Animal Vocalizations and Social Connection

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So Culturelle probiotics, the science of a boring gut can see website for details Oh, it's summer. Pe are getting out of town. They're vising family. They're seeing the sights, and I love it. One thing I don't love is showing up somewhere that does not deliver. And that is where Verbo removes the guesswork. Their loved by guest filter lists their top rated vacation rentals. but the preremier host filter ultimate travel hack. These are the hosts delivering creme de la Creme experience near pererfect acceptance rates, zero cancellations, and just above and beyond reviews. So when you show up, you know exactly what you're getting. Book today on the Verbo app. If you know you erbo, terms apply. See verbo d. com slash trust for details Oh, hey, It's your neighbor who's doing throwing knives in the backyard in the middle of the day again. What's his deal? Anyway? I think his wife has a podcast or something? Jaret's sleeper here That's right. It's your pod mother And I'm here with a bonus episode. It's like a little DVD extra, a special feature, a companion piece biomusicology episode that went up earlier this week and yeah, did we say it would go up Friday and now it's Saturday night? Sure But who's really keeping track of stuff like that Allally invited me to sit in and ask some more questions of the incredible guest, Dr. David Bashwinner. She said it's because I make music sometimes, and she thought it might be interesting to have someone who sometimes does that ask some questions. And I thought, well, I'm so honored that you asked me to do that. sure. I'd love to Also, you know what's so crazy? after the interview, Dror Bashner and I realized I went to a whole bunch of grade school with his little brother. Isn't that so weird? Isn't the world so small and weird Spooky stuff. And that's just one of the sorts of things we talk about, spooky stuff on this very bonus episode, which means it's more raw than usual and doesn't have any asides or patron questions or anything like that. But hopefully you will enjoy it anyway and come along with us as we talk about a whole bunch more bio musicology stuff like the weird experience of creation, the weird spooky experience of creation, where creativity may come from. Whether or not animals use instruments, whether or not the twelve note scale exists in nature amongst the animals, synthesizers While we instinctively know the difference between purring and growling and more with biomusicologist Dr. David Bashwinner I'm very excited and' very honored to be allowed to do this. This is fun. I have a lot of Be me too, I can't believe I got to meet both of you in a single day. Well, this is so funny because this happened a little bit when I do get to tag along on Allie's, uh,h, interviews I always feel like I get to be like in the in the in the ask not smart questions thing, I get to ask the really dumb ones, you know. I really go into the conspiracy realm with nuclear physicists and stuff. And I ask like, did the aliens teach us this? tellell me the truth, you know, whatever. But so I'm really excited about this. Okay, I'm going try to keep it to that realm of creation of music because I find that process very Mysterious and mystical Okay, one here, I'll start with this one. My experience of creation, at least when I think it is good, is that it comes from somewhere else rather than from myself. That there's a channeling feeling that happens And sometimes when I'm trying to make it from myself or it's very frustrating. It like doesn't happen, it doesn't come So I'm curious if there is any kind of I lo what you said at the end of the interview about this unifying feeling, this like meta being that is created by music. So is there anything in your field of study that speaks to this experience of inspiration or it coming from elsewhere. The way music sometimes flows and sometimes won't come at all I mean, yes Yeah, one of the first papers I did in neuroscience was like, it ended up being about Default mode network sometimes because like that's somehow associated with creativity. And so like the way it's defined is like in the nineties it's Reichl. I can't remember Reichl's first name, but he has the first paper, I think on the default mode network. and maybe that was two thousand one. But leading up to that You know, he and other researchers would be like, it's weird. We give someone a task And we you know, we see certain things light up, and then we tell them to just look at the at the center of the screen when there's no task. And it's not like every the brains just going to sleep are doing less stuff. It's like doing something totally different. So there's certain regions are more active when you're not doing anything, then when you're doing The thing. For some reason, like default mode network gets like I don't know, I just like it's gotten like a little warped about what it means in like popular sense So once researchers like my colleague Rex Youunng has done a lot of work on this and when you get people in the Sinner who are being creative who are doing divergent thinking, for instance Like tell me all the things you could do A when you're thinking of those things or people who do that better than others seems to be a little bit more activity in the default mode network. the default mode network is connected with like your memory but it's complex because sometimes aboutout like generating completely new thoughts that are not memory based, but sometimes it might be Maybe you can't do that without your memory in some way. So Yeah, that's actually kind of does into little question I had about instruments and just sounds and how they relate to the development of music, new sounds. That like what you were just saying, can you make something new