Perfect Pitch and Synesthesia

Oh, hey It's your childhood friend who's living his best life selling hot dogs in Miami Sally Wward, What do we got for you? H I'm still galivanting around the Southwest. I'm getting interviews in person with oologists who are so worth the journey. This one This episode is as fresh as they come. Okaykay? It was recorded like two days ago in Albuquerque with a musical theory and neuroscience expert at Albuquerque's University of New Mexico. This person studied psychology for undergrad, they got a master's in composition, and they got a PhD from the University of Chicago in the History and the Theory of music. So dissertation Musical emotion toward a biologically grounded theory. So when they invited me to come and chat about music in nature and in the human mind, how we listen, how we create it, I packed my bags put them on the New Mexico agenda. So we just recorded this It was so interesting. I was like, let's get it out there And I'm gonna get to it in a moment, but first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who support for as little as a dollar a month and submit your questions ahead of time. You two can join up at patreon dot com slash ologies. Thank you to everyone wearing alllogies Merch from allologogies merch dot comot We have shorter, kid friendly episodes available for free. anywhere you get podcasts, just look for the smallmologies episodes S M O L O G IS. They're their own show We also link in the show notes. Thank you to sponsors of the show too who enable us to donate to a cause of each oologists choosing. It's smart to always have a few financial goals and are really smart when you can setit earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover can at this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year Seriously, all of it And we trust you to make smart decisions After all, you listen to this show. It see terms at disiscover dot com slash credit card. Okay, so this one time I booked a vacation rental for my husband's entire family and it wasn't until after the trip was over that they told me a few of the windows didn't open and one of the beds collapsed. I was on the wrong app. Verbo has a loved by guuest search filter for their top rated vacation rentals with near perfect ratings for Caniness and location and all the good stuff. So no surprises what you see is exactly what you get. Search click. book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you verbo, terms apply. seeee erbo d. com slash trust for details Of course, thank you to everyone who reviews the show. that helps us so much, and I honestly do read them all. Here's a recent nice one from Nasnorb who said that listening to these experts makes them more knowledgeable, wiser happaier and more sure of the goodness in this world. That's music to my ears Speaking of Let's get into it. So I arrived on campus in Albuquerque with my recorder Blazon and producer, spouse, pod mother, musician himself, Jared Sleeper, was with me. In the parking garage, out of the corner of my eye, a tall machioed and spiky red haired figure appeared stylishly dressed. slim navy trousers with leather suspenders had a warm smile famamiliar vi. Oh, it's good to see you It was very stoked. We walked through campus, we passed by some cooing pigeons and some tackling gackles and into the AC of their office with comfy vintage chairs and Oh my go, is this a baby grand? It is a baby grand. Holy wa I tried not to, but I did threaten to quit How did they even get it in the So we settled in a chat about music and the brain, the order behind what can sound like chaos Frog songs, whale Crooners communication versus music, how primates evolved to sing, white noise, brown noise, binural beats, identity through musical genres, neurodivergence and music, perfect pitch, in utero playlists, major and minor emotions a lot more. And then in a very special bonus episode that'll come out in just a few days There's a very frank and unedited discussion between this guest and Jer Sleeper about creating music, getting over blocks dial derivations, inspiration, and how making music can click your brain into different gears. Let's tune in with Associate professor, musician, theorist, and absolutely lovely and genial genius, Dror David Bashwinner David, Bash winner, he him I know it's a big question, but like what is music theory? Is it looking at the mathematics of music? Is it looking at whyy certain chords go together Okay, so the way I think of it is grammar grammar of music and the way I think of this is like, I think it was maybe eighth grade or seventh grade when like we learned how to diagram sentences in you know, just like in English class. Yeah. And I remember we learned about nouns and verbs and was like, whoa, I use nouns and verbs all the time. I had no idea that I was doing that. You had this experience too, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. addictive adverb. Yeah. and it's like no one has to tell you use a noun and then use a verb and then it'll be correct. It's like you do that. Yeah, ye. So it means that there is someome sort of like conceptual background that governs how you speak that you can then learn about, but it's there all the time and you don't thinkink about it. So exists for music too. There is a grammar to osers put things together and even if you're just like singing to your dog or something like that and like you make up a song. You basically end up following this grammar that's there. So it's sort of like making Visible This meshwork, relations exists. That's what music theory is I think it like deepest level. Yeah. And Does that involve also scales and time signatures and I know that I think about four four or Th three, I think is a waltz are those really instinctual or do those kind of matter more to you Depending on what you've heard growing up and what music is around you culturally. Um Yeah. is probably the answer is yes so. No. I mean, well U The reason I think about music in a biological sense, it's not just looking at the music of art culture or something like that And even just like not looking at what humans do Four Basic plates for that exist. And this it's cool. There's this theorist named Tink Taorus in the fourteen fifties, fourteen seventies And he came up with these symbols. It's a circle with a dot in it. Circle with no doub Half circ with a dot, half circle was no doub U The half circle with no dots still exists today and we call it it looks like a C And so we say like that's common time. And so four four is common time. And I'm so sorry, but we could spend an entire hour on just Johannna Stinctaurus and the mensural notation and how three was considered a perfect number before four ever was. But you can also, if you want, after this, take a gander at David's two hundred page dissertation for an even deeper dive Or you can check out the twenty sixteen paper, Music Eemplularity in the National treatises of Johannes Tincturus. If someone else wrote that PhD, the point is vibing to music ilies this intensely complex system behind the octaves and the notes and measures So that's like four four That's a march rhythm But it is mathematical, but just like there's mathematics in nature It just kind of exists and we've come up with this language to identify it Yeah I gonna give you an little example from oututer space, and then I promise it they'll come back to me its okay. I trust you. then The four biggest moons of Jupiter are called the Galan moons. They're like by Gal Leo when he used a telescope and the orrbit Jupiter in attern's ar rhymic pattern been the same now since the time of Galileo The inner one is called EO, IO, and then it goes around like every one point seven seven days which You know, that measurement doesn't matter. We're going to call it two for a second So every two days And then the next one out, Europa growes around every four days. And the next one goes around. E eight days two to four ratio ends up being a one to two ratio So a one to two ratio, David explains, is written in the stars in the moons. The math works out that it is exact. where they are relative to one another is always governed by this two to one ratio. probablyably come back to about a two to one ratio is that ends up being an octave in music? This note if you count the vibrations of the string, they're twice A speeder this note. And that's crazy because well long before we were able to count the vibrations of the string that rapidly, you can just hear that that's an octave. So that means somehow our brains do something like computing the relationship of the number of vibrations of one sound to another So that's an octave relationship It's also If you're just playing a drum beat crazy, but those three moons It's a simple like four on the floor drum beam. Sove your viewer hi hat linked. And that's your EO, the Inplanet And then we'll put the snare drum on the third beat That's a four in the floor beat, but that is basically relationship in terms of drumpy, of what you see in those moons. It means that ratio of like one to two to four is something that governs their movement It's it's so precise that when scientists in the seventeenth century were trying to solve the problem of how to keep time when you're at sea. Uh hu. Litude problem onene of the main ways they were trying to do it is by being able to observe the moons of Jupiter because it's such a precise clock. So common time and a lot of pop music is four or four, but why do some people feel less comfortable making music? Like even for