Our panel today looks at the chill effect.
We've all had it, that moment when you hear something in a piece of music, and shivers
run down your spine or the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
Mari's piece, Alt has a kind of ghostly quality, which is why she's chosen it for us today.
Mari is obviously not the only person that will be on our little panel, our discussion
today.
Let me introduce you to the rest of the gang.Beginning with Psyche Loui, she is Assistant Professor
currently at Wesleyan University, but about to start taking over in the Music and Creativity
department at Northeastern University, please welcome Psyche Loui.
And Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, David Poeppel.
Assistant Professor of Psychology at SUNY, Purchase, Meagan Curtis.
From the University of Connecticut, Professor of Physics and Psychology, Ed Large.
Psyche you are also a violinist, so you would've known all the technical stuff that was going
into Mari's piece.
But, was it ghostly sounding, and if so, why?
What would make a piece have that kind of character to it?
I thought it was ghostly sounding, and I think to me it comes down to the fulfillment and
violation of expectations.
So, I think the piece had a lot of dissonance, had a lot of bow noise, and I think our brains
by this age, we're primed to think about sounds as being consonant, especially in music.
And so, when you add a little bit more noise to the bow, or you play closer to the bridge,
that gives you that shivery feeling that is dissonance, and I think that that's what makes
a piece feel kind of unexpected and eerie.
And I think it's that interplay between the unexpected and then kina more consonant resolutions
of sounds that makes us get the chills.
Ed, you do a lot of studying of this vibration oscillation waveform, that sort of thing.
Right.
It can actually have the opposite effect of putting people off of kind of distancing them
from what they're hearing, right?
Sure, sure.
One of things, obviously expectation is very important, but one of the things that happens
when you listen to those kind of sounds is, or any sound, is that the brain stem, the
early parts of the auditory system, literally are synchronizing with the sound on a cycle-by-cycle
basis, and that has really ... It can make even a single sound, not even two sounds in
a row, but those kind of harmonics that Mari was doing, very emotional, and really give
you the chills just that one note even.
But it will be a very individual response, what works for one person, will not work for
another.
When Meagan I know you really kind of have worked a lot with targeting how individuals
respond to things like music, right?
To a certain extent.
There is a lot of individual variability with how people respond to certain songs.
So a song that might create an intensely emotional experience for me, may not create any sort
of experience for you.
And is there a way of ... Has neuroscience gotten to the point where it can kind of co-defy
what the parameters are that make it likely for one kind of music to affect a person that
way, as opposed to another?
Well, I think that there are some predictors that can tell you who is most likely to respond
emotionally to a certain type of piece.
So for instance, if you have a personal history with the piece, if it's well-known to you,
if you're a musician, if you've played the piece before, that's going to create a deeper
emotional response, and the context in which it occurs is going to influence how you respond
to the music.
So there are some things that do seem to have predictive value, however there's still tremendous
variability across different individuals.
Right.
There's a lot there that we're gonna unpack during the course of this conversation.
Things like context, expectation.
David, it seems like maybe 25/30 years ago, music and neuroscience seemed like distinct
fields, and then gradually in the wake of Oliver Sacks' work, neuroscience began to
kinda look at music, and then really focus on music, and now it's like, obsessed with
music.
What has your experience been of this kind of progression of interest on the part of
neuroscientists in this art.
And first, we have to of course say it, neuroscience is obsessed with everything, 'cause neuroscience
can explain everything.
I have to say that as Professor of Neuroscience.
But it's true that the one big change has been the availability of techniques to measure
the human brain, that weren't available 25 years ago.
In the last 25 years, we've kind of optimized and developed brain recording techniques from
awake behaving humans, listening to music, listening to speech, that allow us to monitor
what's going on and begin to come up with kind of more satisfying mechanistic answers.
Some of us work on this, and of course it's often much more compelling and fun to study
something like music than the usual stuff we do in the lab, which is you come to my
lab, you sit in a machine and you hear beep, beep, beep, and then 90-minutes later you're
still hearing beep.
That is necessary, that's how we sort of build up the parts list of how a mind and brain
are organized, but in the end, we're interested in compelling experiences, like music.
Why do we find Mari's piece mesmerizing?
Not because it's beep, beep, beep, because it's something other in our head that's going
on.
