Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 104 | David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine what creativity is all about — how do people become creative, what is happening in their brains during the creative process, and what kinds of creativity does the audience actually enjoy? David Rosen and Scott Miles are both neuroscientists and musicians who have been investigating this question from the perspective of both listeners and performers. They have been performing neuroscientific experiments to understand how the brain becomes creative, and founded Secret Chord Laboratories to develop software that will predict what kinds of music people will like. Support Mindscape on Patreon. David S. Rosen received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Drexel University. He is currently a co-founder and the chief operations officer at Secret Chord Laboratories, a music-tech startup company. His interdisciplinary research program covers an array of topics: creative cognition, peak experiences, the neuroscience of music production and perception, psychedelics and STEAM education. David began playing the piano at the age of 8 and bass at age 15. He is the co-creator and bassist of sci-fi transmedia band, Chronicles of Sound, and instrumental progressive rock band, NAKAMA. Scott Miles received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Georgetown University. He is currently the CEO and innovation leader of Secret Chord Laboratories. He has been performing and producing music since the age of 10. In his doctoral work he investigated how music preference is formed in the brain. He secured funding through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support this work. With David Rosen, Ph.D., he found support for two hypotheses about how the structure of music leads to purchase decisions. Miles then coded an algorithm to generate new music, and in a behavioral experiment, music featuring these properties was indeed preferred. He formed and has overseen the development of Secret Chord laboratories since it was incorporated in June 2018. Secret Chord Laboratories Paper on Surprise and Music

This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA Fan Festival at the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on Giant Scream. Feel every goal with thousands of fans. And celebrate with music, culture, and flavors from around the world. Join us June 11th through 14th opening weekend as the tournament kicks off in Los Angeles. Tickets are just $10 and kids under 12 were free. Get yours now at Los Angeles FWC26.com.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And today we're going to be talking about creativity, what it means and where it comes from. So I thought it would be, well, it worked out anyway, that this would be a fun time to actually be creative in the format of the podcast. This is one of the very rare times when we're going to have not two people on the podcast, me and somebody else, not even one person, as I do in the solo podcasts, but three people on the podcast. me and two other people. We've done this only once before when we had Matthew Lutzi on the program to talk about the pleasures of wine, and Jennifer Willett joined us as a guest commentator there. But now we're going to have two people who are experts in their field, and I will be talking to them. And that field is music and creativity. In some sense, creativity is mysterious for a lot of us. We know it when we see it, but we don't know how to conjure it up. Music is a nice kind of laboratory to explore how creativity works, not just how we recognize creativity, but what is going on in our brains. So both David Rosen and Scott Miles are neuroscientists, and they are also both working musicians. So they're interested in doing neuroscientific experiments to understand what's going on in your brain when you're being creative. They recently published a study of jazz musicians improvising on guitar, and they showed that.

that certain parts of the brain light up when you are improvising. And guess what? The parts of your brain that light up are different if you are an expert jazz musician versus if you're just a beginner. So that might give us a little bit of insight into where creativity is coming from. Creativity is not the same for everyone. On the other side of the coin, the listener side, both David and Scott are interested in why do people like certain kinds of music rather than other kinds? We like our music to be a little bit patterned, a little bit predictable, but not completely predictable, not just wrote and repetitive. So they were actually part of the creative team behind secret chord laboratories that is developing artificial intelligence software that will help you judge

whether a certain piece of music is actually going to be enjoyed by the audience before the audience even gets to hear it. So there's a lot of different aspects to creativity here, and we're going to talk about them in the context of music. But I hope. that this actually extends beyond the simple musical realm to creativity more broadly. That's the kind of thing that all of us could use a little bit more of. So let's go. All right, David Rosen and Scott Miles, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Hi, Sean. Thanks for having us.

It's good to be here. Let me just because I'm not used to having two people as guests, let me help out the listeners. David, why don't you say your name so we can recognize your voice going forward? Sure. Hi, this is David Rosen. All right, that's David and Scott. This is Scott Miles. Excellent. And let me take on the devil's advocate to what you folks are doing here because you're thinking about music and creativity, studying it scientifically, and even thinking about how we could algorithmatize, turn our notion of what constitutes good music into an algorithm.

Isn't there some fear that you're... taking all the heart and soul out of a passionate human endeavor? Oh, well, there certainly is a fear. But I have full confidence that with the approach that we've been taking, you know, meticulously from the very beginning, that we're doing everything we can to make sure that those fears aren't realized. When you really look at it, at the heart of what we do is we look at expectations. So are the principles that we go into and all the science of it,

is attention release. It has to do with expectations that are developed over time. It has to do with culture. And culture is something that, you know, sort of is a biological necessity of evolution. It's something that we develop in the place where we are. So it kind of helps bond us to each other. And it kind of creates, this helps, like, mold this emotional bond that we have to help the cohesiveness of a territory, right? And so one of the thing, one of the functions of music throughout time has been to kind of give an identity to a group of people who occupy a certain territory. You know, there's also, of course, symbols or, you know, you have sports teams or all these

things that identify you, your accent, your customs, how you greet each other. And these things are things that we learn through exposure. And so what we've tried to do is to model that sort of learning, that learning is statistical. And because of the, just that happens to be, and I think that this is actually not intentional, but it has benefited us through our evolution, that the place where we kind of develop these statistical expectations through exposure is very proximal in the brain, in the limbic system to our emotional centers, to the parts of our brain that process reward and that process these, you know, like the dopamine and oxytocin and these feelings of belonging togetherness, And, you know, one of the functions that music has served in the past is it bond us together and we're so passionate because of this. It allows us to overcome, you know, the fear of, you know, God forbid, we have to defend the territory. You know, you see Braveheart and you see them painted in their faces and that sort of thing. And then you go to a kiss concert and you see the same thing, you know, and so you have, or maybe an Eagles game, right?

So there's something about this whole, like, adhering to this interplay between adhering to these expectations, which is really what culture is all about and emotional, the emotional component to culture and music. And really what we've just tried to do is look at that in an algorithmic way. I mean, you're forming algorithms in your brain anyhow. And because of artificial intelligence, we've been able to scale that and say, okay, what might an individual audience, how might they respond to this and maybe help the industry a little bit that way? And let's face it, the industry is already using algorithms. And the algorithms that they're using are not human at all. We're looking at something that's a lot closer to the human experience, which is where the brain is processing the auditory signal.

I think that's a fascinating answer and actually very different than what I expected, which is great, because, of course, I'm not very good at playing the devil's advocate here. I think that we should be trying to understand what goes on in the brain when we do these things. But your emphasis on culture is really interesting. So I presume that when we think about how music impacts the brain, there are universal aspects that everyone, you know, responds to things like rhythm and melody, but then there's also culturally specific aspects. And it sounds like it sounds like it. It sounds like, you spend a lot of time separating those out or at least taking the culturally particular aspects very seriously. Yeah, I think that's a really important part of this. One of the things we say is neuroscience is people and expectations is culture. And what I mean by that is that the brain is really what makes humans unique amongst all the species in this planet, our ability to problem solve and to think into the future and to create plans and organize and create hierarchies out of information, right?

And it's the brain data, really, that differentiates in terms of different analytics and predictive algorithms, the approach of, you know, Scott and I being two neuroscientists, how we want, how we think the most effective algorithms need to have that data point to be human, to be human-centered. Go ahead, Scott. Yeah, and you're right, Sean. I mean, there are, I mean, there's just a little bit of, you know, this is the classic debate in psychology and, and, and, uh, in neuropsychology and cognitive science that about nurture versus nature. And, you know, like you, like there are many scholars who say, oh, the perfect fifth, you know, in a, you know, like in a, you know, like the power cord, you know, and music is universal and it's every, and it's in every system. And you look at, um, in, uh, in the, uh, in the, uh, in the, uh, in the literature. you see like, oh, well, you know, sad songs have minor thirds and happy songs have, you know,

it's more consonant to have a major third. And, you know, people prefer duple rhythm over triple rhythm. But then you see there's some cultures. There was actually some work done by my colleague, Jessica Phillips Silver, with whom I worked at Georgetown. And she actually looked at babies who were, they gestated in, you know, when their mother, you develop a lot of your rhythmic expectations in the womb. So things that seem to be universal might have to do actually with exposure to just the gate of their mother walking. And so some of these things actually are environmental, despite how universal they might seem.

