Nuanced. - 106. Adriana Barton: The Surprising Benefits of Music

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Aaron sits down with Adriana Barton, an author with extensive experience in music, to discuss how her years of intensive training have shaped her unique perspective on the transformative power of music. Together, they delve into Adriana's experiences as a musician, including injuries sustained while playing the cello, while also exploring the incredible benefits of music - from improving mental health to enhancing athletic performance and even combatting dementia. As the conversation deepens, Aaron and Adriana also highlight how music can reflect and shape cultural identity, providing a powerful insight into its global impact.Adriana Barton is a journalist and author of Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound (Greystone Books, 2022). A former staff health reporter and copy editor at The Globe and Mail, she has written about medical research, neuroscience, visual arts, music and pop culture for publications including the Boston Globe, Reader’s Digest, Utne, Azure, Western Living and San Francisco Bay Guardian. She studied the cello for 17 years with teachers including international solo artist Antonio Lysy and former Cleveland Orchestra principal cellist Stephen Geber. Research projects have taken her to Syria, Jordan, India, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Brazil. Follow her at AdrianaBarton.com. Chapters:0:00 Introduction1:15 Playing the Cello12:28 Injuries from Playing the Cello21:10 Writing Wired For Music34:51 Benefits of Music46:20 Cultural Differences in Music49:06 Order Wired For Music51:16 Tim's TakeSend us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Welcome back to another episode of The Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host, Aaron P. Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with the author of Wired for Music, a search for health and joy through the science of sound. We dive into how music impacts us, how it shapes us, how it can impact our moods and perspectives, and how it can impact us for the better in regards to our health. My guest today is Adriana Barton.

Adriana, it's such a pleasure to sit down with you today. I'm so excited to delve into such important topics because I do think that we have a general understanding of music, but I feel like your book really dives into the details and helps us understand our connection and the meaning of music on such a deeper level. Would you mind introducing yourself for individuals who might not have heard of you? My name's Adriana Barton. I'm a journalist and a new author, first-time author of my book at Wired for Music, A Search for Health and Change. joy through the science of sound. I'm also a lifelong musician, a fraught relationship with music that has more recently gotten to be quite healthy and enjoyable for me. And I live in Vancouver with my

son and my husband. I'd like to start with the cello. I think you did a great job of introducing that in the book, your relationship with music and developing a deeper understanding and relationship. And I felt like you did a really good job of sort of laying out that you can be really good at the process of music and not have the connection with the creativity and the art of music. And I thought that that was a really apt way to kind of start the book. Would you mind talking about how you got started with the cello? Certainly. Well, it was a kind of a brutal introduction to music making, I would say. We did have a lot of money at home. I was in rural Quebec with my parents and my older sister. My other siblings weren't born yet. My

mother actually spent hours sketching the National Arts Center Orchestra in Ottawa. So we lived in Quebec, but she would drive across the river almost every day before I started school when I was in preschool. So she'd take me to preschool. She'd go to the National Arts Center and sketch the orchestra backstage. And recently, I found a folder of these drawings. And actually, they've been donated to the National Arts Center, and they were delighted to receive these sketches. But when you look at these sketches, they are just beautiful, and you see this intimate relationship between the musicians and their instruments and the energy backstage during the rehearsals. And I think my mom was just enraptured with this experience and wanted us to experience that, too, as small

children. And so she enrolled me in a conservatory in Quebec, where the lessons were free. But what I didn't understand at the time, because I was five years old, was that it was an audition. I was brought to this place. There was a competitive admission process. And I didn't understand that it was sort of a Faustian bargain where in exchange for free lessons, I was expected to dedicate myself to the life of a professional musician in training at H5. And I'm not talking about, you know, Saturday afternoon cello lessons. It was a full gamut of private lessons, orchestra, theory, sight singing, chamber music, the full thing for quite a few hours a week at a young age. That's incredible.

And so what was your relationship? Was this exciting to you? Was this an opportunity to you? What was your understanding in those early days? I was a dutiful child. And I knew what was expected of me, and I really wanted to please. I wanted to please my teacher, who was a cellist with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. While teaching me, a five-year-old, he also had students at the Universite de Montreal.

So he would commute between Montreal and this conservatory in Hull, Quebec. So he was teaching university-level students and playing in the Montreal Symphony while teaching me. he was very demanding and he had studied himself at the illustrious Paris Conservatory. So I don't remember finding this an opportunity or a joyful thing, but really something that the adults in my life wanted me to do. I do remember, and I describe it in the very first page of the book, this incredible experience of vibration from this massive instrument that was almost as large as I was. And that was a wondrous sensory embodied feeling.

But very soon, that instinctive joy and delight that I experienced that day gave way to something else. Right. And I think that that can be one of the challenges is that it's pulling something out of you. It's giving you this opportunity to improve and to develop a skill. But it sounds like that dutiful element pulled you in a direction. I'm just wondering, did you have a fraught relationship during a lot of that period? Or what was your kind of thoughts as you were going through the process if you were to take that bird's eye view of your journey through? I think I definitely did have a fraught relationship.