And that's what we're trying to figure out.
So if you're able to take an FMRI for example, a functional MRI of a brain as it's in the
act of listening to music, one the interesting things is music seems to affect the brain
globally, there is no like one part of the brain as there is for speech.
Music seems to be all over the place.
Yeah, so let me disagree with you already.
Okay.
So the same is true for speech.
Speech is just as complicated as music.
Let's go right into the meat of this, right?
You asked Psyche, why is it ghostly?
Well, there is a huge individual differences which we're gonna talk about and Psyche has
actually a very influential recent paper about the wiring diagram that is.
When I listen to it, my individual, my response it was, it reminded me of animals.
You probably had nothing like that in mind, your dog or some bird, but I thought this
was a scene of many different animal sounds coming together in weird ways, and that was
my interpretation of it.
So in the privacy of my own mind, I'm entitled to interpret music any way I like.
This is not the case for speech.
In the case of speech, meaning is conveyed by putting things together, you pull out particular
words, and then you put the words together to construct meaning, and that is much more
directed in some sense, than it is in the musical case.
So we have our own private interpretation much more so, and that's partly tremendous
individual variability.
So, if I say to you, man bites dog.
All six of us will have the same interpretation of what that means, as will the rest of you,
and if you don't come see me later.
But if you hear, even a few bars of music, you will not.
And therein lies a really big difference, and that big difference is carried by pretty
complicated networks that are true for the speech case, and the music case.
So it's a story.
Well, I think yes and no, right?
I think that it's a bit of a strong statement to think that if you have one piece of music
that we don't all hear it the same way.
I think we can all take different emotional interpretations from it, but I think part
of the goal of composition in a way, is to align a composer's intention with the audiences
attentions.
Otherwise, if there's no alignment, and this is from Fred just down the street, if there's
no alignment, you could say that a piece is kind of failing.
And so, we have to find the common ground.
Musicians have to find the common ground between what we're making and what the audience is
hearing, and I think that comes down to like us having similarly wired brains to a certain
extent, but of course there's lots of differences.
I think that it's not so simple that you just can't take whatever you want out of music,
I think that there are some commonalities.
And coming from the other side, 'cause I'm on your other side.
It's not as though language is that simple either.
I mean, man bites dog is one thing, but a more complicated sentence, a more complicated
discourse, people interpret in many different ways also.
And that's one of the interesting things about language and music, is it's got this multifaceted
kind of meaning that we can see.
Well coming from the other side, the other-other side, as an interpreter, I do classical whatever,
and if you're trained in the violin, you know that you have to practice the same thing over
and over and over and over and over again, until you're technically, right?
So how do you keep yourself fresh, and how do you present yourself emotionally coherent
to the audience so that you're not just tracing your notes?
What I do, personally this is like behind the-
Tell us how the sausage is made, go ahead.
Industrial secret that you're not supposed to know.
No, just my own process.
I use the Stanislavski, like a, actor's method act-
Method acting.
Yeah, method acting.
I read a lot of Stanislavski when I was young, and I built my own emotional sub context,
right?
So I learned early on that if I practice and practice, I am just bored on stage, because
I've done this before.
And if I'm bored, you are bored, right?
So for me not too bored, I have to build this sub context of emotions so that I can follow
that thing.
But then I have to choose a subtext maybe a day or two before, maybe a conversation
I had, a book I read, a news I saw, some story that I kind of lay out emotionally, and then
that way I can present that.
But then you are not seeing that, you don't know the book I read, but emotional logic
is there, so you can follow the logic.
That's how I do it.
I wanna come back to this idea that if you as a performer or as a composer, aren't feeling
it, that the audience won't feel it.
Because there was a study done some years ago, about job satisfaction, and orchestral
musicians ranked slightly below sanitation workers.
I'm sorry if this has come as a shock to you.
I'm thinking about ... Oh my God.
The fact that we can go to an orchestral concert, and have a really amazing experience, which
is being played to us, apparently by 104 people who are bored out of their tiny minds, is
a little weird.
Yeah.
And we've each picked a piece of music to share with you today that for each of us,
gives us that shiver, that chill effect, and Psyche you picked an orchestral piece.
Does it matter to you if you know that that orchestra has been sawing through this piece
all week long, and is sick of the sound of it, and they're just doing what ... It's a
job.
