SciShow Tangents - Sound

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

We couldn’t make podcasts without the science of sound. There’s a lot of technology involved in capturing the vibrations we’re making with our vocal folds so that we can share them with the whole Internet! So this week, we’re fine-tuning our knowledge of sound. Do scientists even know why music makes us feel emotions? Is the ocean really as silent as it seems, or are fish partying down there? And how did computer nerds send each other video games and Christmas cards through radio broadcasts?Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out themes for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!And if you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Butterfly Hearing:https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/these-butterflies-boost-their-hearing-unusual-strategy[Fact Off]Coral reef sounds:Computer program cassettes:https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1156672/http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Audio/tape2.htmlhttp://artsites.ucsc.edu/EMS/music/tech_background/TE-16/teces_16.htmlhttps://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_fifty.htmlhttps://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1976-02/1976_02_BYTE_00-06_Color_Graphics#page/n73/mode/1uphttp://www.retrotechnology.com/restore/cass_data.htmlhttp://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/10/13/people-used-download-games-radio[Ask the Science Couch]General Feelings & Physiological Effects:https://www.nature.com/news/why-dissonant-music-strikes-the-wrong-chord-in-the-brain-1.11791https://www.pnas.org/content/109/48/19858https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140130600899104?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=terg20https://www.nature.com/news/neuroaesthetics-is-killing-your-soul-1.12640Chills:https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-look-what-happens-brain-when-music-causes-chills-180959481/https://www.wired.com/2011/01/the-neuroscience-of-music/https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2726 https://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/03/10/scan.nsw009.abstract?cited-by=yes&legid=scan;nsw009v1https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735615572358Harmony:https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v1/#sec_2_3_2https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20930-why-harmony-pleases-the-brain/https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.108103[Butt One More Thing]Fart noises:https://www.menshealth.com/health/a19545944/fart-noises/

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I am joined by Stefan Shin. Hi. What's your tagline? Ooh, uh, wrangle me impressed. Yeah, it's very good. High quality tagline. We are also joined by Sam Schultz.

What's your tagline? Big mouthful of bugs. Big mouthful of bugs. Yep. That's too bad. Sorry to hear about that. And also, as usual, Sari Riley is here. Hi.

Hello. What's your tagline? One juicy grape. Ooh. And I'm Hank Green. Sprite-flavored vape juice. Ooh, yummy. That's Sari's favorite flavor.

Yeah. I've vaped so much Sprite-flavored juice. Please tweet at Sari and tell her not to vape anymore. It's in the studio right now. It's in the office environment. As a famous science communicator, did you get any of the space smell perfume? No, that sounds like something that should have happened to me. This is the only reason I want to be famous is so people send me weird stuff sometimes.

Lockheed Martin, for their April Fool's joke, but that was kind of real, bottled up space smell. But you were my one hope of smelling this myself and now I have no hope. We talked about space smell on Tangents. We should have all gotten a bottle of space smell.

Why isn't Lockheed Martin listening to our podcast? Tweet him. Tweet him. Twitter campaign. Everybody tweet that. So in case you're new here on SciShow Tangents, every week we get together to try to one-up and amaze

and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory. We're also playing for Hank Bucks. Sam, have you done the math on who is in the lead? I do have the scores, in fact. Would you like to hear? I would love to. All right.

In last place is Sari with 22 points what in second to last place is Hank with 22 points so we're tied for last

I think that sounds like a tie doing well why am I doing better than Sari in double last place in second place is Stefan

with 23 points whoa you're very close to being tied with us yeah so I'm not doing that well guess who's very close to being tied with us. Yeah, so I'm not doing that well. Guess who's not close to being tied with you? Me in first place. No.

With 28 points. Whoa! Please, Stefan. Stefan recently said he won for the very first time. Has he really only ever won one time? He was wrong about that, too. He's won a lot, actually. Oh, okay.