But as I said, I knew it was very important to the adults. And even at school, I really tried to do a good job on my assignments. and I wasn't a teacher's pet, but I was a teacher who tried to please the adults and meet their expectations of me. Frot, it became more so the older I got because I felt that I could never please my teacher. He would tell me he would not praise my playing or my progress ever because he told me that I would stop practicing if I got reward in that way. And of course we know with children it's the opposite when we encourage them and make them feel that they're doing a good job. You know, it's true that his technique can be a form of motivation, but it's a

really neurotic form of motivation and not one we choose for children today. Now we choose to motivate children through the joy of learning and through the joy of pleasure and the joy of discovery and positive motivations. And what I've also learned, so you probably see in the book, because you've read the book, I assume that some parts of it are somewhat technical. I tried not to bog anyone down with the science. But what we now know is that when the threat circuitry in the brain, they call it the periventricular system, when the threat circuitry is activated, it actually blocks a lot of the pleasure reward circuitry in the brain. So where the dopamine is and all of that system. And that system is also involved in motivation as well as learning. So actually people don't

learn as well when they feel under threat. It even interferes with the very objective of teaching. I think you did a really good job of tying in the scientific. I think you have like over 230 references with anecdotal experiences and a story to make it more accessible. I'm curious around the opportunity to develop though, because there's so few opportunities for people to take something and play it out to its kind of extreme. So often people try a little bit of the this and a little bit of that and kind of salt and pepper and experience where you really got to deep dive into fully understanding what this endeavor was going to ask of you and put your all into that beyond just the specifics of the cello. How did that shape your understanding? Because

you've gone on to do other things. You've written a book. You've worked in journalism. I'm just curious as to what that ability to really push through and see an opportunity kind of till it to its end. And I'm sure that you could have had an even longer career and there were challenges with that. But I'm just curious as to put yourself in kind of fully into something, what that meant to you. It meant a lot of things. So it's a big question that you ask. And I'll admit that when you start something so seriously at such a young age, it's very difficult to separate what is your personality and your aptitude and your approach to life and what is the environment in which you're being shaped and molded.

So I was extremely diligent. I mean, I had, you know, lists of how much I practiced down to the minute. I, you know, I had systems. I had a lot of drive, a lot of dedication. Is that who I am and how I'm wired? Or is that a system that demanded that of me? Or is it a confluence of qualities? I don't know.

I know that I do tend to apply that. other things that I take on, including the book. I can't say that that's because of the cello. It could have been partly my family makeup. I will say there are pluses and minuses to that approach. So the downside is that really being a cellist was almost my entire identity up until the time I quit at 22. I really had not developed other parts of myself very much.

I mean, I had some friends and, you know, I had school. And I guess I was a member of a family. But I didn't have any other interests. I didn't do sports. I didn't. I read, you know, but it was pretty limited. And one of the appeals for journalism, one of the reasons that journalism appealed to me at the end of the whole cello endeavor was that it was a way to find out about the world. I joked that it was like a crash course in life because really I had spent so many hours.

by myself in a practice studio, and I felt tremendous guilt if I didn't practice for one day. Even on Christmas Day, I'd feel like, oh, my God, I'm getting behind because I've taken a day off. I mean, I didn't take weekends off. Weekends were times to do even more practicing because I didn't have school interfering. And, I mean, I think I mentioned in the book this time I've taken, I'm on a getaway for the weekend in the, I don't know, one of the Gatineau Hill. or Algonquin or something, and I've got my cello strapped to my back to bring it to the cabin where I'm going to stay at the weekend. You know what I mean? Like it really was. So, yeah, so on the plus side, perhaps that approach made me able to deal with frustration and to get past

the learning curve in various ways and to stick to, there's a stick-to-itiveness that comes with that kind of training. On the downside, I think it made me more uptight, more professional, perfectionist, more vigilant, about less able to color outside the lines or feel that it was okay to fail. I mean, really, if you're in that environment, at least the conservatory that I was part of, everyone's watching what you do and correcting it all the time. So that's not a positive way to grow up, I think. And, you know, to be honest, when I wrote the book, I kept thinking, oh my God, I'm going to get letters from people who are from that conservatory saying, you got it all wrong.

It was a wonderful place. The problem was you, you know? But to my great delight, literally two weeks ago, I got a letter from a woman who lives in BC and had gone to the very same conservatory, had the same theory teacher. She said, I would love to go for coffee with you because while I was reading your book, it was like reading my story. I too, I don't want to talk about her story because it's her story, but I did. We met for coffee and I felt so gratified that I wasn't making this stuff up. But she said it really was like

if we failed at this, we failed as human beings. That was the message we were given. So it wasn't just me. And we sort of agreed because we'd known musicians with different types of training that it might very well have been the strictest music training you could find this side of the Atlantic. That's wild. And I think it's so valuable for people to be able to share this because people go through this sort of journey, whether it's through military school where they're pushed to their absolute limits. This also pushed your body to its absolute limits. Would you be able to talk about that?

