[ plays rachmaninoff's "rhapsody on a theme of paganini" ]
Subtitles downloaded from www.OpenSubtitles.org
Mcferrin: I do remember when I was about five
Hearing this wonderful music coming from the living room.
And I remember crying, not knowing why,
But I remember laying there,
Listening to the music and crying.
It's like the music's able to get in there
And flip some switch or pull on some string...
Right, exactly.
That nothing else can do.
I wonder about that. I wonder.
Narrator: A musician and a scientist --
Both driven by curiosity.
Levitin: The power of music -- what is it about
This collection of sounds that moves us?
It's a great mystery there, waiting to be solved.
Mcferrin: Music feels really good.
[ scatting ]
The rhythms of our heart,
The rhythm of our breath.
[ cello plays ]
Man: Through music, we experience things
That you cannot experience outside of the world of sound.
Man: There is something that I think
All human beings relate to.
Narrator: Now we're discovering
The true power of music is greater than we knew.
[ scatting ]
Music is in fact encoded into us --
Into our bodies and into our brains.
With groundbreaking research come new questions.
[ infant crying ]
Can music make us smarter?
Go. This one might work.
Can music heal?
Does music belong to humans alone?
[ choir singing ]
Man: When I began on this path of research,
I thought music was important.
I've realized it's even
Vastly more important than I imagined.
Man: We think we just hear music,
But music actually stimulates our imagination.
Narrator: This journey
Of exploration into music takes us into
The musical body and brain,
Into the essence of our emotions,
And to the story of our ancestors and song.
Levitin: The biggest question right now in the field is,
"why music?"
And not just the how did music evolve,
But why?
[ scatting ]
Mcferrin: You know those experiences
That you have sometimes when you hear
A piece of music for the first time
And you're immediately brought to tears?
Is there a certain part of my brain
Where this music goes directly?
Narrator: Bobby mcferrin and neuroscientist daniel levitin
Are our guides through a story in which age-old art
And cutting-edge discovery intersect.
I think what ultimately it points to
Is the relationship between humans and sound,
And the part of the brain that music goes to directly,
That's related to your -- to your deep emotions.
Levitin: The question that initially got me into the field
Was where goose bumps come from.
"what's going on in my brain that's allowing
This kind of thing to happen?"
Why would it be that emotion is carried by
Whether one note is longer or shorter than another?
What's the basis for that?
The rolling stones: ¶ one, two ¶
Why does music move us the way that it does?
One of the questions that comes up
Is how do you take something
That's as imprecise as emotion and make it rigorous
And subject it to scientific study?
Narrator: Levitin is one of
A growing number of scientists from around the world
And from different fields putting music
Under the microscope.
When you talk about humans having a music instinct,
Which is really where we're going with this,
Where does that come from?
People sometimes say,
"well, you're destroying the magic of music
By studying it this way."
But the more people
I tell about it, the more intrigued they are
By the interaction between the brain and music.
Narrator: Our relationship with sound starts early.
[ heart beating ]
The fetus begins to hear between 17 and 19 weeks.
Already we are in a world of sound --
Of breath and heartbeat,
Of rhythm and vibration.
Man: All sound, all music in particular,
Comes from vibrations -- pressure waves,
Those vibrations in air.
To me as a physicist, sound is the actual wave,
The actual ripple of vibrating air.
The difference between one sound and another,
The difference between clapping hands
And a having a beautiful tone,
Is the nature of the vibration.
It's the details of the vibration.
So, a musical note is a vibration that's very,
Very regular.
It repeats in a very orderly pattern.
So if you were looking at the air molecules,
You'd see a nice cyclical progression --
Compression, rarefaction, compression,
As it goes from me to you.
But if you just slap your hands together,
The vibration would have a kind of more chaotic feel to it.
It wouldn't have a nice regular rhythm to it,
And that's really the difference between
One kind of sound and another.
We live in an ocean of vibration.
[ playing marimba ]
The experience of music is something
Deeply related to our physiology.
Woman: Music is energy.
It's possible to feel vibrations through the whole body,
And for me, this is a very crucial part of what I do.
Narrator: For evelyn glennie, the fact that music starts with
The physical fact of vibration
Is the essence of her art.
Since childhood, she has been profoundly deaf.
Glennie: For me, as a participator of sound
And a creator of sound,
I hear.
I hear how I hear, but I hear,
And that's going to be different to how you hear.
Narrator: She feels the sound -- different rhythms,
Even different pitches -- through her feet,
Through different parts of her body.
Glennie: Obviously,
The low sounds we're going to feel
In this lower part of our body.
There's such a big expanse.
The vibration is far, far open.
So you've really just got to almost be the bass drum
When you play the bass drum.
You know that a very high sound like a cowbell
Or a high rototom
Or something like that isn't going to have
The expanse of a big bass drum,
And so this is going to be felt in the upper part of your body.
So you can prepare yourself for that.
You really can.
My profession is about sound,
And I don't want to just use part of my body
To experience that.
Sound is so much part of us.
Mcferrin: So, do you think that
Our bodies are like a large ear when we're listening to music?
I mean, does music -- can it get into your pores
Like it does into your ears?
I'm just fascinated by this.
Do our bones -- say, take, you know,
Different parts of our body, like bones.
They do.
Every object,
Be it a bone in your body, be it the earth,
Has a natural set of frequencies
At which it wants to vibrate
By virtue of how it's constructed,
How it's put together, what it's made of.
Every object has the capacity
To vibrate in some manner.
You know, amazingly, we can write down equations
For how things will vibrate if they're hit or plucked
Or if air is forced by strings.
But there's no music in the equations.
Somehow those equations have to be animated.
Somewhere in there,
This gray thing inside of our head plays a role.
Narrator: The brain.
For most of us, the vibrations of sound waves
Are relayed to the brain through the ear,
Which converts them to neural signals.
Levitin: As the sound hits the ear drum
And it wiggles in and out, it sets up pressure waves
Inside a snail-like structure called the cochlea.
The cochlea has hair cells lining it
That are tuned to specific frequencies.
So at one end,
The hair cells only fire an electrical charge
In response to low frequencies.
[ tuba plays ]
At the other end, they fire an electrical charge
In response to high frequencies,
And, of course, everything in between.
[ violin and tuba play ]
Narrator: So the signal goes from the ear to the brain stem
And up into the brain.
Levitin: And that electrical charge
Goes to the auditory cortex,
Which is amazingly laid out in pitch order,
Almost like a piano keyboard.
The hair cells are wired to the auditory cortex
In such a way that you've got low notes
Stimulating this part of the auditory cortex
On up to high notes stimulating this part.
We used to think that there was a music center in the brain.
We don't think that anymore.
There are music centers,
And they're spread all over the brain.
[ orchestra plays ]
Narrator: The auditory cortex activates
As it receives signals from the brain stem
Through the inferior colliculus
And the medial geniculate nucleus.
Levitin: If you could look at all the different
Areas of the brain involved in extracting
The signal from sound to turn it into music,
You'd see a bunch of coordinated
And a bunch of uncoordinated firing
In different parts of the brain,
Kind of like a neural symphony, a neural orchestra.
¶
So pitch is processed in one set of neural regions,
Tempo in another, loudness in another,
Timbre -- whether it's a violin or a trumpet or a human voice --
In yet another, and it all comes together later.
The "later" in this case
Is maybe 30 thousandths of a second,
So rapidly that you never knew the things were ever apart.
[ singing ]
When we hear bobby mcferrin singing,
We just hear those musical sounds.
[ singing ]
¶ look at the stars ¶
You know, when someone says,
"that piece of music touched me or moved me,"
It's very literal.
The sound of my voice is entering your ear canal
And it's moving your eardrum.
That's a very intimate act.
It's very -- I'm very literally touching you,
And when you speak to me, you are literally touching me.
And when we extend that principle
To the sound of a violin...
You know, it's not so much the sound of the violin.
It's the silence thereafter.
That's the moment when, in some ways,
You hear what was just said.
Man: Sound is a very strange phenomenon.
What is it?
It doesn't live in our world.
What we played or heard
Ten seconds ago in this room is gone.
And this, I think,
Is what gives music its really tragic element
Of the fact that it can die, of the fact
That it is a lifetime.
Every note is a lifetime for itself.
And there is an element of penetration through the ear
Which gives sound -- and, in the end, of course, music --
The great power that it can have.
Narrator: In hospitals, music's connection to the body
Is used to steady the breathing of premature babies
And the heart rates of cardiac patients.
[ heart beating ]
Music often echoes the rhythm of the human heartbeat.
[ mcferrin scatting ]
And our physical connection with music is confirmed
By studies showing the body is a barometer
Of our emotional response.
Levitin: There are a number of ways that we study
The physiological effects of music.
We try to get some measurement, because people
Aren't always aware of what they're feeling
Or they can't put it into words.
So, first, I'm going to put these on your fingers,
And we're going to be able
To monitor your galvanic skin response --
Basically, how much you sweat --
And I'm going to clip this to your ear,
And this will get your pulse.
Together, these will help us
To measure the emotion that you feel
In response to certain pieces of music.
Okay, how about this one?
