Brain in step with offbeat music

When Radiohead appeared recently at the Grammy Awards with the University of Southern California’s Trojan Marching Band, it was an odd juxtaposition not merely because the British alt-rockers interact sparingly with the mainstream.

The song they performed, “15 Step,” was in a tricky time signature known as 5/4.

March to that at your own risk, kids.

To most ears, and even some trained ones, such a time signature (also known as meter) feels off-kilter, accustomed as we are to 4/4 — the conventional grouping of beats that goes one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. Or, in the triplet feel of 3/4 waltz time, one-two-three, one-two-three.

Why that’s so is one part of a fascinating, ongoing critique of modernism by thinkers such as Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker, who mingle the worlds of evolutionary neuroscience, literature and art history to arrive, roughly, at this conclusion: Some things — linear storytelling, representational painting — work easily, and other things don’t.

Exactly why do “odd time signatures,” as they’re commonly called, sound odd? Is it a case of sensory responses traveling along — and flying off the rails of — well-worn synaptic grooves of the brain? Or is it the product of Western acculturation?

Denis Dutton, founder and co-editor of the prestigious Arts and Letters Daily blog, joined the debate with his recent book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.” In it, he argues that standards of aesthetic appreciation are not socially conditioned; rather, they emerged across cultures out of evolutionarily useful activities — not least the ability to woo potential gene transmitters.

About the topic of musical time signatures, Mr. Dutton is more than a passive critic; he has played the sitar for 40 years and, as a California-born Westerner, struggles mightily with the exotic meter of Indian music.

On the phone from Christchurch, New Zealand, where he teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, he describes the subtle distinctions in the time signatures of Indian styles known as “chanchar” and “dhamar,” with their intricate seven-beat groupings.

Mr. Dutton wonders “whether, like learning a language and acquiring an accent, early musical experience sets up what might be permanently engraved expectations for rhythm and harmony.”

“This may make it difficult or impossible to fully appreciate a foreign music later in life,” he says.

Yet he suspects that complex raga music can play tricks on the brains even of native listeners.

Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, author of the entertainingly informative book “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession,” says via e-mail that when listeners encounter complex time signatures such as 9/8 or 12/8 in the music of Beethoven, Chopin and others, they tend to break them down into more familiar, assimilable bundles of three or four.

“It may be partly innate and partly a process of enculturation,” Mr. Levitin continues. “In Indian music, the listener may have to hold in mind time signatures that only work themselves out over several minutes. Clearly, the brain can be trained to do this, but such training probably needs to occur early.”

Recent studies have begun to demonstrate how humans’ perception of rhythm is a deep-seated neural response. As reported in the magazine New Scientist, researchers at Budapest’s Institute for Psychology and the University of Amsterdam found that even sleeping infants have a sense of rhythm, as measured by electrical activity in their brains in response to calibrated drum recordings.

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