Folk Music vs. Psychology

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Yesterday saw the announcement of the 2018 Hyundai Mercury Prize, an annual music award for the best album released in the UK by acts with predominantly British or Irish members. This years’ winners were rock band Wolf Alice for their 2017 album “Visions of a Life." They are now in the very good company of such prestigious previous winners as Primal Scream, Portishead, PJ Harvey and Dizzee Rascal. But not everyone is happy about this.

Writing in the Guardian, Jude Rogers notes that the shortlisted acts have become too homogenous, with even token representatives of genres such as jazz, classical, and even metal, thin on the ground. Hell, there hasn’t been a folk music act on the shortlist since 2012. I wondered why folk music in particular might have fallen out of favour and decided to look in the most unlikeliest of places for answers – the psychological research literature. And I think I have the answer. Well, an answer, anyway.

In a 2012 paper cognitive scientists and music researchers from the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä, Finland, wrote a paper entitled “Expertise in folk music alters the brain processing of Western harmony” in the prestigious journal Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences. In it they measure electrical activity in the brain to assess responses to listening to different chord sequences designed to be more or less conforming to the Western musical system. They wanted to compare the responses of experienced folk musicians with people that lacked any formal music training.

They used the presence of a specific “signature” brain wave called Early Right Anterior Negativity (ERAN) which is wave towards the front of the right side of the brain that occurs soon after listening to a musical stimulus. Specifically, this appears in response to a somewhat disharmonious chord such as the Neapolitan chord. Due to the musical training of folk musicians it was anticipated that they would show a reduced ERAN response to the disharmonious cord compared with the non-musicians.

But guess what – they found the opposite! The ERAN response to the unusual chord was greater in the folk musicians compared to the nonmusicians. This looks to be an effect of musical training rewiring the brains of the folk musicians to be more aware of chord structures that are unusual and outside of more conventional Western chord structures.

Now, this study has a small sample of participants and so these effects cry out for replication, without which we should not take them too seriously. But if true – if folk musicians really do have altered brain networks as a consequence of their training – then perhaps this influences how they go about writing songs and producing music. Maybe the training turns folk musicians on to musical structures that don’t resonate with the mainstream. Perhaps this is why folk acts get overlooked for mainstream awards like the Mercury Prize.

The late 1970s did, of course, see the punk movement as a DIY-inspired reaction against the overly complex time signatures and arrangements of prog rock in which flash musicianship was more highly regarded than a good tune and a catchy beat. Perhaps that punk spirit lives on in the selection processes of the Mercury Prize panel.