Well, sure. There's a funny little trick that I do sometimes to illustrate this and that I don't know if it'll show up in camera, but I was playing so young and my teacher would stretch my fingers apart to help me reach the notes. And so even now, I have not played very much in probably 26 years, but like if you see my fingers, my thumbs are perfectly together, but these pinkies are very far, they're very different because this one is the one that had to stretch to get the notes. And the bow hand did have to do that. He would like pull them apart so you can see my bones and my soft tissues are not aligned from that much practicing. And this shoulder used to creep up. I've worked on it a lot

with, you know, physio and exercises and whatnot. But also in my wrists, I had cysts that developed the size like that big, the size of marbles on each wrist that were very painful. And I got severe tenonitis as well. So there. were some physical, I mean, if you look at it from a Gabour Maté, Dr. Gabour Maté perspective, you could say my body said no. You know, because there were flare-ups that started just as I was leaving home, I had a scholarship to a top-rated American music school university. And I had these physical things started to happen. But I want to mention something else that, that, you know, I think there was this growing unease in me as a teenager as it became more and more a project to become a cellist.

You probably recall this part of the book, and I didn't really make this connection until I wrote the book. And that's what's interesting about writing a book, is that you start to see things in new ways. And there was this thing that happened when I was two years old that I had no memory of, really. My mom, well, without giving too much of the story, my father had died when I was baby, and my mom was hitchhiking with me and my older sister to Vancouver. And she got involved in this kind of hippie musician scene. And they were giving spontaneous music workshops for children with Down syndrome and autism. It was a radical idea at the time, very unusual and very successful.

And there's even some grainy footage that you can find. find online of these happenings with gongs and dangling car parts and instruments that were lying around that these children could pick up and just experience with their bodies and sort of improvise and vibe with the music in whatever way felt good to them. And my mom then left to Mexico with me and my sister, but two of the musicians who were part of that scene went on to found Canada's very first degree program in music therapy at Capilano College. And so when I was writing the book, I actually had this thought. I wonder if this patterning of the spontaneous scene was in me all along and somehow accounted for some of the unrest I had with being someone immersed in this formal training.

because it's quite wild that by the age of five, I'd had exposure to the most free-floating music scene you can imagine on one side and then this ultra-strict system on the other. You know, I had both of those experiences by five, six, which is perhaps why there was an inner struggle, you know? Yeah, this ties in really nicely with some of the people who have actually reviewed your book, speaking of Dr. Gabor-Matte, you also. had the person who wrote The Body Keeps the Score right about this. Excuse me. Dr. Gabor Matei has not rebuked my book. No, sorry. I was just connecting that with the fact that somebody else, when we're talking about people who are experts in this field, that the person who wrote The Body Keeps the Score also reviewed your book. And I was just going to ask, what the response, were you able to

have a conversation? Because speaking of your fingers and the pulling of your fingers, that would be an interesting conversation and obviously the review can't go into all the dialogues you may have had. I'm just curious as to what some of the feedback was in terms of the challenges your body faced. So Dr. Bessel van der Koke is the author of The Body Keeps the Score and we exchanged a few emails, but I will be meeting him next month because he has invited me to give a keynote speech at his international trauma conference in Boston, which is a massive honor. And I've never given a keynote speech for 500 people before, so it will be a new experience. I'm putting a slideshow together right now.

And I've organized to, I've actually connected with the Berkeley School of Music to hire a music therapy student to play guitar during my talk to convey some of the concepts in the book so that people in the audience have an experiential learning aspect as well as slides and a talk. But I'll be learning more about what Dr. van der Kolk, what drew him to my book and what he thinks of it next month when I meet him. I think that will be a really interesting conversation because as you've kind of pointed out, your body has faced these challenges and he would be a very interesting person to get his perspective on some of the challenges you've faced. What were those days of walking away? What were those like? it sounds like there was a lot of pressure on you that you felt in terms of following through. So it must have been a lot of weight to walk away from the cello. What was some of those days like?

Well, I'm going to admit that when you asked me that, even though it was so long ago, and, you know, I've had more than one session of therapy in my life, shall we say. I still felt emotional just now when you asked because it was, I was very vulnerable. I was living in Vancouver, far from my family, and just wondering what I was going to make of my life. I had no idea who I was or what value I had, what contribution I could make. And I felt like a terrible failure for leaving the cello. I really did. Even though I had not really failed, it was my choice to leave.

