Unexplainable - How does music move us? (feat. Sylvan Esso's Amelia Meath)

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Music can give us goosebumps. It can make us cry. It can make us move. How? Guests: Amelia Meath, songwriter and singer in Sylvan Esso; Elizabeth Margulis,  director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠We read every email.Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anyone who listens to Unexplainable knows that music is really important to me. So I want an amazing sound system. But I also want something that's easy. It just works. Sonos delivers on all fronts. The sound is incredible, and my Sonos system follows me wherever I go. I can mix and match speakers in any room in my apartment, louder in the living room, quieter in the kitchen. And the Sonos app makes it all super easy.

Visit Sonos.com and build your system. So knows. Love the sound. Feel the system. One of my favorite bands, Sylvan Esso, just released this new album, Ow Infinity. And there's one particular track I just can't stop listening to. It's called Back Again. It starts with this repeated synth line. And the first time I heard it, I started counting with the first note. One, two, three, four. This goes on for a while. The bass and the singer come in. One, two, three, four.

It seems like it's just this normal groove. But then, all of a sudden, it's like that synth line is totally out of whack. The first time I heard this, I honestly got goosebumps. Like, something weird and awesome was clearly happening here. And the more I listened to it, I started realizing. that the beat itself had suddenly shifted forward, which changed up the whole way I was hearing the song. So this is going to get a little music nerdy for a second,

but just stick with me. It's all about which notes are emphasized and where they sit with the beat. It's not always easy to hear this, so I'm going to use a trick from a drum teacher I once had and translate the music into words. So this is the way that I was listening intuitively. This is the way that I was listening intuitively. But that's not how Sylvanesso wants you to feel the rhythm.

They want you to feel it more like this. This is the way that I was listening intuitively. This is the way that I was listening intuitively. Yes, I know that was weird. But that weirdness is what happens when you shift the emphasis of a whole line one syllable over. And that's exactly what Silvanesso is doing here. They're using a false downbeat. One, two, three, four.

It doesn't come in on the downbeat like you'd expect. It comes right before it. One, two, three, four. It almost leans into it. And that's how you get something that sounds like, this is the way that I was listening. The drumbeat just pulls the rug out. Yeah, because it changes up where you think the one is.

That's Amelia Meath from Silvanessa. All of a sudden, you realize, you're pulled from where you thought you were into a different place, and it focuses everything, and makes you go like, whoa. So it drags you into the song. You were in the sky, and then you're, like, kind of brought down into the ground. Every time I listen to the drums hit,

I get this, like, physical charge up my spine. And at one point, when I was listening to the song for the 20th time, I was just like, what is going on here? How are these beeps and boobs making me have this like primal nervous system reaction? You know, I think about that a lot. So I called up Elizabeth Margulis, who heads up the music cognition lab at Princeton.

I think it's a question that can seem superficial or something like that. But as I've gone through my career, it's come to seem more and more like, we could answer it, there are a lot of things we would understand that we don't right now. Today on Unexplainable, I talked to someone who makes music, and I talk to a scientist who studies it to try and figure out, how does music do this, Taz? Before she was in Silvanesso, before she was in Mountain Man, for the real meath heads out

there, before she even got too big for a car seat, Amelia would sit and listen to the radio. I was in the back of my father's purple minivan, and the who's behind blue eyes came on. And I was like three. But I remember the weird feeling of music felt like a magical spell. Does music still kind of feel magical or mysterious to you? Why it works, why it makes us feel things? Absolutely. I mean, I write music in a really strange way and that I don't have an instrument that I play with.

I, like, write in the air primarily and then work with other people to make arrangement. What does that mean? Right in the air? So I'll go, like, what kind of song do I want to write today? And then I'll go like, hmm, hmm. And then I'll write, I'm writing a song. And then eventually I'll get a whole melodic line and a chorus and a bridge. And then I'll record that and bring it to my collaborator, Nick, Sandborn. And then we will make the arrangement together. I'm writing a song.

I'm writing, writing, writing a, writing a song. I'm writing a song. I'm writing a song. I know when a song is on the right track for me, because usually it elicits an emotional reaction in me. It makes me feel as if I have my hand on the electric line. Hmm. How do you think that happens?

I think about it all the time. Like, the way that we've figured out how to talk about music in general, when you say it too precisely, it kind of zaps the thing of its effervescence or of its magical quality. And I think that when it comes down to it, the thing that I like most about music is it not being beautiful. What do you mean? Well, I think it's really easy when you start making music to decide that what it has to be is the most beautiful thing that anyone has ever heard. And actually, if you make a piece of music that is just beautiful, it's really boring.

