[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: I want a piece of that. Oh, this is fun.

ROBERT KRULWICH: What are we doing about the podcast, by the way?

JAD: Oh, should we do that now?

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Hey I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: Yes it is.

JAD: No, we're doing the introduction.

ROBERT: Oh. [laughs]

JAD: Ready? Here we go. Let's do it for real. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: And today on the podcast I want to tell you about a guy who hears music in a way that is just extraordinary.

JESSICA BENKO: Yeah.

JAD: And painful.

JESSICA: Just thinking about this story makes my head hurt.

JAD: That's Jessica Benko. She's a reporter.

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: And she's the one who initially told me the story.

JESSICA: So a little while ago I went up to visit this guy, Bob Milne.

JESSICA: Bob, it's nice to see you!

BOB MILNE: Nice to see you.

JESSICA: Excuse my snowy feet here.

JESSICA: And he lives in a tiny town in Michigan with his wife, Linda.

JESSICA: HI, Linda. It's nice to see you again.

LINDA MILNE: Hi.

JAD: And who is he?

JESSICA: He's an amazing piano player. The Library of Congress actually called him a national treasure.

JAD: Really?

JESSICA: He's had this special relationship with music ever since he was a boy.

JESSICA: Did you grow up with any other instruments inside the house other than the piano, or was that what you started out on?

BOB MILNE: Well, my mother made me take piano lessons and I hated it. I didn't like the sound of minor keys, and the piano teachers had me playing a recital in which there was a Schubert minor key piece in it. So on the recital I played it in a major, and everyone thought that was a travesty.

JESSICA: These days though, his main music isn't so much Schubert, it's actually ragtime.

BOB MILNE: Ragtime is one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Find the rhythms.

JESSICA: So the thing about ragtime is that oftentimes the player is actually playing two different rhythms at the same time, one with the left hand, one with the right hand.

BOB MILNE: And then you put the rhythms of three on the right hand.

JESSICA: The thing about Bob is he can do this, like, times a thousand.

JAD: What does that even mean?

JESSICA: Well, let me back up. I first heard about Bob from a neurologist named Kerstin Bettermann.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Yeah, Kerstin Bettermann.

JESSICA: Who is now at Penn State.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Penn State University. First time I heard about Bob Milne was through friends.

JESSICA: Kerstin heard about Bob from a colleague who'd seen him play for an audience.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bob Milne: Well I might just take a tune like ...]

JESSICA: He was actually playing multiple rhythms with his two different hands, and switching back and forth between different pieces of music and carrying on a conversation at the same time. You can look up videos of Bob on YouTube, and you can see him performing and throwing out jokes, but at times you'll see him carry on a full conversation while playing. From the perspective of a neurologist, this is actually really hard because the part of your brain that should be engaged in playing a piece of music that complicated should also be engaged in having a conversation.

JAD: The talking part and the playing part are the same part?

JESSICA: They're the same part in most of us.

JESSICA: For most people that sort of thing, playing a complex piece of music and having a conversation, would interfere with one another?

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Yes, that's what you usually would think, unless you're highly skilled and you play maybe one piece of music at a time that you've done multiple times, but even then it would be very difficult to this degree.

JESSICA: So Kerstin got in touch with Bob, and she started asking him some questions.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: About the way he would perceive music ...

JESSICA: In the course of chatting with him and talking about how he perceives music and all of this, he happened to say to her ...

BOB MILNE: That I could hear an entire symphony in my head. And I didn't think that was too big a deal because I always listened to two of them at once.

JESSICA: He told her ...

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: "I only have to focus on the one melody that I want to hear at a given time, and then that's the piece I play. But I hear them all ongoing."

JAD: Did he just say he can hear two?

JESSICA: Two different symphonies.

JAD: In his head?

JESSICA: At the same time.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: And we thought this was very unusual.

JAD: Yeah! But I mean, are we talking the full symphonies or just the melodies?

JESSICA: Every instrument.