He just doesn't remember. I just forget. Yeah, it's one of those things with people like us. We don't remember the good things that happened to us oh no all right so now we know that sam is the one to get and the rest of us are basically all equal let's get that's not how it's supposed to work thank you for letting us know okay that you're the one to get uh so we do everything we can to stay on topic here on tangents but i would be much more in the closer to sam if i didn't sometimes get my tangents deemed unworthy by the rest of you and have to give up one of my hank bucks which is a thing that happens that is your downfall it is part of my

downfall anyway now as always we're going to introduce this week's science topic with a traditional science poem. Like a group of screaming boys, or a little baby's toys, or the sizzle of LaCroix's, a podcast is noise. We are all immersed in gas, molecules with mass, bumping as they pass the energy they amass. And right now my mouth is proud throughout. To form the words I wish aloud. The verbs and nouns endowed they sprout. And crash in waves through air and brains. The growl unbound the howl of hounds.

Propound, profound, we're drowned in sound. That's so much rhyming. Did you rhyme throughout with aloud? I did. I like it. It's so much rhyming. Did you rhyme throughout with a loud? I did. I like it. It's very poetic. I feel like that has felt more like a poem than a lot of things that I've done, just because it's a lot of mouth sounds. To be fair, I usually do a limerick. I had about a half hour to work on a poem, so worked on it thank you to rhymezone.com that only took you half an hour my poems take me

a long time oh really I usually do fine in like 10 minutes oh no my poems take as long as it takes me to research for a fact off

what sometimes not every time well yeah Sari takes like four hours to research a fact off I'm like trying

I find like a list of facts. It's like, okay, which one's the best one? And then you read like four papers. Yeah, and then I read. Goes to primary sources. Nobody goes to primary sources. Yeah, I have to be prepared for mansplainers, people who call my science communication stuff into question.

You do. And people like me. People just trust whatever I say. Yeah. What's that like? And if anybody ever called me out i think i'd be like i don't know let's ask sari so sari be our expert what is sound so sound is a pressure wave that's created by some sort of vibrating object so in the case of our voices

that's our vocal folds that are vibrating and they're transmitted through the medium of air. So like the air molecules are transmitting this wave and then it vibrates our eardrums which sends a signal to our brain. But any sound

is like vibrations caused by something. And the pressure wave can pass through multiple different medium. It doesn't have to be air or gas. It can travel through

solids. It can travel through solids it can travel through liquids you can hear underwater are all pressure changes sound well so here's the rub is it a sound if it's not hearable so according to dictionary uh vibrations that travel through air or another medium that can be heard when they reach a person or animal's ear. So if a tree falls in the forest, it does make a sound. But it also makes vibrations that are pressure waves that are not sounds. Because even if a person or animal were present, they could not detect those pressure waves.

Is there a distinction between sound and acoustic energy what's acoustic energy i feel i guess i feel like there are frequencies that a subwoofer can produce that are mostly felt rather than heard and that feels like it's sound energy but you're not and you are hearing it but like most of that energy you're not actually hearing, I guess. Right, right. I don't really know. Well, according to dictionary, it must be detected with the ear. Okay. So if your ear is rumbling, you feel it in your bones and your ear, then yes. But if it doesn't, the vibrations don't reach up to your ear, then no. Okay.

You only feel it in like your calves. Oh, boy. Why are the questions always so hard to answer? That's like the hardest question in, boy. Why are the questions always so hard to answer? That's like the hardest question every episode is, what is the topic? And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The other panelists have to figure out by luck or deduction which is the true fact. If they do, they get a Hank Buck.

If they're tricked, then Stefan will get our Hank Buck. Stefan, what are your three dubious, deceitful, deficient facts? Wow. Number one, tuning forks generate a single frequency, which you can represent visually as a sine wave. But more complex sounds like voices contain many sine waves that are sort of overlaid and shifting around quickly as you change the sounds that you're making. And so you end up

with a really complex looking waveform if you were to try to draw that out. But a team of researchers and engineers created a device called the Banshee that you can feed an audio file to of someone saying a phrase and the device can mimic that phrase by striking a series of tuning forks in a complex sequence to recreate the interactions of frequencies that you'd get from a human voice. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah. Number two, in the 1950s, some of the earliest television remotes contained tuning forks. And when you push the buttons, they would strike the tuning forks, producing ultrasonic frequencies that the television set would pick up. Oh, that sounds possible. Number three.