[ dramatic soundtrack plays ]
You see the scary music
Makes the skin response jump way up.
It's part of the fight-or-flight mechanism.
The scary music, we think, is kind of a metaphor.
It's metaphorically invoking something
That would cause you to have to run
Or to freeze or to fight, and it causes your body,
Even unconsciously, to prepare for that.
You sweat more, your stomach muscles constrict,
Your pulse increases, your heart rate increases.
This really shows that our bodies
Are very finely tuned to respond to music,
That it's unconscious
And that we're doing it without any
Volition or control over it.
Narrator: Music plays the body like an instrument,
And the brain makes music.
[ orchestra playing ]
Levitin: Goose bumps happen in the brain.
I mean, they -- it feels like they're happening on your skin,
But it's the brain that's driving them.
One of the last frontiers is the human brain.
We know relatively little about it.
We have neuroscientists trying tfigure out
How this thing works.
This is a beautiful image.
Look, you can even see the striations of the striatum.
Yeah, that's true.
Everyone wants to know, "why does the brain do music?"
People have realized
That music really does serve as a gateway
Into understanding human cognition.
There isn't a cognitive function
That doesn't somehow pertain to music.
Not just the brain research
But the technology of it
Has improved in the last ten years.
We can now take pictures
Of the brain in action.
That's what fmri and pet technology does.
We can track where the blood or the oxygen
Is flowing in the brain,
And this is allowing us to map
The different functions and regions in the brain
In ways that just weren't possible
10 or 15 years ago.
Narrator: Brain scans using pet
And fmri --
Functional magnetic resonance imaging --
Are now used to see what happens when we listen to music
And when we perform it.
¶ never knowing why ¶
If you look at music performance,
There's no activity that we do
That allows the brain to do so many things at once
In such a complicated coordination
And with such depth.
¶ but, darling, you and I ¶
But, of course,
Music is actually intrinsically social.
¶ we were born to cry ¶
So, the idea is, today, we're going to...
Scan you.
Narrator: Neuroscientist lawrence parsons asked
British rock stars jarvis cocker and richard hawley
To help out with a new experiment.
Sometimes you'll be singing by yourself,
Sometimes you'll be singing together.
It'll be a bit unusual, because you'll be
Lying on your back --
Cocker: That's not that unusual. Good point.
And singing.
Yeah, that's slightly more unusual.
The idea is the sort of
New edge of research is to look at people
Interacting together while they do music,
Which is, of course, what music is all about.
Whatever you want, you know.
Cocker: We're probably both curious to know
Whether we had any brain left
After many years in the music industry.
When you write songs,
You don't really know where they come from,
And so it's kind of -- seems interesting
To find out what's going on in your head.
It's always something I've been a bit curious about.
Yeah, to unravel the mystery of that.
We're on.
Okay, let's do this.
All of the work published in the past
Have looked at a single person's brain
Doing a single musical experience.
It's worth looking at what brain areas
Are involved when you really do social --
Pair-wise, in this case -- musical performance.
And this is complicated, coordinated social work,
As well as cognitive work,
Since there's a lot of millisecond decision planning
As you go along.
¶
[ muffled singing ]
Narrator: When he analyzed the scans,
Parsons did find differences in brain activity
When cocker sang alone
Compared to when he sang with hawley playing guitar.
During the duet,
Cocker's brain was more active
In areas for phrasing and coordinating music,
As well as cognitive and emotional interaction.
Cocker: ¶ Sunday morning ¶
¶ and I'm falling ¶
Parsons: Eight years ago,
Nobody was studying the brain-basis of music,
Particularly in performance.
It tells us a lot about
The brain at its peak demand --
Situations that demand the most from it.
¶
Levitin: The brain is teaching us about music and music is
Teaching us about the brain.
Music is allowing us to understand better
How the brain organizes information in the world.
Narrator: To really understand
What the brain is doing with music,
We need to ask, what is music?
Levitin: We're wired for sound,
And that brings up the question of, "well,
What's the difference between music and sound?"
¶ Sunday morning ¶
Sound, when it's organized in a particular way,
It can have musical qualities --
Variations in pitch, variations in timing,
[ roughly ] variations in timbre.
All of these different things are the elements of music
That separate it from something
That is just sound and not music.
Mcferrin: ¶ ba ba ba ba ba ba ¶
Levitin: Maybe we could talk about the elements of music,
The components of music.
I guess the first one is pitch.
If you think of something happy...
That could be really easy to do if I can...
[ scats ]
[ laughs ] that's kind of upbeat, and...
There's nothing sad about it.
It doesn't feel that way.
If you wanted to keep some of the rhythm
And the tempo constant,
But turn that into something sad.
Keep the rhythm constant...
[ drumming ]
[ scats ]
One of the things I notice,
Of course, is there's this major-minor difference.
We tend to think in western culture that,
You know, the happy chords are these...
[ plays a major chord ]
[ plays major chord ]
And the sad ones...
[ both play minor chord ]
[ sings in latin ]
And the interesting thing is that that's learned,
Because you go to other cultures,
As you well know --
You go to the middle east, for example --
Almost everything's minor, but it ain't all sad.
No. [ singing in minor key ]
Narrator: In different ways, composers around the world
Use the basic elements of music --
Pitch, tempo, rhythm, melody,
Sometimes harmony, and timbre.
They create certain reactions in our brains.
[ singing ]
Mcferrin: So this brings up an interesting question, then.
Does that mean that the neurons or whatever
Is working in your brain becomes accustomed
To hearing something in a certain context --
Yes. Or are they developed that way?
They're free in the beginning, right?
They're free in the beginning.
And then, as -- over time,
When you hear a particular kind of music
With a structure, then the neurons are fused
In a certain way to accept this music in a --
The brain starts out
With millions and millions of neurons
That don't know what to do,
And they're shaped by experience.
And the process of maturatn in the human child
Is a process of hooking those neurons up
Into neural circuits, neural networks.
We're all born with a music module
That allows us to learn the rules
Of whatever music we're exposed to.
As another element,
Just covering the elements of music, tempo,
We associate fast tempo with...
Energy, spiritedness...
Slow tempo with...
Funeral marches.
So when someone'sad, you know,
Their body is sort of hunched over
And they're moving slow,
And when they're happy, they're full of energy,
And the slow movement leads not only to a slow tempo,
But also stepwise motion in the melody
And falling contours.
[ playing blues ]
¶ I'm walking pretty slow ¶
¶ got nowhere to go ¶
¶ walking pretty slow ¶
¶ got nowhere to go ¶
¶ I'm walking pretty slow ¶
¶ got nowhere to go ¶
¶ I'm walking slow ¶
I like that.
[ laughs ]
We think of music intuitively
As a kind of analogy or metaphor for the world.
Right.
Narrator: So if music somehow reflects our world,
The next question takes us back into history --
How long have we had music?
Man: One, two, three...
Levitin: "why music?" is the question.
I'm interested in the "why" question --
Why music and not something else?
Only in the last five years or so
Have you seen a couple of dozen scientists
Really poking at it and trying to get answers.
Man: For years, I'd been studying
Human evolution,
Trying to work out what makes humans distinctive
From all other species of animals,
And I'd been looking at things such as
The way we walk and the way we talk and the way we think,
And, for years, neglected music,
Probably one of the most distinctive
Characteristics of humans.
I often work to music.
When you're trying to do serious writing,
I've found some pieces of music had really --
Pretty big impact.
And I began to think that through that music,
I can engage with my evolutionary past
Almost as much as I could by looking at fossils
And stone artifacts.
So that set me on a -- I suppose, a quest, really,
To try to understand how this capacity,
This compulsion for musicality
Had evolved in our species.
Narrator: His quest recently took steven mithen
To southern germany.
A team headed by archaeologist nicholas conard
Has discovered ancient musical instruments
Dating to the ice age.
Mithen: In europe,
The first modern humans arrive around 40,000 years ago.
They're making beautiful musical instruments,
The first complex instruments we find.
I've heard about these objects.
I've never actually had the chance to see them,
And it would be thrilling.
Bone flutes made from swans --
The hollow bones of birds -- and from mammoth ivory.
Imagine having the oldest musical instrument in the world.
Imagine digging it and finding it in the first place.
That would be just out of the world.
Man: There's a huge amount of back dirt
That's just been dumped out on the hill,
And we're slowly excavating it
And finding all the material that was missed in 1931.
And that includes the little fragments of the flutes, yeah?
Yeah.
Narrator: The dating of these flutes
Can tell us how human music-making developed.
The bone flutes found here
Were made about 35,000 years ago.
An even older flute was also found by the conard team.
Okay, steven.
So this is the ivory flute.
Wow, this is it, is it?
And it's the original,
And you can see there's one,
Two, three, four finger holes,
And if you look closely,
You'll see it's very fragmented,
And a lot of it's missing.
This white area is an addition of wax,
Just to hold it together.
Entirely unique, as well, no other?
There's nothing like it in the world.
Narrator: The ivory flute
Was found nearby
At another cave in southern germany.
[ flute playing ]
Conard: So, steven, this is geissenklosterle.
It was excavated in the 1970s, '80s, '90s,
And we re-excavated from 2000 to 2002.