that's not iterating off memory? Maybe probably not. But like okay, so something I've been fascinated about thinking about modern music is in some ways it feels like cool thing happened for a long time. like with every development technology like electricity, you get this electric guitar down, the synthesizer is invented. Sampling is a thing that becomes possible with like computers and how those all be comeome repurposed into a new instrument And that sometimes now it feels like We figured all of the sounds out we could make. and now there's iterations and remixing happening with like I'm gonna take this sound of like sixtyies D O and then I'm gonna mix in, you know this weird sampling thing from scratch or something like that I'm wondering Do you think Can we make new sounds? Like are there going be new instruments Or like how does that impact the creation of music Are new things under the sun possible or are we just reiterating things that have existed since we were banging on rocks. I think synthesis like synthesis Totally new and everything that comes from it Really What do you mean? Like in what sense Um, because synthesis when we say synthesis on synthesizer it's liter isn't it literally like creating a vibration hurts a sequence from scratch and that's basically mimicking what we're doing with instruments. It ends up being really useful to have a keyboard that has patches already there that can mimic instruments because we like to hear those things. So it's like if you're making a piece with Snth you need to have like your pads all in one place and your monocynth's in one place and your bass sounds in one place and your drum sounds in one place Like you need to label them that way because That's how our minds create things. but That's Serry If you just think about like the fact that a synth, like you could start with a sign tone and then If you just add one more sine tone and do the binaural beats thing I was talking about before, you can just move the number of herz it's at a tiny bit and you can just create a rhythm out of it. C add in one other thing and that kind of doesn't really exist just like in nature. It's certainly not imitating anything. And if you add just one more thing to that, let's say you just add a third oscillator that's maybe maybe that third oscillator is doing Um Rhythm You now all of a sudden have something that is infinitely complex, even though it might still be really simple, but it's just three things like you can't predict what's going to happen and It doesn't have anything to do with An that you've Well, that's actually so Okaykay One thing I always think about is our tendency to separate things into parts. L one thing I think about like in working out, you're like, I'm doing cardio or I'm doing stretching or I'm doing strength. But when a tiger runs and climbs a tree, it's not thinking about the different things. And like something you just said is like if I make a s wave I'm creating a tone, but then if I adjust something in there now, it's a rhythm. It's rhythm and a tone. and that in nature, there's really no difference between rhythm section and bass or, you know out it's just animals make it. But there is it our body. if you think about like like if you go back to the the reason I like to pay attention to like the various rhythms that are available in the body is because the fact that delta aligns so perfectly with the tempos that we use suggest like Oh. You know, if you take a piece and you speed it up and you do it faster then Delta faster than four times a second. It's not like you can't hear it anymore. It's just like it does no longer functions as a beat. It's just like if you're doing this Right. Its you start hearing this as the beat Y That's like engines. likeike, you know, you can hear you sometimes you can hear like a musicality and like engines of cars, like it'll be like sputtering pop up and then it starts to going up ye, yeah, yeah. Yeah. exactly like. Like some synthesizers and they make that and they're one of my favorite little catnip to my ears sounds. Us in the beats. I interrupt these. synthesizes, I think are The thing is like anything can be sent just like with a three D printer in that sense. It's like it's fundamentally new syynthizers. And then syth all the things that you mentioned, I think, like off of the fact that synthesizers can do they do, even if it's sampling They're still kind I don't know, they don't maybe not necessarily doing it with synthesizers, but at least Yeah we can say that those things are related. Yeah. personally have a big issue, like in my role in academia I don't know when I went to college it like they it was like they told us that Anything that we'd heard before was stupid The music already this. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then they're like, you have to you should write the new music and then R this is more like an academic thing But In academia, it was just like I just didn't learn anything in college that was actually useful. I just learned how to I studied, you know, I wrote like new music for ten years and at the end, I knew enough about it to be like, oh yeah, they were wrong. They were lying to me But then I'd wasted ten years and also not learn anything about composition So like a goal in my life is to try to make it so that kids can learn stuff that I think is actually valuable in college about music And I feel like the focus on the new, it's somehow inseparable from what I see as a problem. like Okay, so Trishia Boden, I think it' I think her name is Pricia. But someone Boden has a cognitive scientist that has this distinction between P creativity and H creativity S is personal and H is historical So If you have a kid that's doing a drawing and then they say, lookook, it's a car And then you say That has already been done. Hm Okay. notot