This Is Your Brain On MP3s

Despite the evangelizing of digital music partisans that it’s just as good a way to listen to music as any analog format–and even if it sucks it’s still the future, so you better get on board, Jack–we’re all familiar with the space-saving signal loss that comes with MP3’s. How often have you listened to a song on your iPod (which oblierates bass to begin with) only to find all sorts of new nuances when you slap a CD of the same song onto your stereo? (Let’s not even bring vinyl into this.) Plenty of veteran industry types (and younger journalists) have been kvetching about our current hyper-compressed musical world for a few years now, but now some folks are claiming that the cruddy quality of MP3’s may actually be rewiring your neurochemistry:

But what is the price of inferior audio quality? Can poor audio touch the heart as deeply as better sound? John Meyer, who designs and builds some of the world’s best speakers at his Meyer Sound Labs in Berkeley, doesn’t think so.

“It turns you into an observer,” Meyer says. “It forces the brain to work harder to solve it all the time. Any compression system is based on the idea you can throw data away, and that’s proved tricky because we don’t know how the brain works.”

It could be that MP3s actually reach the receptors in our brains in entirely different ways than analog phonograph records. The difference could be as fundamental as which brain hemisphere the music engages.

“Poorer-fidelity music stimulates the brain in different ways,” says Dr. Robert Sweetow, head of UCSF audiology department. “With different neurons, perhaps lesser neurons, stimulated, there are fewer cortical neurons connected back to the limbic system, where the emotions are stored.”

So could “music listening fatigue” be a problem in the future? If your head is constantly working overtime to fill in the missing pieces of the frequency-spectrum puzzle, surely that’s going to lead some listeners to burn out, most likely the older ones. Or will MP3s create a new race of young super-listeners able to process huge amounts of very little auditory information? Or will everyone just get sick of it and we’ll all go back to the days of sitting around the piano in the parlor after dinner?

MP3 Music — It’s Better Than It Sounds [San Francisco Chronicle]