me clapping in unison makes me anxious. I never know when the audience is gonna to gradually like trail off of the clapping or if the musicians are like, no Don't. This is not a clapping song. knock it off or if I'm doing it on the wrong beat. And I saw this old video of Haric Conic Jr. appearing very sweetly exasperated at an audience who was doing their best but clapping on the ones and threes, which are the downbeats and not the tw'os and the fours, which are upbeats. And this apparently comes historically from a conductor lowering their little stick down on the downbeat and then up on the upbeat. And in a lot of pop music, a band will be listening for the drummer to hit the snare on the twos and fours. so clapping on the ones and the threes will mess them up. Hence, some musicians that are cursed with an audience clapping on the ones and threes might even noodle with the time signature for a second to get everyone back into four four and to steer the audience onto the twoes of fours. Have you done this at a concert Have you se people who have? I asked David why I must choose between either silence or ruining things for other people I mean, if you go to church every day, or sorry every Sunday and nobody claps. then you're not gonna to learn You got to learn where to cl. If you go to chur Every Sunday we Everybody's clapping on the songs all the time and it's participory then That's just gonna to be partly what to do. So it really is church. I ended up figuring this out, but like church is like the best training for musicianship. It's really weird. That makes sense because I grew up with Catholic mass And we don't do any any of that there Yeah. What about What about, let's say you weren't raised in a church, You weren't raised with music because you are a bird or you are another animal that is a human. How much of that is is music versus communication. Where is the line between you know, if you hear an owl hooting or we heard pigeons when we walked in or there these gackles in New Mexico that make these Absolutely bonkers alien sounding calls So what is communication and what is song? Okay, so there's many animals that don't hear talk about insects for a second because they're like not related to us. meaneaning hearing evolved in insects separately from how it evolved in vertebrates. And it evolved like a bunch of different times insects. so Many of them have ears on their legs or on their body parts. The prang Manus has ears like in its app Yeah And that derived from like pressure sensation from being able to sense substrate vibrations with their leg parts and then it ends up getting sensitive to sounds. So if you imagine like if we're species and you are, let's say, we're praying menaces and you start being able to detect substrate vibrations as found in whatever way then I can start signaling, I can start making substrate vibrations and manipulate you Mammals especially infant and I can manipulate you to help you sleep. to help you focus so you can learn things So If you look across M Animals, right? This has to be super general, but There's sometimes when things seem like with most animals, it seems like they all have something that's like speech And even with fish that have only like three possible types of vocalization Like there's a fish called the midshipman that I spend a lot of time like researching and it has a hum vocalization where it goes It does it for like an hour All day long Th and it has two other sounds that it makes. So it does that by shaking it swim bladder and that's like a roughly a hundred hertz pitch and it shakes the muscles at about one hundred times a second And a you like your father whose me love music, but are unfamiliar with the how's and the why's of it. So sound waves cause things around them to vibrate. And the vibrations have a frequency. That's the amount of times the wave vibrates in a second. and that's measured and hurts. So lower, deeper sounds have low frequencies of that wave. it makes fewer ups and downs per second, while higher pitched sounds are in the thousands of hertz or kilohertz. And humans can hear between about twenty hertz to twenty kilohertz. Something below our hearing range is called infrasound and above our hearing range is ultrasound. Oh, and amplitude is how tall those waves are and thus how loud, and that's measured in decibels. And if you need more music basics, there's a great site called howmusicworks dot orga that's helping me a bunch. But okay, yes, back to this groaning toadfish But it can do that, same thing it can go And that's like a grunt train. And it has one more vocalization, which is M It's a it's modulating the frequency and the amplitude and That latter one is called the growl So the grunt and the growl are both agonistic in But it's like, get out of here. Yeah. And the hum is alluring and that is much more like like that thing, even though it's one tone plex It functions like an attractive beacon And so that is like a song. Hm The other two things are regulating the behavior of just others that are near them So grunting. not a song. but a low hum to attract mates could be considered banger in fish terms I had this reation revelation when I was reading this really cool article about the zebra fininch Zebrafinch is like one of the best studied birds and It's a bird that learns its song So when you're talking about how the learning process works birds, the zebra fininch 's just like a perfect to study. And they have only a single song And so they make about like twelve other different types of sounds. Some of them are 'sust like I think of like things like when you're in the nest and you're just saying, Hey, what's up? How's it going? And then to the kid when the kids are like, Mumy or like a long call which is and the kids are like, Mumy And the mom's far away. Um aggressive vocalizations to one another aggressive vocalizations to other species, warning vocalizations. There's all these things And then the song is much longer, it's stereotyped eachach male again, composes his own and It's acoustically more complex than if you try to figure out the motor structure try to figure out the learning structure of how the bird learns this It's more complex in that sense feel free to enjoy the paper, Developmental Experience alters information coding in auditory midbrain and fore brain neurons in the journal Developmental Neurobiology, which found that developmental exposure to vocalizations shapes the information coding properties of songbd auditory neurons. So hearing things as little babies shapes how they sing in the future Zebra fininches, they start to learn to sing from a tutor from an elder at about a month after hatching And then they kind of start with some nonsense tunes like a baby just going blah blah, blah, blah, blah, as they get the hang of it. And then over the next two months, this baby Zebra Finch, they continue to learn the males and compose their own little tune. and apparently The audience is tough to please. Females select mates with more complex tunes faster singing rates, and the songs also help the birds recognize their relatives the moment where I was like, Ohh Those other things are speech.. And this one thing that stereotyped That's a display. It's one sided, It's a monologue It's always the same and everybody can hear it is Do you think that human beings speech started with song with notes. and evolved to really specialized sounds. There's this game I've seen played online where A group of people try to get one person at a party to do something very specific, like to do the worm Um on the ground while flapping their arms or something like that. Okay, so everyone decides, well the target person is out of the room And then they come back and they try to guess what they're supposed to do. It's a people pleasers's dream. And so the person just tries to do things that are close to it and the whole group goes, H M when they get farurther away from, you know, if they're like this vase and put it on top of the record player. So The whole group as a whole just goes hm. when they're doing the wrong thing And I was thinking about you and I saw that because I was like, is that song or communication because they are communicating with song. I mean, that's why songs in music is so emotional. and I don't know if there are any hypotheses about Whether or not speech came from song or came from something more musical or tonal. or if I should write my dissertation on it Yeah, you could. Um do Okay. And then You can bust this Fim Fam, if need be. It's not mean M I'mt give you answer. Okay So like what a human is is really like the thing that we think of as a human, but also something that is like shared with chimpanzee. Yeah. Like we have ninety nine percent of our same genes with chimpanzees. Yeah. Like you can look at what chimpanzees Do vocally and do do gestures, like you're saying, they're not using vocal gestures as much, but there's something weird about the great apes and not vocalizing. So if you go back a little bit further to say like Gibbons are our next ancestor and all of them are singers, So Great apes, you know, gorillas, Oanga tens Chen' noise and sometimes they do those play is that they're trying to purposely make a lot of noise and they shake things and it's almost like a dance, like sometimes they do like drumming So they't use noise, but they are they're really communicative with gesture. And they're able to learn sign language and stuff like that, but they just don't do it as much vocally Okay, so great apes, not singing, but