SPEAKER_01 0:06

The human brain is an extraordinarily complex structure. It's estimate I have to write this down because it's got numbers in it, but it's estimated to have about a hundred billion nerve cells, two million miles of axons, a million billion synapses. So the potential interconnections between all of that stuff are almost incalculable. Everything we do, every thought we have, every emotion we feel, each has their origin in this organ of bewildering complexity. The creation of music and the impact which music has on us is something important to reflect on and to learn more about. So to teach us about that, unsurprisingly, is Professor Milton Memakides. Milton.

SPEAKER_06 0:57

Thank you so much. Welcome. We live in an age obsessed with technology, spending extortionate amounts of money, at least I do, every year or two for an incremental upgrade to my smartphone that I don't need. And yet we forget that we carry with us the most incredible piece of technology handily in our heads. And so I thought what I'd do is market it to you as if it was a product that you could buy. There's a manufacturer. So it weighs just a uh the weight of a melon, but a similar size, fits in most skulls, fully wireless, and has 2.5 petabytes of RAM. Expiry date up to 120 years, maybe, but there is no warranty, sadly. And it has rave reviews. The human brain is by far the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos. I've added the five stars. And the complexity comes from its incredible processing power. Has 86 billion neurons, that's a hundred trillion synaptic connections working in parallel. And this allows us to become preloaded with mind OS, which is capable of pattern recognition, prediction and surprise, motor control, emotion, continuous adaptation, and lifelong updates, although apparently it's non-transferable. But its premium feature is self-awareness. It's nature's way of regarding itself. Isn't that fascinating? And it's so complex that it can almost understand itself, but therein lies a paradox because if our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't. And so it's so extraordinary that this piece of technology becomes so full of music. Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain and nearly every neural subsystem. Involves perception, not just of sound, action and movement, even when we listen passively. And regions of the brain associated with emotion, cognition, timing, and prediction. And so it's quite telling that the corpus collossum, which is this bridge between the two sides of our brains, acting as a sort of a conductor, is significantly larger in musicians. So when we play or listen to music, our brain becomes a glow. This is a brain improvising jazz. You can see it light up. And I'm quite attached to this brain. Literally, because it's my brain while I'm improvising on this check. And you can see even how my stupid brain just lights up like Christmas when improvising. So if the brain is the organ that makes sense of the outer world, we should ask, since music is so important to the brain, what sense does music make? And if you ask evolutionary psychologists, they'll say sometimes, none at all. It is auditory cheesecake, a confection that we have created just to tickle our brains and please ourselves. Pinker says that music could vanish from our species and it would make no difference to our lifestyle. Which is hard to take in the fact that something that means so much can mean nothing at all. He likens it to recreational drugs, and there he might have a point because we are addicted to music through our whole lifetime. Here's Stefan Grappelli playing with Django Wanghart in 1938, sounding beautiful, and then a full 50 years later, just tearing it up at his 80th birthday concert.

SPEAKER_11 5:27

Effortless one.

SPEAKER_06 5:51

She started much sooner. And extraordinarily even after her retirement, she could sing with expressive beauty into her deep nineties. So music sticks around in our minds, and it's often the last to leave. Ravel had a neurodegenerative aphasia, which means he started to lose how letters connected to words and then the words themselves. And then he lost how musical symbols connect to music, so he was no longer able to notate. But he never lost the music in his mind, always constantly thinking up new ideas. It's a sort of sad but beautiful comfort that he has still so much to say, so many ideas in his head. And music can even survive deep brain trauma. Take the prodigy and jazz great Pat Martino. Here is him as a teenager, just absolutely shredding. And he had a great career in music playing with lots of jazz greats. But in 1980, he had near-fatal seizure because of a huge aneurysm in his brain. You can see that with these red circles here that had to be removed in an emergency surgery. And when he came to, his amnesia was so profound that he lost the memory that he was a musician. His friends and family had to convince him that he was, and after some time and staring at his own records, his face on his own record sleeves, he decided to learn again. Well, let's say to remember how to play music. And in just four years, by listening to his own recordings and practicing along to them, he came back in full force with extraordinary power in his return tour. A more extreme case of amnesia comes with the highly accomplished British musicologist Clive Waring, who, after a viral infection, had a brain trauma so extreme that it left him with the inability to form long-term memories. So he was essentially stuck on a 15-second loop. Here's a page on his diary where he keeps having to reaffirm his uh existence every few minutes. Here he is trying to convince his wife that it's the first cup of coffee he's ever tasted in his life.

SPEAKER_04 9:00

Not being conscious before. I've been here before. This I've seen before. I've not seen anything at all, but I've been completely bland all the time. No taste at all. This is the first taste. The first coffee you've had. Cheers.

SPEAKER_06 9:18

The sweet side of this is that whenever his wife left the room for a few minutes, he would greet her like he hadn't seen her for years. That's really charming, actually.

SPEAKER_11 9:30

Oh dying, I know you were here.