Narrator: The people who lived here
During the european ice age
Carved the flute
From the tusk of a mammoth.
It tells us more about what their music was like.
Conard: And it really was remarkable
When a colleague of mine, maria malina, discovered it.
She said, "oh, nick,
I think I found part of an ivory flute!"
And she had a bit of a finger hole.
And then she continued to work on it for over a year
And found 31 little fragments that fit together.
So this was pieced together from tiny little fragments.
Exactly, and this is the mouth end --
Let's say the proximal end -- this is the distal end --
This is a copy, of course.
[ laughing ] yeah, of course. Okay.
It's astonishing, isn't it?
So it is a flute, then.
Oh, definitely, definitely.
There are recordings.
You can hear an enormous
Array of tones, and the range of music
You can play with an instrument like this
Is every bit as complicated as in a contemporary flute.
So this is the earliest flute in the world
That we know of.
Yeah. I think music was
As much a part of daily life then
As it was today.
It was in a slightly different form.
And also, the caves are ideal settings for music.
You have beautiful echoes, beautiful acoustics.
Ah, because of the natural acoustics. Yeah.
[ drums and flute playing ]
And inside, it must be like
A sort of a whole multimedia experience,
Because you'd have all
The flickering fires on the wall,
Smoke and smell and all that stuff
Going on as well, wouldn't you?
It would be fantastic.
[ thunder rumbles ]
Levitin: What interested me about the finding of the flute,
If you've gone to the web
And you've heard the scale that it plays,
The scale isn't that different, so there's something
About the acoustics of overtones.
There's something there that prefers consonance.
Narrator: Consonance --
Smooth-sounding intervals.
[ plays major triads ]
So these clues from the past make us ask --
Are there certain things
About music that are universal
Across time and culture?
What about the physics
And the math behind music?
[ orchestra tunes up ]
A complex instrument,
Be it vibrating air molecules in a wind instrument
Or vibrating strings,
Creates specific frequencies, or "tones."
[ plays a note ]
Greene: So a string
Is a prime example of a system
That will go under periodic
Rhythmic motion
If you pluck it or if you draw a bow across it.
[ plays low note ]
And as it's vibrating,
There's a fundamental frequency
Which is when the string is vibrating as a whole
Up and down through its natural state,
When it's just straight and not moving.
Narrator: So here comes the math.
First, within each tone.
There are other overtones
That are being excited as well as you play it
Which have frequencies that are higher --
Two times, three times, and so forth.
Narrator: Overtones, contained within that one note.
The first overtone,
Precisely, mathematically,
Would just be the octave.
[ plays octave ]
Narrator: In western music,
That's eight tones above the original note,
Say, c.
And then the next one would be the fifth above the octave,
And then the next octave, which would be that c,
And then the major third above that.
So that would be the series that would be
Typically excited when you play a given note,
Say, the c.
So we're playing this note...
And within that note is a mixture
Of all those notes as well.
Of all of these notes.
That's right.
In fact, even if you look very closely
At the strings,
You can actually visually see the resonances.
[ cellist plays single note ]
One string is being played directly,
But others are vibrating by virtue of being driven,
By virtue of lying
In a resonant series
Relative to the string that's actually
Pushing the air back and forth.
[ cellist plays note ]
Narrator: Those overtone intervals also correspond
To precise mathematical divisions of a string.
[ piano plays octave ]
Divide the string in half by pressing on it
And you get an octave...
[ piano plays octave ]
A ratio of two to one to the original note.
Divide the string so that two thirds of it vibrates...
[ piano plays a fifth ]
And you get the fifth,
A ratio of three to two to the original tone.
And if three quarters of the string vibrates,
You have the fourth,
A ratio of four to three to the original tone.
And so on.
There are features of music that appear to be universal,
Such as the octave.
That's the ratio of two to one
Of the frequencies that create the notes.
[ plays octave ]
There's a physical acoustic reason for this.
That's a case of the brain having evolved in a world
With certain physical regularities,
And the brain has incorporated
Those physical principles in its development.
The neurons actually fire
Synchronously with the fundamental frequency
Of the sounds we hear.
Two other musical universals in terms of intervals
Are the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth.
Not every musical culture has them,
But they tend to be, after the octave,
The most common features
Of musical systems or musical scales.
Again, probably the way they impinge on the cochlea.
The physiology of it
Determines the way that
They've spread across cultures and across time.
[ playing and singing various intervals ]
Narrator: The relationship between different tones,
Or frequencies, called "intervals,"
Ic and our response happens.
Some intervals are safe,
Yeah. Some are dangerous.
Right. Some are considered consonant,
Some dissonant,
And that seems to change over time.
If you play a major seven chord,
That's something that beethoven wouldn't have
Accepted as harmonious.
Probably not.
Bill evans can play it,
And it sounds very soothing.
Narrator: The way intervals are used or combined
Create melody and harmony.
[ improvising over major seventh chords ]
Man: You start with a sound. Then what do you do?
You combine it with something.
You do the same, different,
And that's it!
You could put two notes together,
You could put five notes together,
And then everything else, so it's, it's --
That's as simple as it gets.
But from those combinations,
You can actually describe.
Or you can try to describe and elicit...
Elicit in someone else's imagination
The feelings of.
You know, of joy, of sadness,
Of landscape, of desire, of yearning.
Something majestic, something tiny,
Something universal.
Narrator: So we hear music in certain ways.
How much is shaped by the physics of sound and biology
And how much by our culture?
Man: The brain is the organ of culture.
It's the biological organ of culture.
Yes, it comes with a lot of genetic constraints,
A huge amount of genetic constraint,
Obviously, that would lead to universals in music.
But there are huge cultural differences.
Levitin: By "genetic constraints,"
You mean that we come, each of us,
With certain predispositions...
But we mustn't forget that the brain
Is also an organ of learning.
It's like a sponge for cultural information.
I would be cautious before I termed something
A "musical universal."
Something close to a universal would be the octave
And some intervals that occur often,
But I think it's tricky
To begin to argue hierarchies of musical sound
Based upon simple acoustical information.
Because, very often,
Something that sounds very similar,
Even the same,
May be conceived very, very differently.
[ singing arabic tune ]
Narrator: Other cultures use different scales --
A different number of pitches within an octave.
Mcferrin: Very nice, very nice.
What were you singing about?
It's a love poem.
It's a poem about passionate love.
Yeah.
It's not folk music.
It's a very classical,
Traditional arabic music, so I learned those
As I got more into my roots and I learned --
I was fascinated by the microtonal system.
What do you mean by "microtonal"?
In traditional arabic music and in a lot of
Different musics of the east, there are a lot
Of different intervals within a half step.
So first demonstrate by singing just a western scale.
Well, I'll sing, for example, a major scale.
[ sings ]
And, let's start with a third, for example.
A major third is...
[ sings ]
A minor third is...
[ sings ]
Right.
And a quarter-tone third is...
[ sings ]
Oh, I see.
So, for a lot of westerners, at the beginning,
It would sound like I'm out of tune,
Because I'm not landing in one or the other.
[ man singing indian classical music ]
Here's an example of indian classical music,
The kind of example that I've said
Has very little resonance
For most trained western classical musicians.
And even though this is based on
So of the scales that are different...
[ indian scale plays ]
Which you don't find in the west,
There are some universals under that.
[ playing indian classical music ]
But the whole package in its complexity
Really does signal group identity within a culture
So that members of the culture,
Their brains are so familiar with these patterns
That they're able to put them in the background
And then focus on the nuance
Which they can attend to.
Levitin: And again,
I couldn't detect a clear emotion in that,
And I was listening to the tabla part.
I imagine that if I knew indian music,
I would know when to expect it,
But I had no idea when he was going to hit that again.
The brain is capable of
An extraordinary amount of learning,
And the learning takes the form
Of actually changing the biology.
It really changes the connections
Between neurons in the brain
So that as we have grown up in a culture,
We actually come to the perceptual situation
With different machinery.
You could reach those conclusions
When you study art music of different cultures.
If you look at the materials
That are universally familiar within a culture --
Levitin: Lullabies, for example.
People don't have that feeng of strangeness about them.
¶ mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird ¶
If you listen to lullabies,
Regardless of what culture they're from,
You have no difficulty knowing they're lullabies.
[ singing lullaby ]
They have these falling-pitch contours,
They're quiet, they have a narrow pitch range,
And they're extremely repetitive.
Narrator: Sandra trehub's specialty is the study of how
Babies and toddlers respond to music.
She wondered if infants can recognize
Certain intervals.
Trehub: My research looked at babies' ability
To notice changes in the context of
Melodies or patterns that were consonant or dissonant,
And what I found was that
Babies could detect very tiny differences
If what they were listening to initially
Was a consonant pattern.
Other people then went about
To look at infants' preferences
And found that if you give infants a choice
Of listening to consonant music...
[ consonant music plays ]
Or dissonant music...
[ dissonant music plays ]
They will actually
Spend more time listening to the consonant music.
[ consonant music plays ]
And is it possible that we start forming our musical preferences
Even before birth?
[ woman singing a lullaby ]
Until recently,
No one knew if we can really hear music in the womb.