drumming. So then why do some primates sing And that has to do something with animals that live on the ground as opposed to in the trees. That' thing that comes from Joseph Jordania, who's like thnomusicologist. It's brilliant brilliant guy that talks about relationship of music how we would have evade or scare away Oh And he actually compares us to skunks. So Joseph Jordania of the University of Melbourne wrote a book titled Why Do People Sing? Music and Human Evolution, as well as a twenty twenty three paper Music as Apisematic Signal, Predator Defense Strategies and Early Human Evolution in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. And he notes in that That a longstanding question that comes with this suggestion is, why do terrestrial apes not sing? He says, I propose that the question should be different Why did early humans not stop singing as virtually all the arboreal species do when they visit the ground Many singing and noisy arboreal species like birds and monkeys maintain silence whenever they visit the ground as a cryptic defense strategy from potential ground predators. However, humans, loudmouths, do not And he proposes that singing Kind of like snake venom and stinky, stinky skunk butts is a warning bus alive So roaring is hard on the vocal chords, but singing can go on for hours. And as Jordania continues, musicality, sense of rhythm bipedalism Long head hair, long legs, strong body odor bit hair and traditions of body painting and cannibalism are explained as predator avoidance tactics It's like a warning display defense strategy So human beings in his hypothesis are just out there being weird and that is what saves them. So while you've been thinking that you sing to attract love and to celebrate the vibrations of the universe and to harmonize with other souls. It just may have kept you here because you're loud and you taste bad What about Whales are whales just out there jamming Are they just doing it for the stim of it? Are they just like justust because they love it Do we know? So like with the whales, there's the two different kinds. There's the ones that are dolphin like that have really high pitch vocalizations that use echolocation And there's the ones that are big and humpback like And they have really low voices. So yes, we need a cetology episode all about whales, but meanwhile, there are balen whales they use a big internal mouth mustache to filter and eat little critters. And then there are the toothed whales. Think of an orca biting your ass And if you need some summer jams, by the way, you can queue up Paul Winter's Songs of the Hpback whale. It was produced by legend Dr. Roger Payne on Bancamp. We'll link to it on our website. And these whale recordings are from the late nineteen sixties, but not that much has changed in the last several million years. We're still learning. And scientists typically think of them as not using echolocation. I have to believe that they must be right. But I when I listened to Hpag whale song, I feel like it has to be doing some echol loocation function. So like low sound travels much better in water been in the air five times faster and farther. And then Sounds of whales can travel like halfway. I mean, it's like five thousand miles It might be halfway around the ro. where Yeah So they You know, the way humpacks do stuff is at the summer They go to the poles And they go eat winter and they come to the equator. they Mate, and that's where the singing happens The singing starts happening before that and presumably it can be heard Plls And so it's like an attractive beacon. and there's like these different places. so I like to think of these like music festivals. like if everyone's like, arere you going to go to tell this year or are you're going to go to Ozo. So if you could imagine like People that go decide to go to Bonuru theyre early start singing. They learn from each other and are singing each other's songs. like it's still a mystery why they don't do it in unison if they're singing the same song. but they Learn from each other what the song is of the season And they're singing that And that's functioning potentially like a beacon that can be heard from extremely far away so that when other whales are deciding especially like female whales ready to mate are deceiding which feeding grants go to. they're being influenced in some way by those They're like, whereere's the party at? Yeah, ye, yeah. So yes, some of the notes in the lowest frequencies, even below our threshold of hearing and whale songs Those can spread between groups nearly eight thousand kilometers apart. according to a twenty twenty two new scientist article titled Whale songs can spread between groups nearly eight thousand kilometers apart. And while tooth whales make sounds with a vocal organ that's in their nose, baen whale Voice boxes have been a bit of a mystery until This twenty twenty four paper, Evolutionary novelties underlie sound productroduction in Baleing whales published in Nature, which explained how scientists were able to harvest three Big floppy dead whale larynxes from sweet beached individuals and they were able to pass air through models of them to understand just how these quote unique laryngeal structures for sound production evolved And whales make all kinds of noises for communicating and even herding fish, but just the males make these really long rambling songs. And I would love to tell you all about the twenty twenty five paper whale song shows language like statistical structure, which applied methods based on infant speech segmentation to eight years worth of humpback recordings. They had a back catalog They ran some numbers and it uncovered whale song, the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language David's theory that whale song is also used for echolocation I feel like a whale scientist should probably weigh in on that, but wait profess of psychology at the Uniity of Buffalo and the director of the neeural and Cgnitive pllasticity Laboratory, Dr. Eduardo Mercado III, has just proposed in his new book, Why whales Sing that what whales scientists have been calling songs are actually a sophisticated form of echolocation similar to what bats do. So if you want more on that hypothesis, you can check out Why Whale Sing by Eduardo Mercotto The third Also, Eduardo Mercoto three times Almost a song and I'm loving it. But yeah, we need a whole episode on whales. So the song is a little bit. I mean, it must be somewhat individual for the individual whale somewhat unique to the invisible whale because it contains pects of like other songs they have known before But it also is very much like trying to match the current song of the group that the whale is in And then the songs like have they have structure that's kind of like Motive Br is phrase grou and Makes sense. What does that mean? So u Almost always structured like an A and a B. So like H That's your A and then your B. and it'll go h And the way it might change, even within the phrase is Mm M. H Mm it might like develop within the phrase, but then also over course of months, it can develop in that way by adding or subtracting elements So the whale songs are highly structured and They do have function And then anything additional like how much they enjoy it. is like that stuff matters, but that isn't isn't going be the thing that something that's kind of like invisible to evolution. We can't interview a whale yet. and so maybe we'll find out later. Now what about Why do certain types of music appeal to different people? Is that mostly learned in cultural? Like my sister married to a thrash metal guitarist. My mom is into motown. I got a niece who loves K pop. My cousin Luke plays the Italian acccordion. and I was goth. Is that identity based or do some people, maybe with different neurod divergences like really like fast? fast beats and others, it might be overwhelming. Do we have any idea why people gravitate towards certain genres or beats or minor versus major keys Nature or nurture? Well Let's get back to nature One thing that articulates us nicely is if you think about and Frogs are super vocal compared to other animals And They made it time and Because it's night, they are distinguishing themselves like solely from vice at least from far enough away David said that frogs will even use the equivalent of a stage and they'll slime up to higher ground to get the word out. And the word is, I'm horny, let's make more of me In the dark, how do you know though, if you're trying to mate with the right gal The thing that most dramatically changes to mark their different specciation is their vocalizations. Yeah. And then the other cool thing about this is like most animals, they often only have like a really simple noise maker. they can't make all these notes. In a sense, it's kind of like with us too. There's not that many notes we can sing. But if you change the rhythm the rhythm and the patterning can make your song really different from someone else's. So like the way that you mark who you are Sonically allows to separate from one another So if you think about like kids in high school Mhm as usings music in that way. first of all, they're doing, they're going out to the pond of the lech and listening for music that's different from what their parents play, right? Like that's really important. Yeah. And then you're gonna if like with the goh thing, like it might be the clothes that attract you first and then pay attention to how in a sense, like the arbitrary patterning of the sounds that the