Progress in brain research, volume 216

Franz Joseph Gall and music: the faculty and Paul Eling*,1 , Stanley Finger†, Harry Whitaker{ *Department of Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cogniti

Vincent WalshInstitute of Cognitive NeuroscienceUniversity College London

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ISBN: 978-0-444-63399-6

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Dirk-Matthias Altenm€uller

Epilepsy Center, Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital Freiburg,

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Eckart Altenm€uller

University of Music, Drama and Media, Institute of Music Physiology and

Musicians’ Medicine, Hannover, Germany

Hansj€org Ba¨zner

Department of Neurology, Klinikum Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

Christian Blahak

Department of Neurology, Universita¨tsmedizin Mannheim, University of

Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany

Department of Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for

Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Stanley Finger

Department of Psychology, Washington University, St Louis, MO, USA

Christian Foerch

Department of Neurology, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Antonia Francesca Franchini

Department of Clinical Science and Community Health, University of Milan,

Milano, Italy

Amy B Graziano

Division of Music History, Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music, Chapman

University, Orange, CA, USA

Samuel H Greenblatt

Department of Neurosurgery, Alpert Medical School of Brown University,

Providence, RI, USA

Michael G Hennerici

Department of Neurology, Universita¨tsmedizin Mannheim, University of

Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany

Julene K Johnson

Institute for Health & Aging, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

v

Marjorie Perlman Lorch

Applied Linguistics and Communication, School of Social Sciences, History, andPhilosophy, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

Michele Augusto Riva

Research Centre on History of Biomedical Thought, Centro Studi sulla Storia delPensiero Biomedico (CESPEB), University of Milano Bicocca, Monza, ItalyVittorio Alessandro Sironi

Research Centre on History of Biomedical Thought, Centro Studi sulla Storia delPensiero Biomedico (CESPEB), University of Milano Bicocca, Monza, ItalyReinhard Steinberg

Josef-Lutz-Weg 2, M€unchen, Germany

This is the first of two volumes dealing with music, neurology, and the basic

neuro-sciences It follows two volumes on the fine arts (one exploring historical dimensions

and the other looking at newer developments) and two on literature (one on historical

and literary connections, and one on neurological and psychiatric disorders) These

four earlier volumes appeared inProgress in Brain Research in 2013 (vols 203–206)

and were assembled by two of the three current editors (Stanley Finger and Franc¸ois

Boller) working with others specializing in these fields (Dahlia Zaidel and Julien

Bogousslavsky on the fine arts, and Anne Stiles on literature) Neurologist–

musicologist Eckart Altenm€uller is our specialist member of the editorial team for

the two music tomes that complete this six-volume series

History is the common theme permeating all of the contributions to this volume,

whereas its companion volume provides some history but focuses more on new

de-velopments and insights related to music, the brain and the nerves This organization

parallels how the two fine arts books were assembled In contrast, all of the chapters

in the two literature volumes in one way or another take us back in time

Although there have been quite a few newer books dealing with music and the

nervous system, these compilations are not as historically oriented as the present

vol-ume, although most do have introductory chapters or parts of chapters that provide

some historical material, particularly when famous musicians and their possible

neu-rological disorders are mentioned Moreover, by being devoted solely to music and

the nervous system, this volume and its companion piece also differ from those

neu-rology and neuroscience books that deal with painting, literature, and music under a

single cover, and therefore are more general and less focused, as well as from books

dealing with famous musicians and all of medicine

Thus, this volume has special and even unique features Nevertheless, it goes

without saying that, even with this focus, it is impossible to come forth with a volume

that deals with music and all facets of the basic and applied neurosciences, especially

when also adding in history The literature is simply too vast and the connections are

too numerous The best that anyone or a team can do is to offer a sampling of the

different ways in which music and these specialized scientific and medical fields

can be brought together, with the hope that such an endeavor will stimulate others

to think about additional connections that would shed even more light on several

disciplines

With these thoughts in mind, we have chosen to open this volume with two

chap-ters from the history of the neurosciences One deals with how Franz Joseph Gall and

the phrenologists who followed him early in the nineteenth century approached

music—boldly trying to localize a “faculty” for this function in the front of the

cerebrum based on human and lower animal skull features The other examines

how music, neurology, and psychology were coming together somewhat later in

the nineteenth century

xv

The second section of this volume deals with music and aphasia, but not in famousmusicians who suffered strokes These chapters are largely concerned with childrenliving during the nineteenth century, who attracted the attention of British neurolo-gist John Hughlings Jackson and other medical practitioners because they had verylimited speech yet were able to sing Historians have largely overlooked these casesuntil now, and they make for fascinating reading.

Our third section, although again only brief, focuses on a frightening belief,especially common late in the 1700s and into the 1800s, namely that some types

of music can be pathological Most notably, some writers and musicians believedthat the vibrations from the glass armonica, a musical instrument invented byBenjamin Franklin in the mid-1700s, could fray nerves and some drive peopleinsane! As will be seen, “susceptible” populations at this moment in time meantindividuals supposedly having weak nervous systems, often women living in urbansettings

The fourth section is by far the longest, and it is here that our authors examinefamous musicians with neurological and psychiatric disorders, discussing how theywere treated and how their afflictions affected their compositions and/or playing.The sampling of musicians and their illnesses includes, but is not limited to: RobertSchumann, whose insanity has been attributed to syphilis; Paul Wittgenstein, an am-putee who suffered from phantom limb syndrome; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who,contrary to popular belief, probably did not have Gilles de la Tourette syndrome; andFre´de´ric Chopin, whose problems are still a source of great controversy and, as ourauthor opines, should make us think carefully and perhaps differently about all ret-rospective diagnoses

The idea that opera can tell us a lot about what nonphysicians (i.e., librettists)might have been thinking in the past, and about what general audiences were beingtold about certain neurological and psychiatric disorders, is the subject of our lastsection The first chapter here examines somnambulism (sleepwalking) as portrayed

in the operas of Verdi and Bellini, the former based on Shakespeare’sMacbeth andthe latter being more representative of the Romantic Era in outlook The second islargely concerned with madness in opera, a subject that has always captured the pop-ular imagination

As with the other volumes in this series on neurology/neuroscience and the arts,

we hope that this collection of scholarly papers will show readers some of the manyways in which the basic neurosciences, neurology, and the arts can come together toreveal more about brain functions, the arts and humanities, and, for that matter, cer-tain features of everyday life Ideally, the material covered in this volume will alsoserve as a fitting prelude to our second music volume, which will have a greater focus

on newer ideas and discoveries, and will also examine music therapies then and now

Eckart Altenm€ullerStanley FingerFranc¸ois Boller

xvi Preface

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READINGS

Bogousslavsky, J., Boller, F (Eds.), 2005 Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists Karger,

Basel

Bogousslavsky, J., Hennerici, M.G (Eds.), 2007 Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists—

Part 2 Karger, Basel

Bogousslavsky, J., Hennerici, M.G., Ba¨zner, H., Bassetti, C (Eds.), 2010 Neurological

Disorders in Famous Artists—Part 3 Karger, Basel

Critchley, M., Hensen, R.A (Eds.), 1977 Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of

Music Heinemann Medical, London

Horden, P., 2000 Music as Mwedicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity

Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Aldershot, UK

Kennaway, J., 2012 Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease

Ashgate Publishing Limited, Farnham, UK

Neumayr, A., 1994–1997 Music & Medicine (3 vols.) D.J Parent, trans Medi-Ed Press,

Bloomington, IL

Rose, F.C (Ed.), 2004 Neurology of the Arts Imperial College Press, London

Rose, F.C (Ed.), 2010 Neurology of Music Imperial College Press, London

Sacks, O., 2007 Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain Alfred A Knopf, New York

Zeitler, W.W., 2013 The Glass Armonica: The Music of Madness Music Arcana, San

Bernardino, CA

Franz Joseph Gall and

music: the faculty and

Paul Eling*,1

, Stanley Finger†, Harry Whitaker{

*Department of Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition

and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

† Department of Psychology, Washington University, St Louis, MO, USA

{Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA

1 Corresponding author: Tel.:+0031-24-3612557, e-mail address: p.eling@donders.ru.nl

Abstract

The traditional story maintains that Franz Joseph Gall’s (1758–1828) scientific program began

with his observations of schoolmates with bulging eyes and good verbal memories But his

search to understand human nature, in particular individual differences in capacities, passions,

and tendencies, can also be traced to other important observations, one being of a young girl

with an exceptional talent for music Rejecting contemporary notions of cognition, Gall

con-cluded that behavior results from the interaction of a limited set of basic faculties, each with its

own processes for perception and memory, each with its own territory in both cerebral or

cerebellar cortices Gall identified 27 faculties, one being the sense of tone relations or music

The description of the latter is identical in both hisAnatomie et Physiologie and Sur les

Fonc-tions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties, where he provided positive and

neg-ative evidences and discussed findings from humans and lower animals, for the faculty The

localization of the cortical faculty for talented musicians, he explained, is demonstrated by a

“bump” on each side of the skull just above the angle of the eye; hence, the lower forehead of

musicians is broader or squarer than in other individuals Additionally, differences between

singing and nonsinging birds also correlate with cranial features Gall even brought age, racial,

and national differences into the picture What he wrote about music reveals much about his

science and creative thinking

Keywords

Gall (Franz Joseph), Spurzheim (Johann), organology, craniology, phrenology, music faculty,

musicians, amusia, cortical localization of function, physiognomy

Writing about the history of the discovery of the organ for music, Franz Joseph Gall

(1758–1828;Fig 1) informs his readers: “There was shown to me a young girl,

named Bianchi, aged about 5 years, and I was asked to decide what was the most

Progress in Brain Research, Volume 216, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2014.11.001

remarkable talent of this child.”1He then states, “The idea had not yet presented itself

to my mind, that the talent for music could be recognized by the form of the head.”What he learned about this girl (date not given, but likely in the 1790s) is notable

To quote,

This child repeated all that she had heard sung or executed on the piano; sheretained by heart whole concertos, which she had heard at most twice Her par-ents assured me that she was endowed, with this astonishing faculty for musiconly What could I conclude from this declaration? That there exists a well markeddifference between memory for music, and the other species of memory which

I knew at that period; and that each species of memory must have its distinctorgan

Gall (1835, vol 5, p 63)

He continues with these even more overlooked words:

From that moment I devoted myself to more connected researches into the ent species of memory In very little time I became acquainted with a considerablenumber of persons, who had an excellent memory for certain objects, and a very

differ-FIGURE 1

Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828)

From the Collection BIU Sante´ Me´decine.

