Radiolab - Musical Language

Episode Date: September 24, 2007

In this hour of Radiolab, we examine the line between language and music.

Now? Now? Okay. You're listening to radio. I'll continue. We're here, report the first large-scale study. Oh, that's better. Comparing the prevalence of absolute pitch and two normal populations.

This is Professor Diana Deutsch. Diana Deutsch. Well, yeah, I'm going to turn down my headphone level. And I'm a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Can you still hear me, Diana? Okay. Hello? Diana studies sound.

How humans perceive sound. She's a scientist, she has a lab, but every so often she will also release CDs. Right. These CDs of audio demonstrations that she uses in her research, and that's why we called, because it was in the production of her second CD, that she stumbled onto the weirdest phenomenon.

Well, when you do post-production, as you know, of speech, you loop things, loop things, loop things, so that you can zero in on P's, put, put, that sound too loud, you need to unpop or s's, that sound too sharp and so on. So you put things on loops in order to fine tune the way the speech sounds.

So I had this particular phrase on a loop and forgot about it. What phrase was this? It's a phrase that occurs at the beginning of the CD in which I say, the sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.

Now, I had sometimes behave so strangely looped. The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely. Just those few words. Sometimes behave so strangely. And forgot about it. Sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely.

So here's what happened. Diana leaves her studio. She closes the door, goes into the kitchen to make some tea. All the while, this loop is whirring away in the background. As she's sipping her tea, she thinks, is someone singing? Who's singing? I heard what sounded like song in the background. She realized, wait a second. That's not singing.

That's me. Talking. That very phrase. But at this point, sometimes behaves so strangely. She appeared to be sung rather than spoken. strangely, sometimes behave so strangely. This is sometimes behave so strangely, right? Yeah.

You still hear the words, but they're sung words rather than spoken words. It's weird. Like, it just switches at a certain point. Three or four repetitions in. Right. It's going, it's going, and then pout. It becomes music. And then now none of us can get it out of our head.

Like the whole office is like, sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely. And you know, what, if you do this demo and then you go back to the original sentence, it sounds like you know, speech to begin with, and when you come to that very

phrase, I seem to be bursting into song. The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. I have to say this can continue for months and months.

It's sort of like your brain gets altered for that particular phrase and it continues to sound like singing for a very, very long time. All right, so here we have just one small indication that music is well it behaves very strangely.

I mean, think about this, we started with some basic speech repeated it a few times, somewhere along the way it leapt into song. How did it change like that? And if that's all it takes, To turn something into music, then what exactly is music, really? This is Radio Lab. Today's program is about answering that question.

I'm trying to, in any case. I'm Chad Abramrod here with me. Is Robert Crawlwitch, my partner, and crying. It's a little hard to get out of your head. I know. It is really weird. I know, I know. Okay, so this hour, what are we doing?

We are going to try. And we will probably fail. Yes, we will fail. But we will make an earnest effort to try to find the ingredients of music, both its basis in language, is basis in physics, as basis in your brain. We'll look everywhere we can, software, trying to find out what music is made of and why it touches us so intimately.

Then touches us sometimes not in a good way. If you've ever had this experience of going to a concert, hearing some music, and it just made you upset, for some reason, like you're rationally upset, almost like you wanted to hurt someone. If that rings a bell, there's a segment later in the show you will not want to miss. This is Radio Lab. Stick around. Sometimes they behave so. All right, shall we start? Sure. Well, first, thanks to the LaGuardia High School chorus and Robert Apostle, they were the voices you just heard. We'll hear more of them later.

So let's explore a little bit more closely, this connection between language and music. You think of them as separate. The thing is, they're really closely related, says neuroscientist Mark Jude Trammo. When we speak, we sing. You know how to use the pitch of your voice to convey emotion and meaning. Like, um, I went to the store. Just because I raised the pitch, the note, if you will, you interpret that as an interrogative, a monotonic speech, you know, talking at the same rate and rhythm in the same pitch. And, you know, you know, talking at the same pitch and loudness. I mean, that is not how humans talk. But humans talk in all kinds of different ways. In different languages, each language has

its own musical personality. German is different than French, is different than Swahili. And if you look at those differences closely, there are all kinds of things we can learn about music. Take Diana Deutsch. Okay. She's recently been looking at tone languages. Just published your results, and the results are startling. Diana, before we start, what exactly is a tone language? Okay. In tone languages, words take on different meanings depending upon the tones in which they are enunciated. For example, Mandarin has four tones, and the word Ma in Mandarin means mother in the first tone, hemp in the second tone, horse in the third tone, and a reproach in the fourth tone.