Goth people are doing because you like those people you fit in because of clothes or for some other other reasons So in that sense, it could be totally arbitrary, but you're still going to say like, o, I'm a golf person. I listen to Gh music. and then the more you listen to Gh music becoming part of who you are. So now you alli as you walk around in the world Whenever you hear one of those songs, you're like it has a connection to you and you're like, oh, these are my people in some sense Yeah, it's possible for music to just try to be different arbitrary way just so that that separation of groups can happen and it doesn't have to happen with species, but it's really valuable in culture for you to have like, you know 're for the jocks to be separate from the goough kits for both of them. If you want to somersault into an identity crisis with me, you can feel free to read up on the Death of mononoculture. It has its own Wikipedia page. But essentially back when there were thirteen channels on a TV Jockeys on Coke curated the hits giant groups of people tended to have the same cultural reference points. So There was then a need to say, not me I'm a little different, thanks so much. But now that your algorithm pays more attention to your desires than the devil himself, And trends come so hard and fast that you might as well be dead and buried if you don't have a middle part unless you're above that, like Zendea. Honestly, one million people can log on in the morning, see a photo of you and declare you chopped. So we're essentially like singing frogs in a melting pot We don't realize that our identities are so siloed that we've been tricked into longing for conformity via purchases guided by tech companies. So who are you? What do you actually like Go sit under a tree think about it. You can be anyone you want or you can just you are who you are and it's okay to be that little weirdo. But do Minor keys versus major keys. Do those appeal to different moods or different people And if you want to play a minor versus a major key Just in case people. Yeah, yeah. Like a little like version major Mantic Wh S, would you want to guess Okay, make make me guess. I was gonna say you don't look, but it wont matter if you it won't matter. Minor Yeah Minor What Yeah, but this is hard because I chang the register and everything. That' like that sounds depressing. I like it or? That's minor. Okay. Mhm Light That one's major. I. It's o. It's o major? Yp. Okay. You made that easy I didn't Major That one's minor.. What's the difference? U I mean quickly Yeahah. No, if I I'll do if I do them all in the same octave, like it sounds like what you're doing, you're hearing brightness. like up here This is brighter than if I played it down here, but this is the same chord. It's just up here, it sounds brighter. Here it's darker. Okay. so but if I do both of the chords within the same octave, so this is a C major. And this is C minor U Okay, this is a side seventeen. I've been trying to write it has tried to explain it to me. Joey has also tried to explain it to me. I've talked to Jared about it. Jared has agreed to walk me through it. This is music theory basics If you know a lot about music theory, this might amuse you. If you know nothing, this is just a tip toe through the tulips. of how it starts. And just a heads up, this explanation applies to Western classical music specifically. It does not encompass the whole world. And our very kind brilliant editor, Jake Chafy of jEcmusic d. com went in and added the illustrative piano in here. and Jerret wants you to know that Jake is much more proficient and talented than him Thank you so much. OkayK, let's dive in Jaret goingo on. Okay going to do my best because it's confusing to me as well For some reason, we've decided to make the language of music incredibly confusing. So here we go, simply as possible, buckle up. Okay, first of all All of music is just twelve notes looping indefinitely. We're just gonna to start with whole notes. okay? There are seven of these, and we name them by the first seven letters of the alphabet. A, B, C, D, E F G, o. They loop forever. So after G, you just go back to A In between most of these notes, there is another note dividing them. a note halfway between the whole notes. That's how we get all of music being made with twelve notes. Now, I'm sure you are thinking twelve notes. Hang on. you just said seven notes. And if there's one in between each of those, it should be fourteen notes. Yes. That's why I said most of these notes and why music is so confusing There is an extra note only between most of them So between two of the notes from B to C and from E to F, there is no middle note. All right. It's just one step up instead of two This for me, is one of the most confusing things and why I find music theory so hard is because like why is it randomly and I can't keep the numbers straight, but maybe a lot of people feel that way All right, to make this even more confusing, the note in between the whole notes can be named two different things. Yeah, We name the note in between only in reference to the note on either side of it. Rude. Yes, it's very horrible. So like between A and B, for instance, we would call that either a sharper version of A an A sharp or we could call it a flatter version of B and call it a B flat. It's just but it's the same the same pointo in between A and B That's like when someone calls me Mrs. Sleeper. Or you know what I mean when you're defining ide? Yeah, technique. Sure Sure. Yeah Okay, so all the music comes from these twelve notes. A, A sharp flash, B flat, B, C, C sharp D flat. D, D sharp E flat, E F F sharp G flat, G, G sharp A flat And then for the whole octave, we would land back at A, but higher. Okay Okay, you may be asking yourself, Why don't we say they' twelve notes and they're ABC,F GGH J K L or just call them numbers O, four, five, seven eight, nine n ten, eleven twelve. Yes And I also agree. I have no idea why they don't do that. It seems like it would be easier to grasp, but that's just how it is. Chaos. All right. so that's we're starting there. Keys. Now, what are keys? A key is a collection of seven notes that all sound good together. You'll notice when we play those first ones we did ABCD EFG, they don't sound quite right together We're gonna to start an easier one than the most common one, C. If we start on C and we go C D E F G A B You can see Sounds quite good. This is the C major scale. A ton of songs are written in this.s veryy familiar to us In fact, if you only play the white keys on the piano, you're probably going to be playing in C major. And you're just playing those notes in the whole song. That's like the's palete. That's like your color palette. you're going. Y That's the key. We've decided those all play well together. Now there's no rules if somebody does a little funky thing in there, but yes, for purposes, yes Okay We've identified these patterns of notes and the way we figure out what those seven notes that work well together are, I think the easiest way to remember is this phone number method they call it. You just remember two, two, one, two, two, two one. Each of those numbers is a step up in the notes of those twelve. Now step is a confusing word to use. We're just gonna throw this part out, but just for the people becausecause they'll often say a whole step, which is actually two notes or a half step, which is one. Okay. But just let's not worry about whole half steps. We're just gonna think two, two, one, two, two, two, one. Okay and that those will make a seven Sca fcale, which is a key. Okay. Okay So if I want to play a seven note scale in the key of C major, I would start with C That's the first note in the scale and that's where the scale will get its name from. Okay. And then we do our phone number for major scales. two, two, one, two, two, two, one. So C goo up to skipping C sharp D flat to D And then go up two, skipping D sharp E flat to E. Now we go up only one. We don't skip here to F Then we go back to two, skip F sharp or G flat, whatever you want to call it. G two, we skip again Do you sharpen A flat He Two again, skip a sharp to beef and four be flat up to B and then that's seven. and then we could finish back our final one back too C that's two, two, one, two, two, two, one, and that's a whole oct eightight notes, everythingvery feels right in the world again got land back home And that is the template. two two, one, two, two, two one. So imagine it like like if your phone number were five, five five, two, two one. Yeah. you wanted to call up your Major friend. two, two, one, two, two two one. Nice. Yeah. It sounds like a it also sounds like a car insurance jingle. Exactly. Yeah, I think it makes it easy. That's also where Dor Ri fasoatito, is that? Tw two, one, two, two, two one. Basically. Okay. T one, two, two two two one I guess CDF G, A B C. All right. Okay. So you can create any scale by just starting with the first note where it'll get its name from and then doing the same phone number pattern. two to one, two to two one. So like we start with E, it would be E two to F sharp, two to G one to A, two to B, two to C sharp D sharp and then finally one back to E and optim up. Okay Now, confusingly, that could also be called E, G flat, A flat, A B, D flat, E flat, E, but whatever, That's fine. That's fine.' forget all that. I can't. So what's a minor key. We just take the same formula, but we flatten the third, sixth, and seventh notes. So if C major is CD, E F G, A B, then the key of C minor