1 We have unsuccessfully tried to trace this young girl Antonia Bianchi was a famous opera singer, born

in 1800 in Como, Italy We believe that the 5-year-old girl mentioned by Gall had to be born before this time, i.e., around 1790, since he states that she stimulated him to develop his organology more system- atically, leading to his public lectures from 1796 onward, as described in his letter to von Retzer in 1798.

feeble memory for others These observations led me to augment the number of my

denominations for memory, and I admitted a peculiar memory for tones

Gall (1835, vol 5, p 63)What Gall wrote about Bianchi, and indeed his entire section on the “Faculty of

Perceiving the Relation of Tones, Talent for Music (Ton-sinn),” is the same in his

two most famous works These are his landmarks:Anatomie et Physiologie du

Sys-te`me Nerveux en Ge´ne´ral et du Cerveau en Particulier ., written in part with his

assistant, Johann Spurzheim, and his later, smaller and less expensiveSur les

Fonc-tions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties, which was translated by

Winslow Lewis in 1835 and from which the quotations presented above were taken

(Because we found Lewis’ English translation to be consistent with the French text,

we will continue to cite it when quoting Gall on the music faculty, rather than

translating anew)

This revelation about a specific talent for music clearly energized Gall, altered his

thinking, and affected the course of his research program Based on his own words,

the idea of distinct faculties located in specialized cortical areas seems to have been

present in Gall’s mind, in at least nascent form, prior to Bianchi At this time, while

his ideas about the organization of the mind were still taking shape, he apparently

realized that he had another basic faculty to consider, another reason for collecting

special or unusual cases, and another reason to think differently about memory

These were extremely important developments that shaped his public theorizing

about brain and behavior (i.e., hisorganologie also termed his Scha¨dellehre or

cra-niology; for more on Gall’s terminology, seeClarke and Jacyna, 1987, pp 222–223;

formal system of conjectures, methods, and (in his mind) facts backed by empirical

evidence

The two aforementioned quotations also reveal that the starting point for Gall’s

theorizing stemmed from his interest in individual differences Bianchi, for one,

revealed that some individuals possess specific talents that others do not have and

that a person can be exceptional at one thing, such as music, while being quite

or-dinary at others Clearly, Gall concluded that the human mind is not a general faculty

or even made of a few components such as common sense, fantasy, imagination,

judgment, and memory On the contrary, there are various specific faculties, each

with its own memory function Additionally, Gall was becoming even more certain

that talent is not primarily a matter of learning Because Bianchi never studied music

and was just a child, her unique talent must be innate, although capable of being

shaped to some extent by experience

All of this was of great significance to Gall, whose overriding passion was to

comprehend what might be called human nature He trained and practiced as a

phy-sician, and he was an exceptionally good anatomist (a fact recognized by even the

staunchest opponents of his organology) But what he wanted most was to understand

why human beings behave as they do and especially why they tend to act

differently—an observation suggesting to him that people do not possess perfectly

5 Gall and music

similar brains This imposing challenge was his calling, and it, more than his anatomical demonstrations or even cranioscopy, was his obsession.

neuro-In this contribution, we shall focus on Gall’s views about a basic faculty for musicwith its associated cranial bump In order to approach this largely neglected topic in ameaningful way, we shall briefly describe Gall’s formative years and training, andwhy he rejected traditional views of the mind We shall then turn to how he devel-oped his “science,” examining his research strategies and methodologies With this

as background, we shall then turn more specifically to music, looking in detail atwhat he wrote about a cortical organ for music, venturing beyond the influential casejust mentioned In closing, mention will be made of Gall’s legacy, including his be-lief that one could identify a highly developed cortical area that might distinguishtalented musicians from their less talented cousins

1 A BRIEF SUMMARY OF GALL’S LIFE

Much has been written about Gall and the features of his organology, more monly referred to as his “phrenology,” a term he, however, did not use.2,3He wasborn on March 9, 1758, in Tiefenbronn, a small village in the Grand Duchy of Baden.His father was a merchant of Italian extraction (originally, Gallo), who wanted hisson to enter the priesthood The boy, however, was more interested in the naturalworld than the spiritual world and after some basic schooling began his medical stud-ies in the French city of Strasbourg, where he married his first wife

com-In 1781, he moved to Vienna, where he received his Doctor of Medicine degree 4years later Gall then established a private practice there and in 1791 published twochapters of a book on diseases that he never finished (Gall, 1791) Three years later,Anton von St€orck (1731–1803), physician to Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780),recommended Gall to be his successor Stating that he was not one for court life, Gall,who was doing very well, rejected the offer and suggested another physician, JosephFreiherr von Stifft (1760–1836), as more suited for the position—a recommendationthat he would soon regret

“Documents do exist which show that Gall was working on the elaboration of hisdoctrine on the brain at least since 1792” (Ackerknecht and Vallois, 1956, p 8)

Hollander (1901a, p 4), one of Gall’s biographers, states that Gall began announcingand lecturing on his new brain physiology in 1796 Other historians cite 1798 as thedate of an important published letter to Joseph Friedrich von Retzer (1754–1824) onthe functions of the brain (Gall, 1798) and as the beginning of Gall’s craniological

2 For more on Gall and his system, see below and, for example, Lewes (1871) , Hollander (1901a,b, 1909) , Temkin (1947) , Ackerknecht and Vallois (1956) , Jefferson (1960) , Clarke and Jacyna (1987) , Young (1970) , Lesky (1979) , Zola-Morgan (1995) , Finger (2000) , and Van Wyhe (2004)

3 “Phrenology” was Spurzheim’s preferred term, although he did not coin it ( Clarke and Jacyna, 1987 ,

pp 222–223) Based on the Greek word phrene, for mind, it literally means discourse on, or study of, the mind, which Spurzheim held included the relationship between the mind and the body, more spe- cifically the brain.

project (seeAckerknecht and Vallois, 1956, p 8; Jefferson, 1960, p 98) Making the

dating of when Gall first began to present his ideas publically even more complex,

some of those present at his lectures took and shared notes, helping to spread the

word well before he published his doctrine

In December 1801, Dr Stifft (now “his medical majesty”) advised Emperor

Francis II (1768–1835) to prohibit Gall from publicly lecturing, because it promoted

dangerous materialism Stifft and the emperor were supported by the conservative

Roman Catholic clergy.4The government responded with a “general regulation” that

prohibited all private lectures without special permission (Capen, 1881; also see

Gall, 1835, vol 1, p 19) Gall never applied for this permission, well aware of where

Francis I stood on the issue, the strength of his opponents, and who was being

tar-geted Thus, Gall’s public lecturing ended, at least in Vienna

In 1805, Gall embarked with his recently acquired assistant, Johann Spurzheim

(1776–1832;Fig 2),5on a lecture and fact-finding tour of Germany, Switzerland,

Holland, and Denmark (Van Wyhe, 2002) Their travels involved stops at prisons,

asylums, universities, and primary schools Gall met kings, queens, and other

royal-ties, and was frequently treated as a great celebrity, even though he had not published

anything on his new system other than the letter to Baron von Retzer Spurzheim

informs us that Gall had started on his anatomical studies of the nervous system prior

to this time but after 1800.6

Gall and Spurzheim entered Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769–1821) Paris during the

fall of 1807, where there was freedom of the press and Gall could lecture without

censorship He thought he would spend 1 year there but stayed for his remaining

21 years Anxious to be recognized as a great scientist with a world-class affiliation,

Gall, who was fluent in French, quickly submitted a memoire, coauthored by

Spurzheim, to theAcade´mie des Sciences in 1808, in which he presented his

exten-sive anatomical findings and discoveries, based on dissecting the brain from below

and following fiber tracts centrally (Gall and Spurzheim, 1809) Stating that the

Aca-de´mie des Sciences was prepared to deal only with the physical sciences, but

prob-ably also because of its bias against Gall’s materialism, support for other views of the

brain (as a gland), and Napoleon’s xenophobia, his application for membership was

rebuffed Later, when offered a chance to return to Vienna, he turned it down.7

While continuing to build a flourishing private practice, he and Spurzheim

embarked on an ambitious project in French dealing with organology, theirAnatomie

4

There were also other charges facing him, one being that what he was teaching was particularly

se-ductive to the impressionable female mind Gall responded that he only knew of four young ladies who

had attended his lectures, all chaperoned by their mothers.