Woman: What interested us was to know
How early the human being
Begins its musical development.
And so we were able
To insert this tiny little hydrophone into the uterus
To do recordings in a liquid environment.
What we discovered is that the music itself
Is audible in the womb.
[ amplified pulsing ]
[ woman singing lullaby ]
¶ mary had a little lamb ¶
¶ fleece was white as snow ¶
What we're hearing
Is the rhythmic, gentle sound of the blood
Rushing through the uterine artery,
And this is that, you know, the way nature just
Allows us to evolve with rhythm all around us.
And over that,
We heard the sound of the external female voice
That was actually myself singing,
Standing next to the mother, in a normal volume of voice.
Narrator: This is exactly what the fetus hears,
Recorded by the microphone in the womb.
[ muffled singing ]
And studies show
The fetus reacts to music.
¶ white as snow ¶
He's kicking.
Woodward: We looked at startle response,
And we measured that
With the sudden elevation of the heart rate.
So we were able to determine just an awareness that,
"oh, something's happened
And now there's music."
It's been very exciting to know that
There is a start to that world of music learning
That is happening rit before birth.
[ classical music playing ]
[ infant crying ]
Woman: So we have here newborn.
Narrator: And one researcher in germany
Was surprised to find that infants
Do enter the world knowing something about music.
[ babbling ]
Woman: We found out
That they sound extremely musical.
[ infant continues babbling ]
And we said, "oh, this is really astonishing,"
Because nobody thought of
That small babies might cry in musical intervals.
[ infant cries ]
And then we systematically started to analyze that.
This is a rather large
Frequency jump from this plateau to this one,
And if you measure that,
Then we found that this is a fifths.
¶ do do do ¶
[ infant cries in fifth ]
[ infant cries ]
Narrator: Musicians confirm the computer analysis.
[ speaking german ]
Wermke: And we saw that
It's more than we would have --
Would just happen by chance,
That we find musical simple ratios,
To found minor thirds, major thirds,
Even fourths and fifths.
[ piano plays a fifth ]
Narrator: Remember, those simple ratio intervals
Are built into the physics of sound --
The harmonics of a vibrating string or other instrument.
[ piano plays a fourth ]
Wermke: And then again,
It's going down here to a minor third.
[ infant cries ]
[ babbling ]
You have this special term, "mommy sound"...
Narrator: ¶ mom-my ¶
Wermke: Which is related to the minor third,
And we found that very often.
Narrator: And that minor third is also heard often
When children play.
¶ na na ¶
Some people say the fetus could hear
And learn these intervals in the womb,
Say, from music the parents play.
But a study of hearing babies
Of deaf parents showed they, too, had a preference
For those consonant, smooth-sounding intervals.
So the exposure of these babies in utero,
The fetal exposure,
Would have been extremely limited.
When it comes to consonance and dissonance,
I think it has more to do with the nature
Of our auditory system
Than it is with being a baby or an adult.
Our auditory system is designed in such a way
That certain things
Are going to sound perhaps more pleasing than others.
[ singing tibetan melody ]
Narrator: Still, how to account for varying musical systems
In other cultures?
Shelemay: Western notions
Of melody and harmony are precisely that --
Western notions of melody and harmony.
[ continues singing ]
There are many musical traditions
In which melody and more of
A horizontal musical movement,
A single musical line, is what counts,
And notions of harmony are really not
What the musical tradition is about.
[ drumming on legs ]
And then the range of sounds that are used
Can sound very different.
[ singing in a cameroonian style ]
Every culture has its music
And has an understanding of music
In a particular way.
There are cultural forms and norms.
However, as I travel around the world
And meet musicians from different countries,
As soon as we try to play
And sing together, we can easily find ways
Of identifying each other,
Who we are and what our stories are,
Through music,
Without uttering a single word.
You know, so, music does have that.
[ scatting ]
There are boundaries like there are,
You know, boundaries, you know,
Country to country,
But all you have to do is walk across them.
Man: Doing fmri studies, you realize that there are
Some basic questions that are still unsolved.
You will not find answers with this
Really expensive equipment, this machinery.
What is it in music
That is universal,
And what is it that has an effect on us
Through cultural imprinting?
We organized this expedition to north cameroon
To the mandara mountain range to a very remote area,
And there you can actually still find individuals
Who have never before in their life
Listened to western music before --
Individuals who don't go to markets where they play music,
Who have not been to a church,
Who have never before listened to radio.
It is a culture that is so independent from ours
That we could do tests with them with our music
And with their music.
This is an original.
[ plays mafa music ] narrator: Fritz recorded
The mafa tribe's own unique music.
Fritz: They perform on flutes or on horns
Made of iron and some special wax.
It's quite astonishing,
But they have really a very different idea
Of what music is.
They don't have a word for music,
But they somehow perform music on a daily basis,
And everyone can sing.
[ plays mafa flute ]
To get a tone out of a flute like this...
[ laughs ]
You have to explosively
Exhale air, and they do that continually for hours.
Narrator: So how would they respond to western music?
Fritz: I did very basic, simple experiment, really,
To just get an understanding whether they do actually
Decode musical expressions in music pieces
And whether they are happy, sad, or scary.
[ dramatic arpeggios play ]
[ speaks mafa ]
[ dramatic notes continue ]
[ speaks mafa ]
[ man and woman speaking mafa ]
I thought, "well, someone who's never in their life
"heard a piano melody, and never piano,
"and never any kind of western-music melody,
"can you do that?
"is this something that is somehow really
"just inherent in the melody, or is it something
"that we are culturally imprinted on
By our music cultural history?"
So they -- each time,
They pointed on the face
Which is the equivalent emotion,
And they pronounced "happy,"
"sad," or "scary," in their language.
[ woman speaks mafa ]
And I will play you the ones that are --
That were rated most happy,
Scary, and sad.
So this is happy.
[ piano plays lively tune in major key ]
And scary.
[ piano plays arpeggios in minor key ]
And sad.
[ piano plays slow melody in minor key ]
They recognize the musical expression.
They really can do that.
[ plays beethoven's "appassionata" ]
Basically, it's a simple answer --
The emotional expression of the music
Is inherent in the music itself
And is not solely decodable through cultural imprinting.
Narrator: So the music itself does seem to hold
Keys to our response beyond culture
Or how we might classify a work by genre.
How do you define a piece of music?
That's -- how -- what is truth?
I think there are lots,
Since there are many, many different truths
Contained within even a very simple piece of music.
So this is the sarabande of bach's fifth cello suite.
The sarabande was danced by bedouins,
And it arrived in Spain hundreds of years ago.
Bach didn't invent the dance, but he composed around it.
So who owns the dance?
How can you justay, "well, this is, you know,
"this is classical music.
This is dead white-european-male music,"
Because which truth are you going to choose?
There are a lot of different factors that
Go into our emotional appreciation of music.
Some of it is the memories we have of a particular song
That we heard at a particular time in our lives.
What's a favorite song of yours, for example?
"going to california," by led zeppelin.
I like that song, all right.
Narrator: And are some elements of music
More powerful than others?
Levitin: I'm interested in what attributes of music
Stay stuck in the head -- is it rhythm,
Is it pitch, what is it?
Turns out to be all of it.
The average person has an extraordinary memory
For the components of music.
¶ how great is our god ¶
¶ sing with me ¶
Levitin: One of the ways that we study this
Is we just stop people,
We ask them to sing their favorite song,
And then we analyze their production
And compare it to the cd.
There is a correct answer to the question.
¶ can you hear us? ¶
¶ watch the sun on my skin ¶
¶ and the world that I'm in ¶
¶ makes me delirious ¶
Levitin: So you just record them,
You compare it to the cd,
And you look at the pitch and the tempo
And see how close they got.
Narrator: This woman, for example,
Got very close to the original recording.
¶ makes me delirious ¶
Parfait, merci.
One of the things about musical memory is that,
In some respects, you know, songs stick in our head,
And maybe that's because they're supposed to.
It's difficult to talk about these things
Without talking about evolution.
A lover out on a hunt for a long period of time
Wants to be remembered while he's away.
She wants him to remember her.
They have their song that they sang to each other
And that sticks in the head and it keeps them faithful,
And there's some evolutionary advantages in that.
[ plays beethoven's "moonlight sonata" ]
Narrator: So does music by its very nature
Somehow define us
To each other and to our ourselves?
Does it tell us who we are
And who we might become?
Man: The central question is,
What's going on inside your head
When music is going on?
It's not simply a tape recording or a replica.
You're actually extracting something from the music.
You're, in some sense, making sense of it.
We pick up from music
Cues which are actually prevalent
In the whole of human behavior.
The recognition of surprise,
Expectations not fulfilled.
Which is very often the basis of any emotion.
We feel strong emotion when something happens
Which is not as planned.
But that's when you feel emotion,
And that seems to be what's going on
When we listen to music.
Because music is highly patterned.
It's highly constrained.
It conforms to certain rules, by and large.
And when those rules are broken
Deliberately by the composer through art,
We get a little, "uh. That's not what I expected."
Now, those little "uhs,"
If they are embedded in the right kind of context,
Can create an immediate physical response.
