Transcript

Announcer:

Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

Jad Abumrad:

This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich:

And I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad Abumrad:

Our program today is about music. What it is, how it works.

Robert Krulwich:

And what we want to do next, is we want to stay on the subject, but we're going to explore this a little more deeply. Take a closer look at the connection between language and music. We're going to add touch.

Jad Abumrad:

Touch.

Robert Krulwich:

And that will take us to the ear.

Jad Abumrad:

The ear.

Robert Krulwich:

And then into the brain.

Jad Abumrad:

The brain.

Robert Krulwich:

Then into the big question, the really big question, why does music, or how does music become a feeling?

Jad Abumrad:

The feeling.

Robert Krulwich:

Why do we get such deep pleasure or deep pain, we will have pain coming up too, all simply because of air pressing against your ear?

Jad Abumrad:

All right. Where first?

Robert Krulwich:

All right. Well, there is a psychology professor I want you to meet at Stanford who directs the Center for Infant Studies there, Ann Fernald is her name. And she got it into her head that there is a kind of deep universal music inside language. And she discovered it actually at a hospital. The Max Planck Institute in Munich has an obstetrics unit which is very popular among expectant mothers.

Ann Frenald:

These mothers came from the wards of this German hospital. And so they were Turkish, they were Greek, they were Sicilian, they were the so-called guest workers in the German society. Course, I didn't understand a word of what they spoke. As soon as they put the baby down and no longer had the physical contact, bodily contact with the child, they started to sing almost. In one language after another.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language 00:01:42] the babies.

Robert Krulwich:

Dutch.

Ann Frenald:

I heard them use these melodies.

Speaker 6:

[foreign language 00:01:47].

Robert Krulwich:

Russian.

Speaker 6:

[foreign language 00:01:50].

Ann Frenald:

To reach the child, to remain in touch with the baby.

Speaker 7:

[foreign language 00:01:54].

Robert Krulwich:

Yiddish.

Speaker 7:

[foreign language 00:01:56].

Ann Frenald:

The next day I brought my tape recorder.

Robert Krulwich:

Ann Frenald took her tape recorder from that hospital and traveled all over the world recording parents as they talked to their very little babies. And it didn't matter whether the parents spoke a romance language or a tone language, everywhere she went below the words you heard consistently the same melodies. For example.

Ann Frenald:

I'll start with approval.

Robert Krulwich:

When a parent wanted to praise a child.

Ann Frenald:

We would ask the parents to show the baby they were happy.

Speaker 8:

Good boy. Now you got it.

Ann Frenald:

Just using their voice. Show him you're happy with that.

Speaker 9:

[foreign language 00:02:33]

Robert Krulwich:

Hindi.

Speaker 10:

[foreign language 00:02:38].

Speaker 9:

[foreign language 00:02:38].

Robert Krulwich:

Portuguese.

Speaker 11:

[foreign language 00:02:41].

Ann Frenald:

And what these things had in common was that the melody was a kind of a rise fall.

Speaker 12:

[foreign language 00:00:02:52].

Speaker 13:

Good girl. Good girl. You got it. Good girl, sweetie.

Robert Krulwich:

It doesn't matter what words the parents are saying, it's always really about this melody.

Jad Abumrad:

And why that particular melody?

Robert Krulwich:

All she knows is it worked.

Ann Frenald:

There's something about this melody that keeps the child doing something.

Robert Krulwich:

There are, she says other categories she discovered.

Ann Frenald:

Now with a prohibition in contrast, your goal is to stop the child from doing something.

Robert Krulwich:

The category that says, "Stop!"

Ann Frenald:

Quite a different melody. It's short.

Speaker 14:

[foreign language 00:00:03:30].

Ann Frenald:

It's sharp.

Speaker 14:

[foreign language 00:03:30].

Ann Frenald:

In musical terms it's staccato.

Speaker 14:

[foreign language 00:03:33].

Robert Krulwich:

There is the category of look, pay attention to that.

Ann Frenald:

Mothers frequently use rising pitch.

Speaker 15:

Nora, look. Look, sweetie.

Ann Frenald:

They frequently use higher pitch.

Speaker 15:

A unicorn. A unicorn.

Robert Krulwich:

So far, Ann Fernald has found four universal melodies that praise, that stop and call attention and of course the melody that comforts.

Speaker 16:

[foreign language 00:03:56].

Robert Krulwich:

And while this may seem obvious to you, if you think about it, this is music that is understood by infants who are just new in the world. But we all know what it means. We all know these songs.