it would be CD, E flat, F G, A flat, B flat We also we were supposed to cover chords, so I'm just to as fast as I can, major and minor chords.. L as short as a long long story, short as possible. Geez, okay. a major chord is a collection of notes and the same scale that sound good when played together And a chord is named for the first note in the sequence. This is the root note, which we'll say is one in the formula and then is joined by the third and fifth note in the same scale All play at the same time together They make a lovely harmonious sound And if you want to make that chordate minor, you would just flatten the third one down half a step. That sounds sder and spookier. So C major is C E G. And C minor would be C E flat G. You can also call that you flated D sharp. And I actually hate that so much. I understand. I also do. Yeah. but I appreciate it for its mystery. We're just gonna to stop there becausecause there's sevenh. There's nins. There's something called sus suspend. I just I I can't deal with it. It's really weird we're just gonna stop there and that'sords. And You're doing a bonus episode this week that you when we were with David, you guys talked about creating music. when you're tankering around the piano. Are you thinking about any of this Sort of Okay, I'm really bad. I can really only do C major. I basically just memorized a few chords if say C major. there's this whole joke about like most songs are like C, D minor F and G as like those are C major chords in C skpe. And So many songs you can make with those same notes. And I love that Sam Elliot thing about like all music's just well know character It's just true and I don't know, you can make anything with it. But then lately I've been trying to free myself up from it and just not think about it and just like play what I can. But I find it you probably the reason music theory is made like this at all is because really it's used for remembering what I played. Like, you know, trying to come back and go like what was that thing? what was that now I can write down the things and recreate them Yeah, like like you go in reverse and make a recipe after you've tinkkered around. Right. Because otherwise I go nuts being like And ' I'm not good enough at playing sounds. likeike if I just record it, it's very hard for me to reverse engineer Right becausecause I'm just not that good at music. But I think the liberating thing about it is like literally, if you can just learn like some C major, a few chords at C, you can play so many songs and just iterate on those and it's really fun Well, let's go back to minors and majors with David. Yes. And apologies to any actual music theory people who are going well actually me and I really hope I got that right enough for you. It was really hard for you to learn that over several years of crying Yeah and let's remember This is not a PhD This is a podcast. Be kind to us We are doing our best But or how are they used to convey emotion? I can play the alGy theme song in major. Okay PQite of major Okay, ye That's hard. I've never heard in piano Yeah, that's It's so beautif, I gotta do it in mininer just so you can because I can do it a little bit better in minor. Yeah just because ye it sounds very apparent that the song is minor. I know. Yeah, it's because curious I'll try it one more time. Yeah in major I'm going to do it slower No It's funny just because you' composer composer does some like really funky chords. I'll credit to Nick Norurn. his band Islands G band. But so I never even realized that that was a minor H. Yeah. I mean, you don't, yes. Like you don't that is the thing of like you didn't notice you were using nouns and verbs all the time. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so do you think that different Sow like different keys. and tempos, do they affect the brain? in ways that can you know, lift or change our moods. I know that there are sometimes when if I listen to certain music, I run faster and longer. And if I'm depressed, I can put on an old song and my brains out. Okay, so I'll do tempo first. Okay. If you think about all the rhythms that you have in your body, in some sense, like if there's a tempo on the outside world h. There has to in some sense be like inside you So it's basically like if I'm snapping and we were managed to look at EG of your brain We would see that your brain is responding to each of these things in two ways. First of all, like the lead up the b. Like your brain is expecting the next tap and that's like in the beta range. Uh, like a, um Crescendo up to the tap And so that if I left one out, Your brain is going to have the crescendo up to it the. but then doesn't the second thing. The second thing that happens is every time I snap, your brain after the, you know, at the moment of the snap and afterward something else, I think maybe in the gamma range And so if I left one out, we know that you're anticipating it because you have beta leading up to it There's no like response at the gamma frequency. And just quick quick, so brainwaves textbook definition. these are oscillating electrical voltages in the brain. They measure just a few millionths of a volt. And when they get into rhythms with external sources, it's called entntrainment So according to the twenty twenty two paper, review of electroencecephalograph Sal approaches for mental stress assessment, published in the Journal of Neurosciences. These EEG waves are what your brain is cooking up. And they're delta on the low end, starting at around half a hertz up to theta Alpha Beta and then gamma gamma can go up to eighty hertz. Why? you're asking, God, are those not in actually alphabetical order? Because alpha was the first one discovered and then they just sort of cobbled them on from there. But what do your brain frequencies do? Well, they respond to stress, which surprises you not at all. But let's take a quick tour. So according to this paper, delta waves are observed in high levels of deep sleep and are found in the frontocentral brain areas. And remember, these are the slowest ones. So these waves are associated with tiredness and early stages of sleep and with healing and regeneration while we sleep. And this paper says a few minutes of allowing our brains to tune into delta waves can decrease overactivity and stress of anxious thinking Next up are the theeta waves. and this paper says that they show up in situations requiring focus and hypervigilance or during meditation prayer and awareness. So theta waves a little bit faster than delta. they're also detected in anxiety. And this paper says that excessive theta waves are observed in hyperactivity and impulsivity and daydreaming So moving up from there is alpha. That's your normal awake state And regular meditation and relaxation have been shown to enhance alpha waves. say the scientists peopleeople with traumatic stress don't have as much alpha waves as a baseline person. Oo beta, theseese are getting higher frequency. Those kick into high drive during problem solving and decision making, during stress, during overwhelm beta gets you wired. and unable to relax So if you're opening a news app and youre start feeling something different. Hey hello to your pina wav Finally, we've got gamma waves. These are the highest frequency and they involve thinking and learning. And a twenty twenty four article out of MIT announced that There's evidence emerging that GAamma rhythm stimulation can treat neurological disorders through some non invasive sensory modalities like yes music So thoseose frequency bands delta theetta alpha Gamma Those are thingsings that terms that scientists use. and as you're listening to a tempo, it's like you're The your delta waves. synchonize with Pulsing beta in this example was being used. it's much faster. It's being used in a sense to help the brain coordinate with in a sense If we looked at just your delta rhythms likeike a slower Tempo is going to entrain the slower to them rhythm generators that you have. and that slower delta set of rhythm generators end up Just like if you have slow waves on the ocean and like waves can like ride on top of the slow waves in that sense, or even buoys on top of the slow waves That happens in the brain too. So Your slow waves will entrain with that slow rhythm and everything else becomes Almost like, yeah, falls into slots. So Answer is like definitely different tempos do things different. And then connecting it to emotion is it does connect emotion is just There's more steps in that process. Lucky you, there's a hot new twenty twenty five study published in Nature' scientific reports titled Music Tempo mododulates Emotional States, as revealed through EEG Insights, and it wants you to know slow tempo music induced higher theta and alpha power. in the frontal region, while fast tempo increased beta Gamma band power. So slow music lower frequencies. Fast tempo higher frequencies. And between tempo and loudness and pitch and key and melody and rhythm and harmony, tempo, it says, is one of the most important factors in creating emotional responses. And the paper continued that soft, slow, non lyrical music with harmonies and a lack of percussion can significantly lower blood pressure rate and respiratory rate and increase tempo resulted in higher arousal levels. So yeah, there's this wide spectrum of effects and there's even a spectrum of colors of sounds. We're going to get to that. What about minor major? Does that affect emotion Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, huge. U I wrote my