5

Johann Spurzheim was born in Germany’s Mosel Valley, where his father was a farmer, and began as a

theology student before turning to medicine He first met Gall during one of his lectures in 1800 Prior

to this time, a student named Niklas assisted Gall with his dissections.

6 A concise list of Gall’s many discoveries and insights about the gray matter and white matter, the fiber

tracts, and the cerebral and cerebellar cortices can be found in Hollander (1909, pp 5–7) For a newer

discussion of his anatomy, see Rawlings and Rossitch (1994)

7

The invite was due to Prince Klemens Von Metternich (1773–1859), the Austrian ambassador to

France, who had known Gall in Vienna and influenced Francis II to invite him back in 1814.

7

1 A brief summary of gall’s life

et Physiologie, which was published in four folio volumes between 1810 and 1819with a separate folio atlas (dated 1810) containing 100 copperplate engravings (Gall

dated 1810 and 1812, but left Gall in France for England and Scotland in 1813, whilethe second volume was being prepared Only Gall’s name appears on the 1818 and

1819 volumes Realizing the price of these monumental works greatly limited salesand dissemination, Gall came forth with a slightly adapted set of six volumes (with-out an atlas),Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties,which appeared between 1822 and 1825 (Gall, 1822–1825) These volumes were hislast major publications

Gall’s anatomy continued to be admired during his Paris years, and his large tice was lucrative and included at least 10 ambassadors Nevertheless, his craniolo-gical ideas and other notions about brain and mind generated considerable andsometimes heated controversy Venerated by some and severely criticized as a

prac-FIGURE 2

Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832)

Portrait from the Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 1832 Reproduced with permission from the Whipple

Library, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.

charlatan or quack by others, Gall’s health began to deteriorate about 18268; he

suf-fered a paralytic stroke 2 years later and died on August 22, 1828, in his villa at

Montrouge (near Paris) at age 71 His cranium was added to his own collection of

skulls,9which was acquired byMuse´e National d’Histoire Naturelle, and his body

was laid to rest in the famed Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery

2 ABSTRACT AND NEWER FACULTIES

Gall was not a philosopher: he was not specifically trained in classical theories of the

soul or the mind He had a great interest in nature, both plants and animals He

stud-ied, collected, and dissected animals; he could talk in great detail about their bodily

structures and habits; and he has even been regarded as a pioneer in ethology,

com-parative biology, and animal psychology (Lesky, 1979) Lesky also argued that Gall

also played an important role in the development of biologically oriented psychiatry

many years before German neurologist and psychiatrist Wilhelm Griesinger

(1817–1868)

Aware of behavioral differences between species, as well as within a species,

such as between males and females, it seemed obvious to Gall that these notable

dif-ferences must be associated with structural features, meaning bodily characteristics

Yet he felt he could not accept a theory of the mind and brain based on the general

faculties of perception, judgment, and memory when trying to explain these

differ-ences in behavior Thus, he rejected the time-honored view traceable to the early

Greek philosophers, which, when associated with the cell-like ventricles of the brain,

is sometimes referred to as “cell theory” (seeWhitaker, 2007)

More specifically, Gall repeatedly indicates that the adherents of this theory are

involved withabstract notions that cannot explain naturally occurring phenomena

Humans and animals can, of course, perceive and remember, but they perceive and

remember concrete features To perceive color, for example, we humans must be

able to perceive specific elements in the light reaching our eyes, whereas to perceive

tones or words, we have to be able to perceive specific vibrational patterns, an

eighteenth-century scientific view directly linked with Newton The faculties of

per-ception and memory are not abstract and independent of the features for which they

are designed; they are specifically constructed for these specific faculties Perception

and memory are not basic qualities or faculties; they are secondary attributes

belong-ing to fundamental faculties

8 A small tumor would be found on his cerebellum This is interesting because Gall had a reputation for

being a womanizer and it was here that he had located the organ for amativeness.

9 Gall’s Paris collection contained 354 skulls, casts of skulls, and brains, along with 253 anatomical

preparations This was his second collection, an earlier one having been left in Vienna It was not,

how-ever, the largest skull collection at the time (see Hollander (1901a,b , p 388) As can be imagined,

Gall’s own skull was extensively analyzed by both admirers and critics of his system (see

Ackerknecht and Vallois, 1956 , pp 61–72).

9

2 Abstract and newer faculties

From these premises, Gall assumed that all animals, including human beings,have specific organs serving the functions reflected in the behavioral repertoire of

a species He accepted the eighteenth-century views of la grande chaine d’etre,the great chain of being, and that there is unity in nature and an indivisible structuralplan that is perfected by degrees as one progresses from lower to higher organisms(Lesky, 1970; Lovejoy, 1960) This was a static notion, with the species and evenraces (Gall would use the term “nations”) being immutable—Darwinian evolutionwas still decades away

With the eyes of a naturalist and the mindset of a physiologist, Gall was vinced that each faculty must be responsible for different behaviors Yet, although

con-a species possesses con-a given set of fcon-aculties, Gcon-all con-also knew thcon-at individucon-al members

of that species, even those of the same gender, could differ behaviorally from oneanother This could be explained, he maintained, by assuming that the same facultiescan differ in “proportion” from one person or type of animal to another and therebyvary in level of activity Clearly, there is no perfect moral or intellectual equality on abiological or behavioral level Moreover, training and education could affect howone might use the various innate faculties (Gall did not use the word “function” here;for a detailed analysis of Gall’s psychophysiological concept of function, see

Hoff, 1992)

Gall was not the extreme materialist he is often portrayed to be (Temkin, 1947)

He repeatedly mentions God (or the Creator) in his writings and argues that the tical organs are merely the instruments necessary for specific tasks He even discov-ered (a word Gall uses when describing his faculties) a faculty for God and religion.HistorianTemkin (1947, pp 300–301)states that, although Gall shunned discussions

cor-on the immortality of the soul and was not trying to support intelligent design, heshould rightfully be considered a deist.10To this, Lesky (1979, p 27) added thatGall’s views fit into a scientific stream of natural history investigations, character-ized as physicotheology or natural theology, a movement that originated withWilliam Derham.11

Still, one reason some people have considered Gall an ardent materialist is hisclaim that there is no sharp distinction between man and lower animals In addition

to the 19 faculties he claimed that all animals possessed, he stated that people have

8 additional faculties serving distinctly human higher functions But these are notprincipally different from the other faculties, he informs his readers (Lesky,

1970) Another argument centers on the notion of free will, a concept that has longplayed an important role in religious discussions (Temkin, 1947) Gall did not in-clude a faculty of free will, and his opponents argued that his conceptual schema left

10 Deism is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a creator, accompanied with the rejection of revelation and authority as sources of religious knowledge Deism gained prominence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the Age of Enlightenment—especially in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.

11 William Derham (1657–1735) was an English clergyman and natural philosopher He wrote the Artificial Clockmaker in 1696 and Physico-Theology in 1713.

no place for it Man, they contended, is not the slave of the motives and tendencies of

his faculties; humans are endowed with free will to overcome these primal

tendencies

As will be seen, Gall would localize the physical organs for these faculties in the

gray matter in the rostral brain, the cerebral and cerebellar cortices He was, in fact,

the first to distinguish systematically between the gray matter as the end points of

nerves and the white matter The white matter, in his view, represented connecting

fiber pathways, and he wrote about divergent fibers (les filets sortants) and

conver-gent fibers (les filets rentrants) These connections link the periphery and brain

stem to the cortical organs, and they allow the cortical organs to work in a

unified way

He arrived at this new conceptualization of the nervous system by comparing

lower and higher animals, starting from the spinal cord.12As noted, this was also

the way he dissected the human body, working upward to the brain, all the while

assuming that the grand plan has to be similar in all species (Lesky, 1970) Gall,

it is worth noting, was also instrumental in determining the anatomy of many of

the cranial nerves Further, he knew that the different senses had their own pathways

and could see that they too had distinct territories after they entered the brain Hence,

Gall had multiple anatomical reasons for assuming that the faculties of mind could be

associated with distinct cortical organs, in addition to the increasing size of the

ce-rebral hemispheres, especially those in the front of the brain, which anyone could

easily see increased in size as one climbed nature’s ladder from lower organisms

to the most intellectual and moral of all God’s creatures, human beings

But are there external markers for the different organs? Here, Gall made an

as-sumption, perhaps based solely on his anatomy, perhaps also influenced by what the

physiognomists, including Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), were then claiming

in less precise ways He reasoned that the cortical organs are present before the skull

finishes growing over them and that their size can shape the morphology of the

cra-nium In other words, a highly developed organ, being large, would produce some

sort of telltale bump on the skull that could be correlated with specific behaviors,

whereas a poorly developed organ would have no such bump or perhaps even a

de-pression He first stated this in the aforementioned 1798 letter to von Retzer:

From the genesis of the bones of the skull from infancy to the greatest age, the

shape of the exterior surface of the skull is determined by the shape of the brain;

therefore so far as the outer surface of the skull and the inner coincide, and no

12 Gall’s concept of cortical localization of function really was new No one else had been as detailed,

inclusive, and systematic as him, and although Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) had some very good

insights in the mid-1700s, especially about the motor cortex, what he had concluded from his analyses

of clinical cases was virtually unknown and had no impact at this time ( Swedenborg, 1740–1741, 1745,

1882/1887, 1940 ; also see Akert and Hammond, 1962; Finger, 2000 , pp 119–121; Ramstr €om, 1910;

Toksvig, 1948 ).