There's no surprise. And I think the thing that makes us excited is the surprise, is the elements of grading, just position, changing. This idea that music impacts us because it surprises us, it's actually been the prevailing scientific theory for decades. Yeah, for the past half a century or even more, psychology and neuroscience have been really into this idea. that music is choreographing your expectations.

That's Elizabeth again, the scientist. As you're listening, you have some sense of what it's probably going to come next. And when the music does something surprising, so it deviates a little bit from what you thought was going to happen. That's really an engine of emotional response. That's where things get really engaging. I think the Sylvan Esso song I played at the top, It's the perfect example of this prevailing scientific theory Elizabeth is laying out.

You listen to a song, you get a sense of the pattern. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, three. The drums come in, the whole thing changes, and you get this moment of real surprise. It's moments like those people most frequently report chills responses to music. The hair on their arms standing on end and like shivers down there. spine and that kind of a strong emotional response. Okay, so that feels persuasive to me. But at the same time, there's all this music that I listen to that I would not say is particularly surprising.

Like, I love Steve Reich. You know, he's known for these endless loops, not for like big, shocking bass drops or something. And when I listen to his music, I feel like I'm in some sort of a trans like stayed and actually I feel like I'm getting enjoyment from that. I'm not waiting for when the pattern changes. I think that you are pointing to what, you know, I think even proponents of the expectation violation account would agree is, you know, there's a whole bunch of other things going on too, right? It's not just surprise. And one of the clearest pieces of evidence for that is that, you know, not only can we listen to music that's, you know, not surprising and still derive great pleasure from it, but also even when music starts out surprising, you know,

we tend to listen to it and relisten to it thousands of times. And by then, you know, we definitely know what happens in that song. So what else explains why I'm drawn to listen to music that's so, like, not surprising? Yeah. So another idea is that as you listen to something repeatedly, aspects of the sound that were really not audible to you at first come to the foreground and become noticeable. So to give you an example of what I mean, there is an effect with speech called semantic satiation, where you can just take a phrase or a word and repeat it about. bunch of times, and you start having this kind of really clear sense of weird things that are

happening in the word itself. Right. Like if you say moist to me, I'll think moist of something that is moist. Moist. But if you say it a hundred times. Moist. Then the whole way that the oi sounds, that starts feeling really trippy, right? You kind of lose track of what it typically refers to.

Moist. So that's just kind of a great demonstration. of, you know, in language, what could be claimed to happen in music when you hear something repeatedly, which is now maybe the first time you just kind of heard the melody, but when you keep hearing it, you are able to kind of tunnel into something really fine-grained and nuanced about how the guitar is moving from, you know, one string to another or something. That is where some of the richness and evocativeness may be of that song lies. Elizabeth argues that when we hear something for the first time, we're still figuring out what's

going on, and we're processing what we're hearing with the more conscious, thinky parts of our brain, like the frontal cortex. But when that music gets repeated, when we hear it over and over, we process more of that sound with other areas of our brain, like the basal ganglia, you know, areas that are involved with automatic or habitual behavior? Think of kind of over-learned motor sequences, like brushing your teeth, right? You don't have to, like, do a lot of thought about how that works mechanically. It kind of can operate on automatic pilot. The more we listen, the more we get into a groove, and that frees up the rest of our attention.

So you're able to kind of rove to these other levels of what might be going on. So when I'm listening to a Steve Reich piece, like this one, which is one of my favorites, called New York Counterpoint, it takes a bit, but eventually that clarinet line, you know, dun, dun, dun, da. My brain kind of ingests it and starts running on autopilot, and I can start hearing the way all these other parts overlap and fit together. And when those start becoming automatic, another part starts to jump out. Ryshe's music often has these beautiful melodies, what he calls resulting patterns, that aren't necessarily played by a single instrument. Instead, they kind of emerge from multiple different instruments playing off each other.

And because my brain is running on autopilot, I can go look for them. Can you tell me about some of the research you've done on repetition and how it affects the way people listen to music? Yeah, so I took these excerpts of music by 20th century composers, and I played them for people who didn't really listen to this kind of challenging contemporary art music. Who were the 20th century composers you played? It was Barrio and Carter. Okay. Who really expressly avoided this kind of literal repetition. And I'd just taken clips of music from these composers, and I'd just in the most brutish, obnoxious way, gone in and audio-edited them to just grab out little bits and then copy and paste them and put them back in.