Ann Frenald:

We're used to thinking of sounds as being about something. Speeches always about something. But it feels to me more like touch. Touch isn't about something. If you whack me on the arm in a sudden sharp way, I'm going to be startled or a gentle touch has a different effect. And I think, actually sound is kind of touch at a distance.

Robert Krulwich:

That was Ann Frenald, director of the Center for Infant Studies at Stanford. And when Ann says.

Ann Frenald:

Sound is more like touch.

Robert Krulwich:

That turns out to be literally the case. This is something I learned from a friend of mine, Jonah Lehrer.

Jonah Lehrer:

My name's Jonah Lehrer.

Robert Krulwich:

Who at this very moment is working on a book.

Jonah Lehrer:

An upcoming book on art and science, on the connection between art and science.

Jad Abumrad:

Do we need to have a name for that book?

Jonah Lehrer:

It's called Proust was a Neuroscientist.

Jad Abumrad:

Okay.

Robert Krulwich:

Answers Jonah, thinking about sound as touch.

Jonah Lehrer:

More like touch.

Robert Krulwich:

I asked him, how does sound get into or touch your brain? Take us on that journey.

Jonah Lehrer:

It's just waves of vibrating air. It's just your voice.

Ann Frenald:

Touch at a distance.

Jonah Lehrer:

Begin in your voicebox, compresses air and that air travels through space and time. Into my ear. The little tunnel, waves of diffuse, vibrating air focused and channeled into my eardrum, which vibrates a few very small bones. And the little bones transmit the vibration into this salty sea, where the hairs are. And the hair cells are fastening. The hair cells become active when they are literally bent by a wave. They bend like trees in a breeze. And when these hair cells bend, charged molecules flood inward and activate the cell.

Robert Krulwich:

The sound triggers the bones, the bones disturbs the fluid, the fluid rocks the hairs. And then the hairs set off essentially electricity.

Jonah Lehrer:

That's the language of neurons.

Robert Krulwich:

All those changes from waves to bones, to electricity, all those things were a trip on their way to being heard. It's only when the electricity finally forms a pattern in your brain, only when it's deep inside, that's when you hear something.

Ann Frenald:

Feels to me more like touch. Sound is kind of touch at a distance.

Robert Krulwich:

All right, now that we have gotten a sound, any sound into our heads, let me ask you the next really big question. Why do some sounds and let's make it music. Why does music make so many of us so often feel so strongly?

Jad Abumrad:

Yeah. In terms of what we were just listening to, how does all that electricity from the ear going up to the brain in the next millisecond become a feeling? Well let me introduce you to someone.

Mark Tutremo:

Mark Tutremo.

Jad Abumrad:

Actually we heard from him earlier. He's a neuroscientist.

Mark Tutremo:

I'm in the department neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Jad Abumrad:

And Mark can at least begin to answer this question, this feeling question. He's done something really interesting. He's able to listen to the electricity as it pools in the ear and shoots up this big fat nerve to the brain.

Mark Tutremo:

It's kind of a popping sound.

Jad Abumrad:

He can actually listen to that nerve, to the electricity.

Mark Tutremo:

Faster than I'm able to do here with my fingers.

Robert Krulwich:

Is that the sound?

Jad Abumrad:

That's what it sounds like.

Robert Krulwich:

How do they get these sound?

Jad Abumrad:

I actually have no idea. I guess they sort of tap into the nerve.

Robert Krulwich:

This is the sound of sound entering a brain?

Jad Abumrad:

Yes. This is the sound of sound entering the brain as electricity in little pulses. And as you can hear, the electricity has a meter. What Mark has discovered is that when the electricity entering your brain is even and regular.

Robert Krulwich:

Is this regular?

Jad Abumrad:

This is regular.

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah, sort out my whole suite. Yeah that's regular.

Jad Abumrad:

Right. When the meter of the electricity is regular and rhythmic, it will arrive in our mind and be heard by us as a sound that we generally like. Like this. Nice sound. That in music is known as a perfect fifth.

Mark Tutremo:

The inputs coming from a perfect fifth is very, very regular.

Jad Abumrad:

Like a metronome. However, and here's where it gets interesting. When the meter going from the ear to the brain is irregular, jagged, arrhythmic, unpredictable.

Robert Krulwich:

Wait, let me hear. This is jagged?

Jad Abumrad:

This is jagged.

Robert Krulwich:

Wait, shhh. Oh, yeah, it is jagged.

Jad Abumrad:

Yeah. And what Mark has discovered is that when electrical impulses like that travel from the ear to the brain, they will become heard by us, by our mind as a sound that we generally don't like. Like that.

Robert Krulwich:

Don't care for that one. That's a minor second.