whole dissertation on that The simple answers is that things that are in major for whatever reason sound happier and the things that are in minor sound Sder posossible to make music in such a way. L with the algology theme, like no one would listen to that and be like, that's sad. And that's in minor. So That's like actually a good example of the case was like it's not always the case that minor is sadness. And to quote David's thesis, musical emotion toward a biologically grounded theory two sets of intervals Major on the one hand and minor on the other differ from one another in a mathematical sense, he writes. The former set major is harmonically derived and the latter minor Arithmically. So the major imperfect consonances, this one theorist he quotes declares, are arranged according to the nature of sonorous number. So minor imperfect consonances are arranged contrary to the nature of sonorous number. In his thesis, David notes that musical theorists point out that the brain greatly enjoys proportionate things and it despises and abhors proroportionate key quotes Clearly, this is not a one key fits all moods type of situation And I just looked through my email archives. I went back to twenty seventeen. I can't believe that's almost ten years ago. And a note that I sent Nick Thorburn, who wrote our theme music, and I was asking for an eerie electro theme and the type of music that would be playing if I'm creeping around a museum at night justust in case you needed a visual for the vibe of our theme music. So of course, our theme is in a minor key It makes me happier I think it really helps to not labels on things and then try to figure out what is going on in brain like, why, what is major doing in the brain that ends up being different in some way and like changing affect that you experience in some way, in a very subtle way, presumably And then What is it that composers do to like enhance the minorness of a passage Do one more example. I'm gonna to do this in minor. and if I just play this chord, it actually it does kind of sound sad by itself I'm technically still in a minor key But if I do, R. can like do certain things to like almost like bring out the minorness more. So in yeah, just doing that with them Oh, that's so beautiful. It's you know I want you and Jere to talk after this about creating music because I can enjoy it, but my brain doesn't quite create it. But first, can I ask you some questions from listeners? Yeah. OkayK. We're gonna to do this is a lightning round. Lightning. But first, let's donate a little money to a cause of his selection, and David picked the APS International High School, which is a small public school forforming learning for immigrant and refugee students in Albuquerque, New Mexico and through culturally grounded Project based leararning, students and teachers collaborate to solve real world challenges all while building students English language skills and global knowledge. So that donation is headed to Albuquerque's International High School, a small school with gigantic dreams. So thank you to sponsors of Oologies for making our donations every week possible. 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Find a pro for your project at Angie. com Let's get into questions you submitted via patreon. com soashologies. and the one that we picked first was A Smiley Kylie Mica Raccoon and Protect Tarents liivves asked Do plants and fungi make music that we can't hear You know, I've seen those things again Hook up somelectdes. Is that music or does everything kind of have a have a bit of a rhythm in responding to its environment I would say like, I mean, I would love to get the data that comes from any EG that's attached to a plant and like to look at what's going on and they have cyclical processes I think you could get into what those processes are and you could really I think you can learn a lot about your plants. if you could listen to those rhythms that are going on and figure out how they're responding to how much sunlight they have and stuff like that. I mean, you know So I think it's a great question. And if you need to make this your next hyperfocus, I get it. It's called pllant Bioacoustics. and it's a field that looks at how plants cell walls make noises when they grow or they burst. and how plants can detect each other via sound vibrations and even the phenomenon of certain flowers releasing pollen only in the presence of buzzing that matches the flap of the pollinator wings So a twenty twenty three paper in the journal seell titled Plant Bioacoustics, The sound expxression of stress. leaps out of the gate whopper of a dinner party fact. It says plants are not exactly known to be great conversationalists. In this issue of cell, a new study highlights that when stressed by desiccation or cutting injury, tomato and tobacco plants can produce airborne ultrasonic emissions. These sounds are loud enough to be heard by insects and can be analytically categorized using trained neural networks pointing to their potential informative value Are leaves screaming Our pedalss ears is anything real The world is a mysterious place try to take care of it Well, it'll continue to evolve even after we're all dead. But if you want to hear how your plants and fungi are doing or if you're just fully stumped for a gift for your sister in law. There are these little devices. There's something called Plant Wave you put these like little electrodes essentially on a plant. It picks up on tiny changes in conductivity on two points of a plant and then it translates those electroical signals into a wave which is translated into a pitch. This is a process known as data sonification. It sounds like this That was a sound interpretation via pllant wave of electrical signals from a stagghorn fern Plants are giving you oxygen Andesw Fr ferns to babies, Sarah Chips, Luke Lass andb Protectaren's liivves. Grace Conroy Shirley Lose a Novo, eating dog hair for a living, Hana Rilly, all wanted to know in Grace's words, does playing music for a baby have any effects on brain development? Is the Mozart thing real How do we know how babies respond music either with headphones on the belly or So apparently babies can hear at least in the third trimester Music is always good for babies I asked my sister Celeste, AKA Sauce, if she played Thrash Medal for her two wonderful kids when they were but tos. and she said We play metal in the car sometimes, and Lee, her musician husband, used to play riffs in his studio for the kids. We have an old video of Sophia rocking out to scorpions at about eighteen months old James my nephew We'll sometimes sing rat or do lyrics from wriding around with Lee So also has my niece, Sophia played a flying V guitar on stage with her dad in Japan? She has. so Take that harps of chords One of the main things I think is really important like I was it's I feel like it's really, really important for parents to Oh their babies And it doesn't matter like not as a performance. L it does not matter what it sounds like And it doesn't matter if you don't have any songs, but just to kind of like share in that way, I feel like in our culture, We have this idea about like virtuosity, like we associate People who do music is like having some special gift. I think it's That I think is like yeah, I worry about that so much. I feel like it's really important to for everybody to make a little music to like Oh exist with their baby and like through little rhythmic games and stuff like that. those things do really help the nervous. system and they're just like special. They're beautiful and that's the I learn anthropologist nam Ellen Desenki has focused on addressing this question about emotions and music solely through like mother infant communication and about how much magic goes on in there and how much of what we do and theater and music as adults is really just like grows right out of infant communication. Oh, that's so sweet. I know, it's beautiful. And to think about alo parenting where you think about not just parent and a child, but A group of people helping to parent just think about how much richer that is. And if you don't have access to a rock star in your home, if you're like, wait, what was the baby Mozart thing? I'm going to catch you up really quick. So this nineteen ninety three paper in the Journal Nature titled Music and Spatial Task Performance involved thirty six college students given IQ test spatial tasks three times. once after listening to this piece by Mozart Once after listening to ten minutes of a relaxation tape and once after ten minutes of just silence. So IQ test scores in these college kids were highest after listening to the Mozart piece. This news took off. And Gen Z kids, listening, your parents may have purchased classical music CDs in hopes of you solving climate change one day. Did it work Well, one hundred and ten degrees in Paris. Now a twenty ten paper in the Journal of Intelligenceitled intntellectually, Mozart effect, Schmuzart, effect, a meta analysis says that a transient enhancement of performance on spatial tasks, so temporary, in standardized tests after exposure to the first movement allegro Conspiro of the Mozart sonata for two pianos in D major, KV four hundred forty eight. is referred to as the Mozart effect since its first observation in nineteen ninety three. And it continues that these findings turned out to be amazingly hard to replicate, thus leading to an abundance of conflicting results. On the whole, it concludes, there is little evidence left for a