And there's some work, I think it was Joshua McDermott at Harvard. He looked and he supposedly had found a tribe of people in South America somewhere who did. did not prefer the consonants who didn't find major thirds more consonants than minor thirds. But I actually had the opportunity over pizza one time in Cambridge to have a debate with him over this. And what I said was like, you found a lack of results, but you didn't find opposite results. It would be more interesting. Not to say that it wasn't great work. But I would think if I were doing the study, you know, I would say, oh, but it would be more interesting if you found somebody who had the opposite effect.

right and we don't find that and so that that might mean that like you that you're right Sean that there are some things that are universal and what we try to do in our algorithm is we have there's a lot of layers that we build into the to the you know the machine learning and the artificial intelligence and it has to do with exposure and some of it is just baked into the cake that you know these things like major thirds or or perfect fifths or duple rhythm even for most cultures is something I mean by 44 instead of 3-4 is something that is preferred. But it's a controversy. I mean, even the 12-tone scale, the chromatic scale,

then the major scale, minor scale within that, those are not culturally universal, right? Other Asian cultures and African cultures don't always choose that. Am I correct about that? You are. Yeah, actually, my initial PhD study idea for my dissertation was going to be to see if grown adults, you know, like undergrads, could learn the different tonality

and the different syntactical rules of North Indian classical music over a few exposures and see what's happening in their brain in FMRI and functional magnetic resonance imaging as these rules were being learned. And there's some foundation for that from an artificial musical system it's called Bolin-Pierce

which is kind of, to me it's kind of crazy but it's weird sounding it's from the 60s, it's experimental I think it breaks the octave into 13 tones instead of 12. And so what we wanted to do with that work and it kind of

goes into what our whole idea going into a secret chord is that we wanted to do something that's more applicable and more, you know, more generalizable to what people are actually doing in their everyday life. Cool. So I think, you know, I have a million questions, so I'm hesitating. And therefore, I think what I really should do is back up a little bit. I mean, let's, this is exciting stuff. So let's lay some of the groundwork for how we're thinking about these. And let me just go back to the most basic question. I mean, how do you two define music? What is music? What is it? Why do we all,

throughout every culture care about it, which I guess begs the question. Are there cultures that don't have music at all? Yeah, so that's actually one of the sticking points in the study

about the consonant third. That culture didn't seem to have music in any sort of significant way. Wow. So, you know, that's why I was, that was my counterpoint in the pizza discussion was like,

it'd be interesting if they had a completely different kind of music, but it's just an absence of music. But really, you know, we find, And in one of the famous landmark studies that we kind of base a lot of our research on out of Robert Satori's lab in McGill University of Montreal, was the lead author on that was Valerie Salimpor. And she starts off the paper in her science paper in this experiment.

It was an empirical experiment. But to start the literature review, she brings up that there was a flute discovered from, I believe it was 10,000 years ago, Germany made out of bone. And so at the very dawn of really what we consider, you know, any kind of human species that we would recognize as far as civilization, there was already music. Huh. And what is the definition? Maybe we'll give this one to David.

Like, how would you define what music is? Hmm. I would say music is a nonverbal form of communication that involves a series of different, can be broken down into a series of different features and aspects. And, you know, music can have any or any of these aspects. It can have, you know, a few of these aspects. Dynamics, I think, is an important part in melody, melodic. So in terms of the movement and pitch of notes, now that shifts. I think rhythm is an important aspect of that. I mean, rhythm doesn't just show up in music, of course. We have rhythm to our speech as well. I also think that the texture of the sounds is a critical piece,

and that goes right hand in hand kind of with the timbre, which again, we see a lot of overlap in terms of this. That's why I think the nonverbal communication. But I wouldn't say it's not a language, though, because clearly there's linguistic components in music as well. I think those are some of the core components of it. I know if that's a clear definition or an operationalized. Maybe Scott can give that more of an operational definition a shot.

Well, it was interesting. I don't know if it might as must have been, something tells me it might have been a drummer, but there was a reductionist kind of definition of music that he said, everything when it comes down to it is just rhythm. Because if you play something fast enough, it becomes, you know,

if you play a beat 440 times every second, it becomes middle A, you know, so, or high A, on a piano. So, and then, you know, you play overtones over that, and then it becomes a timbre. And, you know, the one thing that you left out there, I think, was harmony, which is interesting,

as an interesting omission, because when I looked at the North Indian classical music, they have no notion of harmony. It's almost exclusively monotonic music. So, at least the music that I encountered. I remember hearing somewhere this claim that sort of more primitive, what we would call primitive music, ancient music, but also music from other cultures that we Western-centric people might not grow up with. has actually much more sophisticated rhythmic structure than Western classical music does.

And sort of when Western classical music discovered polyphony and harmony and so forth, their rhythmic capabilities atrophied a little bit. And it's more work these days to actually rediscover that heritage. Well, David Byrne as an interesting academic source there, I mean, he's good friends, you know, from the talking heads, He's good friends with someone who's actually advised us along the way. Daniel Levinson, who's also at McGill, who's probably the scholar to ask these sort of questions, the foundational questions of why we have music and that sort of thing.

He's expounded upon that and book upon book. But in David Burns' book, How Music Works, he said the first chapter, the first couple chapters is all about environment. He talked about CBGBs and how the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, structure, the architecture, and the wall hangings and everything just shaped the sound of the talking heads early on. You talked about how Mozart and the Protestant Reformation, why that started, you know, you had more intricate sounds when you had droning sounds and the cathedrals because they

would resonate through the walls. And he talks about Africa and South America. And then when you're outside, what's going to travel far is going to be rhythm. You know, it's going to be the base, the lower notes and the frequency. And I don't know if that accounts for any of. the phenomenon that you're bringing up, Sean, but it's something to think about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so speaking of rhythm, I mean, one of the things that you've done research on is the importance of surprise or the role of surprise, let's say, in how much we'd like

music. Like if all we had was a rhythm that repeated itself in a very basic way over and over again, we would get bored pretty quickly. Whereas if all we had was either rhythm or melody for that matter, that was completely random and unstructured, we would be repulsed. There's some happy medium there, and I know that you've been interested in studying the extent to which a little bit of familiarity and a little bit of surprise plays an important role in how much we like a piece of music. Yeah, so we definitely are looking at expectations being violated and surprise. And there's these two aspects, right?

There's the familiar and the surprising. And there's kind of been work done on both of these topics. But what we really find interesting and what we found through our research is that when you have this right balance of familiarity and surprise, that's when you see the optimal level of enjoyment and dopamine and really pleasure. And where we see this, why this is occurring, the mechanisms and the brain is really because of our two memory systems. we have an explicit memory system that is constantly learning. It's a conscious system. If we related to a language model, it's declarative, in terms of our memory systems, we can recall it.

It's when we've heard a song over and over and over again, and we can sing along with it, right? And we're familiar with that. But as you're saying, if we hear the same rhythm repeating over and over and over again, that's not going to be pleasing. And it's our other system. And the human brain that responds, we've seen through a number of studies, like from Ani Patel, of the implicit system responding to surprises, to chords and to melodies that are unexpected.

And basically, when both memory systems, when music is occurring and both memory systems at the same time are being hijacked by the musical stimulus around us, that's when we see that dopamine response and when people are really preferring and finding their favorite types of music. Yeah, so it seems, so like a lot of things, when you look at a person, they look like a single person. But when you study neuroscience, you realize there are these different systems at play. And, you know, Amos Diverski, you know, famously won the Nobel Prize for their work. Kahneman and Dversky in economics for looking at System 1, System 2. And my mentor at Georgetown looked at this with language, with procedural memory and declarative memory. Sorry, you might as well, I think you should probably explain.

playing more with system one system two are because i'm sure we're going to get back to them yeah yeah so it's kind of like what what dave was was talking about before um so your system system one is the more implicit the more like rules things that you know like if you're just if you drive home and you forget that you drove home because it's something that you've done over and over and over again and it's something that's kind of like automatized in your brain but then all of a sudden if you're driving and then you you know you realize oh i was supposed to go to the i was supposed to go to the dentist and pick up my kid on the way home, then that's kind of more a system two, kind of explicit. And a lot of, you know, Dave's early, his, Dave's PhD work had to do with these two systems

and jazz improvisation. Scott has a great story. Scott has a great story about seeing Michael Jordan in 1992 that I think really clearly articulates the differences between system one and system two. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that, yeah, so I'm not a big sports guy, you know, and so even though I made the, I led with the Eagles reference. When I think of the Eagles, I'm more likely to think of Don Henley and Glenn Fry.