Could you say them? Would you like me too? Yeah, could you demonstrate? I thought you were... Well, you know, I have them on CD, but I'd rather hear you say them. Well, okay, so excuse my bad pronunciation when I'll try. Ma means mother. Ma means hemp.

Ma means horse. And ma is a reproach. Huh. So conceivably, if you screwed up the tones, you could call your mom a horse. Yes, indeed. In fact, there are quite a lot of jokes where Westerners who don't speak the tones right

say terrible things. You have to be very careful. See, this is a basic difference. In English, we don't really worry about pitch. We can say our words up here or down here, or gliss it up or bend it down. It's all the same. not so with tone languages.

In any case, this is where it gets interesting. One day Diana is working with some Mandarin speakers and she notices something. There were these words, these words that they would say where they would all hit precisely the same note with their voices, not just close to one another either, exactly, precisely, and consistently the same pitch.

Even on different days. In fact, would you like me to play for, you one person reciting a list of 12 Mandarin tones on two different days. Yeah, definitely. First you have the first word spoken on day one, followed by the same word spoken in day two. Then you have the second word spoken on day one, followed by the same word spoken day two, and so on. And that way you can see the consistency.

It's going to appear as though the word. the words are being repeated immediately. But in fact, the repetitions occur in entirely different days. So each of those word pairs came out of the mouth of one person separated by like 24 hours? Oh, much more than that. Something like a week. Really? And it was a remarkable consistency.

Jing. Well, that would be like us saying the word mom, always at this note right here. Mom, Mom. Mom. Well, I concluded that basically this was a form of. perfect pitch. I've never more of

English to want to give enough I'm not I've never quite understood

what perfect pitch is to be honest You don't know what that is? No. Should I? I mean I know I should.

Well it's Whisper it to me As a musician growing up Perfect pitch is like the it's like the thing

it's like the thing you wish you had none of us have basically it's like having a tuning fork in your brain Here, I'll give you an analogy.

Yeah. Okay, you see this coffee cup I'm holding? Yeah. What color is it? Brown. And you knew that, how? Through my eyes. Right.

You didn't need me to put this brown coffee cup next to my blue jeans. No, I didn't. In order to see the brown. I mean, it's absolute brown. It's absolute brown. Perfect pitch. People have that with pitch. They hear a pitch. They know exactly what note it is.

The rest of us have to run to the piano. So if they hear a ding from an elevator, Can they name the note? Yeah, that's exactly it. Anything with a pitch, like a horn honk, they could tell you that horn is an F, or those church bells, they're alternating between B-flat and B. And if the faucet were dripping,

they could say that faucet is dripping in a D-sharp. They don't even have to think about it. They just know. It used to be that the note names would jump out at me. Diana Deutsch is actually one of these lucky people. To the extent that it would even be a nuisance. And why is that good? Well, it's really rare.

It only happens like once every 10,000 people here in America or Europe. Yeah, but so does it turn turning your tongue into a you. And of the people who have it? Yeah. Well, let's see. How should I say this? If you look in your music history text, which you will see that every famous composer, like the really big ones?

Like Mozart and Bach. Beethoven They all had it Well really Mendelssohn The list goes on and on So if you have perfect pitch On some level

You are Closer to them You've got the gift Get anyhow Let's get back to Diana Deutsch Okay Okay let's talk about your latest experiment That's the one really interested in

Okay so you compare Chinese kids to American kids to see who has perfect pitch more. So explain how this works. You had a group of Chinese music students, a group of American music students at the Eastman School of Music here in New York. You play them a bunch of notes, I imagine, in a room and ask them to guess what those notes were. Right. How did that work exactly? Well, the test consisted of piano tones, which began on the sea below middle sea, that's this note, and extended up three all the way up to that note. That's a big range.

Yeah, 36 notes. Can you demonstrate? Sure, yes. Here are six tones, such as were given in the test. So you would have played those notes to both sets of kids and asked them to name the notes without going to the piano. What were the notes really? What these notes were, D, E, G sharp, C sharp, D sharp, and G. What were the results?

Well, it turns out the Chinese group far outperformed the Eastern group. Of those students who started musical training at ages four and five, 74% of the Chinese group show perfect pitch, but 14% of the US non-to-language speech. 74%? The Beijing group was nine times roughly, more likely to show perfect pitch than the American English-speaking American group. That's a staggering difference.