11

2 Abstract and newer faculties

exception is made for the usual contours, particular aptitudes and tendencies can

be concluded

SeeVan Wyhe (2004, p 17)Remarkably, Gall never described the organs on the cortical surface itself Heseemed content to assume that the exterior of the skull is a very faithful indicator

of the location and status of the organs comprising his system of faculties, give ortake some organs located in much harder to assess positions (i.e., not pressing onthe skull itself ) As for the overall size of the skull, Gall did not deny that it mightgive a clue as to mental power, but, in his opinion, it will not indicate “the direction inwhich that power will be manifest: whether in the direction of the intellect, the highersentiments, or animal passion” (Hollander, 1909, p 26)

Let us now return to Bianchi to see how this talented 5-year-old girl helped Gall

to develop his system and to see how prototypical her case was to Gall, as he sidered the various kinds of evidence to include when finalizing his new and in manyways revolutionary thoughts about where the various faculties of mind should belocated

con-3 METHODOLOGY AND CORTICAL LOCALIZATION

Gall tells us that the seeds for his theory of discrete cortical functions were plantedwhen he was just 9 years old, after casually observing that some of his schoolmates,who were far better at learning languages than he was, had bulging oxlike eyes Thisobservation, however, did not seem to register fully on him at that time, but it didafter he later recognized the same thing among his classmates while attending uni-versity Gall now inferred that verbal memory might be localized behind the eyes,pushing them out when highly developed In his words, “I could not believe, thatthe union of the two circumstances which had struck me on these different occasionswas solely the result of accident I began to suspect that there must exist a connec-tion between this conformation of the eyes, and the faculty of learning by heart”(Gall, 1835, vol 1, pp 58–59)

Working from this premise, he quickly reasoned that, if one function could belocalized by external markers, so could others To quote,

Proceeding from reflection to reflection, and from observation to observation, itoccurred to me that, if memory were made evident by external signs, it might be solikewise with other talents or intellectual faculties From this time all the individ-uals who were distinguished by any quality or faculty, became the object of myspecial attention, and of systematic study as to the form of the head

Gall (1835, vol 1, p 59)

It is possible that Bianchi, the musical prodigy, triggered Gall to think about hischildhood observations, since, as we have seen, he did not even mention her skullwhen describing her unique talent Yet it also seems possible that she entered the

picture at about this time, being one of those cases that “became the object of my

special attention.” After all, her case helped to convince him that there are distinct

forms of memory, not just a single faculty for memory, and that tone relationships or

music would henceforth have to be treated as one of the basic faculties

In either case, it is easy to imagine Gall’s excitement at this juncture, realizing that

some people are good in remembering words or music, while others excel in finding

their ways around town or with numbers and dates, whereas no one seemed to possess

all of these different kinds of superior memory talents Moreover, he was now

con-vinced that carefully studying crania would allow him to map the organs of these and

other higher functions of the brain, each, he assumed, with its own memory.13

It must be remarked that Gall was now going well beyond what the

physiogno-mists had been claiming The latter were trying to correlate facial and perhaps other

body features with personality traits, but were not linking their findings to the brain

Gall, in contrast, was interested in discovering the fundamental faculties of mindand

was asking how they might be related to brain physiology In this regard, Gall was

setting forth both as a psychologist or behavioral scientist and as an anatomist and

physiologist

But how many fundamental organs does a human being have? Gall admitted that

it could be difficult to determine whether a given behavior is the result of a

well-developed basic faculty or whether it results from a combination of faculties In

his view, empirical research was the only way to determine the number It was

crit-ical to collect all sorts of observations that might suggest a fundamental faculty, and

this meant studying how organisms survive and reproduce, interact, communicate,

and the like

The Bianchi example reflects how Gall now approached his work and why his

favorite method was observation First and foremost, he would look for individuals

with specific talents and then determine if they are independent of other behaviors

But going beyond what he tells us about Bianchi, he would look for special skull

markers (“bumps”) characterizing the people or animals possessing these specific

talents or propensities He was also open to correlating skulls and behavior in the

opposite way, that is, finding people with unusual skulls and then observing their

strengths and deficiencies

Thus, Gall did things like inviting groups of ordinary people for sessions at his

house After making them comfortable, he asked them to tell him what they thought

was so special about another person they knew In this way, he tried to determine

what people were implicitly thinking as fundamental characteristics while also

estab-lishing a “wish list” of people to study Another method was to go to places where he

could observe people who were exceptionally good or deficient in a given domain,

13 It can be argued that some of these ideas have antecedents in the writings of Swiss naturalist Charles

Bonnet (1720–1793) and philosopher Johan Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) ( Lesky, 1970 ).

A principled difference between the psychologies of Gall and some of his predecessors is that he

be-lieved that faculties are inborn, opposing the notion that all knowledge comes through the senses (also

see Temkin, 1947 ).

13

3 Methodology and cortical localization

the latter to obtain negative evidence or counterproofs to support his thinking based

on positive instances This meant visiting mental asylums, as well as universities andprisons To aid in these investigations, and to serve as a reference library, he madecasts of skulls and collected skulls of people with exceptional talents or markedlydeficient in a talent, filling his workplace with hundreds of human and animal spec-imens and, when possible, known information about each (Ackerknecht and Vallois,1956; Hollander, 1901a)

With regard to animals, Gall also kept his eyes open for unusual pets He wanted

to learn about unusual animals, such as a dog that would eat only “stolen” food or alost dog able to find its way home from a distant place He would then do what he wasdoing with people; that is, look at the cranial features of these animals and comparethem to the skulls of nonexceptional or deficient animals of the same species Hewould also do gender and cross-species comparisons, hoping to unravel some of na-ture’s deepest secrets

It is wrong to think that Gall had absolutely no interest in neurological cases orexperimental work with animals This idea might have stemmed from his firm con-viction that “accidents of nature” cannot be duplicated, from the fact that even focalbrain damage in a laboratory study will inevitably be associated with a host of sec-ondary effects (e.g., infections) that can make the findings difficult if not impossible

to interpret, and from what he considered horribly cruel treatment of animals Heknew, for example, that patients with severe head wounds really are not testable rightafter injury and that many will soon die, with the survivors disappearing before goodassessments could be procured This understanding of brain lesions formed a part ofGall’s response to Pierre Flourens’ (1794–1867) attacks on his organology.Still, he did present some clinical cases of brain damage in his books (e.g., whendiscussing memory for words) Importantly, “mutilations” never guided his thinking,which was primarily based on skull features; instead, they were chosen selectively tosupport a conclusion Equally importantly, what he presented clinically was skewed

by the fact that he did not hesitate to throw out or explain away challenging or confirmatory cases.14Indeed, the same could be said about how he treated all of hisfindings He would be assailed by a growing number of scientists for presenting onlysupportive (positive and negative) data, this being poor science even in his day.Among Gall’s other methods, we would be remiss if we did not include his neu-roanatomical research, which involved tracing fibers, such as those from the eye, upthrough the brain Developmental correlations might also be mentioned in thiscontext

non-As noted, Gall’s search for cortical organs resulted in a list of 27 faculties, 19 ofwhich were common among men and animals, with the remaining 8 being specific tohumans Their numbering is the same in both of his major writings, and these

14 Gall gave many reasons for excluding certain findings, such as speculating that there might be brain disease, alluding to missing parts of a specimen, pointing to training as opposed to innate talent, and arguing that other cortical organs working in concert could be mistaken for the functions of the one in question.

faculties are presented inTable 1 Notably, his one-time assistant, Spurzheim,

in-cluded more faculties in his popular phrenology books, while eliminating the

“bad” faculties and classifying them differently Gall, for his part, became highly

critical of Spurzheim, but never maintained that he had a final list, or full knowledge

of the anatomy, when he presented and defended his own 27 faculties

Table 1 Faculties as indicated in the index of the English translation of Gall’s

Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de ses Parties (for some

faculties, the German name was also given)

I Instinct of generation, of reproduction; instinct of propagation, etc

II Love of offspring

III Attachment, friendship, history of its discovery

IV Instinct of self-defense, disposition to quarrel, courage (Muth, Raufsinn)

V Carnivorous instinct; disposition to murder (Wurgsinn)

VI Cunning, trick, tact (List, Schlauheit, Kluheit)

VII Sense of property, instinct of providing, covetousness, propensity to steal

(Eigenthumssinn, Hang zu Stehlen)

VIII Pride, hauteur, loftiness, elevation (Stolz, Hochmdh, Herschsucht)

IX Vanity, ambition, love of glory (Eitelkeit, Ruhmsucht, Ehrgeitz)

X Cautiousness, foresight (Behutsamkeit, Vorsicht, Vorsichtigkeit)

XI Memory of things, memory of facts, sense of things, educability, perfectibility

(Sachgeda¨chtniss, Erziehungs-fa¨higkeit)

XII Sense of locality, sense of the relations of space (Ortsinn, Raumsinn)

XIII The faculty of distinguishing and recollecting persons (Personen-sinn)