But yeah, so, you know, whenever I go to a sports game, I'm like, which one's the base player? You know? And so, but then I went to see because, you know, I was dating this girl and she had tickets to see the Bulls and the Bullets in 1992. So it's like the dream team or whatever it is, you know, the Chicago Bulls and the early 90s. Yeah. And, you know, I went there and I'd never been to a professional. sports game before and I'm sitting there and I'm just trying to get some popcorn or whatever like you know like hang out with my girlfriend and her father and I look out there and I'm like wait a minute

one of these guys there's like 10 guys out there running around then like and nine of them are you know doing what I've seen on TV or whatever you know I've seen in the playground and all that stuff and then this other guy is is performing ballet right and that was Michael Jordan and I was like yeah there was just emergent property of like the way he's he was moving through the court that was just qualitatively distinct to me. And I had no idea anything about basketball, but I knew that that must have been the guy. Right. So, okay, sorry.

So tell us how this explains system one and system two. Sure. So I can dig into that. So because in Scott's situation, he really lacked the system two would be the system that's that's focused on more explicit controlled and conscious knowledge. In terms of neuroscience, we think of that as the executive. control network if we're talking about brain systems. And if I'm a fan of sports and basketball, I know all about how many championships

Michael Jordan is won. I know about the slam dunk contest. He's one. I know where he went to college. I follow him. I have his jersey. I have all these different reminders that have built up that my knowledge set of Michael Jordan. Right.

And let's say, I know, and I'm a huge Michael Jordan fan because of this, of all the, all these stats that are true, explicit knowledge with the fact that when Scott is watching, it, he's really having a more system one dominant experience of watching Michael Jordan because he doesn't have all of that meta information. He's responding to his movement and his visual, the visual stimulus that he's having at that game, probably also with some cheers around and with some auditory stimuli as well. But that's more of an implicit bottom up type of processing. It affects like the dorsal stream. And in terms of neuroscientific systems, we think more along the lines of the default mode network.

Yeah. So to wrap, yeah, to wrap of the reason that people, when they see that, those two things in concert are working what it seems to be that they're working against each other. But what you really want is you want something that's very familiar explicitly, but very surprising implicitly. And it makes sense to me to think that it's like dopamine is a learning molecule. So if you know something, it's like if you're watching a movie like I think it's safe to say usual suspects, you know, if nobody's seen it, spoiler alert, you know. So once you get to the end, if you're watching that movie with a friend of yours and he hasn't or she hasn't seen it before, when you get to the end, you know explicitly that there's a twist there, but you actually

enjoy it even more because you're smarter than your friend and your dopamine is kind of going off and saying, you know something, you know, and it tricks you to thinking that you've actually done work and as you're more evolutionarily adapted to your environment. And if you, if there's nothing there, like you said, Sean, if it's just going on and on and on, if it's just like nobody, they never find cars or soze and that's just a regular plot and there's no twist, there's nothing to learn. There's nothing for you to know. And conversely, if you don't know, then you're, there's nothing for you to be smart about. You know, you're not smart about the thing that is there. So that's the reason that you want new artists, but then you want to play the grooves out and spin them on the radio or streaming because you want to have that fresh sound, but you want everybody to hear it over and over and over again.

And it seems like those two things are diametrically opposed, but the missing premise is they're two different brain systems. And that's what we're seeking to, you know, that's what kind of our laboratory work is seeking to prove. There's a joke here in Hollywood When you go to pitch your TV show to a network The network will always say Give us exactly what's already successful And on the air but completely different And maybe you're explaining that

I mean maybe this is not just hypocrisy Maybe that there is this Once you understand the dual process notion of how the brain works There's a at one system You want to be exactly what people know And in another system you want to be surprising Well don't they ask you for a meat

like you have to say it's alf meets terms of endearment. That's helpful, right, yeah. Yeah, and that would be a great movie, by the way, I think. I mean, I wonder how formal we can be about extending this analysis to things like movies or novels or something like that. Because, you know, in some sense, music is a nice simple test case. Songs are short, there's a finite number of instruments, et cetera. we can analyze the notes, but maybe this is a more general theory of how we respond to art,

maybe even visual art as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it definitely applies. I think your inclination is correct. Sean, we talk about this all the time about narratives and story. I'm a big sci-fi and fantasy nerd, and I was compared to like an epic trilogy, right? And it's like the same thing.

The second act, right? You're building attention. You're building attention. You end on a down moment. And then that's the tension similar to, a musical moment, you have that release of a huge epic battle in the third book. And like, you know, and that's, you know, that's that's that release. And that's where the pleasure really kicks off is that those, those points between that, the push and pull of, of those

stressors and then releasing it, which I think ultimately is rooted in, you know, in, in our evolution, in which we experience. But they have through that. But the practical part of that, Sean, is I think you, you kind of put your finger on it is that with, we have seven features that we look at in music and it's very, and music is, you know, lends itself to being analyzed quantitatively, you know, and because the Spotify's and the Pandora's and the academics of the world, look at features for other reasons, you know, for song similarity and recommendations,

we piggyback on a lot of that work. But when you're talking about, you know, just like if you reduce one frame of a 24 per frame, frames per second movie that's in 4K, you're talking about 8 million pixels times 24 frames and then you have all the different qualities and then you have like how do you generalize

and make fuzzy boundaries around it and it gets a little complex but I mean that there's always work on the horizon to be done. Well no one ever said the complete scientific theory of the success of art was going to be easy so I'm glad that we're starting

with a lot of energy there. My mentor actually started my mentor that I finished out the PhD with works with Renaissance paintings and that sort of thing with the visual neuroscience system. He worked with Thomas Poggio, a famous

visionary in vision at MIT. And he's actually worked in neurostetics with that, Norberto Grievich. You know, but there's a relationship here reminds me of work

that was done trying to claim that abstract expressionist paintings like Jackson Pollock were in part successful because they were scale-free. That is to say that there were things going on on on very tiny scales and things going on medium scales and things going on large scales. They were fractals. Yeah. It was debunked a little bit because the methodology was not that

great, but there's clearly something to it. And I wonder how that also goes into the music thing. But, you know, surprises one aspect, but also this complexity is another aspect, right? Exactly. And I would also argue that there's familiarity and the fact that you know it's a Jackson Pollock. Like if somebody gave you the same painting and said their kid did it, then, you know. Well, I think that the hope was that, yeah, we've all had this reaction. You know, yeah, I could do that. My kid could do that. But the idea was that in the paintings that had become historically very successful in abstract expressionism,

there was something that was not in what your six-year-old does. It really was a quantitative difference. But I think it turns out to be hard to measure that. But do you think of something like that? I mean, have you studied whether something like that is also, true in music, that it's not just the surprise aspect, but multi-scale aspect? Is that an important thing to people enjoying things? Yeah, I think this is expectation violation and surprise has really been at the heart of what we

do, but it's a small piece of really the greater phenomenon of how music moves humans on a greater scale. I know one of the other things we've talked about from work from Carol Crumhansel is called cascading reminiscence bumps. And that has to do with with the influence and seeing how music kind of comes, the popular music, especially comes back every 20 or 25 years or so. You see the 70, you see the 70s creeping back in the other 90s and then you see the 80s that come back. And these are cycles because of when we're younger, really the music around us is not self-selected. This is during that critical period where our implicit systems, those unconscious responses

to kind of the statistical regularities and characteristics of music are developed. And that's really based on the decisions of the music, our parents and our family, our family members choose. And then so that kind of sets this implicit standard. And also from which, you know, the next generation of music comes from, then the listeners who are growing up, they're ready for kind of this certain amount of expectation violation and surprise. And I think that's really interesting to think.