The common wood nymph is a species of butterfly that has unusually large veins in its wings. If you strike a 440 hertz tuning fork near them, it causes these butterflies to go into a mating frenzy. When the wing veins were damaged, though, meaning the researchers cut them, the butterflies did not respond to the frequency at all. They're like big ear wings. It's Dumbo. So we got number one, the Banshee. Tuning forks that recreate a human voice.

Number two, in the 1950s, TV remotes used tuning forks. Number three, the common wood nymph has veins in its wings that respond to tuning forks and makes them go into a mating frenzy. They're all extremely good. The first one, your explanation of like how sine waves work and they all build on each other. I was like, oh, yeah, this is true.

I know this. And then it got to the machine. And I'm like, I don't know. Businesses do a lot of weird things with their time, so I can imagine this being some grad student's project, like their pet project of wouldn't it be weird if we could just use math to make voices? That's creepy, too. If they did it, they would have taken a video of it, and that video would have got uploaded to YouTube, and I've seen all the YouTube videos. I've seen all the YouTube videos. I have a distinct memory, and this could be completely fake, of the Flintstones using a tuning fork to change a television station.

Wow. With a little bird hitting the tuning fork. And I might have just invented that in my brain. But that's the one I'm going with because that seems familiar to me. Wait, you're going with it because it is real in the Flintstones? Yes. I could see what you're saying. Because everything in the Flintstones is real. Well, it's almost real, except the animal does it instead of technology.

Okay. Vacuums are real, but you're not elephants. So remotes are real, but it's not a bird. That's right. The third one's butterfly mating. They could hear with their wings, and it made them have a feeling. A feeling deep in their hearts. And other places.

And other places, yeah. It made them feel all tingly and then they had to mate. But I like that he included this thing about them damaging the wings because that's a thing scientists would totally do. Yes. I'm trying to think of what the evolutionary adaptation would be for this.

Do the butterflies, can they make this noise? So this is like their mating call. Maybe they make a noise or there's some kind of noise that triggers them. But it just also happens that this one activates that receptor protein extra much. Man, I'm leaning heavily toward the TV remote, too, which makes me unhappy. Because I don't like to go with Sam. Why? He's a winner. He is a winner. It's true. He's always guessing right

about stuff. We should always go with Sam. I'm going to go with the Banshee because it seems weird. I want it to be true. I want it to be real. It seems like it should be possible. It seems like it should be possible. The butterfly thing sounds too real and so it'd be a good lie. So I'm going to go with Banshee. Alright, what do we got uh it was the tv remote hey stick with me kid

that sounded the most fake to me analog they they didn't know what they were doing back in those days they were there are so many weird ways we tried to make things work it's great so apparently the one that kept coming up and i think it was the first one is called the zenith space command from 1956 yeah and it had little aluminum rods in it that were tuned to specific frequencies that were ultrasound and the like pressing the button would mechanically strike these rods and cause them to vibrate, which is where the whole thing about a clicker, calling it a clicker, comes from. It would go bonk, bonk. So there were two buttons to change the channels up and down,

one button to turn it on and off, and one button for volume. So I'm not sure how the volume button worked. It just muted. On the commercial, he was telling his butler to turn it up and down, and he was using the remote to do it. So maybe it was false advertising. The butler was using the remote? Yeah, the whole point was like, not everyone has a butler, but you can have the Xenith Space Command.

Yeah, because that's what my butler does, is change the TV channel. They used those up through the 70s, apparently, before infrared took over for remotes. 70s apparently before infrared took over for remotes. So the common wood nymph does have swollen wing veins and they did do experiments where they cut the wing vein from their testing the wing veins affect how

sensitive the butterfly's ears are and so when they cut the vein the ears are actually less sensitive to noise so there's something about the vein that is helping the butterflies hear they don't really know how that's working. The scientists didn something about the vein that is helping the butterflies hear. They don't really know how that's working.

