JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Our program today is about music, what it is, how it works.

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

ANNE FERNALD: Touch.

ROBERT: And that will take us to the ear ...

JONAH LEHRER: The ear.

ROBERT: ... and then into the brain.

MARK JUDE TRAMO: The brain.

ROBERT: And then to the big question, the really big question: why does music, or how does music become a feeling?

JONAH LEHRER: The feeling.

ROBERT: Why do we get such deep pleasure, or deep pain—we will have pain coming up too ...

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: ... all simply because of air pressing against your ear?

JAD: All right. Uh, where first?

ROBERT: All right, well there is a psychology professor I want you to meet at Stanford, who directs the center for infant studies there. Anne 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.

ANNE FERNALD: These mothers came from the wards of this German hospital, and so they were Turkish, they were Greek, they were Sicillian, 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: speaking Dutch]

ROBERT: Dutch.

ANNE FERNALD: I heard these—I heard them use these melodies ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: speaking Russian]

ROBERT: Russian.

ANNE FERNALD: To reach—to reach the child, to remain in touch with the baby.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: speaking Yiddish]

ROBERT: Yiddish.

ANNE FERNALD: So the next day I brought my tape recorder.

ROBERT: Anne Fernald 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 she heard consistently the same melodies. For example ...

ANNE FERNALD: I'll start with approval.

ROBERT: When a parent wanted to praise a child ...

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Good boy, now you got it.]

ANNE FERNALD: ... just using their voice. Show him you're happy with that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: speaking Hindi]

ROBERT: Hindi.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: speaking Portuguese]

ROBERT: Portuguese.

ANNE FERNALD: And what these things had in common was that the melody was a kind of a—of a rise-fall.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Good girl. Good girl. You got it. Yeah. Good girl, sweetie.]

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

[violin]

JAD: And why that particular melody?

ROBERT: All she knows is it works.

ANNE FERNALD: There's something about this melody that—that keeps the child doing something.

ROBERT: There are, she says, other categories she discovered.

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

ROBERT: The category that says, "Stop!"

ANNE FERNALD: Quite a different melody. It's short, it's sharp. In musical terms it's staccato.

ROBERT: There is the category of "Look, pay attention to that."

ANNE FERNALD: Mothers frequently use rising pitch. They frequently use higher pitch.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Parental Voice: Norah, look. Look, sweetie. A unicorn. A unicorn.]

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

ANNE FERNALD: We—we're used to thinking of sounds as being about something, speech is 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, you know, actually sound is kind of touch at a distance.

ROBERT: That was Anne Fernald, director of the Center for Infant Studies at Stanford. And when Anne says ...

ANNE FERNALD: Sound is more like touch.

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

JONAH LEHRER. Uh, my name's Jonah Lehrer.

ROBERT: 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: Do we—do we have a name for that book?

JONAH LEHRER: It’s called Proust Was a Neuroscientist. 

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: And, says Jonah, thinking about sound as a touch ...

ANNE FERNALD: More like touch ...

ROBERT: ... I asked him: how does sound get into or touch your brain?

ROBERT: Take us on that journey.

JONAH LEHRER: It's just waves of vibrating air. It's just your voice ...

ANNE FERNALD: Touch at a distance.

JONAH LEHRER: ... beginning in your voice box, 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 eardrums, 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 fascinating. 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 inwards and activate the cell.

ROBERT: So the sound triggers the bones, the bones disturbs the fluid, the fluid rocks the hairs?

JONAH LEHRER: Yes.

ROBERT: And then the hairs set off essentially electricity?

JONAH LEHRER: Yes.

ROBERT: Huh.

JONAH LEHRER: That's the language of neurons.

ROBERT: 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.

ANNE FERNALD: It feels to me more like touch. Sound is kind of touch at a—at a distance.

ROBERT: All right. Now that we have gotten a sound, any sound into our heads, let me ask you the next really big question.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: Why do some sounds—let's make it music, okay? Why does music make so many of us so often feel so strongly?
JAD: Yeah, like, in terms of what we were just listening to, like, how does all that electricity from the ear going up to the brain in the next millisecond become a feeling?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, let me introduce you to someone.

MARK JUDE TRAMO: Mark Jude Tramo.

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

MARK JUDE TRAMO: I'm in the department of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

JAD: 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 pulls in the ear and shoots up this big fat nerve to the brain.