about because when those huge identity moments of the teenage years, those years when you're really forming your social bonds and relationships, I think that's where we started with talking about power of music and how it's so important there. It's interesting that in terms of popular music, you really see the 13 to 19 or 20 year olds, they're the ones who are consuming and who are targeted the most popular music. And it may be that, and we see this consistent trend of those top songs having these patterns of expectation. violation and surprise because they're kind of at a at a at a set point of of you know they've learned kind of the rules and what's going on around them in the universe now they're ready to take that

to the next step and we see these kind of cyclical patterns over decades and to and to tie in the cyclical patterns to your previous point Sean about the about the Jackson Pollock and the the different levels of complexity I think that it's important even in our work even if we do look at surprise and even we're doing it looking at the same seven features that you take into account that some of the features can be looked at not just as the kind of the dependent variables, but kind of to be looked at to say, okay, these, the values that we find, you know, for these parameters, you know, whether it be rhythm or whether it be, you know, the year of release or whatever it is, certain timbers, they can actually set the stage and say, okay,

you know, it's not a linear effect. So it can say, this is the condition upon which we say, okay, this is now what we're, this is the paradigm that we're looking in. It almost shifts to a different thing that wouldn't be expected because of things like, oh, well, their parents were listening to this music. We've got to incorporate that in the algorithm. Or like, look, I mean, there's certain levels of complexity when you brought up to Jackson Pollock. It makes me think of John Coltrane. You know, I'm a big jazz fan.

My last name is Miles. I named my son Coltrane, Coltrane Miles. And so, you know, giant steps. You know, I've seen, I don't know if this is real or academically rigorous, but I kind of hear it myself. I don't know if it's just, you know, it's wishful thinking, but like I hear sort of fractal patterns in that composition, giant steps. And it's almost like he's composing the composition around the composition, you know, and it's like it turns into this kind of fractal sort of like, I don't, you know, how much rigor, mathematical rigor this would withstand. Like you said, just the same thing as Jack Spolic. But that kind of thing is not something that linearly follows from a pop song.

You know, like you have to go to a completely different paradigm and say, okay, Coltrane fans are listening for something completely different. You know, they are ready for something else. They're not going to, you know, skip after 30 seconds if there's not a hook, you know? And so you're looking for, you kind of have to shift your expectations and making the prediction. Well, it's really interesting how there are these universal aspects. but they play out differently in different people depending on their culture, their training, their interests, etc. But speaking of that, the Minescape listeners are the Coltrane fans of the podcast world. So we want a little bit, we're ready for a little bit more depth here.

And I really wanted you to explain a little bit how you measure the surprisingness of a pop song or any piece of music. Because I know information theory is involved. I know we have a wonderful podcast with Carl Fristin, who has a great podcast with Carl Fristin, who has a theory about how the brain works that is deeply embedded in information theory. So that would be a great connection. Yeah, that was a great, that was a great session. I really got a lot out of that. It was, it was, he's singing our tune.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, the calculations, basically, so we start off the, like, you know, talk about giant steps. We started off in baby steps, right? Yep. So we basically looked at zeroth order. So in other words, zeroth order harmony. is what the dissertation work was on when I was at Georgetown, when I started working with Dave as a research partner.

So we basically looked at a few hundred, like 600 songs, all in a major key, all from Johnny Be Good to Smells Like Teen Spirit, 1958 to 1991, you know, a little sampling, yeah. So of the billboard charts, and it was transcriptions that were done by a PhD student, at McGill, Ashley Bergoin. And so basically we had all the pieces together to kind of work from. And the theory, which was developed by Leonard Meyer in 1956 and 57, which is that information

theory has something to do with meaningfulness. He didn't necessarily talk about preference, but we kind of like morphed it into our measure of like Billboard charting success, which has its own confounds. And everybody always has a complaint about that. But the more we go to direct, you know, behavioral stuff. studies and with actual participants, then you can stop worrying about the confounds of the billboard methodology. But that's what we had. And so basically we looked at the top quartile, which is mainly number one, maybe some number two songs because of the long tail of popular

music. And then the bottom quartile, which is like number 50, 60, whatever, down to 100. And so what we did was we would take using the Shannon entropy, Shannon calculation from 19, 58, I believe, of Claude Shannon and his way of computing complexity or entropy or information in anything that's mathematically or anything that's really

classified into different groups and that you have a whole corpus of it. So we had the corpus, which was the 600 songs, that translated about 30,000 chords, and we took the chords and we cut them off at a seventh, you know, so a seventh and a ninth and a 13th was pretty much the

same. You know, we figure, you know, the ear doesn't really discriminate that much. And, you know, I've learned from my, you know, my jazz teachers, you can always turn a seventh and ninth if you want. So, depending on how jazzy you want to be, right? So, so that was kind of, we cut them off at a seventh. So basically there was about, you know, five or six hundred different types of chords all in one key.

So we normalized everything to like a C major or whatever it is, whatever the one. So we're, we're differentiating between different keys. So it was mainly a mainly, a matter of the function of the key and then the color of the of the of the of the function of the chord and the color of the cord and then we would take okay so let's say it's like one major like c major and c and so that was the most common i think you would probably guess if you don't know anything about music and popular music that was the most common out of the 30,000 chords right that are in all these songs right i mean you know not just each unique chord but every time there's a chord and all the songs we put it all together and we would say okay maybe there's like five thousand times that there's a C major if I break all the songs in a quarter notes. And I take 5,000 divided by 30,000. You get that number. It's a fraction.

You take the negative log base two of it. And so what you get is you get a number in bits of how surprising that chord is. So that chord's not very surprising at all. It's low around one or two bits. And so our range was like between like one or two bits to like six bits, seven bits. You know, like if there's like a, you know, F sharp minor ninth or seventh or whatever, that would be, you know, like seven bits, right? So if it only showed up once out of 30,000 chords, right? So that gave us kind of a manageable scale to work with where we could see, you know, by taking the log and, you know, Claude Shannon obviously came up with that method.

And so that gave us a way of saying in bits, how much information is there from each one of these chords? Now, if you know anything about music theory, you might be listening to this method. and saying, that's ridiculous. Like, if I hear a C major chord in the middle of something, like, it might be very surprising. I don't care what, you know, but we were basically just looking at zeroth order, and that's it. So it's very dumb.

The algorithm itself is dumb. Like, it doesn't know what came before it, what came after it, what context it's in. It just knows what key it's in and how often it happens. And we just basically look there. And surprisingly, we found something, what we were able to find was that the first finding was that there was absolute surprise that was higher just barely, like a half a bit higher in the top quartile songs than the bottom

quartile songs. And that was consistent across the whole song. So no matter where we looked in the song. But we weren't lining them up in sections, right? So then we kind of came up with... Just to clarify, because I mean, that was a great explanation, but there. Let me just repeat it in my own words. So you're saying that the most popular songs were ones in which you were slightly more likely to hear a chord that was slightly less popular than in the less popular songs.

That's exactly correct, yes. Okay, that's an interesting finding. But then there's also within the song you're getting into. Right. So in order to do that, so Dave and I came up with the idea that we were going to look and line up the choruses and the verses. and so it took some convincing because I was dealing with someone who was used to looking at paintings and visual, that sort of thing and didn't know a lot of, you know, wasn't an expert in the musical field.

But Dave and I were pretty sure that that had to be something to do with like pre-choruses and choruses, you know, and so like, do you know anything about like Max Martin, who's like, you know, behind the writer behind and producer behind the, you know, the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears all the way up to Taylor Swift. So he always has these like really massively tense, you know, pre-choruses and then boom, drops the chorus right in your face. And then, you know, and he lives in a wonderful, like, amazing mansion in East Hollywood. So, West Hollywood, sorry.

So, so we visited when we were out there. So I just wanted to see it. So, yeah, so, I mean, you know, it works, right? So we were trying to see, okay, is this something that just works for him? is something that you can actually empirically show is a correlation. And what we do is we lined up, you know, we basically just took, thankfully, Ashley, as part of his dissertation, he had the transcribers that he used actually say what they thought was the chorus and the verse and that sort of thing.