Does that-
Right.
I actually almost chose to become an orchestral musician, and then didn't.
And I think it is because of this feeling that if you're doing the same thing over and
over again each day, it might get boring instead of being the thing that you love.
But I don't think that's completely true, I think that my friends who choose to go into
music professionally, they choose it not because they're not good at anything else it's just
that they can't imagine dedicating their life to something else.
Which I think, says something about why music is so important, because it's doing something
to you emotionally, and it's triggering your reward system, it's hopefully good for your
brain, there's lots of work on that as well.
But I think at the end of the day, even when a bored orchestral musician is performing
onstage in a concert, I think they do enter a different world that is professional and
is together and is kind of in it for the greater good.
I think that the other stuff is maybe like union, administration, all these other things
that Well I think there's also a question of agency.
Musicians like to make the music that they want to play, and when you're an orchestral
musician, you play the music you're told to play, in the way that the conductor at his
or her tempo, and you're waiting for your cue, et cetera.
So there is a question of agency.
I mean, with all due respect to orchestral, I know many of them, and they're deeply committed,
but there is that, they're not getting that little pop that you're getting when you hear
this piece.
Explain what this piece does for you.
So Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, Second Movement, and I chose the beginning of it.
It's really, let's just listen to that.
So it's kind of a hushed tremulous opening there.
Yeah, I think it's setting up a lot of action that's about to happen.
And I think that feeling of anticipation, there's also a lot of chord changes, and we
know from Joss Lebotta's work in '89/'91 that chord changes are more likely to elicit that
feeling of like as if your heart's skipping a beat.
Whereas melodic changes in certain ... There's music theoretical predictors for how you make
these melodic changes, but those are more likely to make people cry.
So you have different kinds of strong emotional responses that are triggered by different
kind of compositional devices.
Which is why I think that ... and I think that composers' kind of implicitly know about
these types of devices, and that's why they're able to deploy these tools of music theory
to make a rewarding experience for audience.
When you get to things like rhythm, you're getting back, aren't you to the lizard brain,
the brainstem and the fact that we learn early on to entrain to a beat, so it sort of comes
back to what I was saying before about music affecting different parts of the brain on
a physical level.
Right.
That part Ed, of the brain is being reached as well as the sort of prefrontal-
It's not just the brain stem for rhythm, its auditory cortex, it's motor cortex, it's the
basal ganglia, and these parts of the brain have intrinsic rhythms, and there's a lot
we don't know about the brain.
But one of the things we do know, is that it communicates within itself via rhythms,
and different kinds of oscillations that are going on.
And one of the most, I think amazing discoveries in the past 20 years is that when we listen
to musical rhythm, our brains synchronize those intrinsic rhythms to the rhythms of
music.
That's the process known as entrainment.
Entrainment, yeah.
Does your musical example give us a sense of that?
Yeah, so I picked on that, yeah would exactly show that off.
It happens to be, so one of the things that happens when we listen to rhythmic music,
it happens to everybody, is you'll find yourself tapping your foot or bobbing your head.
This and that feature of music that makes you want to move has been termed groove by
one of our colleagues, Peter [Ginotta 00:21:50], and he did a large study of all different
kinds of older music and newer music, in an undergraduate's rate the groove, and this
piece that I chose was the one that they consistently chose as number one.
And I'd do this experiment in my class every year, my undergraduates consistently choose
it as number one, even those it's from the seventies.
It's Superstition by Stevie Wonder.
I see you.
It's impossible not to move, right?
When the clavinet comes in-
Yeah.
You know, and adds its layer to the groove that's already been established.
And it's just like, then the brain is suddenly like, what just happened?
Yeah, right right, right right.
What would that look like David on, if you would've hooked one of Ed's undergrads up
to an FMRI, while that was happening?
Any idea?
We can take any of you and hook you up.
Not so much an FMRI, FMRI is a wonderful camera, it's a camera that takes pictures with very
high spatial resolution, but to capture this kind of thing you need a machine that actually
has a high temper resolution, so you can follow their rhythm.
So FMRI's not so great.
You want something like EEG, which many of us use, or its big cousin magnetoencephalography,
that's a giant recorder of brain activity.
And what you see, and what we can measure is how different parts of the brain entrain.