It's a staggering difference. And it's your hunch that the difference is because they speak a tone language? That's my hunch. I mean, it's known that in the first year of life, say, from age six months up to, you know, a little past a year, infants learn features of their native language. This is a very, very important stage. let's suppose that tone and the absolute pitch of tones is a feature which is potentially available to anyone babies who are exposed only to an intonation language such as English are not given the opportunity to acquire tones

then they're going to be at a real disadvantage when they come later on to learn to take music lessons so you think that as there Let me ask this. As they're learning their language, which includes inherently music, to some degree, they are essentially learning two languages as they learn one. Is that right? It's a matter of fact, if you take the first tone, it's a flat tone.

It's really sung. Yeah. Compared with English speech, it's really more like song. That's always been sort of the stereotype of the Chinese language is it's very sort of sing-songy. Yes. For example, the third tone in Mandarin, Ma, is sort of like a J-type pattern. The second tone, which is a gentle upward gliss,

Ma, the fourth tone, which is a rapid downward glist. Ma, I mean, these are all kind of musical relationships. Given the evidence on absolute pitch, one could speculate further and say, well, maybe other features of music are also enhanced for individuals who start off. learning tone language. So here's my big question.

Could this explain the experience that I had, and I think a lot of people have this experience, when they're taking music lessons and we're playing little piddly pieces like Frerejaka. And here are these Chinese girls, right? Who are playing Rachmaninoff. You know, they're brilliant.

Is this why? Well, I think it's a viable hypothesis. I mean, evidently it could be. something else. There could be something else going on. Like what? I mean, one could argue that instead it might be genetic and so on. But that's a, that's such a boring theory, frankly. It's a boring theory. And furthermore, we don't have to assume that, knowing what we do about exposure to tone language in very early childhood as a... It's just not fair. And I think we can look at it another way around. Here we have a faculty that had been thought to be confined to a few

rare individuals who are just extraordinarily gifted. Right. That might, in fact, be available to any individual, provided they're given the right exposure at a critical period. And that raises the question of what other sorts of abilities could be brought out if we only knew just what to do. There may be much more human potential than we had realized. Diana Deutsch is a professor of music psychology at the University of San Diego.

Music psychology? Music psychology. And as I mentioned earlier, she's also the releaser of two CDs. Yes. Yes, two CDs. One's called Musical Illusions and Paradoxes, and the other one is called Phantom Words and Other Curiosity. What would she put on a CD exactly? She puts these little audio pieces that she uses in her research,

the stuff I guess that she will play at a subject as she tests them. And she puts these on CDs because they're kind of. kind of fun to listen to. This is like an ear test? Yeah, sort of. We've actually put a couple on our website. Well, what do they sound like? Just get a little sample.

All right, I'll do some samples. There is the chromatic illusion. Kind of has a carnival feel to it. There's also the cambiazza illusion. Oh, the cambata illusion. And of course, the Phantom Word experiments. Ah, the Phantom Word experiment. None of those pieces are going to make any kind of sense

unless you visit our website RadioLab.org where all will be explained. Coming up, fashionable French ladies and elegant dresses throw things at innocent musicians. I'm Chad, I'm bumrod. Maybe not so innocent. Robert Crubwich and I will continue in a moment.

You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. and NPR. Sometimes they behave so strangely. Sometimes they behave so strangely. Sometimes

This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. And I'm Robert Quillwich. Our program today is about music. What it is, how it works. And what we want to do next is we want to stay on the subject, but we're going to explore this a little more deeply. Take a closer look at the connection between language and music.

We're going to add touch. Touch. And that will take us to the ear. The ear. And then into the brain. The brain. And then to the big question. the really big question, why does music or how does music become a feeling?

The feeling. Why do we get such deep pleasure or deep pain? We will have pain coming up, too. All simply because of air pressing against your ear. All right. We're first. All right, well, there is a psychology professor I want you to meet at Stanford who directs the Center for Infant Studies there.

Anne Fernold, is her name. And she got it into her head that there is a kind of deep, universal music. inside language, and she discovered it actually at a hospital. The Max Planck Institute in Munich has an obstetrics unit, which is very popular among expectant mothers. These mothers came from the wards of this German hospital, and so they were Turkish, they were Greek, they were Sicilian, they were the so-called guest workers in the German society.

Of course, I didn't understand a word of what they spoke. As soon as they put the baby down, and no longer had the physical contact, bodily contact with the child, they started to sing almost. In one language after another, I book you van the babies. Dutch. I heard these, I heard them use these melodies.