Mark Tutremo:

The inputs coming from a minor second is very, very chaotic.

Robert Krulwich:

Let me just sum up here what I think you're saying. If a sound entering my brain is disorderly and unexpected.

Jad Abumrad:

Electrically speaking.

Robert Krulwich:

Electrically speaking, then that would make me feel uncomfortable. And if it comes in, in a familiar and orderly way, that will make me feel comfortable.

Jad Abumrad:

There does seem to be a relationship between the kind of electricity a sound produces and how we feel about that sound.

Robert Krulwich:

Do they have fancy names for this?

Jad Abumrad:

Well, that's a minor second. That thing you just heard.

Robert Krulwich:

But do the scientists have names for pleasant and unpleasant.

Jad Abumrad:

A consonant is pleasant, dissonant is unpleasant. That's not a science name. That's a music name. And these are fixed positions in your ear.

Robert Krulwich:

Well, maybe fixed for scientists. But maybe let me just propose this to you, that what people find pleasing and what people find painful is malleable. I'll tell you why. I'm going to tell you a story now, a true story, it involves a musician.

Jonah Lehrer:

Igor Stravinsky, who is now considered to be one of the great composers of the 20th century, if not the most important composer of the 20th century.

Robert Krulwich:

That's Jonah Lehrer again. And Jonah tells the story of two concerts one year apart in the same city, the exact same piece of music. The audience who heard it first and then the audience, or heard it later on heard totally different things. Let's begin first, Jonah. how does this, just set the scene?

Jonah Lehrer:

This is May 1913.

Robert Krulwich:

It's a spring night?

Jonah Lehrer:

It's a balmy summer night. Black tie costumes, the women have their fedoras.

Robert Krulwich:

This was evening clothes.

Jonah Lehrer:

Yeah. Well this was the Russian ballet. This was high art.

Robert Krulwich:

And the programs said, this is a concert about springtime. But as they settled into their seats, it turns out that what Stravinsky had in mind was not spring like honeybees, no. The spring Stravinsky had in mind, was about change, about radical change, ritual murder.

Jonah Lehrer:

Literally that's what the story of the play is. It's a pagan ritual where at the end the virgin gets massacred.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh dear.

Jonah Lehrer:

But the music itself is fascinating. The beginning is this very charming bassoon. It's a classic Lithuanian folk tune. And it does sound like the earth is warming. And that lasts for about a minute. And then we get some tutti of flutes and it's lovely. It's getting a little more disturbing. And then about three minutes into it, everything changes. There's just an earthquake. Stravinsky plays this chord. There's a great story that when Diaghilev, who was the head of the Ballets Russes, first heard this chord and Stravinsky was playing on the piano for him. He asked Stravinsky, "How long will it go on like that?" And Stravinsky looked at him and said, "To the end, my dear." And it literally does. That chord structures the music. It's one of the most difficult sounds you've ever heard. It is just the stereotype of dissonance. It is. It hurts you.

Robert Krulwich:

Well, what happened?

Jonah Lehrer:

Well, after about three minutes, they rioted.

Robert Krulwich:

They what?

Jonah Lehrer:

They rioted.

Robert Krulwich:

Meaning what? They screamed or threw?

Jonah Lehrer:

They screamed. There was blood. Old ladies were hitting each other with canes.

Robert Krulwich:

Why were old ladies? Old ladies should have gone and hit Stravinsky with a cane.

Jonah Lehrer:

But once they started screaming, Stravinsky ran backstage and by some accounts was crying. Nijinsky was off on the side of the stage screaming to his dancers to keep the beat.

Speaker 19:

[foreign language 00:00:14:17].

Robert Krulwich:

Wow.

Jonah Lehrer:

Quite the fiasco. And the question is why?

Robert Krulwich:

But this is the feeling question. Why so much feeling about a piece of music?

Jad Abumrad:

Why did they riot?

Robert Krulwich:

You would think that they rioted because they were hot, because they didn't like those sounds because they thought those dancers were making strange and odd gestures.

Jad Abumrad:

Well Jonah offers a different theory. Well, let me put it this way. This riot has been talked about and written about for forever, but to the best of our knowledge, no one has ever tried to explain what happened that night through the lens of brain chemistry.

Robert Krulwich:

Brain chemistry.

Jad Abumrad:

Yeah. What music can do to a brain.

Jonah Lehrer:

If you try to imagine yourself where all you've heard is Wagner and the great romanticism of 19th century music and then all of a sudden you get this. These are noises you've never heard before.

Jad Abumrad:

It's all very new, but scientists are beginning to figure out what happens in our brain when we hear noises we've never heard before, especially dissonant noises.