You know, I didn't ever fail an exam, and no one said, really, you don't have what it takes. In fact, I got the opposite. I got a lot of encouragement. I did well in university. But in my eyes, my body was rebelling. And this thing that I dedicated 17 years to was done. And so I felt a lot of shame about it and also pain because it was also a beautiful instrument and a beautiful thing. to be part of music. I mean, who everyone loves musicians and, you know, and even now people are just, oh, you're a cellist. And I always say, no, I'm not a cellist anymore. I play other instruments, but I don't identify as a cellist. I identify as an amateur musician. And I actually love the word amateur. And the reason is that I've had the fortune to spend time in Europe. And there, they stick to the Latin root of the word, which is Amare to love. So an amateur is somebody who loves something. It's not someone who's terrible at it.

So I've been reclaiming the word amateur and applying that to the music that I do now. And it does sound like you've done that throughout. By being able to develop different skills and explore different opportunities, you can come at it as a student and be excited about the experience rather than perhaps the final result, which was what it sounds like was sort of ingrained for you for such a long period. Yeah. How did this book come about, Wired for Music? Got it right here.

I'm curious as to, was it challenging to consider talking about this topic? It obviously you have a fraught relationship, but it sounds like things started to turn around. And I'm just curious as to those early days of starting to look at this concept. I'll try and keep it short because it's a little bit of a circuitous journey. I actually wrote a guest essay for Jane Friedman, who's a very popular book industry figure in the U.S. And I wrote a guest post for her recently on how to write a hybrid memoir because really this is a science memoir. It's a popular science book married to some memoir elements, as you know. And so in that essay I talked a little bit about how it came about.

And really, when I became drawn to music again and started to do music in new ways, what I found was that my brains felt differently from how I'd done it before, my body felt differently, my moods and emotions and relationships with the musicians I was playing with felt different. And at the time, I was a health reporter at the Globe and Mail, and there was all this incredible research coming out about music and the brain and the therapeutic effects of music. And because of all the fMRI studies, that the imaging abilities were much more developed, starting in the 90s, but really more into the early 2000s, there were just so many new findings.

It was, I think, in 2011, where it was proven without a doubt that music stimulates dopamine in the brain, which is a huge, a huge thing. It has so many implications and it also explains so much about music's effects on us. Anyhow, I was seeing this research at work and feeling these things in my musical activities and had this idea that maybe I'd like to study

medical ethnomusicology, which is it's how cultures around the world have used music as a form of medicine through history, through many centuries of development. And I applied for the ethnomusicology program, PhD program at UBC. And they offered me a spot. And then I kind of balked because I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend five years writing a thesis that a thesis that maybe 10 people would reach.

If I was lucky, maybe 20, you know. And I wasn't sure what I would do with a degree like that. And I had, you know, I had a good job at the Globe of Mail, and I wasn't sure I wanted to leave it. So I was interested enough to apply, but then didn't accept the spot. And a few months later, I got a call from a publisher saying, do you have any book ideas? We really like your writing in the globe. And so, you know, I said, well, I have this geeky interest in music and medicine, and they kind of listen politely. And then when I mentioned the cello and my, of course, you would put those together, you know.

And at first it wasn't really obvious to me because I really didn't have an interest in taking a memoir approach to a book. I thought, well, who wants to read about my SADSAC story with the cello that happened two decades ago? Like, really, it's not relevant to anything, you know? So at first I thought, oh, maybe I could do a book that was comparing the new neuroscience of music with cultural uses of music as medicine. But that was way too academic for what the average person wants to read in a book. I mean, I liked it because I was, you know, health-oriented and geeky that way. But then my early readers just kept saying, oh, we love your story, you know, more of you, more of you. And I got that message from the publisher and my editors, too.

So even in the final edit, more of you. And so really, there was a lot more of me that came into the final product or the final book. So hopefully that answers your question. It was a little long. It does. I'm also curious, was it therapeutic for you? Was it harder than you thought it was going to be to tie in more of your story and go into some of these details? It's pretty vulnerable some of the things that you've had to overcome. I'm just curious as to, was it challenging to put this out into the world or did it feel much more comfortable by the time you were done? I would say yes on yes. So structurally, it was incredibly difficult. to braid those two. In fact, there are more than two themes, but to braid the various themes together was very structurally challenging. And that guest post for Jane Friedman, I mentioned how to write a hybrid memoir, talks about just the author writing structural issues involved in that

endeavor. And I joked that I would never recommend that type of book for a first book. And when Jane Friedman tweeted about my book, she said, I always tell writers not to do that kind of book for the first book, but she did a great job, you know, kind of thing. But it's apparently known to be a challenging task for a writer. So sometimes you have to because that's what the book wants to be. And I think that's what my book wanted to be. As for therapeutic, it took me a lot longer to write than I expected. And part of it was that I had so much research and, you know, shaving it. down to what was palatable for a reader. Something I'm used to doing as a journalist, but there was just so much volume that I had to make my parameters smaller and smaller and decide, okay, this is