XIV Faculty of attending to and distinguishing words; recollection of words, or verbal

memory (Wort-geda¨chtniss)

XV Faculty of spoken language; talent of philology, etc (Sprach-Forschungs-sinn)

XVI Faculty of distinguishing the relation of colors; talent for painting (Farben-sinn)

XVII Faculty of perceiving the relation of tones, talent for music (Ton-sinn)

XVIII Faculty of the relations of numbers

XIX Faculty of constructiveness (Kunst-sinn, Bau-sinn)

XX Comparative sagacity, aptitude for drawing comparisons (Vergleichender Scharf-sinn)

XXI Metaphysical depth of thought; aptitude for drawing conclusions (Metaphysischer

Tief-sinn)

XXII Wit (Witz)

XXIII Talent for poetry (Dichter Geist)

XXIV Goodness, benevolence, gentleness, compassion, sensibility, moral sense,

conscience (Gutmuthigkeit, Mitleiden, Moralischer-sinn, Gewissen)

XXV Faculty of imitation, mimicry

XXVI God and religion

XXVII Firmness, constancy, perseverance, obstinacy

15

3 Methodology and cortical localization

In closing this section, we should not forget that Gall’s main focus was very much

on the components of human nature, that is, discovering and delineating the mental qualities that determine our behavior Localization was secondary, a logicaloutgrowth of his primary quest He even tells us that his anatomical research grew out

funda-of his physiological or psychological ideas, writing:

The knowledge of the functions has always preceded that of the parts It is, also, as

I have said elsewhere, without the aid of the anatomy of the brain, that I have madeall my physiological discoveries; and these discoveries might have existed forages, without their agreement with the organization having been detected

Gall (1835, vol 2, pp 25–26)

In a very real way, Gall used this anatomy largely to confirm and extend his behavioraldiscoveries Small wonder that, when describing the individual cortical organs, includ-ing music, he first discussed the faculty and the evidence for it before turning to what

he believed was the probable cortical location for each of his chosen faculties.15

4 THE “FACULTY OF PERCEIVING THE RELATIONS OF TONES, TALENT FOR MUSIC”

Gall numbered his music faculty XVII and labeled it with the words we have chosen

to head this section We shall now work through what he wrote in both hisAnatomie

et Physiologie and Sur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de sesParties, again using Lewis’ translation (Gall, 1835, vol 5, pp 59–80) Our plan is

to follow Gall’s line of reasoning, i.e., to follow his thoughts from the start to theconclusion of his section on this faculty, presenting quotations to provide a betterfeel for the color and depth of his writing, and just how he was expressing himself.Gall opens the discussion by asking, “Why seek in the brain an organ for music?”

He then immediately states, “To be apt for music, nothing is requisite but an ear”(p 59) Here, he is alluding to a position he had attacked in his first volume, whendiscussing the five senses, wanting to lay a popular but ridiculous notion to rest Gallargues that having a good ear is by no means the basis of a talent for music There areanimals with finer ears than we have, and yet they do not show the slightest aptitudefor music Further, there are no differences in hearing between birds that sing and

15

It is noteworthy that Gall liked to number the various faculties on his skulls and diagrams without showing hard and fast boundaries of the territories As put by Young (1970, p 28) , “Gall was content to specify the areas and to admit freely that he neither knew the functions of all the cerebral parts nor the precise limits of those parts who function he had specified.” Spurzheim, in contrast, was more inclined

to show solid lines for the boundaries, which suggested he knew more about the boundaries, something Gall felt could not be supported It should also be remembered that both men found the brain regions behind the frontal sinuses to be a challenge, since they do not press upon the skull Hence, neither man could write in any detail about localizing specific functions on the underside of the brain.

those that do not, and among the species of singing birds, only the males sing, even

though the females have the same organ for hearing If the ears were the crucial organ

for music, he continues, birds and humans would only repeat what they hear, and

clearly, this is not the case Young birds, hatched and raised by birds from a different

species, sing the peculiar tunes of their own species Further, “Why then are not

per-sons, endowed with the finest ear, likewise endowed with the most distinguished

tal-ent for music”? (p 61)

Gall mentions that French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

(1807–1788), and French physician, physiologist, and materialist philosopher

Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis (1757–1808) claimed that faults of certain composers were

caused by an inequality between the ears He argues that this statement is also

mis-guided The well-known chapel master Holzbauer, he explains, was deaf in one ear

and yet still composed very harmonious music Another counterexample comes from

English surgeon and anatomist Astley Cooper (1768–1841), who described a man

who had been very hard of hearing since childhood, but played his flute with great

skill in concerts “All these facts prove,” Gall explains, “that the ear is, at most, but

one of the conditions for executing musical compositions; but that it cannot be

con-sidered as the cause of the perception of music and of musical invention” (p 61)

A similar argument is made against those who maintain that the ability to sing can

be attributed to the throat The throat is for the note what the hand is for the painter; it

is nothing more than a means for execution There remains, therefore, no other course

to take, but to admit, that there exists in the brain, a particular organ for music

Al-though English physician Thomas Willis (1621–1675) had previously tried to

impli-cate the brain in music, thinking that an aptitude for music might correlate with the

softness of the brain, he could not prove it (Lorch, 2010) In contrast, Gall was

fo-cused on a fundamental faculty that he believed must have its own special cortical

territory, choosing to follow a very different path into the brain than the one traversed

approximately a century and a half earlier by Willis

Gall’s passages about tone or music are divided into sections, and he now turns to

“history of the discovery of this organ.” Here, he tells the story of Bianchi, mentioned

above, and how she stimulated his research, likely even before he had the idea “that the

talent for music could be recognized by the form of the head” (p 63) Inspired to look

for individuals with excellent memories for certain things, he relates how he now got in

touch with many people and concluded that there must be a peculiar memory for tones

Musicians and composers are very much a part of the story, and they led him to

the idea that what he was studying was not simply amemory for tones To quote:

.I did not fail to perceive, that the individuals, endowed with an excellent

mem-ory of tones, were ordinarily good musicians, and sometimes composers in this

art This observation led me to conclude, that the denomination, memory of tones,

was too limited I therefore adopted the expression, faculty of the relations of

tones, an expression which refers to the manner, in which the intellect of the

mu-sician brings into operation the relations of tones, to the mode of action of the

senses in general (pp 63–64)

17

4 The “Faculty of perceiving the relations of tones, talent for music”

This faculty, Gall assures his readers, is independent of the aggregate force of theintellectual faculties in general It is a fundamental faculty, and as such, it must haveits own particular organ The issue he faced was how to identify this physical organ.Gall again turned to musicians and noted that the superior lateral part of a mu-sician’s forehead tends to be narrow, whereas the temporal parts seem quite broad,making their foreheads appear like “a segment of a truncated cone.” This, he initiallythought, was the external sign of the music faculty But he now took the opportunity

to observe the heads or busts of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), WolfgangAmadeus Mozart (1756–1791), and other musicians “of the highest merit” in Vienna,and they led him to question his first impression He made molds of some of theirheads to make comparisons easier, and he now saw that it was actually another part

of the forehead that was quite enlarged in musicians “endowed with inventivegenius,” a topic he would soon return to in his section on the faculty for music.Following his general strategy, Gall first wants to describe how he looked forchildren and adults with absolutely no talent for music and some other material

He found that the suspected area in these cases was absolutely flat Interestingly,

he does not say “area of the skull” in this passage; rather, he writes “region of thebrain”! With some skulls from other musicians adding to his armamentarium, hewrites that he now knew “exactly” (again his wording) where the faculty must belocated

Gall next discusses what he calls the “natural history” of this faculty That is, howdid it come about? Music is not an invention of man, he maintains, but the creator hasrevealed it to us through a particular organization of the nervous system Throughthis organization, we are capable of making contact with certain vibrations that fol-low certain laws, that is, sound waves German mathematician and pioneer in thestudy of acoustics, Ernst Chladni (1756–1827), had performed some experiments

in which he made these vibrations visible on plates of sand—the intricate patternsnow being eponymic (i.e., “Chladni patterns”;Ullmann, 2007) Tones are founded

on these lawful patterns of vibrations, writes Gall And, in order to hear music, wemust have an organization to detect these patterns—an organ for perceiving the re-lationships between tones and the capacity to judge these perceptions, which is thebasis for composing and producing beautiful music

Wherever the organ is wanting, there exists no relation between the animal and thetones Where the organ exists, the animal or man is agreeably affected by harmony,and disagreeably, by the discordance of tones When this organ has acquired acertain perfection, the animal or the man not only perceives and judges wellthe relations of the tones, but also creates within himself relations and successions

of tones, which please the more, as they are conformable to the external laws ofvibrations, and to the organization of other individuals (p 66)

That this must be a fundamental faculty is further demonstrated by the fact that it mayexist in high degrees of perfection in some individuals from the “tenderest age.”Here, Gall mentions George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), who “had hardly begun

to speak, when he attempted to compose music”; Niccolo` Piccinni (1728–1800);