very good. tryry again That's a horrible thing to say to a kid, right? You're like, and it doesn't make any sense because you're applying each creativity idea to them You really need to do for a kid. For it's obvious for a kid, you need to be like Whoa, that is so much better than anything you've ever done before Or you don't even have to say that. you just like anyime they're making something, you're like, that's So if you're thinking about yourself as an adult now and you're picking up the guitar for the first time, so Allie, you're going to do this or maybe ukule and you write your first song Objectively your first song This is actually probably is going to beet for any interesting. but like You're not even allowed to think about that You just need to go and write your first song and then that is going to be momentous Right? It's really important that we all like all of us are thinking in the pe creativity sense, like that is the first song that you wrote. So like you should not compare it to someone else's song So in College Yeah, there's this thing of applying always the H creativity thing, you know, it's like I think it's like logically wrong to say You should not learn to compose like anyone who's ever composed before, like Beethoven or Miles Davis or someone like that because it's already been done. That is confusing like the educational process which really like needs you to focus on pe creativity, confuses that with age creativity. And there's this idea like you can train people to make age creative things Those aren't gonna be any good That's very validating. becausecause okay, I have this theory I try to I say I just think True arts cannot be bad Accessing what that truth is may be more or less difficult for different people But I was going actually ask you about this something I see an insecurity from my end is lack of technical ability goes, this isn't good enough. this isn't new enough. This is like so derivative. Even if it feels earnest to me, this sucks. And on the other side, I have some very close friends who are genius technicians. they have so much knowledge and they have difficulty. And I always say to them, If I had your ability, I'd be so annoying. I'm already putting my shit online all the time Why whyy can't you get to your voice And so What advice do you have or what thoughts do you have or what has worked? to I'm going to start on the people who already know shit side first because I think that's a tougher problem, it seems like is Breaking yourself out of the H creative problem, breaking yourself out of this is how things are supposed to sound. This is the context I'm already in. like getting rid of that and accessing that weird channely personersal creativity. How do you do that Also, are drugs involved Yes, and if drugs are involved. Like they used to have budgets in the seventies for cocaine No, that's the what did they say the u the fader or something? The Fader operator. they had a budget in in the line, I think it was f Yeah but really that was just their cooke budget. Yeah, they would hide it. Also also the drugs impact apparently apocryphpily, maybe they say the mixes in the eighties was a Coke mix. That's why it's so like the higher frequencies are always pushed. I think about okay, Pred the album presresence by Zeppelin That's like that album is so like I think they Named that because so high frequency and it it's weird to listen to. And Jimmy that's when Jimmy Page was like Really, really, really going through like very serious like opiate, you know, like heroin addiction. and Robert Plan, I think it just injured himself too. So he wasn't involved like but I'm just guessing that whatever drug was dominant for Jimmy Page at the time, he would be in the studio and and then the mixing engineer would be doing stuff and Jimmy Page would be like, no, no, we need more presents. more super high frequency. Wow. And then the guy would be like, what are you talking about? Yeah? You know, like this is way too troubly already and And Jimmy Page would be like, turn up presence. I want bomb, you know, like yeah, I think that's how I got that name and possible that could happen from hearing damage, butm I think the way drugs work Drugs are going to modulate all different aspects of both what how you hear and also what you like about how you hear. story of think would be super fascinating to go through, let's say twentieth century differentifferent artists and If you can track like which drugs they're on at different face career because I think it's really like So music making is a feedback loop, right? Like by definition almost like When I talk My brain tunes out my voice. If I sing Huh, My brain is allowing the sound of my voice to interact with the sound I'm making so that I can tune the sound I'm making to the sound of my own voice, which comes a little bit later. If we talk, we have to tune that out. but if we sing holding a note long enough that you can tune it to itself And then, you know, when you play with others you're always like tuning what you're doing to what they're doing. So it's always a feedback loop of motor behavior out. then taking in the sensory consequences of that and then tuning your ongoing motor behavior relative to those things So Drugs of all different sorts are gonna in some sense either Change your hearing O change your motor behavor O change something about like how efficient, right the timing is of that sensory feedback feeding into your motor apparatus. And it's going to also presumably change what you like. So even if it didn't change the sensory consequences in the motor behavior, It would change Damine and endogenous opioid response to whatever you're hearing. So you're gonna to like different things. You're gonna like different ways of responding to other musicians Yeah Okay, well, that ties in back