Yon Fishman:

We find that chords, musical chords that are typically judged to be dissonant elicit these wild fluctuations in brain activity.

Jad Abumrad:

This is Yon Fishman. He is a neuroscientist and he studies those wild fluctuations in the brain.

Yon Fishman:

On an area of the brain called the auditory cortex.

Jad Abumrad:

Let's zoom into the auditory cortex for a moment because this is basically hearing central. And when you're listening to music, there are all kinds of neurons doing all kinds of things. One gang in particular, that Yon is interested.

Yon Fishman:

That's right.

Jad Abumrad:

A gang that he suspects gets very agitated when it hears sounds like these. These neurons might be the new noise department. Because he thinks their job is to take every new, strange, unordered, unpredictable noise that comes into the brain and figure it out. Find the pattern.

Jonah Lehrer:

There are groups of neurons whose sole job it is.

Jad Abumrad:

This is how Jonah puts it.

Jonah Lehrer:

To turn that dissonant note, dissect it, take it apart and try to understand it.

Yon Fishman:

We are pattern searching animals.

Jad Abumrad:

And this is how Yon Fishman puts it.

Yon Fishman:

And so at the level of the auditory cortex, the brain has this daunting task of having to be able to disentangle this complex mixture of sounds.

Jad Abumrad:

Most of the time, those neurons in the auditory cortex succeed in finding the pattern. But every so often, maybe this was the case that night, they fail. Okay so Robert, imagine inside the brains, inside the heads of the people in the audience, listening to the Rite of Spring that night were all of these neurons.

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah. I can hear them.

Jad Abumrad:

Trying to make sense of the new sounds and failing. Not just failing once or twice, but over and over and over and over.

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah, because the Rite of Spring keeps being dissonant all the way through so they can never get any rest.

Jad Abumrad:

And when those neurons fail repeatedly, there are consequences.

Robert Krulwich:

Chemical consequences.

Jonah Lehrer:

What happens is our neurons squirt out a bit of dopamine.

Robert Krulwich:

And what does the dopamine do? Well dopamine makes us feel.

Yon Fishman:

A little dopamine makes you feel happy. That's why sex and drugs make you feel euphoric.

Jonah Lehrer:

But a little too much and that euphoria turns into literally a schizophrenia.

Robert Krulwich:

Really?

Jonah Lehrer:

Yes. I don't want to oversimplify schizophrenia in any way, shape or form, but some of our most effective treatments for schizophrenia work by suppressing dopamine released in the brain.

Robert Krulwich:

There's some kind of relationship. Too much dopamine has been shown clinically to make people feel crazy.

Jonah Lehrer:

Yes.

Jad Abumrad:

Maybe that's what happened that night on May 29th, 1913.

Robert Krulwich:

Music erupted, neurons.

Jad Abumrad:

Revolted.

Robert Krulwich:

Right. Dopamine flooded through to their brains.

Jad Abumrad:

And people went mad.

Robert Krulwich:

Literally mad. Let's go to the second night in our story. The piece does come back to Paris, right?

Jad Abumrad:

Yes.

Robert Krulwich:

How much later after the riot?

Yon Fishman:

From May to March.

Jad Abumrad:

Actually it was April.

Robert Krulwich:

It's almost a year later.

Yon Fishman:

Yes.

Jad Abumrad:

And this time it doesn't come with the ballet. This time it's just being performed as a work of music.

Robert Krulwich:

Does anyone buy tickets?

Yon Fishman:

Oh yeah. It's going to sell out. It caused a few nights of violent riots.

Robert Krulwich:

Can you set up the situation now? The audience is it a different audience?

Yon Fishman:

I actually don't know if the audience is different.

Robert Krulwich:

But we can at least say that the audience is coming to it with a different set of information.

Yon Fishman:

Exactly. They've been warned. For the first time they can actually sit back and really try to pay attention to the notes. By being willing to listen, they could hear the orders and patterns that Stravinsky had hidden in this work. They were able to hear the music and find the orders hidden underneath this noise.

Robert Krulwich:

Was there a riot at this time? The second round?

Yon Fishman:

Oh no. Quite the opposite. Stravinsky was a hero. They carried him out on their shoulders.

Robert Krulwich:

Really? Literally he was.

Yon Fishman:

Literally, he was cared in their shoulders and the press was glowing.

Robert Krulwich:

In one year?

Yon Fishman:

In one year.

Jad Abumrad:

In just one year Stravinsky had gone from villainous monster to hipster icon. To the extent that police had to escort him from the concert hall to keep him safe from adoring fans. And that was just the beginning.