Leopold Mozart (1719–1787), who “travelled through Europe at the age of six

years”; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “who studied composition at the age of twelve

years”; and a cast of other prodigies far lesser known today (e.g., Desales,

Mademoi-selle Bills, Crotch, Crouchby, the brothers Pixis, and Baron de Praun) These people

were active in different fields of music (various instruments, composition, etc.) but

had been like other children in all other ways, “which proves that the faculty by

which they distinguish themselves, as well as its organ, are independent of all the

other faculties and all the organs” (pp 67–68).16

The next section in Gall’s treatment of music deals with idiocy and “mental

alienation.” Here, he writes something well known by special education teachers

to-day; that is, that in certain cases of idiocy (he also states mania), where all faculties

might seem deranged, the music faculty can “manifest itself almost in a state of

integrity” (p 68) He illustrates this statement by describing a 14-year-old girl

who could sing 40 songs accurately and by heart, although she was “in such a state

of idiocy, that she ate plaster and charcoal, gnawed bones like a dog, and made efforts

to devour whatever fell into her hands” (p 68)

He also mentions people who became ill and then started to sing Philippe Pinel

(1745–1826), the famous French psychiatrist who was instrumental in dealing with

the insane in more humane ways, provided one of these cases He had treated a

mu-sician and, when he improved, he was given his instrument again Pinel related that

he could play like he used to do prior to his illness, yet still embarked on the most

rambling discourses Another Frenchman, physiologist Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis

(1757–1808), is cited somewhat differently He had described people who always

sung “false” when in a state of health, but sang “justly” when attacked by fever

or when in certain ecstatic states Hence, more evidence that the faculty of music

can remain intact even when the mind itself seems deranged

Having ascertained the existence of the music faculty based on observations of

special cases, both gifted and wanting, Gall returns to the question of localization, or

to use his subtitle, the “External Appearance of the Organ of Music in Man.” As

noted above, he had reasons for attending to anatomy only after satisfying himself

with the behavioral evidence for a faculty (his physiology)—only after convincing

himself that the trait must have a special cortical locus But he first issues a warning:

not all people who have become musicians are suitable for study What he is trying to

say is that some musicians have achieved a level of proficiency not because of the

innate music faculty, but because of practice These are not true musicians, because

their skills lie in their fingers rather than their minds!

Thinking he can distinguish true musicians by their countenance and how they

delight in their music, he tells us that the music faculty can appear in either of two

16 Amthor (2012) wrote a PhD thesis on music prodigies from 1791 to 1860, covering over 370 of them.

She does not mention Bianchi Interestingly, all were able to play music or show a talent for singing at a

relatively young age, whereas those who also became composers were about 28 years old when they

first produced a memorable piece of music.

19

4 The “Faculty of perceiving the relations of tones, talent for music”

forms His wording about the anatomy is not easy to follow,17but his basic message isthat the faculty can be located just above the external angle of each eye, with somemusicians having very broad, and others square, lower foreheads (p 70,Fig 3).Famous musicians showing the first mentioned pattern include the two Mozartsand Michael Haydn (1737–1806) Among those showing the squarer featureare Ludwig van Beethoven, (Franz) Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), opera composer

(1712–1778), the famous philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment, who alsocomposed music Gall produced some drawings of the musicians he cited by name(Plate 86 in his atlas; seeFig 4) He admitted that he had not been able to distinguishdifferences in musical talent that he could associate with two types of crania, butthought that over time an expert in music and organology would be able to detectdifferences in their musical skills

FIGURE 3

Photograph of skull with the faculty of music (Ton-sinn) indicated by an arrow

The photo was made by Eszter Blaha´k and is reproduced with permission from the Semmelweis Museum of the

History of Medicine, Budapest, Hungary.

17

“Either the external angle of the forehead, placed immediately above the external angle of the eye, enlarges itself considerably toward the temples, in such manner, that in this case the lateral parts of the forehead overlap the external angle of the eye, in which case all the frontal region above the external angle of the eye, as far as the half of the height of the forehead, is considerably prominent; or there rises immediately above the external angle of the eye, a prominence in the form of a pyramid, the base of which is supported above the eye, and the point extends to the external anterior edge of the forehead, as far as the half of its height” ( Gall, 1835 , vol 5, p 70).

Gall now produced another, longer list of musicians, composers, and singers,

claiming that “the development of the cerebral part indicated, is so full, that if we

could arrange all their busts in one line, the most indifferent observers could not fail

to convince themselves, that this is the constant and characteristic mark of musical

genius” (p 71) He states that he had never met an exception to this rule

Gall had not yet presented a clear-cut case of amusia, but a possible (albeit

ab-normal) case of this disorder in which musical abilities are lost is presented next This

FIGURE 4

Drawings of musicians, showing the faculty of music, just above the angle of the eye

Plate 86 from Gall’s atlas, 1810.

21

4 The “Faculty of perceiving the relations of tones, talent for music”

was the strange case of a lady he had examined after she had received severe blow onthe back of her skull Her relatives asked him to look at her, since she had becomeinsane after the injury, and to look specifically at the two large prominences that hadsince grown out of her forehead Gall found these prominences to be above the musicarea He learned afterward that family deplored the lady’s misfortune, because shehad previously possessed a great talent for music.

With his broad outlook and appreciation of human variations, Gall now turns towhat we would consider cultural anthropology He tells his readers that “negroes, theinhabitants of Otaheite,18the Spaniards, the French, and the English,” furnish theworld with relatively few musicians! The contrast is with the Italians, Bohemians,and Germans, who have marvelous musical heritages The heads of the inhabitants

of the latter countries, he states, are much broader in the relevant area than those ofthe previously mentioned countries But exceptions are possible, and Gall provides aportrait of a native from the Congo, who learned music himself and played manyinstruments19(Plate 91 in the atlas;Fig 5)

FIGURE 5

Drawing of the head of a native of Congo, presumably Angelo Soliman

Plate 91 from Gall’s atlas, 1810.

18 Gall was probably referring to the French Polynesian island of Otaheite; there is also a part of Hawaii bearing this name.

19 Firla (2008) and Reiter (2008) had convincingly argued that this must have been Angelo Soliman After his people had been destroyed, he was brought to Sicily and from there went to Germany and had

an interesting career He died in 1796 and immediately afterward a bust was made of his head.

Among birds, and also among musicians, Gall tells us that one can find

differ-ences in the way music is produced This phenomenon is not puzzling—it can be

explained by the influence of other organs For instance, if “the considerable

devel-opment of the organ of music coexists with the great develdevel-opment of the organ

of murder, it produces a predilection for warlike music; when coexisting with a

development of the organ of theosophy, it produces a predilection for church

music, & c.” (p 73)

In a similar context, Gall writes that, in order to become an excellent composer,

one has to be familiar with the laws of composition of sonorous vibrations and the

relations of tones This implies a place for the organ for numbers in composing

mu-sic, which Gall proceeds to locate close to his music area Those individuals known

to be good in playing music but not in composition obviously lack a well-developed

organ for numbers

Gall now returns to the age factor, maintaining that people with an exceptional

talent for music typically show this trait very early in life, although exceptional skills

in this domain might also develop or show themselves for other reasons at a later age

Gall points to an essay on music written by Andre´ Gre´try (1741–1813) This author

was born in Lie`ge (present-day Belgium) but then moved to France, where he

be-came famous for his ope´ras comiques His skills were not apparent early in life,

and his musical faculty only seemed to have developed at the age of 17 Remarkably,

his talent for music seemed to appear after a head injury, caused by an accident with a

rafter weighing 300 or 400 pounds

Playing music can also be associated with pain Gall wrote that several

individ-uals complained to him about headaches after playing many pieces in succession

with unusual ardor The pain was localized in the frontal part of the head, precisely

where he localized the organ for music And with the thought that this is yet more

evidence for music being a fundamental faculty, Gall is ready to discuss more about

the roles played by animals, and particularly what can be gleaned from their skulls, in

guiding his thinking about the music faculty

There is not a single mammal that can sing or even repeat notes, he states at the

start of this next section, excluding humans from the rest of this group The skulls of

these other mammals are also smaller than man’s where the music faculty should be

located Consequently, they must lack a great deal of the cerebral matter that serves

this function Yet, animals do possess a sense of tone Elephants and sometimes dogs

appear to listen to music with interest; camels, mules, and even oxen seem to work

harder when they hear music; and dogs, bears, and “Franconi’s horses” dance to

music.20

Most birds have nothing that can be identified as true singing Some birds, such as

the bullfinch and tufted lark, however, can produce their own songs, and still others,

notably mockingbirds, can imitate the notes or cries of other birds Additionally, it is

typically the males that sing well These differences among birds and between the

20

Antonio Franconi (1738–1836) was an Italian equestrian and circus artist, who founded the Cirque

Olympique, an equestrian theater.

23

4 The “Faculty of perceiving the relations of tones, talent for music”

sexes also can be explained by looking at crania, as illustrated by Plate 57 in his atlas(Fig 6) The crania of singing birds are broader toward the exterior–anterior edge andtheir orbits are rounder The lateral depression, which exists in birds that do not sing,

is less pronounced in those that sing, because of the greater development of the derlying organ for song or tune Bird catchers recognize prized male birds by the

un-FIGURE 6

Drawings of bird crania used to compare birds that do and do not sing

great breadth of the head above the eyes, those with the broadest heads producing the

most perfect notes “I can warrant to those who are willing to observe, and who are

capable of making observations, that they will find all those which I relate,

con-firmed, and that the examination of the heads of birds, will equally convince them

of the existence of an organ of music” (p 79)

It is here that Gall ends his passages on the “Faculty of Perceiving the Relation

of Tones, Talent for Music.” He would go on to the nearby “Faculty of the Relations

of Numbers,” which, as previously noted, is typically highly developed in

composers

5 BEFORE AND AFTER

Gall had first described the basic assumptions of his general theory in the 1790s,

al-though its more elaborated version with 27 faculties, including what was just

pre-sented about music, did not appear for more than a decade As noted near the

start of this chapter, Gall had also given many lectures, mostly to general audiences,

prior to 1810, when he started work on hisAnatomie et Physiologie, and others

pre-served and passed around some of what he said What, we can now ask, did these

lectures reveal?