So we look for all the verses that came right before a chorus. And sure enough, there was higher surprise, this surprise effect that you found over the whole song was being accounted for almost entirely by the parts before the choruses. It was like, and the bridges, obviously, but bridges came before choruses too. So it was really something that looked like it was across the whole song, but it was because we were agnostic to where in the song,

obviously different songs would have different places. We were just using each song as one, and we were just saying like halfway through the song, you know, whatever. It's still, you know, quarter way through the song. And it just happened to be that all these were kind of, you know, distributing themselves across all the songs, across 100 songs. So we have expectations for certain kinds of chords in general, but also at particular points

in the song, we have expectations for what's going to happen next, and just tweaking that expectation a little bit helps us make a hit single. Yeah, well, it definitely helps to, I mean, using, using those expectations, it helps in terms of how much of, let's say, commercial success is being driven by these expectations and surprise. And that's a, you know, a question that we ask ourselves, that we ask ourselves every day. But I think it speaks also to, to the common structure of popular music and how that's something when, you know, people who are not musicians or musicologists are familiar with the sing-along, you know, the chorus. And then the more kind of the more wordy verses with more kind of,

that's another thing that we kind of like talk about is, you know, how does, how to rhythmic patterns of words and music also have impacts or of lyrics. So I think that, again, speaks to kind of the explicit system and knowledge and know-how of how these pieces of the song work.

But then also when we look before and after, these key transition points is where we see these, these large transition points and changes in those, in those surprise moments. Yeah, and what was fascinating to me is, you know, the chorus is the part everybody knows. It has the name of the song in it usually. It's the loudest part. You know, it's the hokeyest part.

But at least by the metric we were looking at, and that's a big qualification, harmonic surprise. At least by that difference, there was no difference whatsoever. Like the choruses looked identical in the bottom quartile songs and the number one songs. They looked identical. So what I try to say was it's almost like when you, you go on vacation, you know, if Dave and I, if go on vacation and we go to the same, you know, place or whatever, we go to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a weekend, and Dave worked all week, you know, I'm going to make up a crazy, like, unrealistic situation.

If Dave worked hard all week and I didn't do any work, I don't know that would that would ever happened. But, you know, he would enjoy, let's say, he would enjoy the vacation more because it's more of a, it's the same vacation. It's the same course. You know, it's like my dad says, He says the joke, I told him about this finding. He says, oh, it's like the guy who they asked him, why are you beating your head against the wall? He says, because it feels so great when I stop, you know. Yeah. That has to do with an actual physiological thing, which is you build up these opioids in your brain that are responding to the pain.

And that verse can actually, it's been shown that that actually causes this minor painful reaction at your brain. Well, this is what I was wondering about because you can say that a little bit of surprise is good, and that's probably clearly true, because like we say, we don't want to just do the same thing over and over again, but maybe not all surprises are created equal, right? Like I said, are there hidden variables here? Are there other dimensions along which we say, oh, this kind of surprise makes a song especially compelling, whereas this one would just be annoying to us? Sure. So that's, again, something we think about and look at quantitatively in our analyses. so far we've been speaking about harmonic surprise. There's also surprise in other aspects of the music. There's in terms of the rhythm or the melody or the dynamics. But I think we can really understand how surprise and uncertainty is related to pleasure

and preference. If we think about an inverted, the inverted you, Burlines inverted you of kind of the complexity of a stimulus and how that's related to pleasure. And ultimately, that, if we think about the x-axis as complexity, we can imagine that any single person could have that inverted use shifted along that axis based on their previous experiences in their life. If we go back to kind of the fan of avant-garde free jazz, you can imagine what their set of expectations are and how and where on the complexity axis they fall is going to vary based. on, you know, by the individual. Yeah.

So I think a key factor because in that example, we say, okay, avant-garde, jazz, I'm ready to lock into a 30-minute improvisation with very little noticeable structure and even harmonies that seem like they don't really make sense and an unclear, you know, a chord structure. But that's like, that's it is like having that context and knowing and waiting for this. I mean, I'm a huge improvisation guy. That's where like my side of the work comes on as a fan of music improvisation and an improviser for 20 years in different bands. And like for me, I live for the moment that's 15, 20 minutes in where you find this unique musical place where maybe you even trudged through some, you know, some not very moving or even good music.

But then you reach this epiphany together and almost let go of those evaluations and judgments and really sink into this. new place that you reached, which you wouldn't have gotten to, if not, for dealing with those kinds of, those moments that maybe weren't as good. Yeah, so there's a sweet spot, and that kind of gets to where we are now, like after we've left, you know, we've come a long way since those baby steps. Now we're looking at things like, like Dave said, you're not just harmony, but melody, rhythm, timbre, texture, dynamics. And so these kind of things, we're able to glean through music information retrieval automatically at scale from thousands of songs at a time from audio signal. And so that's one of the things that we're able to do that we didn't really do.

We needed this kind of PhD project from somebody else we were building off of when we did the work there. But now as a company at Secret Court laboratories, what we're able to do is scale this and look at all those different things. And when you talk about the sweet spot, what we're able to do with artificial intelligence, which is kind of where all this kind of feeds into into the signal chain, all this information goes into our engine, a doper. And, you know, people go to doper.com, you know, eventually when we have the engine completely all up and running, you know, we're doing betty tests now. But like, they'll be able to, the engine will be able to say, okay, in the past, in this context, with those, these kind of predictions that you're trying to make, whether it be,

free form invalivoravisational jazz or whether it be, you know, Max Martin's songs from the 90s or whatever it is, this is the kind of weighting of the systems or these are the sweet spots that the algorithm in the artificial intelligence through the machine learning

will find and apply to get the best predictions that show that account for the variance in the past and then apply those to the new songs that you're uploading. Well, let me ask more about that process of creating this improvisation. or even just creating music in general.

I mean, I know that you've done a little bit of research on the neuroscience of this. Like the way that the brain comes up with a piece of music, either sitting in your studio, thinking about it very hard, or literally there on the bandstand in the moment, improvising along with people, what's up with that? I mean, that always seems profoundly mysterious to me. Are we beginning to learn more from neuroscience about what's actually going on? Yeah. Yeah, so that really is a central issue of my research.

It's been using jazz improvisation as just one form of musical creativity and what happens in the brain when people are generating, whether it's an improvised solo or they're recording multiple takes for a vocal take for a chorus. Luckily, I was able to look at this intersection. I was at Drexel University, so it was kind of, of looking at, I had two really great advisors over there. John Cunoz of the Creativity Research Lab, who had done decades of work on insight and the eureka moments in creativity. He was my psychology advisor. And then I had an engineering, a music information retrieval professor, Youngmu Kim,

at a music and entertainment technology lab. And in that lab, he had been, he was an MIT graduate and came from the Media Lab. And when I started grad school, he had a lab of engineering. He had a lab of engineers and they're basically like a feeder for places like Spotify and Pandora and Graystone. And he saw the importance about 10 years ago of not just looking at the engineering side, but really bringing in someone with a music psychology background in cognitive neuroscience. Because by leveraging both of these kinds of tools, we could have a rigorous investigation of what's happening in the music and what's happening in the brain as people are being creative. And so through my work, I did a series of studies that looked at both jazz pianists and jazz

guitarists in correlational and causational studies that showed really distinct brain patterns between experts and novices and also looking at how the phenomenon of a psychological phenomenon of flow or like being in the zone can also. impact creative performance. And that's been really the topic of my work for the last several years. So do we know the answer? Sure. Well, I can give you, I can give you kind of the abbreviated version and then we can dig in. So there's two main differences that we've found through these different studies. First, as musicians gain expertise, What we see is when they're performing, we see prefrontal activity deactivating.

We call this hypofrontality. And this idea with prefrontal activity is associated with conscious, controlled thinking. Jazz improvisation happens and improvisation, I think, generally, is a really interesting topic to study creativity and lends to study creativity through. because when we talk about creativity, I mean, it's a really hard thing to define. Most people will agree that it has to do with novelty and appropriateness in a given context. But expertise and also the type of creativity

is really going to come into play. So there's the creativity of a small child finger painting for the first time. and then there's the creativity of Einstein. We're talking about all kinds of different scales. And so when we're talking about, you know, what does it mean to be a creativity? It really depends on that definition.