specific performance enhancing Mozart effect But don't go yet because a twenty fourteen study in Frontiers titled How musical traraining affects Cgnitive Development, Rhythm, reward, and other modulating variables notes that musical training in children is associated with. tightening of sound sensitivity as well as enhancement in verbal abilities and general reasoning skills and executive functions Be you go duct tape your child's hands to a bassoon Researchers want to remind you that, quote, motivation, reward, and social context of music education how it's delivered are important yet neglected factors affecting the long term benefits of musical training. So you've got to like playing or else you're just gonna to be playing the blues. Speaking of The bls This is such a great question to, Matdie Bicks, Christopher, Blueball, Han the B. wantanted to know Maddie Bicks, first time question, Asskar. Ased, Is there any data or studies done on whether any of the color of the noises white noise, brown noise, pink noise have any effect on the brain. They use white noise to read so they have a clear head, but is there anything more to it Are those just different different hurts Yeah, it's different or white noise is like all frequencies And then cololors of noise just filter out like they make quieter in certain rinders. almost like if you put your hands over the speaker and kind of muted it in some way, you would still hear some of the frequencies coming out and some of them would not be. I don't know. I listen to brown noise just because It's like the deepest like but I usually have to drown out. canan't focus well I'm hear music. So if I work at the cafe, I know it's ridiculous. What do you wear at the cafe? Do you have really loud noise canceling. I really loud noise coming through noise canceling headphones This is so stupid. noise Bown noise. Yeah,ing through noise. So yes, there are many colors of noise, but don't pay too much attention to what the hue is. since white noise It was representative of white light. That's a misnomer or whatever. That's how it got its name It's actually not correlated. But yeah, there's white, brown, Pink, red and blue noises, just hop on YouTube and listen to some, see if any need chill you out. Oh, and if you are wearing headphones, you can also sample some binural beats, which deliver slightly different frequencies to each ear. and that is to modulate the frequency of brainwave oscillations like this delta and theta and alpha gamma we talked about Does it work, though I know you want to know. According to twenty one frrontiers in psychology paper, personersalized theta and beta binural beats for brain entrainment electroencecephalographic analysis Apparently, no different mental conditions seemed to be achieved, they say. But this was a small study with only twenty volunteers and the binural beats were targeted to each individual So there's this other study, twenty twenty three iss binural Beats to Entrain the brain, a systematic review of the effects of binural beat stimulation on brain oscillatory activity and the implications for psychological research and intervention This one essentially said This is very interesting stuff The fourteen studies on record Fder are all really different. We need to get our shit together if we want to know if this could work for people. And David echoes that. He told me that maybe don't listen to the idea that a certain hertz of binural beats is like the frequency of the universe because it's really not true. But yeah, try it out. see what you like And a lot of times these binaural beats have like funky music tracks behind it. He says, and you might just actually be liking the music, which is cool. tootally worth experimenting Um, let me see, I'm looking for some Gilly Nadel, Sarah with an H, Sldor, Mitt Girly all had questions Gilly said what is the connection between music and neurodivergence? Why do so many musicians have autism or slash ADHD? Sarah with an H says my ADHD brain requires music almost all the time. Is there anything in the realm of stimming or in keeping brains focused that are prone to sort of boredom or wanting more stimulation? Yeah, it's a beautiful question. The thing that I find really interesting about this z might be a little bit irrelevant. If you looking at like the neuroscience of creativity, oldlder people when they through a phase of frrontot temporal dementia, offten go through a creative really creative period and it's often musical. And that probably has something to do with a little bit of reucing inhibition From the frontal lobes back to like inhibition onto coral loobes and so That frees up the temporal loobes to be a little bit more generative of melodies. So it It might manifest in earworms Right? likeike tunes that repeat in your head conceivably manifest in generation of ideas, melodic ideas, especially if you have some training and sort of like know how to capture those or your brain is already practiced in that. So the specific answer to that question is like moreore generally Brains neede a certain amount of noise to work on. There's a certain amount of noise that we need and noise in terms of both sound and visual and other people talking and trying to distract you. And it's really different for different people I think it's cool to tune in what is that right amount of noise that helps you do the thing you want to do. Yeah I always wondered we always joke about how Jared and I can hear electricity a lot and we're like, is that have Normal or abnormal brains, I'm gonna to probably say abnormal, but maybe not everyone can You can hear that. And if your're hearing is sensitive to the sound of someone chewing with their mouth open and it makes you want to eject yourself into space, you may love our misophonia episode in case you didn't know that there was a whole word and a study for that. We'll link that in the show notes Many of you though wanted to know about the aging brain. spepecifically Ariel Cberry first time says, how does music affect the brain with folks of dementia? Okay, I thought this was a great question. Greg Lewis said, after reading a New York Times article six months ago about how learning a new art might slow cognition losses for aging people, I decided to learn play the piano at age seventy seven. To encourage myself, I invited thirty plus friends to a recital three months in advance. I had a good time, The recital was fun. Is there any chance that I will keep more of my marbles Yes, Definitely Deinitely. So cool. Whenever I play the drums at my house and I'm like if I'm learning a beat from a book, I'm always like, there should be drums in every nursing home Yeah. because I feel like it's so good for my body and I'm like, this has gotta be yeah So there's a book b a guy who's maybe forty And he decides to learn the guitar for the first time and he makes himself his goal is to play a show a year later. This book sideide notote, is by psychologist and cognitive scientist Gary Marcus and it's called guitar zero. and like that book He goes in and interviews all these including like famous people. 's really beautiful. I think it's like Yeah, it's again, this idea that we tend to think that music You have to go to some fancy music school for music to be a part of your life. but I feel like it's really important First of all, to not think about music in that way way of what you're doing is you're learning in a completely different way than you learn, say facts You're learning with your motor system and When I mentioned drums before, it's like that's great because it's fine to do piano or guitar which uses just like fine motor skills. but if you can be using your four different limbs, and just You know, it doesn't matter once you can play drums, who cares, but the act of working with your large limbs try to make them do something at a certain point in time relative to one another I think that's got to be Really good for your full body cognition for like integrating the parts of yourself. More tips, You might love our Salu Gogy episode with Julia Hotts on why human beings need hobbies. We also have a fun oology episode with Katherine Price, and yes, that is a word, but I am in the trenches working on a menopause episode, which is why this episode came out so quickly because the menopause episode is killing me But it's gonna be great. But that episode, when it comes out will scare you into some real bone building activities We gott to help our bones, all of us. Banging on stuff is also what we need sometimes because life is not always perfect Mari Carey's pitches How about perfect pitch Who's got it What does it mean So relative pitch is probably like the impressive thing. When I have students that do have perfect pitch, I have to find ways to prevent them from using their perfect pitch order to get them to be able to hear other things that people without perfect pitch do naturally. So When when I was mentioning before I was playing like a little chord progression, I mentioned like the that's a one chord and the five chord and the four chord, whatever, they have these different feeling tones basically in a really like extreme logical sense. If someone with perfect pitch heard me playing that They would never have to figure out that such and such is the one chord. They could just be like, those notes are C and E and G and the five chord. They wouldn't have to hear it as functionally related to the one chord. Having perfect pitch is somehow confused in popular culture with being a good musician. and It is the case