Christian Heinrich Ernst Bischoff (1781–1861), one of the lecture attendees,

pub-lished a book (in Berlin) on Gall’s doctrine in 1805, in which we find the organ of

tone mentioned He starts with its external markers on the skull and presents two

cases displaying a well-developed organ for music One is Giovanni Battista Viotti

(1755–1824), an Italian virtuoso violinist, who also composed appealing music

fea-turing this instrument, and the other was Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II

(1741–1790), the “Enlightened Despot,” sometimes also called “The Music King.”

The skull marker,Bischoff (1805)states, can be observed without exception in all

great musicians (no names mentioned), as well as in animals, in particular by

com-paring species that sing and those that do not

Jakob Eliza Doornik (1777–1837; 1806, p 181) also listened to Gall and took

notes, in his case when Gall traveled to Holland in the spring of 1806 He was a

phy-sician and a scientist, and he wrote a short paragraph based on what Gall had to say

about music, one that can be translated as “The Mechanism of Tone Art” (Doornik,

1806) He too covered the location of the bump, and he also wrote about Mozart and

nightingales While lacking in detail, the reports by Bischoff and Doornik suggest

that the material and arguments Gall presented in his Anatomie et Physiologie,

and then again in hisSur les Fonctions du Cerveau et sur Celles de Chacune de

ses Parties, were already well formulated prior to 1806, although Gall probably

col-lected additional “evidence” to support his thinking during the interval between these

recorded lectures and the publication of his volumes

A scholarly discussion about Gall’s differences of opinion with Spurzheim would

provide ample materials for a book of some size, and it is not our intention to go into

their split and professional differences in detail in this chapter Suffice it to say that

25

5 Before and after

Spurzheim was much more the popularizer of the theory than Gall, being interested

in not only spreading the doctrine well beyond the German- and French-speakingcountries but also promoting phrenology as a way to improve education, modernizethe law, select marriage partners, choose leaders, and the like, all for the betterment

of humankind This said, and given the subject matter of this chapter, it is less reasonable to ask whether Spurzheim, then living in England and Scotland (hewould die on a lecture tour to the United States), altered what his mentor, with hishelp prior to 1813, was saying about the music faculty and its location

neverthe-One of Spurzheim’s best-known books is Phrenology: or the Doctrine of theMental Phenomena, which had multiple European and American editions “Tune”

is Faculty 32 in this book, the 1832 edition of which only briefly mentions this ulty Nevertheless, the author starts off, as did Gall, by dismissing the ear as the organbeing investigated, since it “has no recollection of tone, neither does it judge theirrelations.” The focus, he assures his readers, must be on the brain and more specif-ically on a cortical organ revealed by an enlargement of the external corners of theforehead (Spurzheim, 1832, p 67) He mentions a few composers and tells readersthe organ exists in birds that sing but provides very few additional details in whatamounts to a mere six sentences The 1838 edition alludes to two essays on musicthat appeared in thePhrenological Journal and Miscellany Taking up slightly morethan one page, though it pales in comparison to what can be found in Gall’s books, itdoes not contradict Gall’s position

fac-Spurzheim was a persuasive speaker and demonstrator, and George Combe(1788–1858), a solicitor who founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in

1820 and wroteThe Constitution of Man 7 years later (Combe, 1827), was one ofthe individuals who fell under his spell (for more on Combe, see Gibbon, 1878)

A staunch defender of Gall and Spurzheim, Combe published books and articles

on the subject, one being A System of Phrenology, which first appeared in 1819,and, like some of Spurzheim’s books, also underwent numerous editions The section

on “Tune,” also Faculty 32 in this book, follows Gall more closely, opening with thecase of the girl named Bianchi and maintaining early on that the ear has no recollec-tion of tones Combe borrows liberally from Gall and quotes him at times when citingcelebrated musicians, when discussing the independence and location of the faculty,when addressing the two forms in which it is revealed in the skulls of skilled musi-cians and composers, when alluding to national and racial differences, and whenbringing birds and other animals into the picture He is completely supportive of Gall(and Spurzheim) on this faculty, and in his rather detailed section on Tune, he pro-vides additional evidence to support their main points

Thus, although Spurzheim modified Gall’s system, he and Combe were amongthose who accepted his basic ideas and fully endorsed his views about music (Cantor,

1975) There were others as well, but as Gall’s organology and Spurzheim’s morepopular phrenological theorizing spread, there was also more opposition (e.g., see

Davies, 1955, andHollander, 1901b) Some of this opposition was due to its rialism, a charge Gall dismissed (see above) Others, however, questioned hismethods, how he explained away contradictory cases, and what he presented as hard

mate-evidence In Britain, Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), a physician-scientist who

would later achieve great fame with hisThesaurus, was unrelenting in his attacks

on Gall and the phrenologists, some of which appeared in early editions of the

En-cyclopaedia Britannica (Kruger and Finger, 2013) He called the system a poorly

constructed edifice built of “flimsy materials” in a “sandy foundation” and minced

few words when he wrote,

With such convenient logic, and accommodating principles of philosophizing, it

would be easy to prove anything We suspect, however, that on that very account,

they [the phrenologists] will be rejected as having proved nothing

Roget (1824, p 433)

In France, Pierre Flourens, the physiologist now regarded as a founder of

experimen-tal brain science and a pioneer in anesthesia, wrote

The entire doctrine of Gall is contained in two fundamental propositions, of which

the first is, that understanding resides exclusively in the brain, and the second,

that each particular faculty of the understanding is provided in the brain with

an organ proper to itself Now, of these two propositions, there is certainly nothing

new in the first one, and perhaps nothing true in the second one

Flourens (1846, p 18)

Flourens (1824, 1846, 1864)had embarked on a series of brain lesion experiments

with animals, mainly birds, to test Gall’s theories His work showed that the

cerebel-lum is involved in locomotion, the corpora quadrigemina in visual perception, and

the medulla oblongata in respiration But when it came to the cerebral hemispheres,

the supposed source of Gall’s moral and intellectual faculties, he argued that

intel-ligence is affected in direct proportion to how much of the roof brain he destroyed,

not its specific parts There are not different seats for Gall’s faculties; he proclaimed

that cognition is unitary, just as Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) (to whom he dedicated

his book) had previously maintained “Unity is the outstanding principle that rules,”

arguedFlourens (1824, p 122), “It is everywhere, it dominates everything.”21

This is not the place to go into the acrimonious debates that pitted Gall,

Spurz-heim, and their followers against the likes of Roget, Flourens, and other critics or into

the fairly obvious shortfalls of some of the counterevidence that was provided (e.g.,

the use of brain-damaged pigeons or rabbits to argue against the organization of the

human brain) This subject has received enough attention elsewhere What is

impor-tant for us is that Gall was correct when he postulated cortical localization of

func-tion, but clearly misguided about his localizations by having too much faith in the

pseudoscience of bumps and not enough faith in clinical cases of brain damage

In a very real sense, Gall had a brilliant idea but a flawed method, whereas Flourens

21 Frenchmen Franc¸ois Leuret (1797–1851) and Louis Franc¸isque Le´lut (1804–1877) were two other

fierce opponents of Gall’s doctrine, albeit after his death Leuret was very critical of the speculative

nature of phrenology, and, especially for Le´lut, defending Descartes’ philosophy also was a major

motive.

27

5 Before and after

had a better method (studying cases with brain damage), yet was blinded to what itcould reveal by his choice of animals and preconceived notions of the cortex func-tioning much like the soul, i.e., as an indivisible unit.