So I was kind of surgically in this really crude manner injecting the most obvious kinds of repetition. And so then I could play participants either the original example or these examples that had repetition added. And the task they were doing was just rating how much they enjoyed the excerpt and how likely they thought it was to have been crafted by a human composer rather than randomly generated by a computer. And that simple change not only made the music more enjoyable for people, but, but also made them think that it was more likely to have been composed by a human. Barry, I was like rolling over in his grave. I know. This was very upsetting to some people, but this study is simply saying that when you're listening to music,

you know, this unfamiliar for the first time, repetition really is just an automatic tool. And in fact, I reported on this at a conference of professional PhD holding music theorists and a very senior member of that community did come up to me afterwards and say, you know, I just have to confess, I liked the repetitive version more too. Okay, that honestly, I find this fascinating because Berrio is probably not out there to, you know, write a billboard hit, right?

He's not trying to make the most enjoyable music. He's explicitly avoiding repetition so that he can make something that maybe is more challenging, that maybe actually is something you're really. always consciously thinking about. Exactly. But I think what's interesting in those cases still is that we then tend to kind of record those and then listen to them again and again. Yeah. So that this repeated way of orienting to sound, I think is the case even in some situations when people are listening to music that itself is avoiding repetition.

It's interesting you say that because I asked a man. Amelia about performing her songs, specifically about performing, Hey Mommy, which is one of her earliest, most famous songs. And I asked her what it felt like to perform that song, you know, especially one that repetitive, thousands of times over and over again. Does it get boring? And she told me absolutely not. The repetition changes this song all the time.

That every single time she performs it, she feels something new. interesting. It's one of the weirder parts about being a performer. If you can actually be present and paying attention to what's happening when you're singing a song for the 2000th time, you

can find all of the weird intricacies, newness. Also, like, I'm a completely different person singing to the backups of my 23-year-old self. Damn. Yeah. It's insane. It is a weird

kind of live time travel. And it just keeps on getting weird. I love that so much because I think that's true for listeners to a certain extent as well. We know that when people listen to songs, another really common response is to have a very vivid kind of imagining or a very vivid personal memory from your own life. So this kind of quasi-transportive element, I think can be the case for performers but also for listeners. Are you basically saying it's repetition? Like, that's the thing that lets music give us these powerful experiences? You know, I think that if you talk a lot to musicians, and I, you know, myself went to a music

conservatory, trained as a pianist, there often is this sense that kind of repetition is kind of a drag or something. So I feel like it needs like a good defense attorney. It needs like an apologist to like help people see that repetition isn't. just trivial or something like that, but it's actually an important way that music is able to do what it does. I guess I'm curious if you have any questions about how this works, right? Like you are a composer, you're a touring musician. You obviously feel it working, but do you have any questions about how it actually works that you might want me to pose to a scientist? Yeah. I'd love that.

In a minute, we try to find out the answers to some of Amelia's questions. Like, why does music make us want to move? And how does it make us cry? Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music. All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room. You got to grab something from the kitchen.

You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple speakers to try out, so I've got to move to here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall. I get in here to the kitchen, and I got a brand new Sonos play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer, and yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using the airplay. so I can make it louder in the kitchen

without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy, and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp, they've got great bass, and I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos play. It packs this truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So, I don't know, if I want to head outside for a minute, it's super easy. and yeah, pretty nice out.

Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system. I feel like when I listen to stories about music and science, the two things kind of end up separate. You have this musician describing what they made and how they made it, and then the scientist comes in and does their best to explain everything that's going on. The musician doesn't always get a chance to really, be in that conversation. So I was really excited that Amelia had a bunch of questions she wanted to ask.

And I was even more excited to find out that Elizabeth, the scientist I talked to, is actually a Sylvan S.O. Superfan. In fact, my entire family, so all generations are fans. All generations. How many generations? Well, my household happens to have, you know, Alpha Z, millennial, and X. Wow. Okay. And all Sylvan Esau? Also Vanessa from top to bottom, yep. Okay, so here's Amelia's first question. Why do people really love dance music and moving together in the dark? Or even more fundamentally, why does music make us want to move in the first place?

Yeah, I would like to know that. So this is a great question. When it comes to music, it tends to activate, for example, motor areas of the brain. even when we're just passively listening and sitting still not moving at all. What does that mean the motor areas of our brain? Is that a specific part of the brain? Or is it a more like general way of talking? No, it's really quite literal.

So it's just exactly the circuitry that you'd use to plan movement that you're overtly making in the world. And it's also the way the rhythm sits within the meter. when you have the right amount of syncopation, so you're able to generate predictions about where the next note is going to be, but it's kind of off slightly with exactly what you were expecting that can increase the urge to move.

It's like something that's just at a reach. The groove gets you up, and then that slight syncopation makes you want to stretch for it and move even more. Like you're almost participating in the music, not just listening to it. Music often draws us out of ourselves.

Instead of feeling like we're studying some stimulus that's out there in the environment, it can feel like we're a part of it, right? You're kind of singing through or imitating it in your own head. So when people describe their really peak experiences of music, they often use language around having a sense that they merged with the music. There's more of a sense of, shared subjectivity. And it just sets up a different kind of way of being with other people.