[ plays 12 cs ]
[ plays 3 ds ]
So now I've created an expectation,
"well, maybe there are more of that second note coming up.
Is there going to be more?"
[ plays 10 cs ]
[ plays 2 ds ]
One less.
"okay, is there a pattern to that?"
You know, we're --
I've started my own mind guessing.
One of the important feelings is this frisson,
Which is very often your hair standing on end,
A shiver down your spine, and one of the devices
Which really works well for that
Is something called an enharmonic change,
[ plays two e-flat minor chords ]
Where you have a chord which has a particular melody note in it,
And then you have a new chord...
[ plays d major chord ]
Which reharmonizes that same melody note,
So it's the same but different.
And here's a very good
Example of that
From schoenberg's "transfigured night."
Right in the middle,
In the emotional heart of the piece,
You get this e-flat minor chord.
And it's repeated.
There's a little gap, and then it goes to...
[ d major chord ]
D major, so it's the same note
Harmonized that way
And then harmonized that way,
And it's that change
Which creates that frisson.
[ playing syncopated rhythm on piano ]
Sloboda: One structural device is when something
Really major happens
Sooner than you'd expect.
We call that a syncopation.
Levitin: I guess I think of syncopation
As stretching and compressing time.
Yeah, like a mambo or a samba
Or those latin rhythms.
[ singing in spanish, drumming latin rhythm ]
I think what people like about latin music
And african music is the syncopation.
They like it because there is
This sense of unpredictability,
And that's fun, as long as you have
Some sense of where it's going
And you're along with the adventure.
You know, March has its place.
You can synchronize to it.
Your neurons often start synchronous firing
With the beat of a March.
So your neurons are firing at the same rate as the March is,
So you have, like...
[ hums "stars and stripes forever" ]
[ hums bass line ]
But if you want to syncopate it,
You get into more unpredictability.
[ hums March bass line ]
[ syncopates rhythm ]
[ singing counterpoint ]
Subtitles downloaded from www.OpenSubtitles.org
Yep, and that's fun, that push and pull.
This idea of rhythm and tempo
Is very powerful at a neural vel.
You can get what's called entrainment.
There's this particular part of the brain up here
In the frontal lobe that is unique to humans.
We're the only species that has it.
But it's connected to the most primitive part of our brain,
The cerebellum, that all vertebrates have,
Going back to fish and frogs.
So when you get into that kind of a rhythm and it locks,
It's the cerebellum that's locking to it.
And it's the frontal lobe that's trying to predict
What's going to happen next,
Whether you're aware of it or not.
Narrator: And we choose certain pieces of music
With certain characteristics to make us feel a certain way.
[ modern jazz plays ]
Sloboda: People have become
Very good at knowing what pieces of music
They need to hear in order to change their mood
In particular ways.
Woman: Hi, we're doing a survey
On what people are listening to on campus.
Sloboda: One of the things we want to know
Is how people integrate their music cues
In their everyday life.
[ modern jazz continues ]
One of the things we've discovered is that
People use music a great deal in transit.
[ syncopated drums beating ]
It may be to shut yourself off from people who are
In rather too close proximity to you.
It helps to create a bubble around you,
Because the music has certain emotional characteristics
That you can relate to
And you feel you're in company as you're alone.
Narrator: And there's proof of exactly
How music changes our mood.
Levitin: For years,
People have been telling us they like music.
Their brain is telling us they like it, too.
We published a study where we showed that the brain's
Reward center responds to music.
[ singing operatically ]
When people listened to pleasant music,
There was activation here
In the nucleus accumbens
And in the hypothalamus
And in the ventral tegmental region.
These regions modulate the flow of dopamine,
Which is a neurotransmitter
Responsible for mood regulation.
And again, these are areas of the brain
That had never been associated with music before.
They'd been associated with taking drugs,
With having sex.
Now they're associated with rock and roll.
It's drugs, sex, and rock and roll,
Right there in the brain.
[ hard rock plays ]
Narrator: Another brain-imaging experiment
Showed very strong reaction when one subject had
A special emotional connection to a musical piece.
[ woman singing aria ]
Parsons: What was really very surprising
Was the really widespread activity
All over the brain
For a piece by strauss
Sung by his friend,
By his -- somebody he knows,
Which is this moving piece of music
That he said
Meant something to him.
Narrator: Music changes our state of mind,
And it turns out
That it can actually physically change our brain.
Levitin: One of the biggest findings
Over the last five or ten years
In the cognitive neuroscience of music
Has to do with what we call "neuroplasticity,"
And this is actually one of the biggest findings
In all of neuroscience.
The brain can change itself, and its ability to change,
To be plastic, changeable, malleable,
Is far greater than we ever thought.
Zatorre: This whole idea of plasticity is quite interesting.
What we and other investigators
Are beginning to see is that
The brain of a musician is actually physically different.
Narrator: One change --
Some areas of the cortex,
The outer surface of the brain,
Are thicker in people with musical training.
And what you can see is that the areas that show
The greatest change are right here in
The auditory part of the brain
And over here
In the motor part of the brain.
And you see that on both sides.
Now, there are many things
That this leads us to investigate.
We don't know how this occurs.
Does that mean there are more cells there?
Does that mean that the cells are organized differently?
Does that mean that the connections
In between the cells are different somehow?
In this particular case,
We also see areas of the frontal cortex that are different.
The frontal cortex
Does all of the most complicated and interesting things
In human cognition.
So it does planning and higher-order thinking
And it does language.
Narrator: Neurologist gottfried schlaug
Found another brain area
That's different in musicians --
The corpus callosum that links the two sides of the brain.
Man: And it's particularly enlarged in those
Instrumentalists that started early
With their musical training
Compared to those that started late
Or that match non-musicians.
Narrator: The corpus callosum lets both sides of the brain
Coordinate movements --
Say, of hands and fingers.
Zatorre: Before we did this kind of research,
We didn't even know to ask those questions.
We didn't even know that this phenomenon existed.
Now that we see that
There are these changes,
We can look at things like what kinds of situations
Would facilitate or promote these kinds of changes.
Keeping in the theme of plasticity,
We know that people who are musically trained
Have improved auditory abilities.
But it came to our attention that blind individuals also have
Better acuity in hearing
Than the average person.
Narrator: Born in peru,
Hwaen ch'uqi suffered a ildhood trauma
And lost his sight at the age of two.
After being adopted by a family in the United States,
He discovered a passion
And talent for music.
[ music box plays "hickory dickory dock" ]
Man: This little song changed everything
In the tinny resonances of the music box.
My father, his foot
Accidentally kicked a music box
Which began to play "hickory dickory dock."
Very simple little tune,
But I was suddenly transported to somewhere else.
That was how we discovered
That I had at least a love for music.
At my first lesson, I began at once to improvise.
Zatorre: There are many blind musicians.
Part of the reason why those people
Gravitate towards music and become very skilled
Is that they perhaps are able to call upon parts of the brain
That normally would be handling vision
But can be co-opted to help out in somebody's musical abilities,
So they develop a more sensitive ear.
[ typewriter keys clacking ]
Narrator: Neurologist oliver sacks
Has remarkable stories of changes in adult brains
In connection with musical ability.
Man: One such story was presented to me
By a colleague, tony cicoria.
Tony described an extraordinary transformation in himself
15 years ago.
He was a busy surgeon --
He's still a busy surgeon --
With very little taste for music.
Man: I was on a phone in a lightning storm,
I was struck,
And I had a profound out-of-body experience,
A near-death experience,
And I remember thinking "oh, [bleep], I'm dead!"
Narrator: But he wasn't.
He walked away and seemed completely normal.
Sacks: But then, about three weeks later,
He developed what he called a sudden passion,
A sudden insatiable sire,
To hear piano music.
Tony, who himself actually has a ph.D. In neuroscience,
As well as being a surgeon, he said, "as a medical man,"
He said, "I can't explain it."
Narrator: Cicoria --
Who'd only been interested in rock and roll --
Began to listen to classical music,
Took piano lessons to learn how to play,
And then started to compose himself.
Sacks: He had a dream one night,
And when he woke up,
His own music was pouring through his mind
And he was desperate to play it or transcribe it.
That was the piece of music from the dream.
And actually, that was the --
That was the final chorus
That woke me up out of a sound sleep.
And from that point on,
I would sit down and would just start to play,
And it never seemed to change and it never seemed to go away.
It was just always there.
You know, if you had come to me with a story like this,
I would have thought,
"you've got a few loose screws here somewhere",
But suddenly, I'm one of those.
I have no explanation for it.
In talking with dr. Sacks,
He thinks that part of my brain's been rewired.
And certainly, I think that,
To some extent, that's true.
Sacks: One often thinks, you know, one's plasticity,
One's ability to learn,
One's ability to do anything new ends with childhood.
It clearly doesn't.
[ man singing wordlessly ]
Narrator: The brain changes, even in adulthood.
This is -- that is truly awful.
It is awful.
Narrator: Steven mithen decided he wanted to see if music
Could change his brain, the brain of a non-musician.
He asked neuroscientist
Lawrence parsons to scan his brain
Before and after singing lessons.