SPEAKER_06 9:38

And yet his music was retained extraordinarily and beautifully. He claimed that he had never heard of notes of music in his life every time he sat down to the piano, yet he could cite, read, learn new pieces, and even conduct a choir, becoming himself again. Music can survive brain trauma, but strangely it seems to also be induced by it sometimes. The strange case of this American orthopedic surgeon Tony Chakoria, who was struck by lightning through a payphone. And when he recovered, they found no damage to his brain. Yet he was suddenly obsessed with romantic classical piano music. He would practice for hours a day. He had never done it, he had never been interested before, was into rock and roll. And yet he would sit at the piano for hours in the day before work and then until he could no longer focus at night. And this wasn't a passing phase. It's gone on now for a good 20, over 20 years. He practices and performs, writes his own works now. This is the appropriately named Lightning Sonata. So music is a thread in the brain. And it has this way of being remembered. Here's a Beatles super fan recognizing the Beatles track from half a second. Instantly.

SPEAKER_07 11:49

Hello, goodbye. Don't let me down. Oh um hello lover. Oh darling. Oh, I'm the wars. Always in word.

SPEAKER_06 12:14

Notice the movement. Please please me. So you'll notice that some of these are instantly recognized, whilst others need some bread crumbs, some memory chains. They need to be reconstructed. And I'll illustrate the sort of process graphically here.

SPEAKER_07 12:33

Okay, a little harder one now. Oh my god. Oh things we said today. Sorry, it was a bit long, sorry about that.

SPEAKER_06 12:53

And so music lays these little threads across our memory. It's actually very similar to how I remember faces. We sometimes we'll see somebody know exactly who they are, whether whatever angle their face is at. Other times we just know that we know this person, and it's a similar uh metaphor. And we use all of these when listening to music and also when remembering it and making it.

SPEAKER_07 13:18

Oh, she's leaving home. Baby Orvis man. This is so good, isn't it?

SPEAKER_06 13:26

Amazing.

SPEAKER_07 13:27

I'm gonna put this in the lecture, like about any stuff coming on.

SPEAKER_06 13:34

And so it's no wonder that uh music is now being used as treatment for dementia, and it's been shown to significantly improve the cognition of dementia patients and their quality of life. How on earth does it happen? Well, I'd like to spend a bit of time now talking about how we listen to sounds, everyday sounds and speech, because that's the key to understanding music. Because we think of listening as this passive entry force that just happens without effort, but it involves so many parts of the brain and complex brain activity. Think about sound as being waves on a pool or a lake. And the ability to understand sound is like looking at those waves and understanding what boats and animals are in that lake. You're able to separate natural sounds from music, from bird song, from my voice. How do we do this? Well, your brain chooses which ear is better for listening and balances the data from both. It's called binaural unmasking, and it also takes the sound coming in and strips it into its component layer layers to reconstruct it. It's phenomenal. And what it uses is things that we can imagine as templates, sort of recognizable faces perhaps in the mind, and matches the incoming sound to recognize it. Um, so I'm going to play you something now which you might not be able to understand if you've not heard this before. It's actually audio from a cochlear implant, so you get an idea of what people with those are experiencing. See if you can understand what this is saying. Anyone? Now, if I tell you what the sound is, suddenly you'll be able to hear it. This is the original audio. The wife helped her husband. Now listen to it again and it will pop into your mind. Can you hear it now? This is called top-down listening. It's our ability to compare sound coming in with things that we have stored already. And we're very, very good at it. But it comes with some surprising uh quirks. In that if we have templates, we are hunting for certain sounds to be made. And just like with um our ability to see faces out of kitchen taps, we can hear words and sounds that aren't really there, are constructed by our inner library. So this is an experiment now called Phantom Words, and what it does is it takes a phoneme, which is a little fragment of sound, wa, and another one, no, and it puts one in the left ear and one in the right ear. I'll put it play them separately. And then together. And then the experiment flips them. Now what happens is if we play these over and over again, you'll start to hear words naturally like nowhere, that's what I hear, but then I hear a very clear when o when o when o when in the left speaker that drifts over to the right speaker. The right speaker, worryingly for me, has no brain. These are reported other sounds that I sometimes hear and others have reported. So we'll spend about 30 seconds on this with some tripulating and see what you hear, and hopefully see you at the end. I've never heard mango before, but I did tonight. So the reason we these pop up is that the the phonemes we use to speak are so similar and so tightly woven that there is these critical b boundaries between these sorts of sounds. And the boundary between them is where we reveal how our mind works. You might have seen this before if you've ever been on something called the internet, but I'll play this for you now. It's one sound, and you can decide which of these two words match matches it better.

SPEAKER_05 18:32

Laurel.

SPEAKER_06 18:35

Who hears laurel? Who hears Yanni? So now you can look at each other like you're mad. This is the split, which was exactly right in the room, actually. I just quickly counted it. And the reason is that they have very similar spectral shapes. And what you heard was something right in between. This is super similar to the definitely black and blue dress. And so what I can do is manipulate the tone of that sound so it passes between these categories, so everyone can hear what your next door neighbor is hearing.

SPEAKER_05 19:17

Yeah, yeah. Laurel.

