The Current - No joy: when music falls flat for people

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

They're not tone-deaf. They don't have the blues. Music just falls flat for them. Host Matt Galloway speaks with Bill Weiss, who is among a small percentage of people who don't derive pleasure from music. He also catches up with one of the first researchers to study the rare condition; Robert Zatorre from Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University.

Jacqueline Furland Smith, a 40-year-old former Canadian military trainer, moves to Costa Rica to follow her dreams, but in the summer of 2021, vanishes without a trace. How can a woman just go missing and us put out all that effort to find her, and she's still missing? I'm David Rigen, and this is Someone Knows Something, Season 10, the Jacqueline Furland Smith case. Available now on CBC Listen and wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. You know, from cultural gatherings to weddings, sporting events, much of our life revolves around music. Certain songs can feel like the soundtrack to your life. The current's Sam Urech spoke with people in Toronto to see what they're listening to. Hi, my name's Harith, and I'm listening to Pearl Jams Alive. Not only because it's one of the best songs on the Alamo,

album 10, but I love the energy that Eddie Vedder has. I love the guitar. The lyrics really resonate with me. Music helps me work, helps me feel things, helps me relax, helps me sleep. And I just love, love seeing music live. It's just one of my favorite things ever. No life without music. Hi, my name's River, and I'm listening to my favorite song, Chicago by Bryant Barnes.

It puts me in like a happy place, you know, you can sing to it. Could you imagine a life lived where you don't go to concerts, you don't own any music? It's not unenjoyable, but it's... I feel like I kind of wonder, like, what would I be doing, you know? Like, you'd have to find things to do when you go outside or, I don't know, like, go do some chores or some things. Extremely personal question that you might hate me for, but can you admit how many times you have repeated this song? Oh, it was my top number one played album. I still play it.

I listen on the way here this morning to work. I listen to the entire album on the train, and the train's an hour. No shame. Hi there. My name is Prince, and I'm listening to one of my favorite music. It's Bisagasa by a Filipino band, a Filipino group called Midnesty. And I love this song because it means that if I'm with you, everything will be good.

Oh, it makes you be inspired. It's making me feel like I'm in another dimension, you know? If I listen to music, it's like I'm just on my other world, you know? That's it. Thank you so much for introducing me to this song. Yeah, thank you very much too. Music's amazing like that. And for many people, it feels like music makes the world go around.

But that's not the case for everyone. For a small portion of the population, music falls. flat. Scientists call this condition specific, musical, and hedonia. It's something Bill Weiss has experienced his entire life. He's in New York City. Bill, good morning. Hi, good morning. Glad to be here. Glad to have you here. When did you realize that your relationship with music was different from other people? As a kid, I took music lessons, and it was kind of like paint by numbers, kind of like driving a car with GPS. Go faster, go slower. Go turn left, turn right. It was just purely mechanical. And then I got to be a teenager and my peers

were talking about music and how they would go to concerts and they would be wearing music-themed t-shirts about their favorite bands. And I just wasn't. But I didn't want to seem odd. So I would just nod my head and agree with whatever they were saying. Or maybe I would repeat back something that I'd heard elsewhere. Because in our music-centric culture, I just didn't want to stand out as being different. So I felt I had to hide. And in fact, I was basically in the closet, so to speak. And that difference, it's that you can play a piece of music and you don't feel anything at all. No, it's just a mechanical exercise of playing one note after another in a certain way. I want to play you something. This is one of the greatest songs of all time. Have a listen.

This Led Zeppelin, stairway to heaven. Bill, when you hear that, what do you feel? Well, I'm a little worried that my answer is going to sound flat, and I'm not trying to be uncooperative, but I don't have a lot to say because I don't have much response here. I didn't feel anything in my mind or in my body, and the music didn't make me happy, it didn't make me sad, it didn't make me feel anything else.

I just felt neutral about it. So to me, it was just an arrangement of notes with some vocalization. And I don't really understand what makes it so famous or why people like it so much. You can imagine there's some people probably yelling at the radio saying, he doesn't feel anything at all. So can you assess whether it's good or bad or anything? It just is. To you, it just is.

What makes this a particular classic? I don't know. Why is it better than or different from another piece of music? I just don't know. What was it like, you hinted at this, but what was it like growing up with that happening? Because music is such a huge part of who we are, particularly as young people. That's one of the ways that we figure out who we are as young people is by the music that we gravitate to, the music that we love and maybe the music that we hate. So when you were growing up, what was that like?