to the first question about how to access your creativity I think maybe part of that even is like, how do you gain confidence in what you like You know? Yeah Okay, so I mean, one thing is when I start off the year in music theory for my students. I say like music theory can be dangerous especially for peoplee who are more creative It has the ability if you learn too much music theory ahead of the rate at which you're exploring music and figuring stuff out then It has the potential to shut down you're exxploration So it's better like for people who we like Write songs and compose like I want everyone to be like that. but For someone who just wants to play the clarinet, like it isn't as dangerous for them. They might not ever actually get to the point where they're like, they're going to figure that stuff out on their own. So it is very good for them to take music theory. but for people who are super creative, Better for them to be ahead of whatever we learn in music theory class in their creative exploration. So like I like to think of it as like you're walking around your at night in the dark, or just walking around anywhere with your eyes closed. You have to use all your other senses You have to like feel things and listen in a different way. feel what you're doing and like Creativity happens when you're like, that place where you don't know what you're doing Right And I think that theory is really Incredible like as scaffolding You understand the stuff that you're already doing then open up The next doors in all these ways. So it's like whatever your learning level is, or knowledge level in say music theory Be creative, you always have to be on that edge like ahead of it, like being like, what is out here But you know, I love music theory and it's not better to not learn theory. Because if you're just trying to be creative and not learning theory you really usually get bored of it. Like you do some stuff for a while and then you just lose interest I also just find I get frustrated my with lack of theory. like of some but just or a lack of technical knowledge. And this is where some of the fun stuff happens because I'll have a sound in my head and I'm trying to make it and I can't figure out where it is. And then if I go to the YouTube or the music theory books that I have where eventually kind of, oh, okay and things start to unlock. And that's a very exciting experience to have new tools to do new things that like help you connect from sounds you're hearing or feeling and making them out in the world Um, Yes Writing versus editing You know how, I mean, not again, not to not to focus on substances, but I think Hemingway said, like, right? drunk edits over, but like my editing brain is really different from my writing brain. And if I'm trying to write with my editing brain, it fucking sucks. But if I let myself be weird and bad writing, then I can edit later. Is that kind of like I wonder with your friends who are really good engineers and stuff if they're editing as they're writing Are those different parts of the brain? So give a slightly roundound answer, but like that's exactly the right question Like a brilliant question. Okay, so this is another thing about like how I teach theory So There' these exercises. there' called species counterpoint. and like tell the students that they are like Puzz exercises. So I give them a melody that's just in whole notes A common one is u bum d d d d dum bum and they have to write another melody that goes with it a counterpoint to it. So if that's h they can start on this one or they can start on this note. those are two options. U bum If they were started on this note, then they can go to home or they can go to Yeahah, anyway, there's some other options They have to follow like these very limiting set of rules to be able to solve a problem And that, I think is like it's using your musical logic, but you're in a sense just solving a crossword puzzle. And then when you play it, it ends upounding you're like, Ohh,'s sound beautiful. but you're using just logic to do it. And then That's like the first species and second species. You introduce one more thing that they're allowed to do, third species, fourth species, etcetera I like teaching creativity in that way because calling it crossword puzzle logic means All they have to do is solve the problem They're not allowed to say, oh, but I just like this one thing. So that forces them to use this musical logic to solve problems and along the way, they are learning ability to use the ability to Bring music into the mind and manipulate the relationships of things like you do with grammar you do when you're solving a crossword puzzle, you know, like there's a clue And then you have to think of all the possible ways. Oh, you just started doing crossword puzzles Yeah, you have to think of all the possible meanings that a word has, you also have to think of all the different ways that letters like a T can come after an S, but it can't come after a D, that kind of thing So if you're talking about like on an instrument, your fingers can do certain things. And if you're writing just for yourself, let's say playing guitar then if you're writing for yourself to play it then you can only do the things that your fingers can do if you are like imagining piece that you don't have to play yourself in some sense could imagine stuff that your fingers can't do Everything you study with your fingers is going to help you imagining the thing that you want to do. spepecious counterpoint idea is almost like developing the fingers of the mind and Uh, like the part of this that I think is like really So beautiful There's an article by Dietrich and Hyder fromr twenty fifteen, maybe, on creativity. And they make this distinction between emulation and simulation So the example they give is if you wanted to make