MARK JUDE TRAMO: It's—it's kind of a popping sound.

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

MARK JUDE TRAMO: It's a little faster than I'm able to do here with my fingers.

ROBERT: Is that—is that the sound?

JAD: That's what it sounds like. So you hear how that's ...

ROBERT: How—wait, wait. How do they get—how do they get the sounds?

JAD: I actually have no idea. [laughs] I guess they sort of tap into the nerve.

ROBERT: This is the sound of sound entering a brain.

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

ROBERT: Which is—is this regular?

JAD: This is regular.

ROBERT: Yeah, sort of—well, just wait. Yeah that's regular.

JAD: 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.

[cello]

JAD: Nice sound.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: That in music is known as a perfect fifth.

MARK JUDE TRAMO: The inputs coming from a perfect fifth is very, very regular.

JAD: 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, strange ...

ROBERT: Wait, let me—let me hear. This is—this is jagged?

JAD: This is it right here. This is jagged.

ROBERT: Wait. Shhh! Oh. Yeah, it is jagged.

JAD: 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.

[dissonant cello]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Like that.

ROBERT: Don't care for that one.

JAD: That's a minor second.

MARK JUDE TRAMO: The inputs coming from a minor second is very, very chaotic.

ROBERT: Okay, so let me just sum up here what I think you're saying. If a sound entering my brain is disorderly and unexpected ...

JAD: Electrically speaking.

ROBERT: Electrically speaking. Then that would make me feel uncomfortable.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And if it comes in in a familiar and orderly way, that will make me feel comfortable.

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

ROBERT: Do they have, like, fancy names for this?
JAD: Well that's a minor second, that thing you just heard.

ROBERT: But do the scientists have names for pleasant and unpleasant?

JAD: "Consonant" is pleasant, "dissonant" is unpleasant. That's not a science name, that's a music name.

ROBERT: Oh, okay.

JAD: And these are fixed positions in your ear.

ROBERT: Well, maybe fixed for scientists but, you know, 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 gonna 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: 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 who heard it later on heard totally different things.

ROBERT: So let's begin. First, Jonah, how does this—just set the scene.

JONAH LEHRER: This is May, 1913.

ROBERT: It's a spring night?

JONAH LEHRER: It's a—it's a balmy summer night. Black tie costumes, the women have their fedoras.

ROBERT: This was evening clothes.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah, well this was the Russian Ballet, this was high art.

ROBERT: And the program 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—it's a pagan ritual where at the end the virgin gets massacred.

ROBERT: 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 tooting of flutes. And it's lovely. It's getting a little more disturbing. And then about three minutes into it everything changes. There's—there's just an earthquake. Stravinsky plays this chord. There's a great story that when Diaghilev, who was the head of the Ballet Russes, first heard this chord and Stravinsky was playing it 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—and it literally does. That chord structures the music. It's one of the most difficult sounds you've ever heard. It is—it is just the stereotype of dissonance. It is—it hurts you.

ROBERT: Huh. Well, what happened?

JONAH LEHRER: Well, after about three minutes they rioted.

ROBERT: They what?

JONAH LEHRER: They rioted.

ROBERT: Meaning what, they screamed, or threw ...

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

ROBERT: Why were old ladies—old ladies should have gone and hit Stravinsky with a cane.

JONAH LEHRER: Well 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.

ROBERT: Wow!

JONAH LEHRER: Quite the fiasco. And the question is why.

ROBERT: This is the feeling question.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Why so much feeling about a piece of music? That's ...

JAD: Why did they riot?

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

JAD: 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: Brain chemistry.

JAD: Yeah, what music can do to a brain.

JONAH LEHRER: You know, 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, I mean,  these—these are noises you've never heard before.

JAD: You know, 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: This is Yon Fishman. He is a neuroscientist, and he studies those wild fluctuations in the brain.

YON FISHMAN: In an area of the brain called the auditory cortex.

JAD: 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: Hey! Psst, over here!]

JAD: ... that Yon is interested in ...

YON FISHMAN: That's right.

JAD: ... a gang that he suspects gets very agitated when it hears sounds like these, these neurons might be a 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: 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: 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: Most of the time, those neurons in the auditory cortex ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: I got it!]

JAD: ... succeed ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: Now give it to me, give it to me!]

JAD: ... in finding the pattern.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: I think I can get it. I think it's going up, I'm not sure. Wait ...]