JAD: Every instrument. Huh.

JESSICA: And he can focus in, and ...

BOB MILNE: Turn one of them up, one of them down and they both run simultaneously.

JAD: Huh!

BOB MILNE: So then she pushed at the envelope and asked me if can I hear three.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Three pieces of music.

BOB MILNE: And I said, "Well, I don't know. I never tried."

JESSICA: But he was like, "Yeah, I think I could do three."

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: When we challenged him a little bit, actually, he said, "I can do four if you asked me."

JAD: What?

BOB MILNE: But I wouldn't go any further than that.

JAD: No. That's total [bleep]. Just four symphonies at the same time? That's just nothing but noise.

JESSICA: Absolute cacophony.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: You know, the four pieces of music, that's just was wow! I said, "Nobody can do this." I was really critical.

JAD: Yeah, because it's not true!

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: We had to think about how to test this.

JESSICA: Let me tell you about how the experiment worked, and then tell me if you think it's true.

JAD: All right.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: We came up with the behavioral test.

JESSICA: So the first thing Kerstin had to do was find a control, someone to compare Bob to. So she found a conductor.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Peter Perret who's the former conductor for the Winston-Salem Symphony.

JESSICA: Who is himself an accomplished musician. Before the test, she sent him and Bob ...

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Four pieces of music. We had Schubert's symphony, we had Brahms, we had Beethoven.

JESSICA: And finally, one from Mendelssohn. So you have to keep in mind these four symphonies are in different keys and different tempos.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Very different themes and instrumentations. And the challenge for them was to learn these four pieces of music.

JESSICA: Completely memorize them.

BOB MILNE: Four different tunes, and they only gave me a couple days to listen to them.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: And then play them in their mind, and we would then ask them where in a certain piece they would be after an arbitrary time.

JAD: I'm not really following. What did they do?

JESSICA: Okay, so here's what they did. They put these guys in a scanner and they said to them, "I want you to play the music in your mind."

JAD: Play the music in your mind.

JESSICA: Close your eyes and imagine the music.

JAD: So no music is playing out loud?

JESSICA: No music playing, just inside their head.

JAD: And are they imagining it however they want or, like, on the CD?

JESSICA: No, no. They—exactly what they had heard on the CD.

JAD: So same instruments coming in and out?

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: Same tempo?

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: So if it was Vivace on the CD, Vivace in their head?

JESSICA: Exactly.

JAD: And why were they doing this again?

JESSICA: Well, they wanted to see if these guys could track via memory these really complicated pieces of music.

JAD: I see.

JESSICA: So they put the guys in the scanner. They're laying there.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

JESSICA: And on a screen in front of them the word "start" flashes, and at that moment they start playing the first piece of music back in their head. In the control room, they're tracking the music themselves to follow the timing.

JAD: The researchers?

JESSICA: Yeah.

JAD: Oh, so while Bob and this dude are imagining it, they're actually keeping track of where the real CD is?

JESSICA: Exactly. They let it go for a while, and at an arbitrary moment they say "stop," and then they say, "Sing to me exactly where you are in the music."

JAD: Like the note?

JESSICA: The exact phrase. They go back, they compare the timing.

JAD: To the CD?

JESSICA: Right. To find out if these guys can really recreate inside their heads exactly what they'd heard.

JAD: And?

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: So our conductor, our control, was able to listen to one piece of music at a time, and was really right on target with the right answer on timing within a second.

JAD: Wow! So this conductor's imagined symphony was only a second off from the real one?

JESSICA: Yep. Same with Bob. So Bob's within a note or two.

JAD: Not bad!

JESSICA: Now round two.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: The multi-song task as we called it.

JESSICA: They told them both to start that first piece of music again, and then a little bit later they said, "Start the second piece of music in your head."

JAD: Simultaneously?

JESSICA: Yep.

JAD: All right, I'm already like come on! This is crazy. Like, this is—we slipped into fantasy.