V-Kosna? Russian. To reach the child, to remain in touch with the baby. I for a pill. Yiddish. I for a pill. So the next day I brought my tape recorder. Anne Fernol took her tape recorder from that hospital

and traveled all over the world recording parents as they talked to their very little babies. And it didn't matter whether the parents spoke a romance language or a tone language everywhere she went below the words she heard consistently the same melodies. For example. I'll start with approval. When a parent wanted to praise a child.

We would ask the parents to show the baby they were happy Good boy. Now you got it. Just using their voice. Show him you're happy with that. Das. A chatari garri, where did I got it? Hindi. I don't know.

What a cavalo? Portuguese? It's this, boy. This is a cavalo. And what these things had in common was that the melody was a kind of a rise-fall. Mr. Lamb. Good girl. Good girl.

You got it, yeah. Good girl, sweetie. It doesn't matter what words the parents are saying, it's always really about this melody. And why that particular melody? All she knows is it works. There's something about this melody that keeps the child doing something. There are, she says, other categories she discovered. Now, with a prohibition, in contrast, your goal is to stop the child from doing something.

The category that says, stop. Quite a different melody. It's short, it's sharp. In musical terms, it's staccato. There is the category of, look, pay attention to that. Mothers frequently use rising pitch. Nora, look, look, sweetie. They frequently use higher pitch.

A unicorn? So far, Anne Fernald has found four universal melodies that praise, that stop, that call attention, and, of course, the melody that comforts. Oh, Julie, no, don't piongare. And while this may seem obvious to you, if you think about it, this is music that is understood by infants who are just new in the world. But we all know what it means.

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

I was Anne for an old director of the Center for Infant Studies at Stanford. And when Anne says... Sound is more like touch. That turns out to be literally the case. This is something I learned from a friend of mine, Joan O'Learer. My name's Joan Aller, who at this very moment is working on a book. An upcoming book on art and science. on the connections between art and science.

Do we have a name for that book? It's called Proust was a neuroscientist. Okay. Anses, Jonah, thinking about sound as a touch. More like touch. I asked him, how does sound get into or touch your brain? Take us on that journey. It's just waves of vibrating air.

It's just your voice. Touch. At a diste. Beginning your voice box, compresses air. And that air travels through space and space. time. Into my ear. The little tunnel, waves of diffuse vibrating air focused and channeled. Into my eardrum, which vibrates a few very small bones. And the little bones transmit the vibration into this salty sea, where the hairs are. And the hair cells are fascinating. The hair cells

become active when they are literally bent by way. They bend like trees. and a breeze. And when these hair cells bend, charged molecules flood inwards and activate the cell. So the sound triggers the bones, the bones disturbs the fluid, the fluid rocks the hairs. Yes. And then the hair set off essentially electricity? Yes. Huh. That's the language of neurons.

All those changes from waves to bones to electricity, all those. those things were a trip on their way to being heard. It's only when the electricity finally forms a pattern in your brain. Only when it's deep inside, that's when you hear something. It feels to me. More like touch. Sound is kind of touch at a distance. All right, now that we have gotten a sound, and any sound, into our heads, let me ask you the next really big question. Okay. Why do some sounds, let's make it music, okay? Why does music make so many of us so often feel so strongly?

Yeah, like in terms of what we were just listening to, like how does all that electricity from the ear going up to the brain in the next millisecond become a feeling? Yeah. Well, let me introduce you to someone. Mark Drew Traymo. Actually, we heard from him earlier. He's a neuroscientist. I'm in the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.

And Mark can at least begin to answer this question, this feeling question. He's done something really interesting. He's able to listen to the electricity as it pulls in the ear and shoots up this big fat nerve to the brain. It's kind of a popping sound. He can actually listen to that nerve, to the electricity. It's a little faster than I'm able to do here with my fingers. Is that the sound? That's what it sounds like.

Wait, wait, how do they get this sounds? I actually have no idea. I guess I sort of tap into the nerve. This is the sound of sound entering a brain. Yes, this is the sound of sound entering the brain as electricity, little pulses. And as you can hear, the electricity has a meter. What Mark has discovered is that when the electricity entering your brain is even and regular. Is this regular?

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

The inputs coming from a perfect fifth is very, very regular. Like a metronome. However, and here's where it gets interesting. When the meter going from the ear to the brain is irregular, jagged, arithmetic, unpredictable, strange. Wait, let me hear it. This is jagged. This is jagged.

Wait, shh. Oh. Yeah, it is. Yeah, and what Mark has discovered is that when electrical impulses like that travel from the ear to the brain, they will become heard by us, by our mind, as a sound that we generally don't like. Like that. Don't care for that one. That's a minor second.