There might just be a pretty deep connection between rhythm and motion. Like, just think about all those YouTube videos of toddlers dance into their favorite songs. And there's some evidence that that kind of regular pattern in sound is special. So when you make lights flash, for example, in metric patterns. You try to have a visual beat. It doesn't seem to have the same effect. It doesn't seem to entrain you and make you kind of want to move

in the same way that music with a beat can. Why that might be the case, people speculate all the time and make all kinds of origin stories around that. We don't know for sure. Okay, great. Love a sound mystery. Yeah, right.

All right. Here's Amelia's second question. I'd like to know about why people cry when they hear music. Like something that makes me cry all the time is the bridge of teenage dream, the Katie Perry song. When she goes into that beautiful cascade, that makes me cry. It's a great song. It's a great song. But like, why does that happen?

Yeah. So one of the responses that's been really well-studied is chills responses to music. So when your hair stands on end and your hair stands on end, have shivers down your spine. And, you know, as we kind of described earlier, at these moments where the music is suddenly much larger or there's some kind of surprising turn, those tend to be the moments when people have that kind of a response. But they also tend to be contagious.

So, you know, like if other people, you're at a concert and the audience is wrapped, right? And other people are having this really powerful experience that can kind of affect. the strength of the emotion that you're experiencing. Yeah, I feel like this brings together both of those things we've been talking about, the surprise and the repetition. Like, repetition allows music to burrow into this more primal part of our processing. And then when we get surprised down there, it can impact us more viscerally. I don't know.

Is that too metaphorical? No, that's really well said. I haven't thought about it in quite that way. it strikes me as correct. Yeah. Okay. Okay. One more thing, Amelia was wondering. Maybe it said it's like a different language, you know? Or like beeps and boops are simply the words that you and I are saying to each other, right? Like, is it that we actually know a different language that we like can't actually speak that we need other instruments to make? Should we be thinking about music as a kind of language? Or is it a totally different thing?

Well, people have thought about it so much as a type of language because in the cognitive sciences, researchers studied language much more and much before they studied music. So then by the time people got around to studying music, there were all these models and tools and ways of thinking that had been developed for language that people then transferred over and used to try to study music. And so what I really enjoy doing is trying to really think the other way around. What if we started from music in this first principles way and didn't think of it as a language? Where would that take us? And then would that help us understand parts of language even that have been a little bit opaque to us because of the frames we've been using? One less thing I'm curious about. Amelia was telling me that music feels like magic.

And then when she said that, she immediately apologized and she was like, I know that this is a science podcast, so you probably don't like the magic word. Do you think that understanding music through the lens of science makes it less magical? I would really never want to be dedicating my life to eradicating the magic from this sphere of human activity that we treasure so much. Absolutely the other way around. It's trying to see what. we can learn from these experiences that feel really magical, that can help give us purchase and give us insight on kind of what makes us tick in a way that could be useful for maybe increasing

the magic in our lives. And by no measure have we figured out how music gets us to feel things. But, you know, it is really exciting that this field that I work in of music perception and cognition has been growing rapidly. I mean, when I finished my PhD, it was not really a thing. It was like you did another thing and you kind of like worked this in from the sidelines. And now people really are training in this specialty and there are like many labs devoted to this topic specifically. So it's a really exciting time and I feel very optimistic about the future. When you talk about the feeling of magic, what is that?

feeling. It's like you're in the darkness and you've been walking along for a long time and then all of a sudden you see a warm light through the trees and you know that you can get to it. It's the thing that makes you feel

like you are alive with other people and they understand. you. You're able to taste your life in a different way. That's what it's like. This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Salataraff, fact-checking from Colleen Barrett, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. The music that wasn't from Silvanesso, Steve Reich, Katie Perry, The Who, and Luciano Berrio was from me. Meredith Haddonaut runs the show. Valerie Schenckman, Jacob Reynolds, and Kareem Karea are the fact that cartilage is one of the slipperiest substances in the world,

five times slipperier than ice on ice. And Bird Pinkerton pushed the door open and found herself back at 190th Street Station. Behind her, the door suddenly slammed shut. And she made sure to stand clear. So that's where those creepy subway doors lead to, she thought, as she heard the rumble of the train approaching the station. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick.

for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you want to catch our Monday episodes on video, find us on Netflix. And if you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you, as always. You can email us at Unexplainable at Vox.com, or if you'd like to support the show, join Vox, become a member.

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the birthday playlists, the new TV show, the exciting new game you just got. And for the nerds out there, Sonos does have amazing frequency response and extremely low harmonic distortion. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.