not a music therapy book because that's its own thing. And so that took time. But the other part that took time in terms of the therapeutic, personally therapeutic, was that I really did find myself reliving times that I didn't really want to think about again. And They were hard. And so I don't know if you recall the chapter where I talk about the Air India massacre, the Air India bombing. And I lost two orchestra mates in that crash in a devastating way. And I didn't know. I found out about it in a devastating way. And even this last week, I mean, I got a call from a reporter at the Ottawa citizen who was writing an obituary about his father. sorry, not his father, their father, the two girls who died in the crash who I knew. And because he and I reconnected while I was writing the book, I probably spent two or three weeks weeping about this loss that I'd never fully processed when I was young because I didn't have support.

There wasn't the same understanding of grief. My parents don't remember me talking about it at all. you know and so it was very odd as someone I think I was 50 or 51 when I wrote that passage reading the news reports and weeping and it was very odd to be right back there and think of them and they were just so present in my mind and maybe it's two pages of the book but that's the case for other parts of the book that might just be a paragraph but I was taken right back there. And it also feels like an incredible privilege to write a book. I mean, I don't want people who haven't read the book to make a mistake. This book is not

a wallowy book. It's not there, it moves along fairly quickly, I would say. And, you know, I did the wallowing in my writing room. I'm not on the page. You know, I was very strict about editing and not going on, not rambling on. But it feels like a privilege in midlife, as I am, to take this long look at everything that's happened up until this point and sort of make peace with a lot of things and see them in a new way with my middle-aged eyes and see the people who were helpers and I didn't know they were and the connections, how there's this interesting pattern of my life that has somehow makes sense at this stage. And I do feel like I've a sense of peace and resolution with a lot of those events. And an incredible gift, too, has been letters from people I haven't seen in 20, 30 years who reached out to me. And it's including a 90-year-old man who he was the boyfriend of a friend of mine, a woman, who looked after me for two months while my brother was having open heart surgery at age five in London. England that had never been done in North America. My parents left me in Ottawa so that he could

have heart surgery and I stayed with them. And this man I haven't seen since I was 17 wrote to me. And so there have been incredible reconnections through the book that I didn't expect that have been amazing. I've learned from professors that the problem with so many people's writing in the early stages is that it's not a journey. You already have your thesis and your conclusion written so you're not participating in the process of learning and exploration and having a deeper understanding and it definitely feels like that's what the book is delivering is this this broad strokes understanding with tie-ins to so many different topics one of the topics i thought you did a really good job of balancing kind of debunking things and

helping us understand is things like the mozart effect that marketing companies and marketing in general, sort of take important ideas, cutting-edge scientific studies, and sort of gerrymander them for the benefit of the public, to get people excited, to get them interested, companies start to make products based around it to really get started. Would you mind talking a little bit about that? Yeah, well, the Mozart effect was based on a very early pilot study in 1998. And I think it involves something like, 36 students, I'd have to check my notes, but not a lot of people who appeared after a short span of time, maybe a 10-minute span of time of listening to a Mozart piano sonata,

they appeared to show a slight bump in scores and a standard IQ test, not even a full IQ test, just a couple of exercises out of an IQ test. And these gains evaporated within minutes, if they were even clinically significant at all. And this researcher published this pilot research in the journal Nature. And even she and her co-authors did not say that listening to music, Mozart music made you smarter. They didn't say that. They thought perhaps it primed you temporarily for abstract reasoning. But even that was a bit of a stretch based on the data that they had collected. This study, this research was not replicated. I mean, in science, you have to be able to show again and again that the same phenomenon occurs. You can't, it was not, it did not

pass the replication test. It did not bear out in other, many, so many efforts were made to, to challenge it because, because of the amount of hoopla around it, the scientists felt obligated to really, if the letter had about the results had been published and nothing had come of it, nobody would have bothered to rigorously study whether it was really true. But the marketing people got a hold of it before the rest of the scientific community had time to really rigorously analyze it. And it just took on a life of its own to the point where when I think it was the Georgia state governor was saying, well, we should be sending every newborn home. with a Mozart CD because no one questions that it improves chess and maths and everything

else, which was, there wasn't a reason to say, there wasn't a logical reason to say that at that point. And even today, people, and I do think it has to do with some of the elitism that is attached to classical music. People who have access to those instruments and access to those lessons and that type of training come from often privileged backgrounds. And so often they do do well at math doesn't mean there's, you know, the chicken, it doesn't mean there's correlation, but not necessarily causation. And that's what was missing. And Einstein, he was a great lover of Mozart. He compared the symmetry and the beauty of Mozart's compositions to his mathematical equations and the ordering of the universe. So that I think that the idea of the idea of

the Mozart effect might have existed even before that seminal experiment in 1998. That myth probably existed. And also, Mozart himself was regarded as a genius in his day. So that matching of genius and Mozart probably started when Mozart was, you know, 10 years old and just grew and grew and grew over time and became this myth that was very difficult to kill off. Yeah, absolutely. The meat of your book centers around the benefits and having a thorough understanding of the various benefits. Would you, for people who are interested in learning the full information, they should go read your book? But I'm curious, what are some of those broad strokes? You mentioned the idea of antidepressants and that they can have effects on that, that it can bring up mood, that it can have an impact on us.