The scientists did cut the vein. I was right about that. I told you they'd do that. That sounds very realistic. And then the other thing about the banshee I just made up.

Oh, man! That's so good! That's so lame. That's very good. Ah! I trusted you because you know so much about sound.

I'm like, oh, yeah, that'd be great. It makes a lot of sense. It does, though. If you're a grad student and you're listening to this podcast, make us a tuning fork machine that reproduces this sentence. Maybe just this word.

Wah. Great word. Next up, the fact off. But first, let's hear from our sponsors. We're back. We've got points. We've got points. Sari, you've got no points. Yeah, I know. We don't all have points. Sam's got a point.

Stefan's got a point delivered directly from Sari. I got two. Thank you. I'm coming for you, Sam. Yeah, I'm staying firmly in last place. Probably. Well, at least this episode you are. Yeah.

Could you catch me? I can if I win both the points in the fact-off. Oh, Ryan. And it is, indeed, time for the fact off. Oh, Ryan. And it is indeed time for the fact off. Two panelists bring science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow our minds.

We each have Hank Bucks to award to the fact that we like the most. So, who's gonna go first? It's the person whose favorite band

is cooler. So, to preface this, I don't listen to music, really. I listen to mostly instrumental, like video game soundtracks.

That's cool. And musical theater. So like parody songs of things. Okay. So for my favorite band, I'm going to say Powerline from a Goofy Movie. Powerline from a Goofy Movie? I guess it's like one dude. So I don't even know if that counts as a band.

But Panic at the Disco is also one dude, as i've learned from our office slack chat yeah he's your favorite musical artist tell me like one fact about powerline because i'm not a familiar oh he's uh why is powerline cool cartoon dog yeah he's a cartoon dog he's very cool the whole premise of the movie is that max lied about being able to go to his concert and so they road trip across the country just to go to his concert and then Max and Goofy end up on stage with him singing a great song. What's the song called?

Eye to Eye. It's very catchy. I think I can confirm that this must be your favorite band because you know something about it. I know a song, yeah! Do you think you're a bigger fan or do you think Max Goof is a bigger fan? Max Goof is a bigger fan? Max Goof is a bigger fan for sure. I don't think I've ever driven somewhere for a concert.

Well, Powerline has not performed anywhere nearby. Sam, what's your favorite band? Is it cooler than Powerline? Now I'm panicking. My favorite band changes all the time. I think my favorite band right now is probably Foxygen. They're real, not cartoon dogs. I'm looking at a picture. They seem very cool. They seem like, they seem cool enough that, like, I would feel uncomfortable

if we were hanging out. The dog had a yellow jumpsuit, though. My interpretation of both Foxygen and Powerline is that they are confident people slash cartoon dogs. They're, all three of them are very cool. Equally cool. They're very cool.

I'm going to go with... No, I didn't say equally cool because I'm going to go with Powerline because I'm looking at some pictures and like this dog is very cool. All right, Sarah, that means you go first. Okay. Yeah, why would you fight for that?

You hate going first. Oh, yeah. So as someone who is not extremely submerged in physics or technology, the science of the capture and storage of sound is very weird and cool to me, especially when there are physical objects involved, like a record or a cassette tape. Because you get waves and capture them, and then you can hold it in your hand, and that's just mind-blowing science. I don't know. And so the way cassette tapes work is they're a strip coated in magnetic particles like iron oxide,

and there are hundreds of millions of those particles per inch. So when that strip is exposed to a magnetic field, it will be magnetized, and the particles get realigned. For sound waves, they can be converted into an electrical signal by a device, and the electrical signal can generate magnetic fields fields which can be stored in the tape. And then you have another device that undoes that process. Yes. And you reverse that process to play music. So it goes from the magnetic strip to generating electric current to a speaker that vibrates the air molecules that end up in your ear. But magnetic tape wasn't just using cassettes. It was also used as a way to store computer programs.