Now, here's what you did a year later.
¶ la la... ¶
We've got a set of areas
That after your year of singing,
To compare before your year of singing,
Were increased in activity.
And when you say "increased," you mean that's where
There's more blood flowing in my brain
Which indicates more activity?
Exactly, so we're using blood
As an indicator of neural firing.
We found the strongest area was this area on the temporal pole,
The superior planum polare,
Is an area that we've in many other,
In several other studies, shown to be active
For representing musical structure.
So when I started, there wasn't
Much activity in the area
Because I was just hearing sounds
Rather than hearing music.
Is that what you mean?
I was astonished that within just a year
I could have manipulated my brain in that way.
I still didn't sing very well,
But it was a fascinating experiment.
Narrator: If music changes the brain,
What does that mean for education?
Can musical training help children improve
In other skills?
Levitin: There's been a kind of practical side
Of music research, trying to figure out
If music can make you smarter.
Emerging evidence
From carefully controlled studies
Is that learning to play an instrument,
Not just passively listening,
But learning to play an instrument early on,
Can actually confer some cognitive advantages.
There are skills that are
Closely related to musical training
That musicians might out-perform non-musicians.
Certainly motor skills and auditory skills.
What has been a debate about is whether or not there are
Other skills that might be enhanced
Through musical training as well,
Such as visual spatial skills,
Verbal or vocabulary skills, or math skills.
Narrator: He's confirmed that children around ten years old
Who've had musical training did improve in those other skills.
...Time.
Okay.
So there was an effect in their vocabulary skills
And there was an effect
In a visual test.
Narrator: And a recent study in germany shows
That music training seems
To help children learn verbal language,
Even beyond vocabulary skills.
[ boy singing ]
Members of the famous st. Thomas boys choir in leipzig
Were subjects for the study.
Man: The boys in the boys choir, they are a very,
Very good example of a high amount of musical training.
We wanted to investigate if musical training
Also improves the processing of linguistic syntax,
And this is the quite new and the most important issue.
Narrator: Syntax is the structure of language,
The grammar.
[ speaking german ]
Jentschke: We had two sessions.
In one session, we did a music experiment...
[ piano plays ]
In the second session,
We did a language experiment.
[ woman speaking german ]
We compared the e.E.G. Responses
Of the children with musical training
And the children without musical training,
And we found out that children with musical training
Had an improved processing of musical and of linguistic syntax
Compared to children without music training.
It shows that it is important
Or it can be important
To learn a musical instrument, because
It does not train only the perception of music
But also train processes in other cognitive domains.
We're talking about a very particular type of training
That leads to being smarter in certain things.
Musical training and probably other kinds of training as well
Have repercussions on brain anatomy.
Until a few years ago,
No one really had an inkling that this was going on.
Narrator: Of course,
The voice is also a musical instrument,
And the key is not just listening to music
But doing it.
Many musicians certainly believe
That early musical training has a great impact.
Daniel bernard roumain, dbr,
Started playing in public school.
He began a special program
In the new york city schools
After cutbacks in music education.
Dbr: Were it not for the violin,
My life would be very different.
Music not only changed my life,
I feel it saved my life.
So, of course, the question is,
How many lives
Are being lost now, you know?
Narrator: The program he started,
Called young composers,
Is run by the orchestra of st. Luke's.
It starts early
With children like wen hui zhao in chinatown.
Boy: You need to work hard to make music
And you need to be focused before
Composing music and everything else.
Narrator: They're learning to make music
Even if they can't play an instrument,
Even if they can't read music.
Man: What did you think about it?
Boy: Too slow. It was too slow.
Dbr: Music notation, by its very nature,
Is a graphic notation.
It's just a bunch of symbols --
Lines and dots and circles on a piece of paper.
I then say to them, "okay,
"we can take a story and set it to music.
"you have a character and another character.
Well, what instrument should it be?"
And they'll reply, "a flute."
"okay, what character should this be?"
And they'll reply,
"a drum kit!"
Man: Let's try -- you play with the percussion.
[ piano and tambourine play ]
Dbr: By doing this,
It's a way for them to think about music,
Well, in non-musical terms.
All right!
Good morning!
Students: Good morning!
Good afternoon! Good afternoon!
We're here in brooklyn
At the bedford village school, p.S. 3.
[ cheers and applause ] yeah!
Right! [ orchestra plays ]
Narrator: The young composers program leads some children
To fluency in the language of music.
Their pieces are performed by orchestra members.
Boy: I've been composing
For about three years now, and this is my style.
Barenboim: I was brought up in a household
Where music was the most natural form of expression
Because both my parents taught piano,
And this naturalness
In the contact with the music
And with the act of making music and listening to music,
This is what I want the kids to have.
Narrator: Daniel barenboim has founded music kindergartens
In the middle east and in berlin.
Barenboim: The children are there
In the music kindergarten,
Which is not a kindergarten for music.
Its not education of music, but through music.
They get help
To get in contact
With the music, with the sounds,
What kind of a story
The music can tell them,
And then, through that, they learn
All the things that children learn in kindergarten --
Discipline, playfulness,
Affection.
You learn that through --
With and through the music.
Makes me wish I were three years old again.
Levitin: The story hasn't been fully worked out,
But it looks as though if you learn
To play an instrument early, you learn to read
At an earlier age, you learn to read more quickly,
You're better at math,
You're better at a variety of scholastic topics.
And we're not exactly sure why this is,
But it seems as though learning to play an instrument
Trains attentional networks
In the anterior cingulate gyrus.
Nobody's saying that music does it uniquely,
But we're saying that music does seem to do it.
Sacks: In fact, music,
The investigation of music, can take neuroscience
To a higher level and to a degree of complexity
Which it hasn't had before, and it's doing that.
As a physician, it only hit me
When I found myself at a hospital in the bronx
Where there are many hundreds of patients
With chronic neurological problems.
Some have parkinson's.
And it was originally
The nurses and people who knew these patients well who said,
"they can be transformed by music."
[ modern jazz playing ]
It's not just the rhythm.
Everything in music carries one along.
Narrator: Brain imaging shows a strong connection
Between the auditory and motor regions of the brain,
One reason the rhythm of music helps parkinson's patients.
Zatorre: So I'm going to
Show you a sequence, and I want you
To watch me as I do it and I want you to listen,
And then I want you to reproduce the same sequence.
Okay. It goes like this.
What we're attempting to understand here
Is this communication between
The motor system and the auditory system.
Okay, go ahead.
When you hear music, everyone --
You don't have to be musically trained,
Any child even --
Will start to rhythmically move or dance, or...
Music seems to engage the motor system
In a way which other modalities do not.
By achieving this understanding,
We think it will have a lot of applications.
Woman: And this time try to swing your arms...
Zatorre: People who have motor disorders like,
For instance, in parkinson's disease,
Can be helped by having a rhythm track
So their walking can be improved
If their actions are accompanied by music.
[ drum beating ]
Maybe if we understood the mechanisms
That lead to these changes,
Maybe we could come up with rehabilitation techniques
That would kind of patch up the areas
That might have been damaged.
Now, this is, you know, sort of science fiction,
But those are some of the implications.
I think there are definite potential applications
In the future for aging,
And music might very well have a role to play there.
Sacks: However severe a dementia,
Even if people have lost language,
They almost never seem to lose
The memory or the response to music.
This seems to be much more deeply in the brain.
And so that even severely demented people
Will recognize old songs and be delighted by them.
That's exactly right.
Very nice.
Once you get it in your head, it stays there.
That's right. Narrator: One study shows
Long- and short-term memory improvement
In patients receiving music therapy.
Perfect.
[ pianist playing boogie-woogie ]
Narrator: Music is also being used to help stroke patients.
Sometimes it helps improve movement.
Man and woman: ¶ I love ¶
¶ paris in the summer ¶
Sometimes music helps stroke patients having trouble
With language and speech.
Woman: Cheryl has difficulty with repetitions,
So I did some testing with her
Before she started the music therapy sessions...
Dress.
And her repetition score was in the 70s.
By the end of these
Music therapy sessions, her repetition
On an immediate task in speech
Improved up into the 90s.
So she still isn't perfect, but it was really significant.
With speech,
You have to invest in probably
Many dozens of hours of intensive therapy...
Ti-ger, ti-ger.
Which will perhaps go through intermediate stages.
This is sometimes called melodic intonation therapy,
Having people sing
Little phrases.
¶ ti-ger ¶ ¶ ti-ger ¶
Narrator: This therapy is being used
With stroke patients who have aphasia.
They can understand
But have trouble speaking.
¶ dri-ver ¶
Schlaug: They're typically characterized
By having suffered a relatively large stroke
To the left side of their brain.
So far, what we have learned is there are two
Essential components to melodic intonation therapy.
One is the melodic intonation or continuous voicing.
Woman: Okay, so if your two-year-old daughter
Is running off down the street without you,
You have to tell her...
¶ wait for me ¶
Schlaug: And the other thing is
The tapping with the left hand at the rate that
Syllables are produced by the patient and the therapist
To engage a sensory motor network.