So the brain is hijacked by rhythmicity, you can't stop yourself, and you see the brain
activity, the waves of the brain surfing on the waves of the sound, and it's sort of inescapable.
So the sound can be kind of conceptualized as a series of waves that we can analyze in
all kinds of ways, and the brain activity literally surfs on top of that, whether it
wants to or not.
So you're actually seeing movement, motions-
Well you see, that's how we visual it.
So Ed mentioned that the rhythmic brain activity in different areas, or we call them neural
oscillations, and you can imagine that is the brain breathing at different rates.
Yeah.
Right?
So, at the level of single cells or local networks or larger networks, the brain is
breathing at faster rates and slower rates, it has to do with biological factoids that
we don't have to unpack here for fear of losing your audience.
But these are sort of optimally suited to grab onto the rhythmicity to the piece, and
when you're listening to Superstition, different parts from the periphery to the central part
of the brain, literally are just locking on or entraining to this, and so you can't stop
yourself.
How much of this Meagan, do you think is cultural?
Would an Australian Aborigine in the Outback be as quick to entrain to the groove of a
Stevie Wonder as anybody who grew up with Western pop music?
Well, perhaps.
There is some evidence that the emotions that are perceived in music, are perceived to a
certain extent at a universal level.
So, if you are an individual from a particular culture, you're going to be better at identifying
emotion in music from your culture, than you would for other cultures that have music that
you're less familiar with.
However, you'd still identify the emotion above chance, and what that tells us is that
there are some universal features that are used to detect emotion in music.
When we think about emotional responses to music, it's actually helpful to distinguish
between the effective response that you have, and what is being communicated by the music.
And, within a given culture, there are these codes that exist, that tell the listener that
this is a sad song, or this is a happy song, or this song is going to induce fear.
And those codes are fairly well established and agreed upon by listeners within a culture.
So one of the interesting things that you'll see is that listeners will very quickly identify
an emotion that's communicated by the music, they could do so after hearing only a quarter
of a second of a song, and the level of agreement between listeners is actually really high
particularly within cultures.
Now, how that translates to your emotional experience, the emotions that you feel in
response to the song, that's a different question.
So you have what's being communicated by the music, and then you have the factors that
lead to you actually experiencing an emotion.
And a field really makes a distinction between the two.
You sound like you're probably familiar with the work of Thomas Fritz among the Mafa people.
Where he ... the Mafa live in the highlands of Cameroon and had minimal contact with the
West and Western music.
And he went there with a series of pieces of music had a happy face, a sad face, and
a scared face, and consistently, the Mafa were able to, hearing Western music for the
first time, or keyboard music for the first time that he had brought to them, were consistently
able to identify correctly the emotion.
And then even more unusually he brought some Mafa music back to Germany, and the people
there were able to identify correctly the emotions that music was carrying.
I wonder for you Mari, did you grow up with traditional Japanese music as well as Western
Yeah.
When I grow up in Japan, I was telling your producer that there's a song, children's song,
it's a very innocent about bubbles.
Right?
It's like a happy song.
Yeah.
It's a song about little bubbles, you're blowing bubbles, and bubbles fly to the roof.
Oh it hit the ceiling and he disappears, oh we don't blow, let the bubbles fly.
And it's just an innocent song.
And then it turned out the composer's daughter died, so the lyrics are about the daughter
who died, he said don't kill my daughter.
After I knew that, I cannot listen to it the same way, right?
Yeah.
So it's very like, I grew up singing that song, but now I can't.
I relate in a different way.
Okay, so this gets to an interesting question, which is, let's say just for sake of argument,
that and I know this isn't true, but let's just say, everybody who grew up on Western
pop music, hearing the opening of Superstition, is going to get that little pop of dopamine
or whatever.
That little hit, that little shiver down the spine, when that keyboard comes in.
Would that happen when that listener is two or three, or does that listener have to have
some experience to know ... I mean at what point does your own cultural and individual
experience completely alter or color your response to music?
So it's interesting, and a lot of people make this mistake, they think, well you know, I
sit down and listen to music, I start tapping my foot immediately, therefore it's innate,
it's inborn somehow.
But in fact, there is a long trajectory to the development of rhythm perception and rhythmic
interaction with music.