A little bit isolating, I guess. And also, I guess, there was this feeling of embarrassment from feeling different from my peers who were so into music and I just wasn't responsible. in this way, but I didn't want them to know that I was not responding in this way because I didn't want to stand out and be the odd one in the group. Did you have any idea, and I want to get to the specific definition of what this is, but did you have any idea what was going on? No, to me it was just like, why is everybody so into music? What's the big deal? And so what you live with, as I said, is called specific musical an hedonia. How did you figure out that that's what you live with? In 2014, somebody mentioned to me that there had been a podcast on NPR about musical Anhedonia,

and so I lost no time in listening to that, and I thought, wow, this really describes me and it describes my musical response. In particular, I learned about the BMRQ, the Barcelona musical response questionnaire, and I think it basically boils down to two questions. Do you own any music and do you connect to other people by discussing the music? And for me, the answer is very clearly no and no. You own no music. You have no CDs, no records, no.

And there's no music on my phone, no? Nothing at all. And so what was it like when you learned that is actually a condition, that that's something, it's not just you that has this lack of a response to music, but that this is something that other people share? Oh, it was just incredibly validating to know that there's, science that explains my lack of musical reaction. And so it turns out that I'm not some sort of a freak. It's that my brain simply doesn't connect the auditory cortex to the reward center. And that's

just how I'm wired. And if anything, it's kind of a social whole pass for me now because I feel much more free to talk about my musical response or lack thereof. And I don't feel I need to hide it or to be in the closet anymore. And in fact, the first time that I told somebody that I I do have musical Anhedonia. They didn't run away screaming, and they actually thought the whole story was very interesting. It is really interesting. But you said it gave you a social hall pass. Where there, and you've talked about this before, but being in the closet,

were there awkward moments where your lack of interest in music and your lack of reception to music created awkward situations? Sure, because I would be with a group of people, and we would all be pretty well connected and we'd be focusing on, say, a conversation, and then suddenly someone would comment on the music in the background, which I hadn't even really noticed. And then the talk would turn to music, and I would have nothing to contribute here at all.

And so I would feel really isolated. Weird personal question, but you're married? Yes. Did you have a first dance at your wedding? I did, as a matter of fact. And at the wedding, planning the music, was certainly my wife's department under the circumstances, but she enjoyed the music that she selected,

and she had a great time with it. And then I did do a first dance with my wife, and I stepped onto the dance floor because I wanted to honor the tradition and to honor my wife's expectations, even if I couldn't personally connect with the music. So I guess you could say it was an attempt to meet her in a world that feels very foreign to me.

Did you know what you were dancing to? I mean, you could hear the beat, and things like that, but there was no connection with what you were listening to. In this momentous moment, a song that's going to mean a bunch of things to a bunch of people that didn't really mean anything to you. Yeah, it was, again, a mechanical exercise. This time, it was one in which I moved my feet and moved along the dance floor with my wife. Do you wish there was a cure for something like this?

I'd read, you were speaking with The New Yorker, and you said that if I never heard music again, it wouldn't be a particularly big loss. Do you wish that you could hear music? Do you wish that something could happen that would change your relationship with music? Not especially. I'm just this kind of person who doesn't have much of relationship with music. And I get why people would like music, just as I get why people would like eating steak. But I'm not a carnivore myself, and I get my pleasures elsewhere.

So, you know, we're all different in our own ways, and that's what makes us all interesting. So this way, I think, if anything, I have more time to pursue the things. things that do bring me pleasure instead of music. And that's important as well, because it's not as though you live a life without joy and without pleasure and wonder, right? What are the things that fill that hole for you? You know, people say they feel bad for me because they assume that I'm missing out, but I'm really immersed in many things that move me. So, for example, I'm a very visual person. I love art. If I could, I would visit a different gallery or museum every day.

and I enjoy walking around cities and admiring the architecture, and I'm a foodie who enjoys many types of food, and I love to read. And an interesting fact here is that books can give me chills on my skin sometimes the same way that many music lovers experience chills for music. This is so interesting. It's fascinating to hear what you have gone through and whether you feel like you're missing anything or not.

I would say that my life is a simple. of experiences, it just doesn't happen to have a soundtrack. And I found that you don't need a chorus to have a life that sings. Well put. Bill Weiss, it's good to speak with you. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Bill Weiss lives with specific musical an hedonia, which means he doesn't derive pleasure from music. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson and I host the Daily News podcast, Front Burner. And lately, I'll see a story about, I don't know, political corruption or something and think during a normal time, we'd be talking about this for

weeks. But then it's almost immediately overwhelmed by something else. On Front Burner, we are trying to pull lots of story threads together so that you don't lose the plot. So you can learn how all these threads fit together. Follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcasts. Robert Sotore is a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University. He was one of the first people to study this rare condition. And in his lab, he scanned the brains of music lovers to pinpoint exactly what's going on or not when people listen to music. Robert, hello to you. Yeah, Matt. How would you define what this is?