Yon Fishman:

The third story, if you wanted to tell a third story would be, it became children's music. It became Disney music in 1940.

Jad Abumrad:

27 years after Stravinsky caused a violent, bloody riot, he was negotiating with Mickey Mouse over the rights to use his music in Fantasia.

Robert Krulwich:

Which Fantasia? Is starring a hippopotamus in a little tutu? Is that the one?

Jad Abumrad:

Is it the mushrooms, Jonah?

Jonah Lehrer:

Yeah, I think it's the mushrooms, isn't it?

Robert Krulwich:

It's the mushrooms.

Jad Abumrad:

Actually, we looked it up later. It was the part with the dinosaurs.

Robert Krulwich:

How does this happen? How do you go so quickly from being the most outrageous thing that literally maddens people to a triumph, to kid's music?

Jonah Lehrer:

Yes. The Rite of Spring is perfect evidence of the brain's astonishing plasticity.

Jad Abumrad:

See, this is the really cool part of it for me. If you remember just one bit of science from this whole thing, remember this, those neurons we met earlier.

Robert Krulwich:

The ones with the little voices? I like them.

Jad Abumrad:

Yes. It turns out those neurons learn and they learn fast because they're actually part of a larger network of brain cells with very technical name.

Jonah Lehrer:

Called the corticofugal network.

Jad Abumrad:

And what this network does is it's always sort of monitoring, listening to the sounds that are coming into the brain and tuning those neurons to better hear those sounds.

Robert Krulwich:

Wait, trying to get the station on the radio just to getting it just right.

Jonah Lehrer:

Our neurons literally adjust, literally we're talking in the biochemical engineering sense. If on that first night you just hear the Rite as pure noise all the way through from beginning to end. If you're listening, if you're letting your corticofugal network do its job, it can actually resculpt your brain and let you hear the patterns better as the symphony evolves.

Robert Krulwich:

Is it fair to say that this is a sort of tug of war that an artist comes, create something that is new and unpredictable and strange and maybe noise-ish at first hearing and the artist is thrilled to be new in that way. And then the brain ruins it all slowly but surely by making it familiar.

Jonah Lehrer:

Well, the brain abhors the new. The brain constantly wants to assimilate every experience we've ever had into every other experience. And I think Stravinsky realized it was the purpose of the artist to challenge the brain, to break the brain out of its conservative cycle.

Robert Krulwich:

The astonishing thing to me is here you have an artist like Igor Stravinsky who comes to town intentionally trying to get people to sit in their seats and really listen to music. And the strategy he chooses is instead of pleasing them, he wants to put them in a little bit of discomfort or real pain even. And indeed they not only listen, they riot. But within a year and this is the sad part to me, within a year it's easier to hear. Suddenly it's pleasant, suddenly they like it. And suddenly Igor Stravinsky is robbed of his newness.

Jad Abumrad:

Why is that sad for you?

Robert Krulwich:

Well, because it's kind of, I don't know. I never thought of the brain as the enemy of the artist before.

Jad Abumrad:

Yeah, yeah, but I can give you a different interpretation on this. Here comes a guy who offers up the most dissonant, stabbing, percussive, painful music to anyone had heard to that point and we learned to love it. Doesn't that make you sort of feel pride.

Robert Krulwich:

No, no.

Jad Abumrad:

Our brains can decode anything.

Robert Krulwich:

We learn to love it only because it's well made. If it was just random car honks I don't think you could really appreciate that.

Jad Abumrad:

I disagree.

Robert Krulwich:

Oh you think it would be like.

Jad Abumrad:

Have you heard the music that was written after Stravinsky? It's even worse than what you just did.

Robert Krulwich:

Yeah, but my brain has never accommodated that.

Jad Abumrad:

But some people love that stuff. And my only point is that if there are these fixed poles in our ear between consonance and dissonance, which is how we started this whole thing, and now we end up learning that our brains can override that to such an astonishing degree. Well then culture wins. Culture beats biology.

Robert Krulwich:

That's true but to me, it's sad.

Jad Abumrad:

Sad for the artist. It's not sad for us.

Robert Krulwich:

It's sort of like the artists and the brains are in a kind of eternal struggle.

Robert Krulwich:

Special thanks for that story to Jonah Lehrer, who is a regular Radiolab contributor. And he's the author of the upcoming book, Proust was a Neuroscientist. [foreign language 00:25:11].

Jad Abumrad:

I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich And I will continue in a moment.

Speaker 21:

You are listening to Radiolab.

Speaker 22:

From New York Public Radio.

Speaker 23:

WNYC.

Speaker 22:

And NPR.

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