Broadly speaking, how does music impact us? I'll try and keep it very brief. I would say there are three main domains. And so off the bat, music is known to stimulate something like 100 plus neurochemicals in the brain. It's not the only activity that does stimulate many, many like that. I'm sure sex might too, you know, but it certainly has been studied to stimulate quite a range of important chemicals in the brain. But one of the most important is dopamine. And the reason the dopamine pathways are important is that, in fact, I'm going to include a slide from my talk in Boston, you see all the areas that the dopamine pathways touch on, and some are motor control, some are the pleasure reward circuitry. They descend, the dopamine pathways

descend into the brain stem and the spinal cord. And so a lot of the clinical benefits that music therapists have demonstrated do ultimately stem from the dopamine system. So for instance, we know that music or dancing to music seems to help people with Parkinson's. And interestingly, in Parkinson's, you have a deficiency of dopamine that accelerates as the disease worsens. You have less and less dopamine when you have Parkinson's and music is something that perks up dopamine. So they're now various experimental treatments using music to try and perk up what dopamine is available to people with Parkinson's in terms of mood and one of the wonderful things about music is that people keep wanting to extract what's the best frequency, what's the best genre, et cetera, et cetera.

The beautiful thing about music is the more pleasure it gives you, the better it works. And the pleasure part is really all about your preference, your cultural background, what jazzes you up, literally. The more you love the music, the more of the mood benefits you're going to get. And it could be sad music because they've also shown that the pleasure responses to sad music, interestingly, can be even greater at times for some people than the pleasure responses to peppy happy music. And happy and sad music, of course, are culturally determined. So we've got the pleasure aspect, which is way more complicated than what I've just summed up. And then we have tempo, which is what most people would think of the speed of the beat. So tempo is separate from pleasure and what you'd call the valence of the music, the happy, sad scale.

tempo is if you listen to music at about the pace of a resting heartbeat like thumb, thumb, thumb, thumb, your brain waves and your brain stem will, the neurons in the brain stem and your brain waves will tend to start synchronizing with that beat, which then has effects on your heart rate, your breathing rate, your cortisol levels, etc., etc., etc. So if you want to come down, you, it sounds just so simple that it sounds made up, but it's actually, true that you choose the slow-paced music to try and regulate your body to that pace. And the same in a survey of 74,000 pop songs, the most common tempo is 120 beats per minute, which is about double the pace of a resting heart. And the idea is that's the tempo that initiates the desire to move, gets people to go on the dance floor. And so then there are sports psychologists who have rigorously studied the effects of music in sports, exercise and sport training. And they found that at the higher beats per minute, you can rev up the system so that the exercise feels like it's taking less effort. And you're kind of smoothing out the kinks in the movement chain so that if

you exercise in time with fast-paced music, you'll use 7% less oxygen. Then you need to do the very same exercise without music, which is 7% is a lot for a high-performance athlete. And again, I could go on, but the tempo is is universal. Like our brains will all respond to tempo. It doesn't matter if you're in the Congo or in Montreal. But the dopamine pleasure, violence aspect of music has to do with your personal associations, your cultural associate your early exposure to music. And the third domain, I would say, would be the social. We get a lot of social benefits from music because, again, this sounds made up. But if you go to McMaster University, they have this, McMaster University, they have this wonderful lab that has all this

high-tech equipment that allows them to drill down and figure out what's happening between the musicians on stage and the audience members, et cetera. And they did one study where all of the audience members were wearing halves full of electrodes. And they could show that the brainwaves of the audience members started to entrain or synchronize with the tempo of the musicians on stage and with each other. And so they were literally getting on the same brain wave length through music. Not only that, the more that happened, the more they felt. a sense of social connection with each other.

Just from listening to music together in a stadium or in, sorry, in an auditorium, which explains why we go out and pay big money to listen to big acts in a stadium because there's that high and that feeling of belonging and togetherness. And music isn't the only thing that gives us this, but it is very much efficient at making us feel part of something without using words. And that's the other thing I think is special, especially right now with all the divisions and the tone policing and the fear around saying the wrong words. It's a way to transcend the minefield of verbal communication.