¶ why -- ¶ ¶ why did ¶
¶ why did ¶
Schlaug: The melodic intonation seems to engage
Areas in the right side of the brain,
Particularly in the right temporal
And parietal lobe.
The right side of the brain seems to be better-equipped
In recognizing the overall structure,
The contour, or the melody of a piece.
And it brings me to tears, you know,
To see that
People and patients who have not been able to speak at all
Now are actually able to say,
You know, words, simple sentences,
Can express that is very gratifying.
[ woman hums ]
Levitin: Understanding how the brain is wired up
Ultimately can help us come up with treatments
For stroke and tumors, lesions of the brain,
All kinds of brain damage that people undergo,
And that's the practical hope,
Is that we'll be able to come up with
Better medicinal interventions.
Narrator: As clinical and laboratory work
Explores the brain wiring affecting language and music,
There's new debate about how, why, and when
Each ability developed in the brain.
Levitin: What do you all think are some of
The big controversies in the field
In the next five or ten years?
Man: Well, certainly, is music its own separate
Innate brain function that we were wired up to do,
Or is it something we build out of different abilities
That we have and put together as a new...
Levitin: For example,
Is there a distinction between music and language?
Are they two sides of the same coin,
Or are they fundamentally different things?
You know how it is,
How often, when somebody will say something, they'll say
How much they like you, but you can tell
By the tone that they don't.
You know what I mean?
It's all in the tone.
You're absolutely right.
Because there are parts of the brain
That respond to music that don't respond to language,
And there are even parts of the brain
That respond to the melody of language,
And they're separate from the parts
That respond to the melody of music.
Narrator: There is research supporting the argument
That at least some components of music and language
Are separate in the brain.
This woman has no ear for music --
A condition called amusia
That does not affect language and speech.
Woman: Emily is suffering from life-long musical disabilities.
She cannot perceive pitch,
Musical pitch, in a normal way.
Narrator: And some stroke patients who can't speak
Can still do music.
Peretz: The fact that you can disassociate music from language
Suggests strongly that the two systems --
That is music and language -- are separate faculties.
Narrator: But the case is not closed.
[ indistinct speech ]
Man: I think there's a lot more connectivity
Between these systems in the brain
Than it's generally been believed.
We also see from brain imaging that there are other areas
That are shared between language and music.
Narrator: Ani patel's studies show
There are aphasic stroke patients
Who also have trouble with music.
And there's more evidence
Of a connection between music and language.
Patel: So, for example, I might ask somebody,
"does this sound more like english music or french music?"
[ plays the 4th movement of elgar's "symphony no. 1" ]
Narrator: If you've ever thought
That the music of a particular country
Sounds like its language, you're right.
Okay, and then I might play another clip and say,
"does this sound more like english or french music?"
[ plays debussy's "quartet in g minor for strings" ]
Now, people are generally very good at
Guessing which is which.
The second clip was actually the french composer,
Claude debussy, and the first clip
Was a british composer, edward elgar.
And that clip by debussy somehow captured something
About spoken french, and similarly with the elgar.
And having evidence for that
Is kind of interesting.
Narrator: So first he analyzed and compared
The rhythms and patterns of everyday language
In english and french.
Woman: La reconstruction de la ville
A commence apres la mort du roi.
Patel: There's more of a tendency
For longer vowels to alternate with shorter vowels in english,
And you can apply exactly those same measurements
To notes in music.
And so you're kind of making an analogy between
Vowels in language and notes in music.
See the car with four wheels?
What's happening is th when we learn our native language,
Part of what we learn as a native speaker
Is the timing, the rhythm.
And we extract that as listeners,
And composers do, too, when they make their music.
I think that we recruit parts of the language system
When we process music,
And we incorporate it into this wonderful
Set of brain networks that we use to understand music
And make sense of music.
I think music is an example of an invention,
A human invention that we created
That transforms human life.
[ improvising and scatting ]
Mithen: I think what definitely
Comes before language is musicality.
And I think the capacity for musicality,
For appreciating rhythm,
For using variations in pitch, for developing melodies,
That all comes long before language.
One of the stimuluses for my work
Was steven pinker's book called "how the mind works."
I think it's a fantastic book,
But I think he got something extraordinarily wrong
In that book.
He came up with the idea
That music is purely a technical invention.
It's something that is a spin-off from language,
Something that's recent
And of no deep significance to humankind.
I think he's totally wrong.
Narrator: Steven pinker wrote that music
Is simply "auditory cheesecake" --
A pleasurable offshoot of our linguistic ability.
Many people, including many scientists,
Want music to be an adaptation
Because they feel that
That would ratify its value in human life.
It would ennoble it,
Make it part of our nature.
But I think we should resist that,
That it may indeed be part of our nature,
But it may not necessarily be an adaptation
In the biologist's sense.
Unlike other traits -- fear of heights, language,
Sexual desire, where it's fairly
Straightforward to see how it would have enhanced
Reproduction and survival -- music is not so obvious.
[ piano playing ]
Levitin: Darwin asked in "the origin of species"
These very questions, and he had
A plausible hypothesis.
His idea was sexual selection.
Music made the male of the species
More attractive to the female.
It showed that the male who had mastered music
Had a certain amount of cognitive
And physical flexibility.
But I'm leaning towards the idea
That music may have helped to facilitate culture-building.
¶ but, darling, you and I ¶
It is very much rule-based
For how the different participants are going to
Come together in a lawful fashion,
And that is really a foundation of society.
¶ ...And I ¶
¶ we were born to cry ¶
Narrator: Maybe we're built to like music,
So we associate something we need,
Say, culture-building, with reward.
Mithen: How can --
You know, how can we respond so emotionally
And so intuitively to music if it isn't something
That's really deeply embedded in our biology?
How could that be?
I don't understand how that can be.
We really do need to go and look
At the fossil record.
What we can try to deduce is the evolution of the...
The vocal tract, the evolution of the body,
Because the first musical instrument we had,
And probably the most important one
We still have, is the human body.
Narrator: The discovery of part of neanderthal's vocal tract
Led mithen to a theory.
Mithen: Here we can see a cast of a neanderthal skull,
And you can see, in many ways,
It looks almost identical to this one here.
This is homo sapiens.
This is you and me.
We're close cousins.
We shared an ancestor just half a million years ago.
And they were probably able to make
As wide a range of vocalizations as we could.
Probably sounded a little bit differently.
You know, they had these great, big noses,
And it was probably a much more sort of nasal sound.
But nevertheless, a fantastic array of sounds,
Just as we could today.
Some were saying that is just that they had language.
And that's what that vocal tract had evolved for.
But, you know, when you look at how they're behaving
And the artifacts they're making,
I don't think there's any signs of language there at all.
Narrator: Some experts disagree.
But mithen argues there's no evidence
That neanderthal developed more advanced tools
In a way that would have required language,
Nor does he see proof that they used symbols.
Mithen: Language is a system of symbols,
And there is no evidence at all for them
Having made any material symbols.
So we don't have any paintings,
We don't have any carvings,
We don't have any figurative art.
And if they weren't using language,
What are they using these fantastic vocal tracts for?
So I think their vocal tract was being used for singing,
Mainly, for making music.
So I think they had
A sophisticated form of communication
That was based not on words
But what I'd call "holistic phrases," okay?
It's a musical phrase,
But it doesn't break down into separate little meanings
Like each note has a different meaning.
It just means a complete meaning in itself.
And indeed, I think this wasn't only used by the neanderthals
But used by the direct ancestors of homo sapiens in africa.
And it's from this ancient communication system
That our capacities for language and for music evolved.
I think they would probably have had
A lot of movement in it as well,
The gesture, body posture, merging into dance.
Trehub: You know, in many cultures,
People can't imagine the notion that you would listen to music,
You would hear the same thing over and over again,
You wouldn't be there
To see the movements of the people making the music.
Levitin: Well, we're talking about receiving information
From more than one sensory modality, right?
So, I mean, are you including not just
The visual awareness of performers, gestures,
But also the feel of the drums underneath your skin and...
Trehub: It happens on both sides.
It's on the part of the performer
And on the part
Of the audience.
So the audience is seeing, hearing,
In some cases, touching,
So it may be feeling vibrations,
But in the case, say,
Of a mother singing to an infant,
It may often be physical contact.
Music is not normally separated from movement or from dance,
So there are many cultures who don't even have a separate word
For music and movement.
[ drumming ]
Levitin: I think the broader picture here,
In terms of music and the brain informing each other,
Is that in fact music and the brain co-evolved.
If you go back tens of thousands of years,
I think you're looking at little steps
Where music changed, and then the brain accommodated it
In some small way,
And then music changed again
And then the brain changed again,
And you're really not looking at them
Evolving independently, but co-evolving
Over tens of thousands of years
In humans and other animals.
Patel: We'll never be able to go back in time
And know the answer,
"which came first, music or language,"
Or the precise origins of music, but I think
One of the things that we can do
Is use ideas about evolution to motivate experiments
And empirical studies that we can do with living animals,
And one of the interesting ideas is, if we're so
Specially wired-up for music
In the way that people think we are for language,
Then you should be able to identify things that we do
That other animals cannot learn to do.
One of the things
That has been fascinating to me
Over the last few years
Is this issue of synchronization.