JAD: But every so often ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: Where's the pattern?]

JAD: ... and maybe this was the case that night ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: This is making me sick.]

JAD: ... 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: Yeah, I can hear them.

JAD: ... trying to make sense of the new sounds and failing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: This is unlike anything I was ever prepared for ever.]

JAD: Not just failing once or twice but over and over and over and over.

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

JAD: And when those neurons fail repeatedly there are consequences.

ROBERT: Chemical consequences.

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

ROBERT: And what does the dopamine do?

JONAH LEHRER: Well, dopamine makes us feel.

JAD: 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 schizophrenia.

ROBERT: 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 release in the brain.

ROBERT: So there's some kind of relationship. Too much dopamine has been shown clinically to make people feel crazy.

JONAH LEHRER: Yes.

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

ROBERT: Music erupted, neurons ...

JAD: Revolted.

ROBERT: Right. Dopamine flooded through the—through their brains.

JAD: And people went mad.

ROBERT: Literally mad!

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

JONAH LEHRER: Yes.

ROBERT: How much later after the riot?

JONAH LEHRER: It's from May to March.

JAD: Actually, it was April.

ROBERT: Huh. So it's almost a year later.

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

ROBERT: So do—does anyone buy tickets?

JONAH LEHRER: Oh yeah, it's—it's gonna sell out. It did cause a few nights of violent riots.

ROBERT: Can you set up the situation now, the audience—is it a different audience?

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

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

JONAH LEHRER: Exactly. They—they've been warned. So 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: Was there a riot this time, the second round?

JONAH LEHRER: Oh, no, quite the opposite. Stravinsky was a hero. They carried him out on their shoulders.

ROBERT: Really? Literally, he was—he was ...

JONAH LEHRER: Literally, he was carried on their shoulders, and—and the press was glowing.

ROBERT: In one year?

JONAH LEHRER: In one year.

JAD: 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.

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

ROBERT: Which Fantasia? Is it starring a hippopotamus in a little tutu? That's the one?

JAD: No is it the—is it the mushrooms, Jonah?

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

ROBERT: The mushrooms.

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

ROBERT: So how does this happen? How do you go so quickly from being the most outrageous thing that literally maddens people, to a triumph, to kids music? [laughs]

JONAH LEHRER: Yes. I mean the Rite of Spring is perfect evidence of the brain's astonishing plasticity.

JAD: See, this is the really cool part of it for me.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

JAD: If you remember just one bit of science from this whole thing, remember this: those neurons we met earlier?

ROBERT: The ones with the little voices? I liked them. Yes.

JAD: Yes. It turns out those neurons learn.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: Oh I see.]

JAD: And they learn fast.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: I am so smart.]

JAD: Because they're actually part of a larger network of brain cells with a very technical name ...

YON FISHMAN: Called the corticofugal network.

JAD: 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: Like trying to get the station on the radio, just getting it just right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neuron: Woo. Wow!]

YON FISHMAN: So our neurons literally adjust. Literally. We're talking the biochemical engineering sense, so 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: Is it fair to say that this is a sort of tug of war? That an artist comes, creates 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?

YON FISHMAN: Well the brain abhors the new. The brain constantly wants to assimilate every experience we've ever had into every other experience.

ROBERT: Huh.

YON FISHMAN: 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: 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.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: 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: Why is that sad for you?

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

JAD: Yeah, yeah. But I can give you a different interpretation on this.

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: I mean, here comes a guy who offers up the most dissonant, stabbing, percussive, painful music that anyone had heard to that point, and we learn to love it.

ROBERT: Well, because ...

JAD: Doesn't that make you sort of feel, like, pride?

ROBERT: No, I—no.

JAD: I mean, like, our brains can decode anything.

ROBERT: We learn to love it only because it's well made.

JAD: Yeah, but ...

ROBERT: If it was just random car honks, I don't think you could really appreciate that.

JAD: I—I disagree.

ROBERT: Oh, you think it would be like just [squeak squeak honk]?

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

ROBERT: Yeah, but my brain has never accommodated that music.

JAD: But some people love that stuff. And my only point is that if there—if there are these, like, 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: That's true. But to me it's sad.

JAD: It's sad for the artist, it's not sad for us.

ROBERT: Hmm. It's sort of like the artist and the brains are in a kind of eternal struggle. 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, or Proust était un neuroscientist.

JAD: [laughs] I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

 

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