I love that you just put it that way because that's often what I reference in terms of raves. I've not been to one myself, but you see that it is a spiritual, religious type experience that the people there seem to just be in a different world and everything seems to be harmonious with the music and that they're taking things to elevate that experience even further and that that is something that they don't articulate, like if you were to ask somebody attending, they wouldn't be able to say that,

but that's certainly the experience they seem to be having. Yeah, and I mean, I get more into that near the end of my book. There's another book that's called Aw. I don't know if you've heard of it. by, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing the word, the name correctly, but it's by Dacher Keltner, who's a psychologist in California. And the book is about awe and the value of wonder and transcendence in everyday life. And he and his colleagues did cross-cultural survey in, I think, 26 countries, if I'm not mistaken. And they boil down the eight main sources of awe.

people's everyday lives. And an entire chapter, one of the eight, was music. And so I've now, and it sort of echoed some of the thoughts I had in my book. And so I now describe music as a reliable portal, a reliable portal for experiences of wonder, transcendence, and awe. And we truly do need that, especially in secular societies. And there's research showing that if you feel a sense of wonder and oneness and transcendence in everyday life, you are happier. And this is shown to be true regardless of your spiritual or religious beliefs. We need to feel that we're part of something bigger. And music is one of the ways we can tap into that need and also that feeling relatively

easily without dogma, without the need for a, you know, PhD and whatever without, you know, it comes to us because, as you see in the book, we are wired for music from long before any of us were born. You know, really it goes far back in our evolution. As you describe in the book, there's different areas of the benefits of music. It has helped me run when I feel like I have no energy left. It has helped people get to sleep when they're having trouble sleeping. It helps people with dementia, stay connected.

And my grandmother was put into a care home. and as I've come to learn, being in that environment is so unfamiliar that there's not those things to root them in something to keep their mental health and to keep their strength with their memories. And so music has been shown to help with that. Is there an area in which you've seen and you were like, I did not know the music could do that, something that stood out to you that's somewhat unique? Gee, that's a tricky one because I've spent so much time researching that the new parts are, you know, some years ago. So it's hard to remember which one struck me that way. But certainly the exercise was interesting to me, the sports psychology that's been done using music. I didn't know about that because I'm not really a sports person.

And I like to be active, but it's not something I read up on a lot. So that was interesting to me. The evolutionary roots of our capacities for music were new to me. And I found that to be profound. Honestly, I so wish that I'd read this book when I was 10 or 15 because I think it could have validated some of the misgivings. I was having, I think it could have helped me see other possibilities for music making younger and not wait so long. And I think it would have helped me with the confidence issues I had in my own musicality,

knowing that we are wired in this way to this degree. And, you know, I've also had the fortune to travel a lot. I've been to India and Syria and, you know, Brazil and many other places and to see how people approach music in other parts of the world and sometimes so joyfully and effortlessly, I wish I'd seen more of that when I was growing up to see that this is one system, but it's not necessarily the best system, and it's certainly not the only system. You make the follow-up so easy. My question was going to be, you talk about the Inuit, you talk about throat singing.

Is there a culture? Is there a community? Is there an ethnic background that stands out to you that's somewhat unique in how they approach music and how they utilize it in their culture? I don't think I would identify one culture. I think culture is left to their own devices come up with unique and innovative ways of making music. It's really more looking at the way that is interfered with because I think, I mean, if we look at the fiddling communities in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia,

You know, they make music with the same spirit and ingenuity and joy and integration into the fabric of a family life and community life that you might see in a village in Africa, you know, and of course not every single family, but the Cape Bretners are known for this and that music tradition does thrive still today. So I think that that's what we're meant to do as humans and we lose our way with the formal training really did kill music for a lot of people. I mean, so many people come to me and say, I was told I could not sing that I had no ear and I can't even sing happy birthday. That is a tragedy because honestly, in many parts of the world, it just would be unthinkable that you couldn't sing along at the family dinner or the family or the community. celebration, you know, that's something we do in Western European societies. And I think it's wrong and I think we need to change the story. And other people who tell me, you know, I took piano lessons. I wish I hated them, but I wish I hadn't quit because now I can't play musical. So many people say I'm unmusical. And I feel that, yes, some people have an easier time getting music down than

others, but it depends on what music you're talking about. I mean, not everyone needs to play the violin. There's so many ways of interacting with music, and it's about choosing one that fits your joy and your abilities and the type of community and people you want to be around. That was really well put, especially when you talked about how it's important that you find the music that resonates with you. That's going to bring the biggest result. It's not about, oh, this is what this document says, so I should go listen to this music that I don't even like. That's not going to yield the same result, particularly because you're probably not going to play it over five years, ten years, if it's not something that you enjoy. Would you mind telling people how they can find your book?

Yeah. Well, it's actually a bit short of stock at the moment. The paperback is coming in the summer, and certainly you can find it at some of the, I think, to go is sold out online, but some of the other large chains online have copies. And you can call your local indie store and see if they still have a copy. But my publisher has been out of stock in Canada since Christmas, which is just two, three months after the book came out because they sent them out all over the world and people have been buying it. So it's great. But there are some copies available still online. Of course, the e-book is always available.