What is specific musical an hedonia? We defined it by looking specifically at people who not only do they not respond to music, but very importantly, they do respond to lots of other things, kind of the way that Bill said. So to have the specific form of musical an hedonia, you should not be generally depressed or have some problem with enjoyment of the world. you should be sensitive not only to art but also to everyday activities, you know, social engagement, food, sexual activity.

So it has to be really only music that's affected and nothing else. And the other important defining feature is that there's nothing wrong with your auditory system. It's not that you are hard of hearing. It's not that you have a musia or tone deafness, that you can't hear the music properly, that it sounds distorted. So it's none of that. It's very specifically the way you respond emotionally to music. How does it manifest itself?

Some of what we just heard from Bill explains a bit of that. We played him a bit of Led Zeppelin, and he had no response whatsoever. I've heard of people who they're standing in the grocery store line and there's, you know, Muzac playing. You see some people who are nodding their head or tapping their toes, and folks who have this condition don't do anything at all

because they don't feel so moved by the music. How does this condition manifest itself? in your research? What's really interesting is that for years, we were studying the positive response to music in terms of emotion and pleasure and what we call reward. And in our studies now more than 20 years ago, we showed, for example, that average people, when they listen to music that they like, we find that there's dopamine release in a part of the brain that's called the reward system.

and this is in line with other kinds of rewarding stimuli. So food or sex or receiving money in a gambling game like a video game, all of those things really engage the reward system. And so this was sort of a big discovery that we made that, oh, music, although it's very abstract, right, it doesn't really have a direct reward value the way, say, food does. It's not a substance like a drug. And yet the same sort of biology is, it's behind. behind the response. So that was our work that we did for, you know, a good decade or so. And then we

got to thinking, well, is this response really universal? Because we made the assumption that it was. And somehow we started thinking, well, maybe it's not the same for everyone. Let's try to understand it. And so we started developing a questionnaire that Bill mentioned with my colleagues in Barcelona. And we discovered that, you know, we gave out this questionnaire to, I don't know, 2,000 people in an online survey, and we found that 30 or 40 of them really responded no to almost everything. They don't really get any particular pleasure out of music, and it's specific. So when asked about other kinds of things that result in pleasure, they're totally fine.

There's nothing really wrong with them. And so that was very curious because we didn't know it existed. And then we started actually scanning people, because as I mentioned, we know that in the average person, when you hear music you really like, you have this dopamine response in the reward system. And you can see that, you can see that in the brain scan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see a very clear response that we've replicated many times and other laboratories have done so as well. And so we thought, well, let's see what happens when we scan people with the specific musical antidonia. And sure enough, they had essentially no response, sometimes a negative response.

would actually be inhibition of the reward system. And this is quite different than when we gave them like a video game to play, which is kind of addictive and kind of fun to play, then they had a perfectly normal response. So it shows that something uniquely is going on in their brains, such that they do not respond to music, even though they do respond to lots of other stimuli. Do we know what that is? Yeah. So we have now been able to track it down to a difference in the wiring. And I think Bill has done his homework very well. He's read of all. of our papers because he described exactly what's going on, which is that the auditory part of the brain, which is located in the temporal lobe, is basically not transmitting information in the usual way,

down to the reward centers, which are found in deep structures, the deep nuclei of the striatum, for example. And we can see this when we do brain scans, we can actually trace the white matter paths. These are the axons that connect one part of the brain with another part of the brain. And we can see that it's much weaker. That connection is much weaker in people with this condition compared to average people. And furthermore, we've been able to demonstrate that it's very highly heritable. So when we study twins, for example, we find there's a 50% coherence between the score that one person gets and the score their identical twin gets. So we think it's probably a congenital, you know, rewiring of the brain that leads to this, you know,

curious condition. I don't like to call it a disorder because I think Bill was very articulate in showing how he leads a perfectly, you know, normal and happy and fulfilled life. And that challenges, you know, some of our assumptions about, oh, music being, you know, absolutely necessary. It seems not, even though for the majority of people, it is. Are you a huge music fan? It's how I got into studying music in neuroscience. And so you, as a big music fan, you scanned your own brain. I have on occasion. I know for a fact that I have very strong responses to music,

not only in the brain, but also physiologically, you know, heart rate and respiration and pupil dilation, all of those things. I definitely get a big kick out of music. What's a piece of music? Maybe it's not the Led Zeppelin, but what is a piece of music that gives you that response? Well, it's funny you say that because it would have been Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin, if you had asked me, you know, when I was 14 in 1969, but at some point when I was a late adolescent, I was exposed to classical music. I started learning to play the organ because I wanted

to play like the Moody Blues or the Doors or things like that. And instead my teacher said, no, no, no, you should play Bach. And I started listening to that and I was completely blown away. and I thought, oh, okay, yeah, this is what I want to devote my musical life to, is, you know, the complexity, the depth of Bach and other great composers. Do you think you could be a good musician if you lived with specific musical and Hedonia? Bill was talking about, you know, like it's like driving with the GPS, and you can get around and you have the GPS, but you may not know where you're going. Do you know what I mean?