And in our studies, what we did was we looked at creativity with two different lenses. And based on how you categorize creativity, you'll have slightly different results. So in these studies, the one component was we had jazz musicians, come into the study and they would perform a number of jazz solos over like a backing track accompaniment. They would be randomized and sent out to some jazz professors and jazz experience jazz players. A number of them would rate them on a series of different metrics, one of which was

creativity, another was technical proficiency and another aesthetic appeal. As you can imagine in a highly technical domain like jazz, there's lots of overlap between those scales. So we end up kind of average we average them into a composite quality score. Okay. And so through these studies, what we see is that, that when experts are performing, of course, different than novices, they're more experienced.

They have a more robust set of explicit knowledge. And if we go back to those system one, system two approach, it's the same idea here. It's that through rigorous, through rigorous training, years and years of experts, explicit practice, we're able to develop these kind of implicit, unconscious systems that are

able to perform extremely well in these highly cognitive, this high cognitive demanding task. And that's kind of why jazz improvisation is really interesting creative tasks, because in a lot of creative tasks, you have these very distinct phases of the creative process. So if I was to, this is like in terms of talking about whether it's music or another topic, you know, composition versus improvisation, for example, is there's this ideation phase. Okay. You know, generating lots of different ideas. This is related to, you know, one aspect of creative thinking, which is divergent thinking is, which is kind of the most tested area of creative thought in terms of standardized assessments is, you know, how many different uses can you think of for, you know, a brick or a given object? And that's kind of like when you're trying to come up with a new part for a song,

that's that ideation phase in composition. But really the ideation phase, and then the next piece is evaluation and ultimately modification in many domains in terms of that cycle of the creative process. That's more evaluative, right? And what happens is you're modifying, you make edits and you're tweaking, and then you kind of maybe go back to ideation phase and you go through this process. It's iterative. With improvisation, you get one shot.

And it's all happening for any of that. Yeah. Yeah, it's all happening in real time. Sometimes as, you know, as fast as like 240 plus beats per minute with chords changing, perhaps, every quarter note or every half note. And so it's amazing in which some of the greatest jazz musicians say things like, like Miles Davis's famous quote, I'll play and I'll tell you what it is later. It seems like it's amazing that these eminent performers, these kind of anecdotal responses show that they're actually letting go.

They're releasing that cognitive control to be in more of a state, which I think they're familiar with the state also in terms of being that experience in terms of getting there and are able to enter that state more easily of relaxing and performing kind of in that bottom up sensory kind of way. Yeah, I wouldn't venture to compare myself to Miles Davis, even though we share the Miles part of the name. But Dave and I had a presentation that we worked really, really, really super hard on. And we kind of did this kind of like surprising thing because we're kind of doing this meta demonstration of the surprise effect of the music. And when we finally did the presentation, which was like, it's in Nashville at the BMI building in front of a bunch of industry executives. music industry executives. It was about six minutes long. And so there was a musical part of it.

And we get to the break. The musical break, you know, like after the first verse that is the chorus. And the second verse starts and I had the feeling. I don't know if you know, Sean, like when you wake up, when you're on vacation somewhere and you're jet lagged and you just wake up and you don't know where you are. All the time. Yeah. So that's how I felt.

But I was on stage in the middle of the performance. and I was highly engaged in the, it was, you know, it was like I was carrying the performance, and I felt like I was waking up. I didn't remember anything that happened before, and we were like three minutes into the performance. Right. And I think that, you know, so, I mean, help you get it straight here. So is this saying that if you're not an expert, if you have not practiced this much, if you're just an amateur, you're just learning,

improvisation, maybe creativity more generally, but at least improvisation is more of a system two thing, because you're thinking it, you're overthinking it, or you're trying to control it very much. And then through training, it becomes a system one thing. It becomes subconscious. Tell about the John McEnroe thing. Sure. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good assessment in terms of novices in a domain.

I think we're queuing each other's stories today. So John McEnroe, may I'm showing my age a little bit, he was a tennis player really famous in the 80s. He was very, very charismatic to say the least, screaming obscenities often on the tennis court, which is, you know, which was very interesting, interesting to say the least at his, at that time. But there was a match, I believe it was during Wimbledon. And he was getting beaten by this underdog opponent. He was that John McEnroe, who was the top ranked player in the world at that time. And in the first set, he just,

he was getting beat. And this player, he couldn't return his forehand. He just couldn't hit it back. And so after sets and tennis, players will switch sides of the court that they're occupying. And as they switch sides, John McEnroe whispered his opponent's ear, what are you doing today with your forehand? There's something that's going on that I just can't hit it back, but you've really been working on that. And then after that set, after that set happened and those words were exchanged, John McEnroe beat him in straight sets. And the idea there being that, you know, in tennis, similar to music, it's very much, it works on, you know, the intersection of really cognition and action. If you're an expert, if you're an expert, yeah, it's better. That's the point that Sean was getting at.

Yeah, if you're an expert, you can do it implicitly better than you can do it explicitly. But if you're not, you better stick to, you know, maybe trying to figure out what you're doing. Right. Yeah, exactly. And this goes beyond music, presumably. Is this a general lesson for creativity or mastery that what we aim to do by mastering the subject is taking some of the more system two parts of it, the parts that we really need to think about everything we do and transferring them into system one. And that's that's our goal. Yeah.

And that's actually, well, that's actually one of my colleagues at one of my people who was the professors who was on my dissertation committee at Georgetown works in, he actually was also with Pogio at MIT, but he works with automaticity. And the idea is things going from frontal to further back to the parietal lobe, which is kind of the top of your head. And he sees that happen over time as people practice simple tasks. Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably obviously true that when we master something, we want to get, you know, the muscle memory or whatever it is. We want to make it automatic.

But it's interesting to me that we're now able to actually see it literally in locations. in the brain. I mean, how advanced is that project trying to see, like, literally something that we would have done with part of our brain lighting up as we get better at it. The same task lights up a different part of our brain. Yeah, so it's, it's, the technology that we have available to us now really makes that possible. We've done our series of studies with both electroencephalography in terms of correlational work. I've also had the opportunity to use transcranial direct current stimulation, which is actually placing two electrodes on someone's scalp non-invasively and sending a weak electrical current into the brain in which you kind of

flip the neuroimaging pattern, a paradigm on its head. And with EEG or FMRI research and neuroimaging, what you're looking for is to see, you know, what happens in the brain when I either have two groups of participants like novices or experts or I have two different tasks, such as performing a memorized melody or an improvised melody with the stimulation what we look for we say if we target this brain area and try to modulate the activity in an inhibitory or disinhibitory kind of way do we see a difference in the output of the behavior yeah and so we were able to use kind of both of these methods to look at these kind of this hypofrontality and movement to posterior activity I think it's important to say the difference is really between the experts and novices.

So to different groups, our variables, kind of the number of gigs or how much experience you'd had in jazz. But I wouldn't just, I wouldn't be so quick to say that, you know, we're relying only on system one when you're an expert and system two when you're a novice because my theory is I haven't tested this yet and I would love to do this experiment is if we look at smaller, time scales, specifically when errors happen. And errors and mistakes, I know, in lots of the creativity literature associated with, you know, breakthroughs of creative performance where, where a misstep, like, took you on a new trajectory, increased uncertainty. And then you kind of, you went with it. And then when you go with that, you're resolving it. And that kind of brings it back ultimately to this, the same kind of expectation theory that we talk about on the perception side of things. Sure. Yeah, it's like I was talking to somebody today, I was saying that, um, uh,

I was seeing one of your old talks, Dave in preparing for this. And I was thinking like, like a Formula One race car driver, right? You know, you're just cruising down the road. You're just in the zone. And then all of a sudden somebody like checks you or, you know, like something happens. You're like, oh my God, wait. And then you get out of it, but you could get the lead because of that because you make that explicit decision to do something, you know, different. Um, but I think, um, one of the, one of the things that I was thinking of when, when Dave brought in the whole thing about changing behavior and whether it's this kind of distinction between, you know, Dave and me in like in our academic career of kind of trying to use these stimuli and use music to try to figure out and discover things about the human brain. And like I think that's the overarching, you know, dominant paradigm in music cognition.