Sure. Why is that a sure? Floppy disks. You remember floppy disks? Oh, sure. I'm not that old. They're a thing. Floppy disks were a thing.

They also, before floppy disks, had big reels of this tape and stuff in between punch card computers and other storage. I don't know. Yeah. What we have nowadays nowadays like hard drives on chips chips yeah they're on chips now they're on yeah a little snack a little ruffles yeah so in the 1970s and 80s when floppy disks existed but they were still relatively new technology i think um they were really expensive and so data storage was expensive. And an affordable option was actually cassette tapes for several types of computers, as far as I can tell.

Like cassette tapes, like the ones that I would get my mixtape on? Mm-hmm. They could be used to store programs for computers. It only worked with certain types of machines. I don't know about this. And this is where my understanding gets a little bit wibbly but they basically recorded a bunch of brief audio tones to represent binary data and one source i read said a few hundred bits per second and it sounds like weird and screechy yeah but modem yeah like a dial-up noise and that's cool but the next logical step to that is sending computer programs over radio broadcasts for anyone to record and use. Onto their cassette tape that they would put in their cassette tape computer drive. And then you could play a video game.

Video game? Yeah. They sent like mini games. One was called Manic Miner. And it looks like I don't know like pre-Mario Mario where you're like

it's just a platformer walking around jumping on stuff grabbing things. So they sent mini games in July 1983 a UK radio program called Datarama

sent a photograph of Cheryl Ladd who was in Charlie's Angels. So they just like pixelated a lady face and then sent that out. Steamy dudes. And

in December 1983, a show called Computer Club programmed a Christmas card with music and a dancing reindeer and sent that out to people. Computer Club. Yeah. Oh God, these people thought it was the future didn't they? Everything in the future. We'll do this all the time. We'll just send

out things to people over the radio. Well, that's they? They did. Everything in the future. We'll do this all the time. We'll just send out things to people over the radio. Well, that's almost what we do. We send out stuff to people all day long, though. Yeah, and I guess Wi-Fi is radio.

It's just not the radio radio. They were just giving it their best shot. Yeah, and there was a show called Ventilator 202 in Serbia that aired around

150 computer programs in total, including short educational programs so you could send SciShow over the radio. Oh, yeah, I'm sure you had 100 bits per second. Yeah, in screeches for a very long time. This died out because better storage happened,

like better storage than cassette tapes. It was also, like, wildly inefficient. Someone did a comparison, and they said, if we were to try to broadcast Grid, which is a modern PS3 game in cassette format, it would take around four years and require a very, very,

very big cassette. Not just four years of time, but you need four years of cassette tape. This is the problem. What blows my mind, and this is just generally, there's so much analog to digital conversion of information and back and forth. Like you had to record it and that's one conversion. And then you're broadcasting it, which is another conversion back to analog.

And then your receiver is picking that up, converting it again to digital, and then playing that back to the speaker. And like there's just so much conversion happening. And there are people out there with the technology to still do this and i don't understand it enough to understand what you would need but in the comments of this youtube video of manic minor on speccy 48k someone in the comments was like i just hooked up the sound output of my laptop and played this video and it loaded up the game because there's all these screeches going on so they still can convert these same sounds into a game i definitely want to watch a youtube video that that uh shows me the this process in action if anybody can find one let me know there was one

some guy did it with uh mario i think just like a pixel sprite of mario not all not mario the game yes but he actually showed how he converted an audio file into something and then put it on a cassette tape and then put it into a different computer and said look there's no mario sprite and now there is one and i didn't understand it but it was fun to watch. Sam. Okay. Snorkeling around a coral reef might seem like most people to be like a really quiet, relaxing, peaceful thing. Jacques Cousteau even called the ocean the silent world. But while it might seem quiet down there to people with human ears, like people, a collaborative study done in 2010 of coral reefs in the Las Perlas archipelago off of Panama's Pacific coast revealed that coral reefs are crazy loud. Scientists recorded and analyzed the sounds of the coral reef and they discovered that they could hear crabs and shrimp clicking their claws. And that was like the main background sound.