The inputs coming from a minor second is very, very chaotic. Okay, so let me just sum up here, what I think you're saying. If a sound entering my brain is disorderly and unexpected, Electrically speaking. Electrically speaking, then that would make me feel uncomfortable. Yeah. And if it comes in in a familiar and orderly way, that will make me feel comfortable. There does seem to be a relationship between the kind of electricity as sound produces and how we feel about that sound.

Do they have, like, fancy names for this? Well, that's a minor second. That thing you just heard. But do the scientists have names for pleasant and unpleasant? A consonant is pleasant, dissonant is unpleasant. That's not a science name, that's a music name. Oh, okay. And these are fixed positions in your ear. Well, maybe fixed for scientists, but maybe, let me just propose this to you, that what people find pleasing and what people find painful is malleable. I'll tell you why. I'm going to tell you a story now, a true story, and it involves a musician.

Igor Stravinsky, who is now considered to be one of the great composers of the 20th century, not the most important composer of the 20th century. That's Jonah Lehrer again. And Jonah tells the story of two concerts, one year apart, in the same city, the exact same piece of music. The audience who heard it first, and then the audience who heard it later on,

heard totally different things. So let's begin. First, Jonah, how does this set the scene? This is May 1913. It's a spring night? It's a balmy summer night. black tie costumes, the women have their fedores. This was evening clothes.

Yeah, well, this was the Russian ballet. This was high art. And the program said this is a concert about springtime, but as they settled into their seats, it turns out that what Stravinsky had in mind was not spring like honeybees. No. The spring Stravinsky had in mind

was about change, about radical change, ritual murder. Literally, that's what the story of the play is. It's a pagan ritual where at the end the Virgin gets massacred. Oh dear. But the music itself is fascinating. The beginning is this very charming bassoon.

It's a classic Lithuanian folk tune. And it does sound like the earth is warming. And that lasts for about a minute. And then we get some tutia flutes. And it's lovely. It's getting a little more disturbing. And then about three minutes into it, everything changes.

There's just an earthquake. Stravinsky plays this chord. There's a great story that when Diagolev, who is the head of the Ballet Rousse, first heard this chord, and Svindski was playing it on the piano form, he asked Stravinsky, how long will it go on like that? And Stravinsky looked at him and said, To the end, my dear. And it literally does. That chord structures the music. It's one of the most difficult sounds you've ever heard.

It is just the stereotype of dissonance. It hurts you. Well, what happened? Well, after about three minutes, they rioted. They what? They rioted. Meaning what? Like, they screamed?

They screamed. There was blood. Old ladies were hitting each other with canes. Why were old ladies? Old ladies should have gone and hit Stravinsky with a cane. But once they started screaming, Stravinsky ran backstage, and by some accounts was crying. Nijinsky was off on the side of the stage,

screaming to his dancers to keep the beat. Wow. Quite the fiasco. And the question is why? This is the feeling question. Why so much feeling about a piece of music? Why did they riot? You would think that they rioted because they were hot,

because they didn't like those sounds, because they thought those dancers were making strange and odd gestures. Well, Jonah offers a different theory. Let me put it this way. This ride has been talked about and written about for forever. But to the best of our knowledge, no one has ever tried to explain what happened that night through the lens of brain chemistry.

Brain chemistry. Yeah, what music can do to a brain? You know, if you try to imagine yourself where all you've heard is Wagner and the great romanticism of 19th century music, and then all of a sudden you get this. I mean, these are noises you've never heard before. No, it's all very new, but scientists are beginning to figure out what happens in our brain when we hear noises we've never heard before,

especially dissonant noises. We find that chords, musical chords, that are typically judged to be dissonant, elicit these wild fluctuations in brain activity. This is Jan Fishman. He is a neuroscientist, and he studies those wild fluctuations in the brain. On an area of the brain called the auditory cortex. Let's zoom into the auditory cortex for a moment, because this is basically hearing central. And when you're listening to music,

there are all kinds of neurons doing all kinds of things. One gang in particular that yawn is interested in. That's right. A gang that he suspects gets very agitated when it hears sounds like these. These neurons might be the new noise department.

Because he thinks their job is to take every new, strange, unordered, unpredictable noise that comes into the brain and figure it out. Find the pattern. There are groups of neurons whose sole job it is.

This is how Jonah puts it. To turn that disinant note, dissect it, take it apart, and try to understand it. We are pattern-searching animals. And this is how Yon Fishman puts it. And so at the level of the auditory cortex, the brain has this daunting task of having to be able to disentangle this complex mixture of sounds. Most of the time, those neurons in the auditory cortex succeed in finding the pattern. Okay, really? But I think I can get it. I can do it.