And I think what we're more interested in, you know, now that we're like, you know, running a business, but also we've, as musicians, because we're curious about the music, is to say, okay, let's sit back now. We have these wonderful tools that can show us these amazing things that are happening in the brain, but we know what they are. And now that we know what these signatures and these markers are, we know there's dopamine here. We know there's certain, you know, neural signatures for, you know, event-related potentials when there's, which is detected, which is like surprise or this tension. And so what we're trying to do now in our next research,

research, and we're actually working with the National Science Foundation to try to get this done in the near future, is to say, okay, and the things that we're looking at in secret core laboratories and the business end of it, to say this is what we think the surprise is in the music, you know, in this information theory kind of caveman kind of way. But you know what? That's not accounting for like everything, right? And so what, why is it? And like maybe we can get some of that gap closed through music theory and then we have more of a music theory, you know, but some of that is we need to actually bring the 13 to 19 year olds or whoever it is, you know, who's consuming this music and we actually have to tailor these controlled stimuli and what we're actually measuring is in the

music. And what the stimulus that we're using, you know, it sounds kind of mad scientisty, but the stimulus is these kids' brains, you know, like we're looking at what happens in the brains and we're trying to say, okay, what gets that reaction that we know is there? Because all these, we're standing on the shoulders of giants and, you know, Robert Zatorea and all these other, you know, Anni Patel and all, and us, you know, and other people have made these discoveries. We know what it looks like in the brain. How can we get that reaction? You see what I'm saying? So we're using the brain to learn about music.

And it seems like that, you know, that helps us. But it also seems like there's not enough of that in academia even. And we're continuing to publish these reviews. results. And so because everybody's looking at, you know, using this kind of stale, controlled music to try to see what happens in the brain. And it's not necessarily stale, but, you know, because of how science works, you have to only change one thing. Yeah. And it brings up a related issue that I wanted to get into because we talked about improvisation and the test that you did, David, involved individual guitarists listening to a pre-recorded background track. But another aspect of improvisation is that you're in a group, right? You can be on the stage with a bunch of people, improvising. Sivising separately. And I'll confess, as we're recording this, I'm just a few days after doing a webcast with Winton Marsalis. Winton was one of my first guests here on Minescape.

And so he returned the favor. He had me on his webcast. And he's just very interested in, you know, the science or whatever we can learn about how people are interacting there on stage with their creativity. And certainly making mistakes was a big part of it, recovering, being surprised. sometimes you're in sync, sometimes you're exactly out of sync.

People are doing opposite things, and sometimes that's okay. How far have we gone and studying how the different brains of different musicians are interacting with each other up there in real time? Well, first, feel free to give Winton a call for me. I'd love to have him in his group in a neuroimitching study. It's interesting that you say that. So coming from growing up, I was a big fan of the band Fish and rock rock improvisation

that's where that was my access point to improv before I got into fusion and jazz and other styles of improvisation and I think you really hit the nail on the head is that what really drives that live performance with a group is when the synchrony happens

the whole building feels it when the four or five members are in sync together and there's some preliminary work. That's really where I kind of found that you could even record guitarists with EEG signals and the signal wouldn't be distorted enough. There was a group in Germany who looked at dual guitarists and improvisation and having them improvised together. Now this is, you know, as you add more musicians, four or five, six, you add more complexity, you add more things are changing. So they went from one to two and looked at duets.

Not to mention looking at the perceivers, right? You would also want to see if there's any synchrony there with the audience, and that would be really special. Right. So as far as I know, there's two places in the world that have the types of facilities where they have an auditorium with neurological and physiological metrics for an audience and musicians on stage. I'm McMaster University.

Toronto. Yeah. In Canada. And the Max Planck Institute. in Germany, which actually before I joined Secret Corps Laboratories, I was going to head over to Germany as a postdoc. And then when we realized that this kind of research, because we could kind of, you know, lead the ship, steer the ship and exactly what kind of music we choose and artists and how we design our studies, that's definitely on the forefront of our research goals,

is further exploring the interactions, both between band members and also the audience as well. And what? You said you've gotten so far as to get to Fish's management for that? Yes. Yeah. So I meant it's funny. Scott and I were attending the Northeast Music Cognition Conference, I believe it was back in 2017. I think it was the week between my wedding and my honeymoon. And I gave a talk there. And afterwards, a big fish fan up in Massachusetts came up to me. He's a medical doctor who uses Ronald Hirschberg, who looks at the clinical aspects of music and how it can affect in rehabilitation of, of, military, military vets. And he had been, he was a huge fish fan. He had been, like, record, he would record it with a group of 100 people, some background vocals and told me this whole story from 1992 in like an old, an old church. And he said, came up to me, he's like, all I could think about, now I didn't mention

fish or anything during my talk. It was focusing on jazz as we've been talking about. But he said, all I could think about during your talk was doing a study with, with the four guys in fish. And I was like, oh, my God. And then we just started talking and going to say, I know their management. So, so we wrote a letter to their management. we included all of our CVs and our credit and our post publications and they were like we'll forward it to the band and then you fast forward fast forward a couple months later there's actually an academic conference called the fish studies conference in Oregon and I got to go out there and you had coffee with Mike Gordon right oh that's good and propose this and propose this study of getting basically all four guys hooked up to EEG devices the drumming data probably wouldn't be so good but actually looking for those those peak moments which

is really what the work focuses on is those peak creative moments. There's quite a bit of research looking at improvisation just generally as an activity versus other forms of musical performance like composition or playing a memorized melody. But I think that's a kind of a consistent focus. That's where flow comes into play is there's distinct peak moments that if you asked everyone involved who was performing, you know, when were those? I believe there would be high agreement. and then to look at that underlying brain data and musical data is definitely a goal of mine. Another fascinating aspect of the results from this study is that we found critical hemispheric differences between the left and right hemisphere. In the mid-90s, Alconin Goldberg developed and tested

a neurocognitive theory, which showed evidence for the left hemisphere being more engaged for routinized and habitual tasks. The right hemisphere is recruited in more novel and unfamiliar your situations. So in our study, expertise or jazz experience was significantly predictive of the quality of an improvisation. Thus, when we first analyzed the brain activity associated with high and low quality improvisations, the high quality ones showed us both posterior shifts in brain activity and left hemispheric activity. So if we were to define creativity by this product definition, which is what we're doing when we're asking experts in a domain to rate the improvisations, the left hemisphere would be critical because the experts are likely using

well-learned routines and a jazz vocabulary and phrases they've learned over many years to construct a solo on the spot to new chord changes. However, once we statistically controlled for expertise, then the brain activity shifted from the left to the right hemisphere, indicating that that neural activity in the right hemisphere underlies the more creative improvisations once we remove the effects of jazz experience. So these results represent more of a process definition of creativity, where novelty and flexibility are central. So generally, if creativity is defined in terms of the quality of a product like a song or an invention or a poem or painting, then the left hemisphere plays a key role.

But if creativity is understood as a person's ability to deal with novel and unfamiliar situations, as is the case for novice improvisers, then the right hemisphere plays a key role. The other thing, you know, on the flip side of this, you're both musicians in some sense, right? I don't know, I'm not familiar with your work per se, but I believe this is one of the things you do. How much does this, you know, academic, scientific study of what's going on in the brain, etc., et cetera, change how you are as musicians. I mean, does it affect how you play, how you enjoy it, how you think about your success? So it's interesting.