a piece of music that sounded like the ocean waves That would have to be simulation because our minds can't do ocean waves. But if you wanted to make a piece of music that is something like what your fingers can do on a piano That's emulation because your motor system can do those things So with creativity when you're imagining something, like sometimes it's the case like you might like imagine flying or imagine something that you can just envision almost like a third person sort of thing. And that' simulation and we do that But it's a different kind of creativity where when you're working with the simulation system, the things that your motor system can do, including like your creative motor system And so that I like to think of is like that scaffolding, like building ures Um, with This syntax of the motor apparatus. and then you get to jazz musicians who Improvise you have to practice improvising. So what they're doing all day is they're practicing skills and arpeggios and practicing moving from one to the other. practicing the use of the They're building these things into their motor apparatus so that in the moment of improvisation see have so much freedom in this emulation. sense where simulation doesn't help you at all in improvisation scenario So when we're getting at like how do you teach creativity and going back to me talking about my students and why I do the speechious counterpoint thing and Also tying into the H creativity and pe creativity It's like evenven though other people have done spepecies counterpart before, I really think it's important to the students to this this motor system development mind and them to be able to emulate more and more complex musical textures that gives them this freedom to generate creatively complex musical Das And then to like reward that in the pe creativity sense. And that should give them freedom to make their own rules and to think things that haven't been thought before in the age creativity sense through doing stuff that is pe creativity. It's kind it feels like it made me think of like cooking You can make a burger a million times, a million different ways And as you gain technique and experience with how salt affects what you're doing, how heat, high heat, low heat, how what oil you put in the panet at what time, all those kinds of things, these will all affect how good or bad the burger is. and it's still maybe the sameame burger you had when you were a kid That doesn't make it any less delicious or meaningful and also will always be unique to the moment in which you made the burger and the time of year you got the ingredients and from where. you know what I mean? L and there's nothing lesser or even It feels it's not even more historical. It remains personal being a recognizable thing And still very satisfying and very meaningful. Hey, cutting in real quick here because we need to have an ad break And also because Allie said I could pick the charity this week And that charity is going to be the Gaza Hand of Salvation Initiative. It's one that you may already know about if you've been following Ali in the pod for a while. It's very direct mutual aid to some people who are frankly being brutalized in Gaza Every time I see them post about the very modest money they've received and how they using it to buy basic ingredients to prepare food, to just feed people in their community or to replace a solar panel that's been destroyed It makes me cry they're surviving is so goddamn evil. I can't describe it. People are people everywhere in the world. and it's so unbelievably unfair that just because of where born someome of us can just order door dash and watch TV and some of us are hoping we aren't starved bombed just for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time making me emotional as it always does. On top of it, they keep getting booted off Instagram and stuff like that. again for the terrible crime of existing as Palestinians and talking about it. Can't have that canan't have the world know what's still going on over there. Anyway, in a world where it really seems like you can't do fucking anything to stop your tax dollars from funding a genocide, at least you can try to help some people there get some fucking dinner Details about finding them on chuff can be found in the show notes and thank you Mercedes, who has been the lead on keeping us in contact with them and her continued advocacy for these people who are just like you. and me As always, if you're interested in learning more about war crimes, humanitarian law and genocide, check out our genocideology episode with Dr. Dirk Moses was a magic Sorry at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Com We don't do fairy tales. We do real like real adventures to Mars, or real journeys into the future to see how imagination can really take us to strange new worlds, and real trips into the past where we meet heroes and legends way ahead of their time. real rockets, real astronauts, real adventure, all at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Discover something real This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all in one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name and helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before allGies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website In one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. 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So that's QuI ncE dot com slash allologies for free shipping and three hundred sixty five day returns. quQints dot com slash allologies Eight, seven, seven, three, nine, three, four, four, four So by even be h let's get online thirty a month gonna blow your mind. five oes don't hesitate L it in now before's two l eight seven, seven, three nine three, four four four eightes apply S optimumot com for details. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from MintMobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for fifteen dollarars a month is back So I thought it would be fun if we made fifteen dollars bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at midmobile dot com slash switch Upront pay forty five dollars for three months ninety dollars for six mons one hundred ninetyllars forelveth, reired fifteen doll for a month equival to taxes extra. initial term only greater thanty gigytes slow netork busy t Okay, back to the show When you're sayking about the emulation simulation. So you said if it sounds like the ocean, It might doing emulation or simulation If I sit down then I go, I wanted to sound like when I was sad at the ocean Well that okay, that's still simulation. Okay. I'm gonna to fill in one little blank in here, which is like I was trying to figure out the time like why is it that compomposers can When you're in a dream, your mind can generate music and or like just a semi dream like state. A lot of composers say that songwriters. happens to me? It's like I just know after all these years that if my mind generates something in a dream or a dream like state then like I just need to write it down record it, capture because that stuff is go. That is the best stuff and If you allow yourself to think like in the moment like is this any good? like it's gonna seem not good. You're going be like, this is stupid, but it always is just rillant. But it's so wacky to try and figure out how is it's if you try to figure out like, how can my brain generate something without me, like it's both like a silly question, but it's also like, yeah, but how can it? right? Like why can my brain generate a melody better than I can because I am my brain There's something about This hands off generative Yeah state. And that's this question that you were asking earlier So the simulation idea is simimulation emulation What I came to from working through all these ideas is that If you go to sleep and wake up with music in your head, like Anything that's simulative do because somehow that dreaming brain that generates content through the motor system. So it's doing it, it's the emulated of system that the brain's going to use to generate and probably something about like acetylcholine levels and maybe like reduce serotonin and norpinephrine, something like that that allows the motor apparatus to maybe have do more less common things, you know, like make more connections that are less usual The dream state chemistry allows Yeah, it seems like there's an aspect of cultivating a trust in your body. Like that my body has instincts and abilities. I don't make myself breathe or I don't make my heart beats. And likewise, you you touch the stove, the nervous system of my body before it hits my brain is doing something. tellelling me, don't touch that before can feels, I wonder if that's part of just a creative problem overall is like a lot of aspects of our society today a lot of experiences of whatever, I think, I would say trauma, even if it's like, you know, just the emotional difficulties or, you know, the way we're educated kind of discourages you from trusting your body when I'm hungry, when I'm tired, what my feelings actually are in disconnecting from those. So that becomes very difficult perhaps, especially if you've layered on top of it a whole bunch of stuff about the proper and right way to do things, which obviously comes with a wrong way. Yeah. then how do you go back to going like, well, I'm just going to go back to trusting my body like when I was a kid just banging on Trumps, you know? Yeah I mean, that's beautiful. Like that question dude just in itself. Well, okay, I want to dovetail off that a little bit about nature and music theory stuff Do Nature music theory as we learn it, like twelve notes Do animals do twelve notes Do does it exist there No,, but the ratios do Um, U so hold this for a second. Yes We watches yeah, it's good, right? My dog banana, you catch the end? She's good. Already. So this is like an instrument that Supposedly, Pythagoras invented and I've been doing tons of reading about like what we actually know about Pythagoras, but ye There's a story where he's walking through the woods, he hears the consonances, hears like He hears those sounds and he's like, what is that? And he goes and he follows them And he ends up at a blacksmith's workshop And it's people like hammering things. and it turns out there's a tone for each hammer So it's like this one is coming from one of the hammers. There's four different hamers There's like a big guy with a big hammer and a little guy with a little hammer. switches hands. he switches and the little guy with the big hammer. anyyway, goes with a hammer, not with the guy. so it's not how they're hitting it The hammer itself, he weighs the hammers. This part is not scientifically accurate, but this is how the story goes. He weighs them, he figures out they are in the ratio of six to nine to twelve So those numbers might not make that much sense right now, but the lowest one and the highest one are in the six to twelve ratio And he's like, oh, that's an octave and it's a Six to twelve ends up being one to two ratio. Its like maybe an octave. is a one to two ratio. That's just a guess at this point. but He takes these two and this is a six to nine And this is a perfect fifth. d d d d d likeike you could sing twwinkle, twinkle to it. So that makes a fifth This guy, eight and twelve Also a perfect fifth d d d Twinkle, twinkle. R you could do it there too. and that Though those are both a two to three ratio. So he's like, a mayay a two to three ratio is a fifth And you get the same thing with the fourth too. So six to eight ends up being three to four ratio and that's a fourth nine to twelve So that's a story