They could hear that all the time. But they could also hear fish gurgling at each other and grunting at each other and running into stuff and going, ooh. They could even hear the sound of the creature, of the coral itself moving around inside of the coral reef. So as they listened more, they discovered that the loudness of the reefs had maybe some kind of correlation with how healthy the reef was. So they would listen to lower frequency sounds and they could start to determine how many fish there were in the reef just by how loud the lower frequency sounds were. And they could listen to the higher frequency sounds

and they could figure out how much coral was inside of the coral reef because there was a lot of them making lots of sounds. They also theorized that coral fish that swim out to sea and maybe get lost or maybe do it on purpose can listen for high-frequency coral sounds and they will prioritize swimming towards and inhabiting louder, high-frequency sound reefs than lower frequency.

So they're choosing where to go. They're not just planktoning. They're not, like, floating around. Yeah. They can hear the louder one and go to it. They can also move. They can locomote. Apparently they can locomote.

So marine biologists are looking into monitoring reefs now with audio equipment instead of like mounting huge diving expeditions to check out the coral reef and figure out the health they would just like sync some microphones and listen in and see how many fish there were how much coral there was and they are also talking about making artificial reef structures that have speakers in them that would play the sound of a healthy reef, sink those into the bottom of the ocean. The fish would swim toward them and be like,

what? This party sucks. Well, maybe eventually it would work. Well, yeah, all the little pops would come. The pops would come eventually. I think the fish would be like, this is lame. But the pops probably don't know better. Yeah, they're too small to know.

It's like, oh, I guess the friends are really far away i guess these rocks are friends i like that fact very much i like well here's the bummer of it before this you would have to go down and snorkel to do a reef survey yeah and so that's like fun field research for scientists. And now it's like, ah, no, just sink a mic. Sink a microphone down in there. We'll record for 30 minutes and we'll be done. And they're like, but I want to go snorkel. I learned to be a marine biologist.

I don't want to not snorkel. That's very good. Sari's fact is very good. Ah, I just love nerds too much to not give it to Sari. I'm sorry. It's a very good. Sari's fact is very good. Ah, I just love nerds too much to not give it to Sari. I'm sorry. It's a very good fact. It's not that you're way ahead. Are you sure that you don't

like being in last place enough? But also, Sari's gonna catch me if she gets both facts. You're in a real conundrum right now. Still be tied. I'll have to go with my gut

and say I love nerds so much. Okay. They were sending Cheryl Ladd pictures to each other via radio. That part is pretty funny. It's like the opposite of a secret message, too. It's like a long, screechy, loud message. Both of these facts are mind-blowing to me,

but I think I have to also give it to Sari. Whoa, no! We're going to be tied again. Catching up. Yeah, we're going to be tied. I'm just going to get used to the long point drought that I'm about to experience. You already got a point this episode. Well, that's one drop of rain.

Don't stop a drought, you know? That's what they always say. And now it's time to ask the science couch, where we ask listener questions to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. Sam, what you got? At NG Jenkins asks, Why does music, not lyrics, make us feel things like harmony? Why does harmony feel good?

So there's two things here. Both of them don't make any sense. One of them makes slightly more sense. So like a sound wave has like a certain number of vibrations per second. Harmonies are when, like, there are good ratios between those things.

When I learned that, I was like, that actually surprises me that it makes that much sense because, like, how does my brain

know, like, I'm not hearing, like, vibration frequencies when I hear a sound. How does my brain know that that ratio exists?

It does, apparently. And it can tell, and it likes that. And it likes certain ratios more than other ratios, and weird ones sound discordant, and whole number ratios sound nice. But then there's the thing of, why does a minor chord sound sad and a major chord sound happy?

