’t reinforced; language is. By the time a child has music lessons, it’s already remedial. And that’s a reasonable way of looking at it.”

Musica is dedicated to gathering and disseminating such scientific findings about music. Weinberger makes that information available to the public and to the academic community at no cost.

By doing so, he hopes to promote more research and cooperation among scientists.

“The impetus is that in music, researchers don’t interact,” said Weinberger, sitting at his computer with hundreds of books and papers piled high around him.

“Educators are one thing, therapists another,” he said. “Neuroscientists study the processing of music and other information in the human brain. . . . Then there are the medical disciplines, such as psychiatrists and geriatric specialists. There is growing interest in music as a human behavior and as a way to understand behavior, as a way to understand old age and brain deterioration.

“These communities have separate perspectives, but they often have something to say to the others that isn’t said to the others.”

Whatever is said, the public has always been last to know.

To help remedy that, Weinberger publishes Musica Research Notes, a twice-yearly newsletter that addresses issues that he finds of particular (or more general) interest.

“I simply read the literature as much as I can, and search our own database, and write about whatever is out there,” Weinberger said. “I try to pick interesting topics and hopefully get people to think about them.”

The fall 1995 issue of the newsletter reported that playing slow music, a.k.a. elevator or background music, as opposed to fast music in a national chain of supermarkets increased sales. Tremendously.

“Shoppers stayed in the store longer and purchased more, a lot more,” the study found, with an average gain per store of 39.2%.

Rap music is a thornier topic.

One study on “the influence of misogynist rap music on sexual aggression against women” suggests that misogynist music “facilitates sexually aggressive behavior” and “supports the relationship between cognitive distortions and sexual aggression.”

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Another study indicates that teenagers who prefer heavy metal and rap, as compared with peers who do not, have poorer school grades, more behavioral problems, more sexual activity and more drug and alcohol use and arrests. Weinberger refrained from concluding that a clear causal relationship exists, suggesting that more research is needed.

Wisely, it turns out. Yet another study found that exposure to “radical rap” can support efforts toward fostering racial harmony among high-school students. Weinberger drew the same conclusion: More research is needed, now.

The Musica database lists 23,000 study citations and abstracts to date. (The full text of a study can be obtained through most university libraries for about 10 cents a page.) Response has been significant.

“We had a tally of the number of log-ons, and there have been thousands, although I’m sure the bulk is in North America,” Weinberger said. “Many of these people have not gone through the scientific rigors themselves yet seem to be quite interested in finding out experimental results. Most inquiries come from music education.”

The database can be accessed by modem. (Telnet address: mdic@mila.ps.uci.edu. Logon: mbi. Password: nammbi.) The service is also on the World Wide Web at https://musica.uci.edu.

As Weinberger tells it, five years ago he and Gordon Shaw, a UCI physicist and biologist, were discussing a brain-pattern theory, which Shaw had developed, as it might be applied to music; as they talked, they realized it would be a tremendous benefit to researchers if they could somehow coalesce the vast literature on music.

Shaw is Musica’s co-founder and technical director emeritus; the computer that houses the database is located in his physics department laboratory. Weinberger, a professor of psychobiology, is Musica’s scientific director.

Hasn’t Weinberger strayed a tad from psychobiology?

“I’ve always loved music,” Weinberger said. “It’s very dear to me and to my family. I had done one neurophysiology study with animals that had to do with music, unusual things in the brains of animals that indicate that there is a basic biological capacity for processing musical information.”

Musica is funded by the Carlsbad-based National Assn. of Music Merchants, but according to Weinberger, there is “no relation between that source of funding and what I write.”

An advisory council includes such high-profile musicians as Yo-Yo Ma, Bette Midler, Yanni, David Benoit and Gerard Schwarz, but Weinberger allows that “the idea of an advisory council to help with foundations or private contributions didn’t really work out. It was our hope to have a fairly large enterprise. . . .”

The working Musica staff consists of two part-time students and a part-time data processing manager. And there is only so much such a modest staff can do.

“The music community itself will have to deal with a database on music and the arts per se,” Weinberger said. “The music database lags far behind the science database. Science is research data; the arts are, for the most part, performance oriented. I like to have plans that are realistic. There is a need for a whole-arts database--but it’s not in our plans.”