The audiobook, which was narrated by me, is also always available. And the paperback is coming, I think, late August. So, yeah, not to discourage people, there are some hardcover still available, and the paperbacks will be readily available soon. And more information on my website, adriana barton.com. So, A-D-R-I-A-N-A-Barton.com. That's got to feel good. Is there any social platforms, Twitter, Instagram that you want to direct people towards? I'm on Instagram at Adriana Barton author, or underscore author, Twitter, Adriana Barton, Facebook. Adriana Barton writes is what I use more for book stuff.

And I have a personal Facebook as well. And I'm on LinkedIn. I don't use it very much. But those are the main ones, I guess. It was such a privilege to do this. I am so grateful. I think your book is so insightful. And as I said, over 200. references. It's clear that you try to balance the two of giving your experience mixed in with important research, debunking things, and sharing more thoughtful information. It's just such a pleasure to know that individuals like yourself are helping shine light and give us a deeper connection with the things that we love, such as music. Thank you. You asked excellent questions, and I really appreciate your podcast. What's your favorite type of music, Tim? I am a child of the 90s, well, 80s and 90s.

So my whole coming of age music was Grunge, the Seattle music scene. My number one band of all time is Pearl Jam. My number one Canadian band of all time is the Tricifully Hip. I remember distinctly where I was. I was about 21 years old when I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit for the first time by Nirvana. That, and you're... What of me? What is that?

I say, what, no. Okay, you've been giving me side eye for my lack of rap knowledge. This is criminal. Are you aware of, like, smashing pumpkins? I think I've heard of them. Wow. Okay. We've got some learning to do my boy.

Okay, who's the next guest? tell me I need to interview a accident well Eddie better is my spirit animal if you could land him you would holy smokes let's go I got this

okay so what is it about the music that you enjoy what's the connection what's the what's the depth for you I think it resonated with me at the time and even listening to our guest and how that you're just innately makes you feel. That was a time where it was brand new. It went from late 80s, if you liked anything

kind of hard, it would be guns and roses or even early in the Molly Crew and so forth. And it took an ultimate right turn when it went to that scene. And it was just dirty and raw. And that's why Seattle and the whole scene just absolutely exploded. The arm's there of Kirk Cobain. Have you heard that name? Yes. Okay. He's a musician, right? He makes some music. He did. Um, he is least on what's that? He died at 27, but, um, I'm 27. Yes, 27 is actually a huge age for musicians. If you can get past that, you'll probably live. But that's out as well. I've taken this podcast in a totally different direction. Let's back to you. I'm just curious, like, what did it say for you? Because, like, you can see that, like, I felt misunderstood and I was, like, maybe an angry teenager, and the voice

of the M&Ms and the rappers are like, oh, I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to overcome. I'm going to endure. What was that for you? What was smashing pumpkin saying that resonated so much for you? You said raw. You're a pretty, I would say, pretty stoic person. You don't, you don't show your emotions on your face like maybe this guy does. So what was Smashing Pumpkins and Mr. Cobain doing? I would say the reaction is very similar to what rap in your era did. It was just a reaction. It spoke very deeply.

It was an outgrowth of teen angst and just some of it quite political. And it just made you feel. So tell me, do you know, tragically hip? I do. Okay. Gord Downey. know Gord Downey, a national... No, I thought I was going to get brownie points

for knowing who the Tragically Hip are generally speaking, specific see. So you did not see the Tragically Hip's final concert on CDC? 20 million Canadians saw that live.

20 million and one would have if I had it. 20 million people tuned in to because Gord was basically had brain cancer and did a final tour, and that was his last concert before passing away. In fact, Trudeau was in the audience in a jean jacket, and yeah, it sits. Wow.

How many people live in Canada? You said 25 million. 35 million. I'm more than half the country watched this concert. Wow. Yeah. And when was this? It was approximately four years ago. Where was that? Exactly. Wow, the shade is being the road. Anyways, back to the regularly programmed content.

I appreciate you sharing that. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think she's right that we have a weird relationship with music right now. I think it's a lot of people's, it's a cliche term now, but it's a lot of people save space to feel understood. When I'm on runs, certainly there's songs that will just bring out that energy where I can do the rest of the run without running out of energy.

And that seems to come out of nowhere. On sad days, you listen to the right song and those feelings are processed and you're able to put them away. So I highly recommend people pick up Wired for Music. I think it is well worth the read. I'm very proud owner of the book. I got mine off of Amazon.

I think they still have copies. So well worth the read. I really appreciate her for being willing to take the time and share her insights and share so much of her story. I think that that was really beautiful the way she interweaved her journey of feeling like music maybe isn't the place for her because of all the challenges she faced and then finding a way to balance out of the two and again turn those wounds into wisdom and grow as an experience. So pick up the book Wired for Music and tune into the next episode coming soon. Thank you.