I think it's going up. I'm not sure. But every so often, maybe this was the case that night, they fail. Okay, so Robert, imagine inside the brains, inside the heads of the people in the audience listening to the right of spring that night were all of these neurons. Yeah, I can hear them. Trying to make sense of the new sounds and failing. Not just failing once or twice, but over and over and over and over. Yeah, because the right of spring keeps being dissonant all the way through, so they can never get any rest.

And when those neurons fail, repeatedly, there are consequences. Chemical consequences. What happens is our neurons squirt out a bit of dopamine. And what does the dopamine do? Well, dopamine makes us feel. A little dopamine makes you feel happy. That's why sex and drugs make you feel euphoric. But a little too much.

And that euphoria turns into literally schizophrenia. Really? Yes. I don't want to oversimplify schizophrenia in any way, shape, or form. But some of our most effective treatments for schizophrenia work by suppressing dopamine release in the brain. So there's some kind of relationship. Too much dopamine has been shown clinically to make people feel crazy.

Yes. Maybe that's what happened that night on May 29th, 1913. Music erupted. Neurons. Right. Dopamine flooded through this system to their brains. And people went mad. Literally mad. Let's go to the second night in our story.

The piece does come back to Paris, right? Yes. How much later after the riot? It's from May to March. Actually, it was April. So it's almost a year later. Yes. And this time it doesn't come with the ballet.

This time it's just being performed as a work of music. So does anyone buy tickets? Oh, yeah. It's going to sell out. Did it cause a few nights of violent riots? Can you set up the situation now the audience? Is it a different audience? I actually don't know if the audience is different.

But we can at least say that the audience is coming to it with a different set of information. Exactly. They've been warned. So for the first time, they can actually sit back and really try to pay attention to the notes. By being willing to listen, they could hear the orders and patterns that Stravinsky had hidden in this work.

They were able to hear the music and find the orders hidden. underneath this noise. Was there a riot this time, the second round? Oh, no, quite the opposite. Stravinsky was a hero. They carried him out on their shoulders. Really?

Literally, he was... Literally, he was carried on their shoulders, and the press was glowing. In one year. In one year. In just one year, Stravinsky had gone from villainous monster to hipster icon.

To the extent that police had to escort him from the concert hall to keep him safe from a... enjoying fans. And that was just the beginning. The third story, if you wanted to tell a third story, would be it became children's music. It became Disney music in 1940. 27 years after Stravinsky had caused a violent bloody riot, he was negotiating with Mickey Mouse over the rights to use his music in Fantasia.

Which Fantasia? Is it starring a hippopotamus and a little tutu? Is that the one? Is it the mushrooms, Jonah? Yeah, I think it's the mushrooms, isn't it? Actually, we looked it up later. It was the part with the dinosaurs. So how does this happen? How do you go so quickly from being the most outrageous thing that literally maddens people to a triumph to kids' music? Yes, I mean, the right of spring is perfect evidence of the brain's astonishing plasticity. See, this is the really cool part of it for me.

If you remember just one bit of science from this whole thing, remember this. Those neurons we met earlier? The one of the little voices? I like them, yes. It turns out those neurons learn. Oh, I see. And they learn fast. I'm so smart.

Because they're actually part of a larger network of brain cells, with a very technical name. Called the cortogofugal network. And what this network does is it's always sort of monitoring, listening to the sounds that are coming into the brain and tuning those neurons to better hear those sounds. Like trying to get the station on the radio, just getting it just right. So our neurons literally adjust. Literally, we're talking the biochemical and...

engineering sense. So if on that first night you just hear the right as pure noise all the way through from beginning to end. If you're listening, if you're letting your corticofugal network do its job, it can actually re-sculpt your brain and let you hear the patterns better as the symphony evolves. Is it fair to say that this is a sort of tug-of-war that an artist comes, creates something that is new and unpredictable and strange, and maybe noise-ish at first hearing. And the artist is thrilled to be new in that way. And then the brain ruins it all slowly but surely by making it familiar. Well, the brain abhors the new. The brain constantly wants to assimilate every experience

we've ever had into every other experience. And I think Stravinsky realized it was the purpose of the artist to challenge the brain, to break the... brain out of its conservative cycle. The astonishing thing to me is here you have an artist like Igor Stravinsky who comes to town intentionally trying to get people to sit in their seats and really listen to music.