that was used It was probably used for like many hundreds of years in oral tradition From the time of Pythagoras,' five hundred BC to when it was first written down in two hundred D. and then It's like at the beginning of every music theory treatus up to the end of the fifteen hundreds. It gets at this idea that When we hear two tones, I played these two tones for Ali before And I was like, this one is going to be half the frequency. of this one And that's weird because long before we could compute Frequency We heard that as consonants So Pythagoras supposedly invented this instrument to demonstrate these principles. The instrument is just like one long string. why it's called a mono chord. You put a Movable bridge in the center and It right now it's I have the You know, I've measured it's thirty six inches wide so I have the Bridge at eighteen inches. play one side of the string And then I played the other one Very quiet but. their unison That's not surprising because the two strings are the same exact length. Hm Briiant idea. Now I'm going to move brridge I divided the string into three parts. so it's thirty six inches, so it's twelve and twenty four The twenty four side is longer, so it's going to be a lower tone U and the side that is one third of that two third So this ratio of three to two gives a perfect fifth. That's the same numbers that we were talking about before. If you do it at Here I have one side of the string is the length of four things Three things. So a four Oh U Four to three is a perfect fourth. And if I kept going, I get four to five. sorry even those sounds. Major third Think it going five to six is a minor third So those intervals, let's go back to the animal question. It's like this's recently just in the last ten years Someone reported that those ratios really are found in some animal songs It's not as common in animals as it is in human music, but it's not as common in human speech as it is in human music. And the most important thing is This might take me a second, but Any, I'm not doing like I'm using my mouth to filter to mute certain frequencies to make other ones louder. But every time I sing the note, this one then There are other sounds that go simultaneously. Those are just present in that sound and the reason why this is B flat is I don't know, maybe about one hundred one ten, so we'll call this one twenty So if this is one hundred and twenty, then that means you get vibrations at one hundred twenty Fty, three, sixty eighty, et cetera. And those give you these notes. onene, twenty, two, forty sixty four eighty, etcer So it means every time you hear a pitch with a voice, not just a human voice, but any animal voice, You're getting collection of tones that are always in those ratios So When we hear two tones simultaneously, we judge them based on this measure, this ruler like thing which is the harmonic series. like we can hear like We have names for them but hear like, oh, that's octave. that's a fifth A lot of people want to say that's because we learn it from vocalizations almost certainly is not the case because even fish processes s in this way all vertebrates If you use vocal chords and you generate a periodicity through it in tube of the throat and then you shape it with you know your face, which is what all At least all tetrapod verterates do always getting harmonic series with every tone you sing. The way it turns out what turns out is like, The auditory system invertebrates has evolved with the most important thing is to pay attention to voices. Like other sounds matter, But voices matter the most, and other sounds don't have redundancy in this way Whereas voices are always structured in this way auditory system has developed Oh tones that it's hearing try to make sense of them according to You know, this mathematical relationship. and then allow those speiving sounds, which are voices to drive the brain the most So then is music theory similar to other physics or math or whver where itd's, us identifying patterns and communicate them to ourselves so we can to say this is exactly what reality is, but this is the best way we have of understanding reality in a way we can recognize this pattern And this happening of vibration and sound, you know In a sense o One more thing about Pythagoras is like the what he's mostly known for is for saying there's a macrocasm out there There's a microcosm inside And the interface between the two is like music Hm. We don't know exactly that he felt exactly, but that's at least like the main Yeah. And so Some of the examples I gave like with the moons of Jupiter, like those follow this the one to two to two to four ratio. Those are harmonic ratios. If you look at the out don't the hall I have a picture of the asteroids of the solar system as they coordinate with Jupiter and Saturn and they follow along, you know, there's musical ratios Those ratios I just showed you, like they are stable in all kinds of dynamical systems. Anytime you get oscillators interacting with one another There are stabilities that happen in those systems and the stabilities happen relative to the simple ratios. So you see music like things in the external world The nervous system is also a collection of oscillators. So nervous systems evenven if we weren't making auditory sounds or music would still have some sort of harmonic relationships with them are by the way we walk has within it harmonic ratios, like one to two ratios of like legs to trunk movements and stuff like that and then The fact that voices come from a vibrator D generates harmonics and go through a tube that shapes it That fact and that that's been going on through all vertebrates like going back five hundred Maybe three hundred million years at least. auditory system takes advantage of that to be able to maximize its ability to voices And our voices