And I'm like, meh. Eh.h? Is that cultural? Is it genetic? It seems very innate to me. To me, it feels like there's a large cultural component to it. So there's harmonies, which is like related frequencies. And then there's harmony as a thing that's like a set of rules by which you write Western music that's governed a lot of Western music for hundreds of years. So that's just like something that we've we grow up with and like are used to like what a major scale sounds like and what a minor scale sounds like. And like those are things that we learn to enjoy, I guess. And interpret, I guess. I don't know.

I still feel like there is some innateness to it. I might be wrong, but like a minor chord sounds sad, man. With harmonies, I found a study that makes it seem like there's some innateness to it. So there are some people called amusics or amusia. It's a musical disorder that is either acquired, which occurs as a result of brain damage, or it is inherited, which results from some sort of brain anomaly. And it doesn't affect a lot of your life. It's just you can't process pitch very well and don't have musical memory or recognition. Wow.

So there's like tone deafness. And then there's amusia, where it's like, look, I have a brain disorder. Yeah. I'm not saying I can't sing. I'm saying like this whole idea doesn't make sense to me. That's interesting. And I couldn't find like a really good like definition or examples, but I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure there are people out there that could describe it better than I can.

But it sounds like my understanding of it is like if you hum something at them, they could not repeat that. Like there's no musical memory whatsoever. And so a study about harmony found some A music people and people who can process music normally. And the A musics didn't have a preference for harmonic over inharmonic tones. harmonic over inharmonic tones so there's something in the recognition of music part of our brains that also leads to the good feelings with harmony in addition to the cultural thing so there's some like recognition of this mathematics that's happening these nice these nice math noises so at least like this sounds nice more than this is a happy chord or a sad chord yes yeah more so than the feelings and then the feeling stuff seems to be like completely arbitrary and scientists are just kind of like.

Because. Good to know. We know that it does make us feel things and it does cause physiological effects, but we don't know how. And we're limited just by like the tools we have in most of these cases. Right. So you can put somebody in fMRI and be like, they're feeling a thing. And it's like, yeah, I mean,

we knew that they were feeling things. Yeah, exactly. We have like fMRI and PET scans and or like PET tomography and a bunch of different imaging techniques that let us see the brain while things are happening. And so we can look- It's like we just spent $10,000 to report

that indeed that cord made you feel good. Yeah. And we can like localize it to certain areas of the brain. So places that have been called out are like the nucleus accumbens, which is a reward center of the brain. Amygdala, which is emotions. The hypothalamus, which is involved in like other nervous system functions. So like blood pressure or your heart rate or things like that,

which is basically just reinforcing the things that the subjective experiences that we've already been told. Do other animals harmonize, like wolves and stuff? Birds kind of do. I don't think that wolves intentionally harmonize. They sometimes do it accidentally. I've heard it. It's very chilling. But birds definitely do intervals.

I don't think they harmonize with each other, but they will go from one to another interval. That is like a whole number ratio. Yeah. Cool. Thanks to Nick for your question.

It was fascinating to explore. If you want to ask the Science Couch, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out

the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to Awkward Amoeba and Juan Rich Dog and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Thank you to Awkward Amoeba and Juan Rich Dog and everybody else who tweeted us your questions this week. Final Hank Buck scores.

Sarah, you are at zero. You are at zero and now you're at two. Oh, yeah. You said I am at zero? Sarah, you got no point. No, no. I'm sorry. I counted.

Those two Hank Bucks are hard earned. Sam, you got one. Okay. And Stefan, one. And me, two. Bye. I wasn't as deceitful as I was hoping to be today. Do better.

Fool that one. I do often, when I'm constructing them, think about Sam. Really? Weirdly enough, yeah. Like, what would Sam think? Yeah. I'm a sharp, inquisitive Sherlock Holmes-ian mind. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it is very easy to do that. First,

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Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. If you swallow air and that triggers a fart, that fart will be louder because there will be more volume. But if the fart is created by the fermentation of bacteria in your intestine, it will be smaller but stinkier and also quieter. So there is truth to what they say silent but violent

thank you for this wisdom that you've imparted to us