that the earlier you study music, the more likely you are to have perfect pitch but often have really good musicians who have perfect bitch. but it's probably not causal. Oh wow, okay Mhm So first off, perfect pitch It's actually called absolute pitch. and it means that you can hear a sound and identify the exact note Relative pitch, however, is when you hear a note knowing what it is, and then you can identify the next note relative to it. Absolute pitch. more rare Elephet Gerald had it. Jimi Hendrixs apparently tuned his guitar just by ear. That's very hard to do from what I understand. Beethoven, Selene Deion, Steavie Wonder, Yo Yoma, Brian Wilson, and Mozart by age seven had absolute pitch shouldh you develop it over the summer as a party trick? Maybe? If you're like five because apparently It's one of those things you have to be gifted for and develop at a young age or else your brain is like, I'm not doing that. I've moved on. So you got to kind of start young. Also, speaking a tonal language that relies on pitch variation to get different meanings of words like dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese, That can also make your discernment of pitch much sharper So can autism, some researchers think. And there are some studies going back decades that show study participants with autism demonstrated superior ability for single note identification Who else tends to have better pitch? according to a twenty thirteen paper, Absolute Pitch exhibits phenotypic and genetic overlap with syesthesia in the Journal of Human Molecular genenetics, about a fifth of people with absolute pitch also experience syesthesia where input of one sense, like a sound, triggers a totally different sensory experience, like color or a taste. So one person's bug is another's feature. lastast listener question innastetia. Let's talk about it in a real quick nutshell. Claire McManis, Karen Oosk If's a soter Madeline Stanton Meghan M. Metzo in the middle, Natalie Snesthesia, Abby, Kelly D. Morg Cantini, Greg Losis's wife, Fern, Claire McManna said, as a syynastthate who experiences chromesthesia or musical synesthesia, seeing colors and shapes while hearing music. I'm curious what you think is happening in our brain. They've always thought of it as a way of seeing or interpreting sound waves And I understand I have a little bit of syesthesia too. I understand that the different parts of the brain are kind of talking to each other that Maybe not everyone has those kind of wires connecting. What's what you have that too I do have it for like different numbers and years or different colors and sometimes experiences will be different colors. And I feel like it's fading a little bit as an adult. and maybe that's just because my brain is too consumed with my phone or something. It's not creating as much Do you have any kind of syesthesia I don't think I do, but I did have I do have a student is a really brilliant student. she's blind. And and composes music and She has like a Credible H by which I mean play a note, doesn't just hear that one note. She hears all the upper resonances of it. and has conscious access to them, which That's very unusual and So she experiences be Can't remember how much color is a big deal for her in hearing sound Mixture. and smell and taste. go along with notes. So other thing that's really interesting, like it doesn't matter what instrument is playing the note. just going to play Heres just one note this is Uhm. Uh, and That note, it wouldn't matter if a different instrument playing it it would still have that feeling tone But If you play that that was a C. if I play a C and octave up It ends up being a different different synesthetic experience for her or a docted down. So it's not like all C's have the same one and then I've asked her some things Um, I remember this in this case was a D. And u I think she said that This D combined with This be flat ends up being something like B Blueberries. Yeah. Cereal Cereal and blueberries And then but I was like, okay, what's so what happens? So if you play that, it ends up being like cereal with blueberries. and I was like, what if you keep these two notes If play this one instead, that changes it technically from a B flat major chord to a D minor chord. So a different chord, but you still have these notes and then ended up being something like Blueberries and cream There's some way in which it's still like similar ingredients, but it's still changes and these things are consistent for her from day to day pretty much. So it's not really she's not making them up She has her brain is somehow really using All of these sensory systems to Pay attention to sound. Yeah I mean You would think that someone who's blind doesn't use their visual cortex, but the visual cortex is not really cortex, it's like spatial cortex So people that are blind are using different senses to Fh out what's going on in space God Yes. So that's what echolocation does in other animals even like what spiders do with their webs, which is a kind of new Mordeur as this scientist at Oxford published couple years ago about how orb weaving spiders tune their webs like guitar strings. Yeah. Yeah, it's really brilliant and sort of nowhere, know what kind of animal is in there web and where it is based on being like auditory perception. And the mole crricket, according to the nineteen seventy paper, the mechanism and efficiency of sound production in mole crickets This little cute little baby. builds a double mouth horn shaped burrow for singing and it contains a bulb probably tunes the horn to act as a resistive load to the vibrating wings. What they do is they dig a burrow, right? The entrance is in the shape of a trumpet It's like if you mounted a bullhorn on your chimney Duck your head into the fireplace and screamed I'm single, but yes, back to beautifully crossed wires I have a friend Micah who has no sense of smell, but he's a musician and when he's mixing music He can tell when something is is flat or too sharp because it tastes metallic to him. He's just he has amazing like such a gift for that, but worst thing about the job worst thing about what you do An or a song that you cannot hear I do. I mean, yeah earworms, you know, like yeah, there's I don't know. I get to do whatever I want. But I I'm not very good at writing papers or I'm not good at answering emails I don't know, E is bad E is bad. Every I don't like I don't the job. I think's There are certain things I am not good at for the job I think grading anything in an art space is probably. Yeah, but I don't I purposely don't teach composition for that reason. I teach theory because theory is like, did you spell the chord? is the chord major or minor. Yeah. It's not Like, why'd you do a major accord there? Maybe you could have done, you know, something else. There's more mathemat. Yeah, yes, exactly. What about what you love about it That is that the final question? Yeah, final question. before I before I put you and Jared on the mic. yeah. Taking that example of the spider Like the web ends up being this extension of just the spider's body but extension into space of your sensory apparatus and Um tuning into cognitively to like the vibrations can figure out what's going on around you And there has to be resonance somewhere inside the spider to be able to detect those vibrations and then do a logical deduction. on them through your system, and the spider doesn't know that it's doing it Um so I think like, yeah, the The way general culture tends to see music is is imagine that it is something that's just invented by humans and we just like what we were raised listening to and that it's just ic pleasure is just like pleasure seeking and that it doesn't have any function I think of it much more like Almost like the spider thing. And I'm going back to like mother in communication They're not separate beings The music is like a thing that makes them a meta being. And if like the three of us all play music together right now makes us a kind of like meta being for a moment There's a scientist named Victor. Muller I remember' front but somewhere in Germ And he studies brains of two people simultaneously with EEG And so He studied it with people kissing and with them playing music together And in both cases, what happens, what you see is if you look at the EEGs across two people's brains simultaneously when they're doing something that coordinates them you end up seeing that there's some parts of your brain say that are more coordinated parts of my brain than they are with even other parts of your own brain. Oh wow. So that's really this concept that you and I' use when we're playing music talking presumably when we're sharing ideas There's sort of like a third being that is the combination of the two of us. And you can enjoy the twenty twenty six paper Nonlinear coupling Dynamics withithin and betweenetween Brains during romantic kissing as compared to joint passive tasks But yes, this phenomenon is called interbrain synchronization. and it's observed notot only during music making but also in playing computer or chess games colloaborating with a team, making decisions and face Music is more than just, you know, a pop song on the radio It is somehow the language of connection between people and the things that that matter about that connection. I would love to explore making more music and it's something that for some reason is a real challenge for me in college. I found like organic chemistry easier to understand. and I was bad at organic chemistry, but my