So, turns out infants, if you test infants the day after they're born, you play them
different kinds of sounds, you play them speech, you play them music, they'll move more to
music, but they won't synchronize, they can't synchronize.
It turns out that if you play them rhythms from the Western culture, and Balkan cultures
like Bulgaria, they can tell the difference between those rhythms when they're six months
old, but by the time they're 12 months old, they undergo perceptual narrowing, and now
they can't make those distinctions.
Similarly, to speech or to faces.
Kids that are two and a half, three and a half, and four and a half years old still
can't synchronize very well.
But they synchronize better if there's a person in the room to synchronize with.
And it's, they're six or seven years old before most kids can really dance in synchrony with
music.
There're exceptions, right?
Right, right.
Justin Bieber being one, right?
You've seen the movies of him playing-
You had to go there, didn't you Ed?
Yeah I had to.
But there're sort of rhythmic geniuses out there.
But most kids, they're six or seven before they can really synchronize with music.
But, even to come back to what David, you were saying about Mari's piece, Alt, that
you heard something in it that she probably hadn't intended, but three or four year old
David Poeppel might not have known what to make of that.
You're bringing a lifetime of auditory experience.
Of course you bring one of the delicious parts of human experiences that we have a hard disc
of life in our head, that colors everything.
So what we bring to every experience, whether it's music, the visual arts, dance, theater,
what the art historian Hans Gombrich called The Beholder's Share, it's I think a beautiful
phrase.
And so for me, the Beholder's Share to to you piece was finding something different.
I don't wanna skew this discussion too much towards meaning, but I will anyway.
Because a second example that just came up, was the one you gave with the Japanese children's
song, which you hear it for the first time and think, oh that has a cheerful thing.
The moment you tell the story, it colors it in a completely different way.
So now, I too, cannot hear this, 'cause it's kind of, oh this is this joyful rah, rah the
balloons are flying up or blowing bubbles.
Knowledge is a dangerous thing, in knowledge your preconceived, the priors you bring with
you to the perceptual experience color your interpretation of that.
That invariably leads to individual differences because we all have slightly different things
on our hard disc.
And your hard disc, includes a little area devoted to the music of Tom Waits, which …
Surprisingly big area.
So I am to the dismay of my wife and sons who are all musicians incidentally, I am a
deep fan of Tom Waits, and I selected a song for the particular reason I think it makes
a few interesting points, called Kentucky Avenue, which is about childhood
and pairs well with your-
[music]
So this one works for me every time.
Okay, why did I?
I selected this simply because I like it.
But it makes a couple of points that I think are germane to our discussion.
One is the, so this is about childhood right?
This is a song about all the weird stuff that happens when you're a kid, and the compelling
effect it has on your head.
So the stuff, the first time you heard certain things, or you fell in love, or you kissed
for the first time, or you had some awful experience with a parent, anything.
Stuff in your childhood has a particularly compelling grip on things.
That's one point, so our experiences early on, really color stuff later very profoundly.
The second point I think is, which is interesting, and I think it's easy to overlook, although
we all have this experience, is that material that's putatively sad, which this song is,
can give you a positive aesthetic experience, right?
So sad things are supposed to be sad, and in real life, sad things are sad, we don't
seek bad experiences, we seek positive experiences.
But in the arts, one of the fascinating things is that a negatively colored emotional things,
can be experienced as wonderful, and aesthetically engaging and moving, and that's one of the
most exciting things about the arts, and the music really brings it out in this magnificent
way.
Yeah.
Meagan, you've done a lot of work with this sort of, the behavioral kind of response is.
What is it about the sad song that we keep coming back to?
Well, it might be that it's one of the safe ways that we can experience this emotion,
without having any sort of personal consequences.
When you have sadness that's evoked through traditional ecological means, it's because
you've experienced a personal loss, no one wants that.
But music, and art in general, gives us the chance to explore these emotions that we tend
to avoid, because they have no consequences in this context.
So we can go to the theater and enjoy being really frightened, because we know that we're
not in danger, and music may be doing the same type of thing, where it gives us the
chance to explore negative emotions, in a way that have no consequences for us.
Yeah, and I think that it's really about experiencing a certain beautiful thing together, right?
The fact we're in it together.