And the strategy he chooses is instead of pleasing them, he wants to put them in a little bit of discomfort or real pain even. And indeed, they not only listen, they riot. But within a year, and this is the sad part to me, within a year, it's easier to hear, suddenly it's pleasant, suddenly they like it, and suddenly U.S. Trevinsky is robbed of his newness. Why is that sad for you? Well, because it's kind of, I don't know, I never thought of the brain as the enemy of the artist before.

Yeah, but I can give you a different interpretation on this. I mean, here comes a guy who offers up the most dissonant, stabbing, percussive, painful music to anyone had heard to that point. And we learned to love it. Doesn't that make you sort of feel like pride? No, I, no. I mean, like, our brains can decode anything. We learned to love it only because it's well-made. Yeah, but...

It was just random car honks. I don't think you could really appreciate that. I disagree. You think it would be like just... Have you heard the music that was written after, Stravinsky? It's even worse than what you just did. Yeah, but my brain has never accommodated that. But some people love that stuff.

And my only point is that if there are these, like, fixed poles in our ear, between consonants and dissonance, which is how we started this whole thing. And now we end up learning that our brains can override that to such an astonishing degree. Well, then culture wins.

Culture beats biology. That's true, but to me, it's sad. It's sad for the artist. It's not sad for us. It's sort of like the artists and the brains are in a kind of eternal struggle. Special thanks for that. Story to Joan Aller, who is a regular

Radio Lab contributor, and he's the author of the upcoming book, Proust, was a neuroscientist. Oh, Proust is a new scientist. I'm Chad, Aboumran. Robert Krollwich and I will continue in a moment. You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio.

WNYC. And NPR. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad. I'm Robben. And I'm Robert Krollwich. Today, our program is about music. We ended our last segment with a look back at a very famous riot in 1913 and a composer, Igor Stravinsky, whose primary objective was to create something new and dissonant and disturbing. Right now, we'll present... The opposite. The opposite. The Un-Stravinsky.

The anti-Stravinsky, in a way. What we mean is we're going to introduce you to a guy who has inventions. a new, radically innovative and ingenious way of creating something old. Hey there. Are you, Ellen? I am. Are you David? His name is David Cope. He works and teaches composition at UC Santa Cruz in California.

And recently, our producer, Ellen Horn, was in the area. And it is a beautiful area. It's 22.5 miles. And she paid him a visit. It's extraordinary. And they like birds. We've got a, we've got, you know, I have nests. each window each year.

And sure, and this one's over here. You can take a look at your back. Come back in. It's okay. It's just me. Come on. Get back in your nest. Mom.

Usually she'll just hop right back in when she hears me talk. Aren't she going to listen to me? All this was beside the point, because we'd actually come to talk to David Cope, not about nature, but actually about something unnatural that he'd done, which started about 20 years ago. In 1980, I had a commission for an opera. which involved actual money, which had been given up front, and which, by the way, since I had four small children, I had already spent.

And for the first time in my life, I suffered a composer's block. It was like somebody just shot me. I mean, I hear I should be at the height of my creative power, and I can't find a reason to compose a first note. C-sharp sounded no more interesting than C-natural or D, and notes just didn't make any sense to me. I was really lost. I can't think of anything worse

because it's not my profession. It's what I am. A short time later, David Cope is at a party and he finds himself talking to a guy who programs computers. He was asking me how things were going and I just simply said, you know, it's a nightmare. And we talked through it, you know, and I think I must have initiated it by saying, are there any intelligent programs out there that I could possibly use to help me through this? And he said, well, there aren't any...

intelligent programs, period. But he said, you don't really need one. Don't you really just need some kind of a foil? He called it that. And I really had an epiphany. What I would do is build not so much a composing engine, but an analytical engine. A computer. It took him years to build.

And that's it. This is Emmy right here. Emmy is the computer's name. It's spelled EMI. Emmy is an acronym for experiments in musical intelligence. And what he built Emmy to do is analyze things, specifically notes. Treat notes like data. In other words, he'll feed Emmy a bunch of sheet music.

For example, Bocorrells. Emmy will then convert every single note on the page into numbers. Well, can you describe what you see on the screen? Well, there's thousands of thousands of numbers. There are five numbers for each note. Numbers which represent all kinds of things. The on time, the pitch, the duration. A corral becomes a huge mass of information, which Emmy then sort of

through, looking for patterns. Hmm, note 450 always seems to be followed by note 456, loud and then soft. She will find the patterns. Every composer has them the little things they do. The DNA of the individual. Now finding all the patterns, mapping the creative DNA of a composer, is in and of itself not all that interesting. It's what happens next, which is the spooky part. Cope hits a few buttons and all the DNA starts to recombine. Ghosts stir in the machine. Emmy Mahler. Emmy Beethoven.