feedback. This is a principple by Michael Ryan, he studies at Tungara frog principle is called the sensory exploitation hypothesis, which is It isn't just that our ears evolve to detect voices is that our voices evolve to maximally drive the auditory apparatus of listeners. Cool. Yeah. And like one of the best things about this from the perspective of like we do in music and why is We tend to think of like the composers or the instrumentalists as being the ones who are like in charge but it's the listener. And it's more complex, the listener's brain and the listeners' emotional responses to things way more complex and way more interesting and has a way more of effect an effect on what kind of music gets made then just the mer makers That's really good. I kind of wantanna end on that I'm going to end on that Are there any animals that use instruments Spiders can use their web mobile crickets, morick. Mle crickets build like a Trumpet like or like, yeah, like a Tuba like apparatus that they sing inside of And it's definitely that like comes out like a horn as a horn, maybe just yeah, maybe two horns And they definitely tune it to give the right resonance for the sound that they're creating. So that may be your best example, mole crrickets That's awesome. On the same thing related to the pant hoot display. How come we all get a sense that purring means good, but growling means bad when they're like sort of similar things Yeah, that's beautiful. Okay, one thing is like if the purR didn't function as soothing been attractive than You know, it wouldn't be used that way. So like that feedback loop. is necessary, but then you can look at you can look at like, I mean, growling behaviors across animals are Rough They're loud They have like unpredictable Frequencyies like it's like nonstable. It's not like you're not singing a pure tone. It's not predictable. There's harsher upper resonances That is something that is common for aggressive vocalizations across animals urring Han is like unique to cats? but I even even not specific cat like like like This dog, my brother's husky, has like a kind of a purring thing that is very close to the growling. sometometimes we're like, is he growling? But it's something like he's L likes that he's getting ye Yeah. yeah, yeah yeah I don't know. That's cool Yeah, But I think what you said is really interesting. it sounds right about like that there's something to when they're purring that is cyclical, it is consistent. It's repeating and calming in a way. also muted. It the high frequencies. It's you know that like it's almost like you could say the cat is conveyed you that its body is not stiff It's not like everything that's an aggressive vocalization, either that or fear. is always veryy rapid in loud versus quiet likeike it might just be all loud, but Fear is like Oh yeah. scary ye. ye. Thank you. And like so if I'm purring, you actually know like the status of my Oh, almost like my trunk muscles, my breathingusles. Yes, rightight? Your state of tension. Yeah So the one thing I would say is like, you know, our tendency is to interpret that as like, oh, the cat's giving a signal. but It's much more interesting when you get into that the feedback thing of like the cat in a relaxed state will start making certain types of sounds and if they're the wrong types of sounds, they won't function as soothing and like wanting to you know, attract someone So then the things, the sounds that we make that convey the state were in or that that make the other person feel comfortable in the way that we want them to regardless of meaning are the things that end up taking on meanings like we can look at cats and say like, oh, that's what the per means But it's actually the meaning is something we add on. Yeah, it's later when I love that I hear this sound and then there's a million calculations and interpretations going on in my brain that are like extrapolating diaphragm has to be relaxed here to do this. The cat's probably got to be relaxed to do this. And that means the cat's probably relaxed. And then it feels very much like the thing you said that I want to really end on that feels really tied into how do we access her creativity and all that. And what you said at the end of Ally asking questions, which is we are sort of automatically becoming this meta being by listening and then I start instinctively interpreting and even feeling what the the sound creator is feeling. And I wonder if that isn't part of the key to accessing our own creativity is allowing ourselves to listen to whatever the sound that wants to be made is and justust let that feedback loop keep happening. And with the tiny other thing, which is I feel like music doesn't exist unless you're doing it with another person. So I mean So one concert once where one person performed one song where he was by himself And it was just at the audience and it was brilliant. But every other time Likelo solo performance can be a thing if you're really connecting with the audience. That one song was just this brilliant way of connecting was like a The song was a tool and forth communication between that performer and the audience. And as musicians, like you have to practice on your own. And if you're composing something, you might have to do some work by yourself, but I think like the alchemy is not there. you're putting the ingredients in the crucible, but like you're not adding that extra additional An'a Mundi or whatever thing that makes it magic or the thing that makes it music, like isn't there untill There wass actually someone else there that like you're playing with and you're responding to that person That's pretty perfect Thank you. Thanks for making a Ma Be with us today. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for letting me do this Al. B listen. I enjoyed being in met Make music