I think that a lot of the experience of music moves us because it's kind of a resonant emotional
experience across a lot of people.
And so, we've done some work looking at brain differences between people who often get chills
when they listen to music, compared to people who don't, when controlling for all these
different variables, and it seems like the auditory areas are actually more connected
to areas of the brain that are important for social and emotional processing, among people
who always get chills.
So it's as if, when you're listening to something that's beautiful, it's a songwriter's way
of going straight to your social and emotional processing regions of the brain, through an
auditory channel.
So Meagan, the music that you chose for us is a sad song.
It is.
But it is a very different kind of sad song, from Tom Waits lonely guy at the bar at closing
time sort of, this is, I'm sad and I'm storming the gates of heaven to let the universe know
it.
What is it about this excerpt from the Mozart Requiem that does it for you?
So, one of things that happens in the clip that we're going to hear, is that Mozart created
this beautiful melodic line, that doesn't resolve in a way that you expect it to.
So the end of the melodic line ends on the seventh scale degree, and we generally expect
that to resolve to a very stable scale degree in music, that we call the tonic, and that
doesn't happen.
And I think that leaves the listener wanting more, and it gives you this sense of lack
of fulfillment, yet there's such beauty in that, and there's mystery, and for me it definitely
causes all sorts of emotions.
Well this is some of the Lacrimosa from the Mozart Requiem.
I suddenly wanna buy a car.
It's been used in a car commercial recently.
Which is pretty telling actually.
You know?
You had your emotional experience.
Longing, longing.
What kind of car?
I don't remember the brand, but it's a recent commercial.
But this piece has been used in films, many ... That, especially what we heard at the
end, where the voices come back in, that's become a kind of iconic musical moment in
film, in TV shows, music consultants love this piece.
Because it has a lot of emotional content, not necessarily the one that the text would
lead you to expect, Lacrimosa is tears in Latin.
But this, people hear something grand in this, and something elegant, and so you said there're
lots of emotion in this.
Right.
For you, what do you hear?
Well, one of the interesting things about this melodic line is that for me it reminds
me of the sound of someone crying.
So the fact that it is Lacrimosa tears, may have some direct relevance to how he decided
to create that line.
Maybe he was trying to emulate the types of sounds that people create when they're crying.
So, for me this taps into this very basic type of sadness response, and yet it's not
my sadness, so for me that becomes translated into an aesthetic response, rather than me
becoming personally sad, instead I appreciate the beauty of it.
So, if you're feeling a kind of response on a purely aesthetic level, are you less likely
to get that shiver-effect, than if you're actually responding to it as if that's your
emotion that's being prodded?
Well the shiver is thought to be an aesthetic response.
Oftentimes the songs that are most able to create the shiver-response are sad songs.
Yet people say that the response is highly positive, people generally don't think that
they're feeling sadness when they experience this extreme emotional response.
So, what is being communicated by the piece, maybe very different than what is being experienced
by the listener.
The listener response, maybe highly pleasurable, even though the piece is really sad.
And actually that kind of brings us to the piece that I chose, which is something I've
only recently discovered, and which I'm not sure I know how to set up, other than to say,
it's a man and a woman in a room, in their living room.
Bruce Green and Cora Loy McWhirter, I think they're married, they're in North Carolina,
and they sing old folk songs.
Like generally lesser known pretty dark, what the critic Real Mark has called, weird old
America.
And it's one microphone, there's no reverb, it's just two voices singing, I'll say together,
but you can decide for yourself.
The song is called, Come Near My Love.So,
I don't know what the hell is happening there.
Harmony.
But what kind?
It's a fourth.
Parallelfourth.
But it's not tempered, it's not the parallel fourth that get-
Sometimes it's not parallel, maybe that's what you mean.
They sound like they're droning first of all.
Yeah.
Rather than singing.
The sound of the fourth, right?
Yeah.
So, again it's not a tempered, it's a pure ... So it's wrong, it's not the fourth that
you'll get at a piano or a guitar, although you could do it.
Pythagorean.
maybe.
I don't know.
I'm often listening to music while I'm doing other things, and I just stuck this CD in
'cause a friend recommended it, and I just like rooted to the spot, what is that?
Because it was unexpected, and just like different from anything that I'd heard from Mountain
Appalachian, the high lonesome sound, it's definitely not that.
