Musical Brain attempts to get handle on tunes
By Alex Stranchan, CanWest News Service January 31, 2009
SATURDAY
You can't judge a book by its cover but sometimes you can judge a TV program by its name.
You know, for example, when you see the name The Musical Brain, tonight's W-5 Presents documentary, that it's not going to have much to do with American Idol.
The Musical Brain is billed as a look at how music tunes the mind. The hour-long program takes a complex and subjective subject and tries to make sense of it, by applying scientific reason, empirical evidence and recent breakthroughs in neuroscience.
Michael Buble, Feist, Sting and Wyclef Jean appear -- not to sing a tune or dance a jig for Randy, Paula and Simon, but to articulate what music means to them. It's a tall order, trying to put music into words. And to the extent that The Musical Brain succeeds, it's more about getting viewers to open their eyes, and ears, than it is about revealing any startling new insight into musical creativity.
Of all the art forms, music is possibly the most difficult to get a handle on scientifically and verbally, but that doesn't mean you won't get a kick out of hearing Sting talk about his creative process.
Sting sat down with the filmmakers at McGill University's Neurological Institute during The Police's reunion-tour stop last year in Montreal, and agreed to undergo a brain scan -- though it's unclear what, if anything, the doctors expected to find.
An oversized right-side of the brain, perhaps? Or perhaps they expected to find a giant, throbbing cortex, like something you might expect to find in the big-brained, giant-headed aliens in the original Star Trek.
Since Sting hasn't been locked up in a neurological institute somewhere for "further study," you can safely assume that his brain turned out to be normal. Physiologically, anyway.
There's a lot more to The Musical Brain than Sting's MRI, though. It's a fascinating, if all-too-short look at a fascinating subject.
The science of music and how it affects the human brain is a subject that probably warrants an entire series, and not just an hour. Given the financial realities facing Canadian TV at the moment, though, an hour will have to do. The Musical Brain is a feast for the mind, and music to the ears. (7 p.m., CTV, channel 42, cable 13)