Even Scott Joplin? And of course, his favorite Bach. Of course, then I became very excited about this prospect and immediately put in some cope. And sure enough, my opera, which had taken, I don't know, by the time I put in the cope, it was maybe five years had passed, the opera was written in about 10 days.

So as a demonstration, I'm going to play. for you the opening of a corral that was composed in 1987 in the style of Bach. One of the first ones that came out of the program. Now this corral was so bad it sounded to me when I first heard it that I threw it away and put in the trash can and then I said well there's something about that that I kind of like and I pulled that out again. And thank God I did because it's one of my favorite pieces the program ever produced. So here's what it sounds like as a machine would play it. You can hear the rigidity the performance, the machine-like rigor of the meter being processed and all the notes being

processed at precisely the right time with these timbers, these sonorities, which are egregious. I mean, they're just terrible. Now I'm going to play for you the same corral as performed by a group of singers, a wild leader. Same piece of music, incredibly human, personal, musical, going someplace, entreaties. I want to hear more of the second one. I'm glad I turned off the first one when I did. Oh, the number of negative reactions, far, far outnumber the positive reactions.

Can you remember recall one in particular one that? Oh, yeah. I was at a conference in Germany in which Collie hit me in the nose with his finger. I'm pretty much of a coward physically. He was bigger than I, so it was quite a moment. But there have been many, many occasions. you know, shouting matches.

If you've spent a good portion of your life being in love with, you know, these dead composers, I mean, that sounds horrible, but you know what I mean? And along comes some twerp who claims to have this little piece of software, which he says, isn't in much at all, that can move you in the same way. Suddenly you're saying to yourself, well, what's happened here? Certainly my relationship to the original pieces of music is cheapened in some way. I mean, is Chopin really just nothing more than a bunch of clichés strung together? I hurt with them in a way, and when they hurt, I feel successful, and I also feel very bad.

I mean, I'm messing with some pretty powerful relationships here, and doing so in a mechanical way. If I had done it myself as a human being, these individuals could probably live with it because after all they could say, well, you know, he's just really good at that sort of thing. But somehow using Hal, you know, or some version of Hal, is the ultimate insult. There is nothing intelligent about my program in this lightest.

Nothing intelligent about it. I could do everything it did if you gave me 10 years. I just don't have that amount of time. to spend five minutes. Thank you very much. We did a concert here of Bach, of Emmy Bach. The middle movement was just adorable. I mean, it's just lovely. And a friend of mine was sitting in the back of the hall

next to an ancient lady. She must have been in her 80s, late 80s. And she couldn't read very well, so she hadn't read the program notes. And she really just was at this concert because friends told her she didn't know what was all about or anything like that. But she knew all about music, and she loved Bach.

And she listened to that. And she turned to my friend and said, That was just beautiful. And my friend started to say, But do you know that it was... And then he said, Well, the hell with that. It was the reaction that I hope people will have 100 years from now.

If by some weird fluke, this stuff hangs around long enough to still be around them, that I hope we can put aside all this machine trapping the stuff. and really just deal with the music itself. Peace was produced by Jonathan Mitchell and recorded by our producer, Ellen Horn. David Cope composes and teaches at UC Santa Cruz in California. If you'd like to hear any more compositions by his computer, Emmy,

and there are hundreds, you can visit our website, RadioLab.org. There you will find Emmy Bach, Emmy Chopin, Emmy Scott Joplin, even Emmy Navajo music. And the scary part is that much of it is quite good. Emmy Navajo music. Yep. Well, I guess we should sign off, right?

Yes, I'm just still thinking about Emmy Navajo music. Actually, you know what? Let's let Emmy take us out. Oh. This is actually your favorite composer, as reanimated by Emmy the computer. Maller? Emmy Moller. Oh, damn. You know, this is very troubling.

This is very troubling. And for more information on anything you heard this hour, check our website, RadioLab.org. And while you're there, communicate with us. RadioLab at WNYC.org is the address. This is Radio Lab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krollwich and I are signing off.

Okay, here we go. Radio Lab is produced by Jad, Abamrad, and Ellen Horn. With help from Sarah Pellegrini, Sally Hershey, Melissa Keval, David Martin, Michael Shelley, Amber Seeley, Laura Vitale, Special thanks to Eileen Delahunty, John Elliott, cellist Rubin Cadelli, and also special thanks to me, Diana Deutsch. Radio Lab is produced by New York Public Radio and distributed by NPR.

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