It's definitely not Nashville style harmony, it was just really kind of unexpected.
Well you know, it's funny, you started out the conversation by saying, well you know
30 years ago there was no music neuroscience and so forth, but really music has been studied
in science since there was science.
At least in the West.
Mari brought up Pythagoras.
Pythagoras was considered by some the first scientist in the West, and his question was
exactly that.
Why do those two notes sound so good together?
And we're still asking the question.
Right.
And why we should not let these two notes play together, because they make people do
impure things.
That's right.
That lasted-
Til the 15th-
In the 18th century, Johan Mathisson in Germany, a doctrine of the different affects that scales
would ... this scale will make people slit their wrists, this people will make people
run out and make bad decisions with the next person of the opposite sex that they meet.
This was really, this was seen as science, and you know.
Well you know, I think a lot thinking like that went way off the tracks.
Right?
But there's also a lot of good evidence that there are physiological responses that we
have.
The brain, going back to the brain stem, responses in the brain stem in the early auditory system,
that correspond to our feelings of what this harmony makes us feel.
You can almost, in that song you played, you can almost just hear one harmony, it doesn't
even need to progress, and you can already feel an emotionality out of that.
So I don't think, although it has for the past couple of 100 years been very fashionable
to discount that way of thinking, I think people are beginning to come back and say,
no maybe there really is something about the way we respond to individual intervals that's
really important.
All right, so give me some news you can use.
Why is this important to study, what does it tell us, what if any use is this?
Scientifically, behaviorally.
You mean music in general?
No, our exploration of these kinds of emotional and the physical affect.
Look, I think we shouldn't have to justify this.
So let me disagree with the question.
The premise of the question.
So obviously there's a-
It is a world science festival.
So yes, that's why we do science, because we can't help ourself trying to understand
stuff.
And so there's a deep value to basic research.
There has to be no nugget.
So it turns out that there is, because there's fascinating therapeutic implications understanding
music.
But from my point of view, we do basic science to simply understand the parts list, we're
here, we're trying to understand the parts list of the mind, the brain, and music.
And so, there are two things that can happen, we can use to understand something about music,
and something about the mind and brain, and we can use neural biological methods to understand
something about music.
These are perfectly valuable and reasonable things, and there has to be no end game, if
there's a pill or a lotion or a car I can buy, it matters not.
Okay?
We do basic science because we're wired to have ... we have a science forming faculty,
we just try to understand stuff.
And that's very important, and we should not forget that part of science is just that.
It's not trying to come up with an application, it's to satisfy curiosity and to let our minds
wander in weird directions, and say, damn that was interesting.
It turns out music is an extremely well-structured domain to learn something about how the mind
and brain are organized.
And that's deeply exciting and satisfying.
Yeah.
I can't agree with that more.
But I also think that the reason why I do science is so that I can understand more things,
and so that I could be more open-minded towards new ideas.
Before I started doing this, it was like of course you listen to Mozart, because he was
a genius, because he sounded good, and he was good because of all these ways.
But then you hear about all the people who are kind of deriving different experiences
from the same thing, like the illusion.
And then that, thinking about that just makes you appreciate like diversity more, it makes
you more open-minded I think.
Meagan, do you more of an application-based approach?
Well I think that addressing this question in general it raises new questions about the
nature of music, and the significance to the human species.
So if you look at the brain areas that have the strongest response when someone is experiencing
chills, you see that they are the same brain areas that are involved in rewarding behavior
that has biological significance.
So acquiring food, having sex, and these brain areas are also responsive to drugs.
So, when we see that music is activating these reward centers, we have to ask, well, does
it have any sort of biological value for humans?
Or, is it hijacking these systems in the same way that drugs do?
And that's an open question.
But I think this type of research raises those questions, and those questions are important
to understanding what is music, and why is it important to humans?
How about you Ed?
Well I want to start out by agreeing with David, because I'm 100% I think he's right
on with that.
I think, but I wanna add two things to it.
One he touched on, which is with music, music is so well-structured that it allows us to
go and see the brain when we use EEG or EMG, we can see with the rhythms of music, we can
see so clearly that brain entrainment.
People like David have spent a lot of time studying speech, and it's in some ways the
structure is not quite as clear, but in music we're able to first go in and say, oh my gosh
the brain is really entraining to music.