Narrator: Humans can move in time --
Synchronize -- to a beat.
Patel: One of the things I've been interested in
Is trying to find evidence
From other species whether or not
They can learn to move with the musical beat
Or to produce a musical beat synchronously.
And very recently,
We've found that there is at least one other species
That does seem to respond to music
In this rhythmic way.
Backstreet boys: ¶ all right ¶
It's actually a bird, a cockatoo,
Which is a bird that has complex vocal learning.
[ "everybody (backstreet's back)" playing ]
Narrator: Studies of the brains of vocal learning birds
Show that ability to learn song structures
Is linked to motor skills.
Patel: Over three million people have seen this video
Which propelled this little bird to fame.
This raised many questions.
The first question I think a lot of people wondered is,
"is it real?"
Well, it's real.
I've been out there and visited the bird,
And it does really dance to music
And it's not just imitating the movement of its owner.
You can be still
And not be giving it cues
And the bird will still dance.
And then the next question is, "how flexible is it?
Can he dance to other songs?"
And he does.
"can he adjust his tempo to the same song
"if you make it faster or slower
So it's a version he's never heard before?"
[ "everybody (backstreet's back)" playing ]
And the answer is, yes, within a limited range,
He can do that.
This is real synchronization,
This is real musical synchronization,
And this shows that this ability is not something
That you need a human brain to do.
Narrator: In other words,
He's arguing that if other species
Have music-like abilities,
Then music probably is not
A special adaptation in humans --
Something unique to us,
Something that we needed just for its own sake to survive.
If a bird can do something
That we think of as genuinely musical,
Like moving to the beat of music,
To me, that suggests that that doesn't require
Natural selection for music.
Narrator: But what if there's a possibility
That some other species did themselves evolve
True musical ability --
That they, too, needed music?
Parsons: People have been looking at
Activity by other animal species
That looks comparable to human music.
[ birds singing ]
So one really exciting new finding
Is a study of plain-tailed wrens,
A kind of songbird.
And what is remarkable about the finding
Is that they showed, for the first time,
Synchronized choruses
Of these birds.
[ birds singing ]
You know, what's notable about it is,
Synchronized choruses had never been seen outside of humans,
As far as I think we're aware.
For the species themselves, we don't really know
How to describe what it means to them.
We don't know how to place these animal expressions
In the human continuum
Of language and music and other things
And dance that we all do as humans.
[ various birds singing ]
Patel: We say birds "sing,"
And we use that term,
So isn't that, in a sense, music?
But if you look more closely
At what animals do with their vocalizations,
There are lots of things about them
That I think are different from music.
Animals tend to use their vocalizations
For very specific functional reasons.
Male birds typically sing
To attract a mate
Or to defend a territory.
[ bird singing ]
Narrator: Bird-song researchers
Analyze the vocalizations,
Searching for clues to why and how
Birds sing.
Ofer tchernichovski records zebra finch songs
And finds music-like structure.
Man: I don't know
If bird song and music songs are the same,
But I think that they share something.
As a scientist, I like to follow beauty.
[ zebra finch sings ]
This is a wave form of the zebra finch song,
And you can see one motif
With different syllables here.
[ zebra finch sings ]
You hear a little? Not too much.
Let's slow it down a bit.
[ slowed-down zebra finch song plays ]
[ sings zebra finch song ]
There's a very nice melodic structure to it.
Here's a spectral image of what you've just looked at.
See the vibrato right here?
And here is that glissando.
Look how beautifully it goes down.
Those are the two harmonic sounds.
¶ ba da ¶
[ clarinet playing ]
Narrator: David rothenberg became a student of bird song.
He even plays his clarinet with birds,
He's so convinced
They are making music.
[ bird sings ]
Man: People sometimes say, "rothenberg doesn't believe
That male birds sing to attract mates and defend territory."
That's not true.
It's not that I don't believe that.
That's what the song is for, but that's not what the song is.
What is it?
It's really music.
The more I investigated this,
The more I realized each species is a world unto itself
In terms of how it learns song, how it uses sound.
[ whale singing ]
Humpback whale song is different
Than the sounds of any other animal
In the fact that it's so long
And so complex.
It's really not just a bunch of moans...
[ whale "moans" ]
And shrieks...
[ whale shrieks ]
But an organized series of patterns over and over again.
[ whale sings ]
So this is very remarkable that this giant animal
Should have evolved this ability to learn these complex songs.
[ clarinet playing with whale song ]
And then --
[ whale "grunts" ]
Here is an example of
A just sped-up humpback whale song
Mixed in with catbird song.
And if you speed it up, it's like a bird song.
There is some sense of pattern, rhythm,
And form in the music of the animal world
That is common at different levels of organization.
I would say that just as people have identified, you know,
Different visual patterns in the shapes of shells
And the way plants
Have developed these certain kind of senses of order
In visual form and symmetry,
The same thing is going on in sound.
[ whales and birds singing ]
Barenboim: I think the universe is musical.
Music is both inside and outside the world.
Music is inside the world, therefore it is universal.
It speaks to people
Who have had centuries of contact with music in vienna
And it also speaks to little villages in palestine.
But it is only a physical phenomenon.
Whenever somebody plays,
It gets a human dimension.
You can phrase a lot of interesting phenomena
In the universe in terms of music
Or at least in terms of an analogy with music.
For instance, I work on a field called string theory,
Which is an approach to describing
The fundamental constituents of matter
And says inside of all particles
Is a little tiny string that vibrates,
Sort of like the string on a violin would vibrate,
And the equations that we use to describe the vibrations
Of these little tiny strings at the heart of matter
Is very close in structure to the equation that we'd use
To describe the motion of a string on a violin.
In a sense, what we're saying is that
If string theory is correct, at the heart of matter is music.
Narrator: And music echoes the cosmos in other ways.
The big bang created waves
In cosmic microwave background radiation.
They vibrate at different frequencies --
Vibrations in air akin to sound waves.
Greene: The ones that are vibrating twice as fast.
Those are the overtones.
We see the cosmic harmonics,
Cosmic music, as the universe was oscillating
From effects that took place in the beginning.
If you were there, you wouldn't be able to hear it.
The vibrations are at too low a frequency
For the human ear to hear it.
Narrator: But transpose them higher
And we can hear the sounds of the universe.
[ deep rushing sound ]
Even black holes have pitches.
Greene: One, found it's a b-flat,
But it's 57 octaves below any b-flat that we could hear.
In a way,
It is totally remarkable, the way in which a single idea
That can move us in a concert hall
Is at work in the cosmos.
It's all a matter of the same underlying phenomena,
Vibration, and vibration is so apparent in the universe
That you see the unifying thread.
Narrator: So if music is somehow in the world,
Then is it, in fact, in us?
[ mcferrin scatting ]
Has it always been in us
Because we need it simply for itself?
[ heart beating ]
Levitin: I mean, I come to this from a kind of bias,
Which is that the human genome is crowded.
We only have about 22,000 or 23,000 genes,
And that's not a lot
To do all that they have to do.
I mean, there is a lot -- you know,
The vast majority of our genes
Are doing kind of housekeeping functions.
If something's in there, it's there for a reason.
That's my bias.
If music's been in there for as long as we think it has,
It must be serving some evolutionary function.
Otherwise, the genome would have kicked it out.
So, "why music?" is the question.
What was the compelling force
That drove us to music, do you think?
Bharucha: It's got to be group cohesion
And it's got to be building group cohesion
As a way to align peoples' brain-states.
One of the interesting developments
In the last few years is that we are moving
From a study of an individual brain
To the study of
A society of brains, if you like,
And music serves to synchronize our brain-states.
¶ whoa-oh whoa oh-oh ¶
All: ¶ whoa-oh whoa oh-oh ¶
Mcferrin: I've had musical moments
Where I've locked myself into some motif.
It literally feels like I've gotten to a place where I'm
No longer singing and I can't stop.
Levitin: Yeah, it's not you.
It's coming through.
It's like it's coming through.
[ band playing "all right now" by free ]
It's that loss of me as a separate entity from others,
The barriers sort of drop
And you feel this sort of unity.
And you get this sense of something
Larger than yourself happening.
[ rock playing, crowd cheering ]
And then you look around and you see there's
This whole crowd of people that are locked into it
And you're getting all these chemicals
Shooting through your brain that are changing
Your mood and your state.
You've got this
Neural firing that's completely synchronized,
And you see everybody else
Is experiencing the same thing,
And you begin to feel part of
A larger whole.
Narrator: Music connects us
To ourselves
And to others.
Mcferrin: The thing that's wonderful for me
Is that you create these communities,
A community of strangers.
[ chorus singing ]
I've had experiences where, at the end
Of a concert, and I've given the audience
A certain part or something to sing,
And the concert's over,
Yet they will continue to sing
And they will leave the hall singing
Because the music that took place
Might have come out of me,
But it went into them and became all of us
And we took that out.
[ chorus singing ]
Narrator: So why music?
It's written into our very being.
Science is showing that song lies at the core of life.
[ scatting ]
[ heart beating ]
from www.OpenSubtitles.org sync by: kicipu for:subscene.com