JESSICA: Well, and that's what happened for the conductor. He couldn't do it.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: He couldn't do two simultaneously.

JAD: Yeah, of course he couldn't do it! It's impossible.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: There was no chance. He said, "This is an overwhelming impossible task."

JESSICA: His brain just shut down.

JAD: What, like, he died or something?

JESSICA: He stopped even being able to track the first piece of music.

JAD: Ah.

JESSICA: He just got confused. Now we go to Bob.

BOB MILNE: They put me into the MRI, and they asked me, "Start tune one in your head." So I did. Then roughly 10, 15 seconds later, I got a message on the screen that says, "Continue listening to one, start two." And then 15 seconds later, "Continue listening to tunes one and two. Start three." And then the same thing with tune four. Then on the screen it said "stop," and then Kerstin came out on a little—I could hear her talking to me from somewhere. And she says, "Bob ..."

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Tell us. Where are you?

BOB MILNE: "Where are you in tune one?"

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: In Beethoven's symphony right now. What do you hear?

BOB MILNE: So I told her, and I described what the piece was playing at that point. And the same thing with tune two, three and four. She announced that I was exactly right on down to the note in each one of those symphonies.

JAD: Jess, you're telling me something that's just not ...

JESSICA: Kerstin's a really—she's got a lot of integrity.

JAD: It's just my common sense right now is yelling like a three year old.

JESSICA: It really is mind boggling to think about. It makes my brain hurt.

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: But, you know, we proved yeah, he can do it.

JESSICA: When Kerstin gave you different pieces of music to listen to, did any of them clash?

BOB MILNE: No. No, they don't clash. They're all just playing different pieces. There's nothing chaotic about it.

JAD: All right. So assuming this is true, how does he do this? How does he explain to himself how he does this?

JESSICA: So I think there's two things going on here. The first has to do with emotions.

JAD: Emotions?

KERSTIN BETTERMANN: Bob is using different brain areas, I think. In his case, probably more—more emotional brain center.

JESSICA: Yeah, emotion deepens the way that we experience things, makes stronger memories. And Bob has a really strong emotional relationship with music.

JAD: Well, don't we all?

JESSICA: Yeah, but it's a little bit beyond the whole "Minor keys make me feel sad." He has really specific emotions associated with individual keys on the scale.

JAD: Huh.

BOB MILNE: When I hear C major, it's a very bland key. It's like—I don't know how to describe, it's like eating water soup or something like that. But D major is a bright key that makes me want to dance, even though I can't dance. And every key, every one of the keys on the piano had a different emotional attachment to me.

JESSICA: So for Bob, if just the keys are triggering different emotions?

JAD: Yeah?

JESSICA: Imagine what it must be like when you get to actual music.

JAD: So you think that something about how he experiences the emotions of the music makes it etch more deeply in his brain or something?

JESSICA: Yeah, I think he's—when he's got these four pieces of music going, he's not thinking hard about tracking each one of them. He's already in them, he feels them inside his body. And you can feel more with one feeling at a time.

JAD: Huh!

JESSICA: So that's one idea. The second idea has to do actually more with image and space, really. So Bob often closes his eyes when he's talking, it just helps him focus. So I asked him if he could try playing back two pieces of music right now, and I asked him, "When you hear these two symphonies in your head, what are you seeing?"

BOB MILNE: I can picture two symphony orchestras sitting side by side.

JAD: He actually sees the literal orchestras in his head?

BOB MILNE: Yeah. And I see them as silhouettes. There's no conductor in front of either one. There's a brownish hue out in front of them like it's the floor. It's more the color of the deep brown of a violin. And in back of them, there's a semicircle that's bluish in color. Then when I listen to them—I'm going to listen to Brahms Second Symphony over in the left side, and over on the right side I'll turn on the Emperor Concerto Third Movement of Beethoven. So I'm listening to that. Now these are in two different keys. Emperor's in E flat, Brahms is in D. So now if I want to pay particular attention, oh let's say I'm gonna listen to the Emperor here. I'm gonna go into the E major, I just sped it up. I can speed the thing up to go to some other part in it. I can jump backwards. Let's see, just a minute. I can hear it in F, I can put it into any key I want to, but I'm gonna roar forward in this third movement of the Emperor here and listen to the E major variation on the piano, which is just like a—it's just rocking on this beautiful E major part. Pivoting around to the E flat note, and going up and down from there on the piano.