And then, pretty soon, people like David were saying, hey guess what, it's happening for
speech too.
So it gives us a kind of a way to focus the brain on this rhythmic thing.
And then I will go and talk about some applications.
So it turns out that there're a lot of kind of disorders of the brain in which you find
people also have a problem with rhythm.
Okay, so autistic kids have a problem with rhythm, people with specific language impairment,
people with dyslexia.
And there're other ways in which ... So we're not exactly quite sure what that means yet,
but there're other very clear ways in which people are using music therapy to clinical
benefits, so to help rehabilitate speech after a stroke for example, with melodic intonation
therapy or rhythmic stimulation can help people rehabilitate their gait, if they have Parkinson's
Disease.
So there really are, we are beginning to understand that there may actually be some clinical applications
to music, and a lot of them have to do with rhythm.
It's funny that we're coming to this realization at a time when there're a lot of musicians
who kind of pushing at the borders of what we consider to be music, as opposed to noise.
That, we could go down a whole rabbit hole, but instead, I think what we're going to do
is open the floor to questions from you folks, Yeah..
In talking about the fundamental processes involved in engaging with music, and talking
about rhythmicity, that's suggests that if it's so fundamental, that it would be happening
in other species as well.
So what kinds of properties here generalize, that we can tell, generalize the experiences
that say dogs or apes or others have with music?
Oh, that's a really great question.
Is that Finn by the way?
Hi Finn, how you doing?
Did you plant a question in the audience?
I did not plant a question, but I'm glad she asked it.
There're a bunch of really exciting studies going on right now.
I don't know, probably many of you in the audience have seen Snowball, the dancing cockatoo?
And people raise your hand, just so I get an idea of, yeah.
So you can go on YouTube, dances to the Backstreet Boys, it's sort of, it looks like he's having
a really great time.
One of my colleagues Oni Patel or two, and John Iverson went and actually studied Snowball,
and found that Snowball is in fact doing a pretty good job of synchronizing.
It's intermittent synchronization, so Snowball goes in and out, but statistically, they measured
statistically, he's pretty well synchronized.
But, so then another colleague of mine Peter Cooke, decided to teach a sea lion to synchronize.
And this is Ronin, who's also you could see on the web, and Ronin synchronizes as well
as a person.
Literally, just never misses a beat.
So there're some animals, we have done some preliminary work with a Bonobo, just playing
the drums and trying to get the Bonobo to synchronize, and the Bonobo will synchronize
with drum sounds.
The thing about some of these other animals though actually synchronize to music, which
we haven't gotten there with the Bonobos yet.
So, there're some people who say, well it's really a human thing, or you really to be
a vocal learning species, but then there're other people, things like Ronin suggests,
well, maybe it is more widespread, and at least the capability to synchronize.
Maybe not the motivation per se.
But yeah.
All right, let's take one more question.
Yes?
Gentleman in the blue shirt here.
Hi.
My mom has dementia, she's in her nineties, in a conversation she may not remember what
you said 30 seconds before, but she can recall the old hymns, word for word, or if you put
on Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey or something, she's back out on the dance floor with my
dad.
What's going on there, and how can it help people with Alzheimer's and dementia?
Do you wanna talk about that?
I'll say a little bit.
We know we have this network in our brain called the default network that's constantly
on.
And especially an area in the frontal lobe, medial prefrontal cortex, tends to have less
activity over time as you age, and people with Alzheimer's it's really much less activity.
And so what I think the music is doing is kind of acting a rejuvenator of that system,
so that you're increasing activity in those regions that that might then last a little
while.
Yeah, I think you know, the brain is a funny thing.
And people talk about the brain as if it's a computer, right?
And we wanna know how this little cog works with that little wheel and so forth.
But if what we learn when we study the brain it that it just doesn't work that way.
It works in all kinds of counterintuitive ways.
Another thing that you might know is that, if you have a stroke and you lose your ability
to speak, there's a very good possibility that you will preserve your ability to sing,
and that's now being exploited in melodic intonation therapy and so forth.
So the answer is we don't really know what's going on, but music is touching like every
facet of memory and our ability to communicate and so forth.
And on that note, let me thank all of you for being here on our wonderful panelists,
thank you so much.