So when I came up with this, I was kind of a disgruntled, not disgruntled, but I was, you know, I was in, I wasn't, anyhow, I was having a great time working for a Harvard neurologist in Boston. And I was also worked, I was kind of not focused, put it that way. And I was working on this huge album project, and it was my first album, and I was, you know, trying to do everything, like, independently and perfectly and professionally. And I had the Boston String Quartet, and I rented out, like, WGBH for the, you know, Fraser Studios for their big Steinway Model D to, you know, make here, everything was perfect and purist and that sort of thing. And that's really when I came up with the idea, one of our co-founders, Brian Owens, who's back here in Virginia, you know, I kept sending him, you know, what do you think of it? this bridge. What do you think of this bridge? He's like, I don't know. They all sound the same. And so I was like, you know, I was doing fMRI. And so I was looking at fMRI in language and auditory processing. And I was like, oh, I can put this all together. And that's kind of how I

came up with it. The short story for me as a musician is really like working on this like, you know, 60, 80 hours a week for like the next 10 years after that. That was 2011, right? has not only occupied my time, but also discouraged me from writing new music because I keep saying, I'm very close to knowing everything there is to know to writing the perfect song. So I'm just going to wait and I'll put my ideas together then. And it's kind of given me an excuse to kind of procrastinate from the creative side of my musicianship. Yeah. There is no such thing as the perfect song, sadly.

It's the same thing with writing. or anything like that. Of course, yeah. But it's just like the idea that, you know, oh, I'm going to have, you know, I'm going to have a lot more data to base up, you know, like, why would I write something now, you know, when I could, you know, write it with the, you know, with the benefit of having this, you know, all these, all these insights from, you know, all the greatest songs ever written.

So that's like in my mind kind of justifying my, my procrastination. But I still jammed since then. Sure. And but finally, you know, you know, we both mentioned, you both mentioned several times that, you know, the concept of flow, you know, being in the zone, feeling it. To what extent can we extend this beyond not just music, but even art, all the way into our lives, right? You know, are we learning something here about how to live well, not just play music well? Is there something to be said for becoming such an expert at life that it becomes second nature to us and we're in. flow and in the zone. Sure. That's that's the philosophy that that I've taken. I think flow,

I mean, flow is related to positive psychology. It's a theory that's really where it comes from. As a mental state where really individuals are immersed in a task and there's this intrinsic motivation that really you choose to do it because just the experience and having that energized focus, it's a joyful process and you're totally absorbed. cognitively. And I think this definitely expands to, I mean, I talk to my friend who codes video games to people who, you know, enjoy hiking. Reading is a task that's on high flow. And for me, I, you know, I keep my, I keep my sanity by when my, like, yoga routine or, or music, or practicing with, with my band falls out or, or writing. And I lose those pieces for, because work comes into play

too much and I get too caught up in other things. I notice, I noticed the effects, you know, I kind of higher anxiety and maybe a little more depressed and like when those pieces fall at a line and I try really hard to, I think it's, that's like a, there's a discipline piece also of saying like, you know, you don't always see the output of writing your song and then having it be commercially successful with or with, with or without the formula. But there's another component of just engaging in a, in a, a, and developing a craft regularly, which I think makes these flow experiences more common and easier to enter into. Yeah.

And Dave brings up the, it seems kind of paradoxical with flow and routine, right? And so you think about people like, you know, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or like, you know, like where you do things routine, you know, a lot of things that we do in the company, like are, and it was just like that, that I'll do, that people are saying, like why are you so, you know, obsessive, compulsive about certain things? And to me, it's like, you know what? I don't want to have to worry about what I pick out, you know, like Steve Jobs in the case of like wearing the turtleneck, right? I don't have to worry about fun. There's no right answer. To me, it's like this type of thing that there's like no right answer. So why, why occupy your

mind if you're like a big, you know, brilliant person? Why, you know, and then that way, if you don't have to worry about certain things, if they're all routine, if you are sticking to a routine, the things that you are focused on, then you can riff on. And, like, that's the kind of thing that, you know, when we're talking, obviously, it was a little bit tongue-in-cheek about, like, waiting to have the pattern

to write the song. But, like, you know, it's like jazz, right? So when you have a lead sheet in jazz, you know, that the, you know, that the chord changes, you know, for September song or whatever, you know, the chord changes are going to be fire. You know, they're going to be great, you know?

If you do a, or if you do, like, a 251, or whatever it is, you know what the chord changes are. are, and if you have certain constraints, then you're able to have more of a flow state and everything else you do. Yeah, you know, I got a, but now I don't like it anymore because I think that this is, I mean, you're sacrificing something for something else, sure, but I don't want to be living in a world where in order to be the best software designer, I wear the same clothes every day.

I think that, you know, you have people who have secretaries who take care of their laundry for or take care of their phone calls. You know what I'm saying? So they can just, like the Rolling Stones, you know, I read this book one time, is like, why are the Rolling Stones so great? Because they just get there, they get out of the bus, they go on stage, and they play. They don't tune the guitars. They don't set up the gig. They don't do all these things.

And that's another thing, you know, and you get into the whole tension about the, you know, artists are having to do everything now because, you know, there's no artist development in the music business anymore. But, you know, there's a certain thing to speak. he said for only doing what you're a peak performer at. You know, you don't have to wear this. There is. And I'm very, you know, I'm being legitimately on, I'm not playing the devil's advocate now.

I'm, I'm uncertain what to think about this, because this is a very provocative fact, because the flip side of that is if you're the one who tunes the guitars, you know your guitar a little bit better, right? Sure. You know, I, people are always surprised when I invite them on the podcast and they're not familiar with it. And they're like, you know, they mentioned my producer or my editor. And I'm like, yeah, that's all me.

There's no person who is the audio engineer here. This is all me. And there's definitely pluses and minuses to that, right? The audio quality is not as good, but at least I understand it. Well, I certainly don't have any of those people. Yeah, exactly. I don't have a secretary. Yeah, I get it.

Yeah, well, I think when we talk about flow in this very general sense, We're not really talking about how it's operationalized in terms of the psychology literature. And the work on flow is, I mean, there's very little neuroscientific work on it. And, you know, it's not well studied. And I think part of that is because of the complexity, there's nine kind of different components. And so people look at, they break those into two subsets of components. We can talk about there's conditions that allow flow. to happen in the external.

So those two main features there are... Is this Chick-Sem-Me-Holl? This book Flow 1990s kind of seminal publication there, but there's been a number of papers since then. And so there's this balance between challenge and skill as one of the conditions and then clear goals and feedback. So those are the conditions. That's how we set up.

So some research, they choose kind of one of these aspects, such as the balance between challenge and skill. I know I've seen some work where you set up, they've had people come in and do math problems. And depending on your math ability, they would create an algorithm that would present math problems to you and how you, if you get problems wrong or correct, they would advance you or move you back on the level. And kind of have you hooked up to some type of electroencephalography and look for, you know, neural correlates of this facet of flow. When we talk about this in terms of music, I think what we're missing, if we're defining flow only in terms of balance between challenge and skill, which is this condition. addition of flow, we're missing out on the key phenomenological aspect of flow, the subjective state that people report and experience. And on that side, we talk about those dimensions include

intense concentration and immersion, the merging of action and awareness, a sense of control, the distorted sense of time that Scott mentioned earlier, and critically, I think, the experience of intrinsic reward. So for studies that only that, that, that, would only encompass flow as only a balance between challenge and skills, such as the math task, I would ask you, well, how much do those people love math? Right. So it's, it's, I think, yeah, like a lot of this comes down to, like, who would come to where you are in a given day and say, you're lucky to be doing what you're doing for a living, you know, like, or have that hobby or whatever it is, because I think that's what people think of when they think of somebody who's

lucky to have a certain job or something, you know, like, if they're doing something that they're good at, but it's a little bit challenging, you know, like, you know, like, and not everybody finds that. And I think as, as an educator, which I know Dave has spent, you know, in his other life, he spent a lot of time in steam education and that sort of thing, I think we have a lot, a long way to go in helping, you know, students and children, you know, and helping them find the place where in the world, where they're going to be beneficial to society, be able to feed themselves, and also somehow, I'll reach this kind of zone, you know, at the most possible. So what I conclude from this is that life and success and creativity are complicated and difficult,

but that it's possible to make progress and learn about them. And I love the idea of using music as sort of a paradigm for studying all these things in the brain. So David Rosen and Scott Miles, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you, Chuck. You're confused about your credit score. One site has one number and another site, something completely. What? That can't be right. It's okay. Forget everything except MyFICO.

These free scores from other apps can differ by as much as 100 points from your FICO score that 90% of top lenders actually use when you apply for a credit card, personal loan, car loan, or mortgage. For the moments that matter, get the score that matters, your FICO score. Visit MyFICO.com and get started for free today.