Based on clinical observations and experiments on dogs and other mammals, tical localization of function would again come into vogue, albeit in a more acceptableform, during the 1860s (Finger, 2000; Young, 1968, 1970) Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud(1796–1881), a French physician who had been a founder and secretary of theSocie´te´Phre´nologique de Paris, started to provide clinical evidence for some sort of a speechcenter in the anterior lobes in 1825, and he continued to collect hundreds of cases.Pierre Paul Broca (1824–1880), then a Paris physician, surgeon, anatomist, and anthro-pologist, followed up on what Bouillaud had started and in 1861 more sharply local-ized the faculty for articulated speech in the third frontal convolution of the righthemisphere, again by looking at cases with brain damage Experimental evidencefor a cortical motor area followed 8 years later, with the work of two Germans, GustavFritsch (1837–1927) and Eduard Hitzig (1839–1907), who combined brain lesions andstimulation to identify a part of the cortex that controlled willed movements of the op-posite side of the body in dogs (Fritsch and Hitzig, 1870) In the new localizing zeit-geist, language, willful motor functions, and sensory perception played dominantroles: Gall’s faculties were no longer in the mainstream or even a serious part ofthe discussion, and the word “phrenology” was shunned But what about music?Music played a minor role in the ensuing discussions on aphasia Observations onindividuals who had lost the faculty of spoken language, or who were severely im-paired, suggested that their musical abilities sometimes remained surprisingly intact.This led to some discussions about the possible relationships between these functionsand their underlying brain structures But it was not until much later in the centurythat serious studies on the effects of brain lesions on different forms of musical pro-cessing finally appeared

cor-August Knoblauch (1863–1919; 1888, 1890) and Hermann Oppenheim(1858–1919) were pioneers in this research Knoblauch was a German physician, pri-marily remembered for studying a patient with a disorder of music perception and forhis adaptation of the Wernicke–Lichtheim model to include additional lines andcircles that would enable him to account for music disorders (Knoblauch, 1888).Hermann Oppenheim (1858–1919) was one of the most influential German neurol-ogists of the period In 1888, he published a paper that outlined how the assessment

of music skills in patients with aphasia could lead to a better understanding of aphasiaand language (Graziano et al., 2012; Oppenheim, 1888) Another very influentialstudy was performed by Johan GustafEdgren (1849–1929;1895), a Swedish profes-sor of medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and physician to King Oscar

II (1829–1907) and his successor Gustav V (1858–1950) Notably, none of these searchers referred to Gall, let alone his musical faculty

re-Over time, Gall continued to be forgotten or ignored by those interested in music.For example,Bernardini and Ferrari (1896)did not mention Gall, although secondauthorFerrari (1896)had another publication in which he included a short reference

to Gall’s observations on the skulls of musicians Sadly, this trend continued into the

twentieth century, with most authors covering the neurology or neuropsychology of

music (e.g., amusia) while completely ignoring Gall’s rightful place in this colorful

and at times misguided history (e.g., Benton, 1977; Brust, 1980, 2001;

(Ustvedt, 1937) On a more positive note, there have been a few newer articles on

music that at least mention him among other contributors to this history (e.g.,

Bentivoglio, 2003; Lelie and Lokhorst, 1981; Ziemann, 1970)

Based on what we have presented in this chapter, we believe that Gall deserves

more attention from historians of music and historians of neurology and the

neuro-science of music This is not to say that his organology or the phrenology that

fol-lowed from it was good science, for it was not But the history of science should not

just be about the “winners”—those whose great discoveries and insights changed the

landscape and set others on a more direct path from darkness to light Gall is clearly

deserving of criticism, particularly for his methods But his search for the

fundamen-tal faculties of mind is fascinating; he was the first person to put cortical localization

of function on the table; some of his observations remain noteworthy; and what he

wrote just about music tells us much about the man, the culture of his day, and the

science of his time

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Professors Axel Karenberg and Claudio Luzzatti for providing

copies of relevant papers and Franc¸ois Boller for his editorial assistance

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Music, neurology, and

psychology in the nineteenth

Amy B Graziano*,1, Julene K Johnson†

*Division of Music History, Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music, Chapman University, Orange,

CA, USA

† Institute for Health & Aging, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

1 Corresponding author: Tel.: 714-997-6897; Fax: 714-997-744-7671

e-mail address: graziano@chapman.edu

Abstract

This chapter examines connections between research in music, neurology, and psychology

during the late-nineteenth century Researchers in all three disciplines investigated how music

is processed by the brain Psychologists and comparative musicologists, such as Carl Stumpf,

thought in terms of multiple levels of sensory processing and mental representation Early

thinking about music processing can be linked to the start of Gestalt psychology Neurologists

such as August Knoblauch also discussed multiple levels of music processing, basing

specu-lation on ideas about language processing Knoblauch and others attempted to localize music

function in the brain Other neurologists, such as John Hughlings Jackson, discussed a

disso-ciation between music as an emotional system and language as an intellectual system Richard

Wallaschek seems to have been the only one from the late-nineteenth century to synthesize

ideas from musicology, psychology, and neurology He used ideas from psychology to explain

music processing and audience reactions and also used case studies from neurology to support

arguments about the nature of music Understanding the history of this research sheds light on

the development of all three disciplines—musicology, neurology, and psychology

Keywords

mental representation, Tonvorstellung, Stumpf (Carl), Gestalt psychology, aphasia, amusia,

Knoblauch (August), origins of music, music and emotion, Jackson (John Hughlings),

Wallaschek (Richard)

1 INTRODUCTION

The relationship between music and brain has emerged as a central issue in the

twenty-first century in the field of music cognition, as well as a topic of investigation

in the field of neuroscience How and why did music come to be one of the domains

Progress in Brain Research, Volume 216, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2014.11.002

of brain research? This question takes us back to the late-nineteenth century, wheninvestigations of music and brain became a shared element in the newly emergingfields of psychology, musicology, and neurology Researchers in these three disci-plines, primarily located in Germany, France, and England, were interested in var-ious aspects of music and how the brain processes music Because these academicdisciplines were new, domains of knowledge for each were fluid and overlapped withother disciplines Psychologists and musicologists shared concepts and discussions,and thought in terms of multiple levels of sensory processing and mental represen-tation While neurologists discussed similar concepts, they pursued a completelyseparate research path focused on localization of music function within the brain,including a dissociation between music as an emotional system and language as

an intellectual system

2 BRAIN PROCESSING OF MUSIC

The modern study of music perception and cognition is often traced to the work ofHermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), a German physicist, physician, and physiol-ogist (see the chapter “Franz Joseph Gall and Music: The Faculty and the Bump” byEling et al., as well asGraziano and Johnson, 2013, for discussion of earlier roots ofthe study of music perception) Helmholtz took the scientific study of music fromacoustics to perception, from the physical to the physiological—he “ .shifted thefocus of inquiry from exterior to interior aspects of the perceptual process”(Green and Butler, 2002).Helmholtz (1863)believed the physical aspects of music(acoustical properties) had been addressed by his time but the physiological and psy-chological aspects of music still needed investigation He stated:

Now whilst the physical side of the theory of hearing has been already frequentlyattacked, the results obtained for its physiological [sic] and psychological [sic]sections are few, imperfect, and accidental Yet it is precisely the physiologicalpart in especial—the theory of the sensations of hearing—to which the theory

of music has to look for the foundation of its structure

von Helmholtz (1877/1954, p 4)Helmholtz explored the anatomy and physiological processes of the ear, which ledhim to describe three levels of music perception: (1) acoustical properties of soundthat lead to (2) physiological processes in the ear resulting in sensations(Empfindungen) that lead to (3) mental images (Vorstellungen), which are percep-tions (Wahrnehmungen) He was particularly interested in the development and role

of sensations

Helmholtz’s work led to the study ofTonpsychologie (tone psychology), focused

on the physical and physiological aspects of sound, as well as on sensations produced

by individual musical elements This line of research was pursued in Germany

among psychologists and some musicologists (who overlapped with psychology).

The musicologists involved were practitioners of comparative musicology, later

known as ethnomusicology During the second half of the nineteenth century, the

study ofTonpsychologie expanded Some researchers considered how a combination

of individual musical elements formed entire musical compositions This emphasis

on higher-level music led to investigations of higher-order cognitive processes, the

study ofMusikpsychologie (music psychology) The practitioners of

Musikpsycho-logie focused on mental representations or conceptions (Vorstellungen) for music

(seeGjerdingen, 2002, for detailed discussion ofMusikpsychologie)

Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), a German psychologist and comparative musicologist,

was one of those who discussed mental representation for music, emphasizing the

psychological rather than the physiological Stumpf’s work can be seen as a

precur-sor toMusikpsychologie Like Helmholtz,Stumpf (1883)discussed different levels

of music perception: sensations (Empfindungen) result from hearing or remembering

a sound; sensations become mental representations (Vorstellungen), which are then

analyzed (Urteil); the analysis of mental representations leads to understanding or

knowledge (Erkenntnis) He explored several musical elements, such as musical

con-sonance.Stumpf (1883, 1890, 1911)detailed how the perception of consonance is

psychological rather than physiological The sensation of an interval (two

simulta-neous tones) leads to a mental representation, the analysis of which results in an

un-derstanding of the sound as a whole rather than as two separate tones The two tones

fuse into a sound of consonance This was Stumpf’s theory of tonal fusion

(Verschmelzung) (Ash, 1995; Green and Butler, 2002) The perceptual process of fusion

leads to an understanding that intervals are transposable—for example, the same

per-ception of consonance results for all fifths, regardless of the specific pitches involved

Stumpf speculated that tonal fusion developed in “primitive cultures” when

adults and children called out to each other in different vocal ranges, creating

differ-ent combinations of tones He stated:

Of all the combinations, only one has the virtue of pitch simultaneity that is similar

to the point of confusion with the impression of a single note: the octave [sic] .In

psycho-acoustics [sic] we know this characteristic by the name fusion, and even

Greek music theorists found the essence of ‘consonance’ in it This unity of

simul-taneous pitches in the octave did not arise initially through music itself It is not

the result of a musical development, rather a phenomenon that is necessarily

con-ditioned by the nature of tones or the brain processes on which they are based

Stumpf (1911/2012, p 46)

Stumpf (1911)stated that intervals other than the octave exhibited the same

charac-teristic of fusion, especially the fifth and the fourth

Theodore Lipps (1851–1910) was another psychologist who described a series of

perceptual events from the physical to the psychological, resulting in a mental

rep-resentation for music (Lipps, 1905/1926) Both Stumpf and Lipps emphasized the

psychological aspects of perception, while concentrating on individual musical

ele-ments removed from musical context

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2 Brain processing of music