All manner of scientific claims have been made regarding the alchemistic relationship between music and the brain. Oliver Sacks famously explores this topic in his 2007 tome Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, citing that imagining a piece of music ignites brain activity similarly to that of listening to music. And Harvard University’s Dr. Gottfried Schlaug famously discovered that the differences between a professional musician’s brain and the brain of a layperson may be visible to the naked eye—particularly in the big band uniting the organ’s two hemispheres and the cerebral cortex.
Yet there are just as many spiritually linked hypotheses surrounding this relationship. Countless singers and instrumentalists credit muscle memory and stellar performances to an unknown being. The geniuses of Mozart, Leonard Bernstein, and Joan Sutherland have all been attributed to God. Debate rages on between nature and nurture as it pertains to singers—while plenty of studies have investigated the neurological workings of instrumentalists, very few have given us insight into the singer’s brain.
A former singer and the product of a musical family, Boris Kleber has conducted preliminary studies that suggest an untrodden field of study with immense potential. “What those studies usually find is that certain areas in the brain are larger and process differently, related to the tasks those people have learned,” Kleber says. As an example, he cites pianists and their abnormally skilled finger sequences and abilities to process complex dexterous movements. Yet while years—or, as Kleber puts it, 10,000 hours—of practice create these heightened motor skills, they also amp up the brain’s primary motor cortex (“The spot of the brain that sends the impulses to the periphery to say, ‘Okay, now do this,’” Kleber explains).
Yet, unlike pianists, singers have a more intimate relationship with their instrument. A Leif Ove Andsnes can walk away from his instrument (even if his hands are still tapping out a passage in “Pictures at an Exhibition”), but not so for an Anna Netrebko, who would be hard pressed to divorce herself from her larynx. “When we speak and we sing, the basic complexity of the process of producing the sound is very, very similar,” Kleber says. “So it’s already on the motor level [of] very high complexity. The interaction of the air stream and the vocal folds and the mouth as the resonator constantly change in singers.” Doubtlessly, practice makes perfect—which, in part, explains how singers learn to play around with the resonating qualities of their voice, sing the right notes at the right time, and fill an opera house without amplification.
Kleber’s 2009 study, published in Oxford Journals’ Cerebral Cortex, explores these phenomena, focusing on how the brain shifts as people learn to sing. Ten choristers and soloists from the Stuttgart State Opera, 21 vocal students from the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, and 18 medical students from the University of Tübingen with minimal singing experience (the laymen quotient) were compared against one another as each individual performed Giordani’s “Caro mio ben,” phrase-by-phrase, in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. Among other criteria used to get a more or less uniform data pool, all singers were right-handed in order to ensure that each of the 49 subjects used the similar side of their brain. The results were both parallel and perpendicular to many of those gained from instrumentalist studies of similar scope.
“In a nutshell, what I found was that those areas of the brain that process all the thought-related ideas—like the feelings from the larynx, from the vocal folds, from the whole mouth area—[are] differently processed in singers,” Kleber explains. “So it seems that singers use this proprioception differently to fine-tune this complex system.” The same reflexes laypeople use when they choke or have something go down the wrong pipe are the same reflexes at work in singing. Progressing from medical student to vocal student to professional vocalist, the proprioception—internal perception, or what Webster’s defines as “the reception of stimuli produced within the organism”—increases. The more training singers have, the more attuned they are to these goings-on in their bodies and the more active their body responses are perceived to be.
“I might even call it physical intelligence, or body intelligence,” Kleber adds. “The interesting side, though, when I look at my data and compare it to what people have found in instrumentalists, is that I don’t find any changes in this part of the brain that actually sends out motor commands. We call it the primary motor cortex. This is actually the spot of the brain that sends the impulses to the periphery to say, ‘Okay, now do this.’ And the other part that was active in my study is the one that receives the sensory information, either from the fingers as a pianist or the larynx as a singer.”
I asked Kleber if this data means singers are born, or at least genetically predisposed vocalists, or whether this is a skill—and muscle function—that can develop in anyone given the proper training. “That’s the old debate, and it’s really hard to make the final conclusion based on my data,” he concedes. “It’s always a kind of a combination, and it’s a big discussion about talent and giftedness. Giftedness often refers to this genetic component. . . . Talent, on the other hand, is something that really shows.”
This is where nature and nurture come into play; a gifted musician who isn’t supported musically by their family may never fully realize their talent. Vice-versa, a singer with a variable amount of giftedness that is fostered can realize their full potential. Caruso is brought up as a famous example.
“Caruso, if I recall correctly, used to sing in a boys’ choir at the church. That doesn’t mean that he had professional training, he just loved to sing,” says Kleber. “But coming back to the results of my studies, which show that the proprioception is what distinguishes the singer from the non-singer, you could argue that Caruso had a very highly developed proprioception as far as everything in his voice was concerned. That he was able to do the right things without a lot of training—and later on when he got the training, he was very quick at understanding what the teacher was telling him.” And like other singers, Kleber asserts, the more Caruso trained, sang, and performed, the more his brain grew from this, developing more neurons and cells that form the larynx.
Unsurprisingly, comparisons between singers and athletes are easily drawn in this sense: athletes are constantly developing and building muscles in certain areas of the body. And the most developed muscles are naturally related to the purpose of the sport. It’s the building of motor skills and proprioceptions, however, that separates the Olympians from the amateurs.
“It’s the skills training that changes the brain like that,” Kleber says. “Building up muscles is always one aspect of athletes, but it always helps the purpose. Throwing a disc is a skill, and this skill requires a certain sequence of muscle activities—and only if you do everything in the right sequence and activate the right amount of power in each muscle involved at the right moment, then you will throw the disc really, really far. The strength alone won’t help—it’s the skill that you have to develop, and the skill development is what actually changes the brain.”
Similar brain shifts are at work in experienced singers when it comes to thinking about singing. Using the same aria (“Caro mio ben”), Kleber had singers—both professional and amateur—sing one line at a time while Kleber and his research team measured the blood flow in the brain. “Because you have to increase blood flow to those areas that are really active, you can indirectly measure neural activity in measuring the blood flow.” Next, singers were asked to imagine singing “Caro mio ben,” line-by-line, but not actually sing.
“What we found there is that we actually had the primary sensory motor areas—they pick up the sensory signal to the periphery or they send out the motor commands to the periphery—those were actually active during imagery. . . . So it seems once you’ve learned a task, you can actually kind of offline rehearse it.” Regardless of whether a sound is produced, the larynx is still working. Next time you’re sick and your voice teacher tells you not to even listen to music, you’ll know why (and next time you hear a singer say she just “imagines” the high C, you’ll know there’s some truth to the claim).
This study also produced some interesting results related to performance anxiety. As Kleber writes in the study, “Imagined singing involved additional activation in areas related to emotional processing.” This includes the bilateral temporal poles, which are “involved in conscious self-regulation of emotional responses,” he adds, citing research by Beauregard and Lane.
At the University of Tübingen, Kleber also used MRI scans of singers (along with surgeons and athletes) as they reacted to photographs of performance to pinpoint the exact areas of each individual’s brain that hold “fear centers.” When these centers were targeted again in pictures, singers were subjected to soothing sounds that allowed them to associate calm with the high stressors. Such relaxation techniques affect the amygdala portion of the brain which, like the temporal poles, is related to emotion regulation.
It may not exactly be the “Serenity now” lampoon on Seinfeld, but as singers become more aware of their bodies, it’s possible for them to also become more aware of the moments of stress in performance and find ways to counteract that stress—even without an MRI machine.