This is a great description that he gives. I do think there are musicians who more or less play the way. Bill described, that for them it's a set of instructions that you execute. I think probably to be really in the top tier of musicians, you really need to actually feel the emotion so that you can communicate it, because that's sort of the essential extra 1% that makes the difference between a real artist versus a competent musician. And I think if you don't have that, it strikes me as, you know, that it would be quite difficult to be able to be at that top level where people are going to respond to you, not only because you can actually play the right notes in the right order very well,

but also because there's something extra that you're communicating. Painting by numbers is still painting, but it's not Picasso. Good way to put it. Have you thought at all, part of this in just reading about your research, there's an element of, in studying what people love about music, there is an element of predictability that people respond. to as well. And you wonder whether the work that you're doing helps us

understand why certain things click with huge numbers of people. Why popular music becomes popular in some ways. What do you know about that? Yeah. Yeah. So this is an excellent question because we spent sort of 10 years figuring out well, what responds in the brain which regions and

what are their characteristics? Is it dopamine or is it, you know, something else? So that was a lot of work. But then we still haven't answered the question well, why? Why would music give you this response? As I mentioned, it's not a substance, it's not something that you biologically need for survival as such. And I think we've come across the idea that music is a sequence of events that unfold over time. And your brain is extremely good, not only at perceiving that sequence, but also predicting what the next element

will be. So basically, the brain learns what the rules are and is very, very sensitive to any deviation from those rules. This happens in language, for example. It's how we learn language. It's that certain words follow certain other words, but it's also true for music. And what musicians are very capable of is playing with a degree to which something is expected or not. And when I describe my theories to musicians, they always say to me, oh, well, of course, we know that. We know what you're talking about, because especially when I'm performing, for example, if I'm a performer, I don't necessarily always do it the same way. I don't play the next note or whatever it is in exactly the same way.

I might delay it. I might make it softer. I might introduce extra notes. I might put in an ornament if you're playing Baroque organ music. You always do something a little different to give the listener something unexpected. The best music, the music that people love the most, is the one that has a balance between predictability and surprise. humans and other organisms, we're driven a lot by curiosity. We're driven a lot by learning new stuff, by figuring out things, by opening that black box to see what's in there. These are very natural

sort of functions, right? I just can't imagine my life without music. It has been such a driving central force in my life every single day from, you know, beginning to end in some ways. And yet, I found it fascinating that Bill said that he didn't miss it in some ways and that if there was a cure for it, he wouldn't be that interested. What does that tell you about how we think about pleasure? Because I'm sure there are other things that other people would say they couldn't live without that I have no interest in. What does that tell you about how we think about pleasure? There's a central pleasure mechanism in the brain. It's this reward system we keep talking about. I think what it tells us is that you can get to that reward system via different avenues. That our brains are very complexly. wired and there are a hundred different ways that pleasure can be experienced depending in part on your wiring, also dependent

in a big part on your exposure, your environment, your training, your culture, all of those things influence it. And so what it means is in a way that we humans are very versatile. We can drive pleasure from many different sorts of activities,

right? Some people love sports. I don't particularly. Other people love food. I'm with Bill on that. I'm a big food lover. And so different people basically have slightly differently wired brains, whether it's due to genetics and or to environment. It's almost certainly both.

I think this also is a way to argue in favor of diversity, because if everyone was exactly the same as you yourself, the world would be incredibly boring. It would. So the fact that different people have different preferences, you know, different likes, different dislikes, different settings, if you will, their brains are wired up slightly differently. It makes a world go around, right? And it's the source of all of our interactions with other people. And I hear you do this every day when I listen to the current. You always ask, well, what's it like for you to do X or to be this way or to have had that experience, right? You want to understand what is in other people's mind. and we're very social creatures. We like to communicate with other people, and we like to express and share those internal states,

whether they be thoughts or beliefs or wishes or fears or loves. That's what we do when we talk to each other. It's also what we do with music. This is fascinating. It's really about what makes us human in some ways, and that diversity of how we live, and the things that give us pleasure is at the center. of that. Robert, this is really interesting. I'm really glad to have a chance to talk to you. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Matt. Robert Zotore is a professor and Canada research chair at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.