JAD: Wow! Wow! So his crazy talents may have something to do with this movie-making thing that he does in his head.

JESSICA: Yeah, but it's not just a movie, it's like a 3D movie. He can use it to find out where a specific instrument is.

JAD: How do you mean?

JESSICA: In his mind's eye, he can fly out over these orchestras, and actually look down on the individual instrument he wants to see.

BOB MILNE: When I'm looking down and I see the piano out in front of them.

JESSICA: He can zoom in and see them playing their instrument.

BOB MILNE: Okay, now I'm up there in the air listening to this thing, and over on my left side I can still hear this Brahms going along. Now Brahms, I can only see the silhouettes from the front, whereas the Emperor over here I can see full color and every person's face in it plus hear the lines that they're playing.

JESSICA: And as he's flying out over these orchestras, the instruments actually get louder and softer depending on where he is. Like if he goes behind orchestra number one ...

BOB MILNE: I can hear the bass much louder. And then let's see, yeah then if I go over to the left side I'm hearing the violins.

JESSICA: And he says he can float right above the players and actually see what they're doing.

BOB MILNE: I can see every wrinkle in the pleated shirts of their tuxedos, and I can see the deep brownish orangish color of the violas, and I can hear the deep sound, beautiful sound of that low viola, and I can hear every little rosin scratch across their bows.

JAD: God, listening to music for this guy must be like an acid trip! The way that he is describing it?

JESSICA: [laughs] I think it is. And when he listens to recorded music, it's so much diminished from what he feels when he's imagining it.

JAD: Huh. So he doesn't listen to CDs.

JESSICA: He cannot stand listening to CDs.

JAD: That—wow!

JESSICA: Yeah. He's a real example of the extremes of the human mind.

JAD: So what does he do with these crazy talents? I mean, is he like a billionaire?

JESSICA: [laughs] Nope. First of all, ragtime's not exactly the most popular form of music in the United States at this point, but it's what he likes to play. And he plays 250 shows a year, but a lot of them are at historical societies or churches.

BOB MILNE: Linda and I, we've got a small motor home. It's an airport bus, one of those little 15-passenger buses. It's got a hot shower and a bathroom and a bed, of course.

JESSICA: So, you know, he travels around in his little motor home with his wife when he can and without her when he can't, and sleeps in Walmart parking lots. He's working on an opera—which is mostly done—and he writes it in his head while he's driving, and then he sits down in a McDonald's and writes it out on paper. And, you know, that's pretty much what he does with his life.

JAD: Thanks to reporter Jess Benko for that great story, and also to producer Mark Phillips for making it sound so good.

ROBERT: But why should we share the information about what we just did? Why not do the outro in a way that Bob Milne would fully and completely appreciate?

JAD: You mean, so we should say it all together in a big jumble?

ROBERT: Simultaneously. And he'll be able to think the Jad side and then the Robert side.

JAD: Okay. Ready?

ROBERT: Yep.

BOB MILNE: One, two, three, four.

JAD: Thank you to people who play the piano, or thank you to listeners of the piano players who play the piano. Thank you, of course, to tuners of those pianos. Thank you to Walmart and their discount cheap goods.

ROBERT: Special thanks to Jessica Benko.

BOB MILNE: ... the left hand hitting the piano.

ROBERT: Thank you, Bob.

JAD: Thank you, Robert.

ROBERT: And good night.

BOB MILNE: See that?

[LISTENER: This is Ann Anderson, a Radiolab listener from Richland, Michigan. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Have a great day! Bye.]

 

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