SPEAKER_06 19:22

Are we friends again? Good. So here's the interesting thing is that we each have our tipping points where it goes from laurel to yanny. But they are different and unstable. Mine change from day to day, and actually here in blue is where I turn from laurel to yanni, but I turn back from yanni to laurel at red. You'll have something wholly different. I'm Yanni here. Still Yanni? Now Laurel. Make it make sense. In fact, we gain our ability to hear not just from the sounds we hear, but also what we see. For example, tell me what you think this man is saying.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Bah, bah, bah. Most people hear Bah.

SPEAKER_06 20:36

Right. Now this example here, watch closely.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Bum, bum, bum. Most people here are sort of.

SPEAKER_06 20:50

Here's the thing. They are the same sound. You're hearing different things because of his mouth shape. Same audio. Which means you can decide what you hear by who you choose to look at.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.

SPEAKER_06 21:15

And if you look away, it'll be a clear bum.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Bum, bum, bum, bam, bam.

SPEAKER_06 21:21

This mixing of syllables like b and f is just an amazing phenomenon called the MGurk effect. I think it's bucking frillients myself. I have to be careful how to say that. So this is where music comes in. Music uses templates also. And the line between speech and music is not so clear. For Musewski, he says, whatever speech I hear, my brain immediately works out a musical exposition. And the wonderful uh British-American psychologist Diana Deutsch did a lot of experiments. One of them is called the sing song effect, which I absolutely adore. And I adore it because she found that by accident she was preparing a lecture and she was editing her own voice, and she had to edit this phrase.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.

SPEAKER_06 22:26

It's this phrase.

SPEAKER_03 22:32

But they sometimes behave so strangely.

SPEAKER_06 22:35

They sometimes behave a musical melody with them.

SPEAKER_03 22:38

Sometimes behave so strangely.

SPEAKER_06 22:40

Particularly on this descending phrase here.

SPEAKER_03 22:44

So strangely. So strangely.

SPEAKER_06 22:47

So she wants to see if others had that same effect. So she took the audio example and played it to six individuals and had them repeat it back. She just played it one time, and this is what they said.

SPEAKER_04 23:02

Sometimes behave so strangely.

SPEAKER_06 23:04

Sometimes trying to sound like her.

SPEAKER_02 23:07

Sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely.

SPEAKER_06 23:18

Altogether it sounds like uh speech.

SPEAKER_10 23:22

Sometimes behave so strangely.

SPEAKER_06 23:25

But an extraordinary thing happened when she took different individuals and played that same phrase not once but ten times. What happened is the gaps between the syllables evened out into just one or two bar or two slices of rhythmic units so that you could notate it. And the contour simile fell onto grid lines, so it could be notated. So speech when repeated But they sometimes behave so strangely gets interpreted into melody.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely.

SPEAKER_06 24:22

And so accurately do they repeat that back that you can play them together and it sounds like a choir. So it seems that music is inbuilt into language already and sort of lifts out of it, or perhaps the opposite is true. And certainly we find cases where speech is embedded into music, like the talking drum of Acra, which has specific words that it's imitating. Or the Tamar of Senegal, which uses these vowel-like resonances, and elaborate Hindustani balls, which is syllabic connections. But even in language we speak musically, you can tell when I'm gonna continue my phrase and when I've ended it by the melody alone. You can tell if I'm asking a question that is uh requiring a response, can't you? Because you want to complete that sentence. There is these contours and accents that we use to express above the literal meaning of the words, but these can be lifted out into music, into language of music itself, which behaves like speech, but has its own particular strange properties. For example, we think of pitch as existing on a ladder, that's where we get scale from as it goes up. But the strange thing about uh these sounds is that those two sound almost the same. It's called octave equivalence. So maybe rather than a ladder, we can think of music as existing in a circle, so that a scale goes round. So we go up, but we end up where we start. So even when we have an ascending scale, it's like we're going up but nowhere at the same time. You can kind of feel that, can't you? So these are the windmills of your mind. They have to somehow manage to go up and stay the same at the same time. Some people represent it as a helix, so we are as circularity, but still height that exists. And we're sort of managing those dimensions at the same time. What happens though when these compete? We have a circular viewer of pitch which stays in the same plane, and we have a helix that goes up. Well, here we can play tricks also and trick our mind to thinking that we're going up and staying the same at the same time. This is known as the shepherdone or the barber pole illusion, and you can see the analogue between them here, where if we fade out the low notes coming in and the high notes coming out, and we just do octaves all the way up, your brain thinks we're constantly going up and staying the same. In fact, this is just a short loop of sound that loops over and over. Yet you're convinced we're going up because we're being pulled up, yet that can't be possible because we're still here. So somehow we must be going up and dropping down quietly in the background of our mind. But we can zone into that point, we can take a sliver of that point and see where we drop down. Because there must be a point where we're doing so. This is known as the tritone paradox, where we create an ambiguous set of pictures which are exactly the same in their spectral center, but are placed somewhere on that circle. So you can tell me if this is going up or down. Down for me? Any uppers? We've got some up here. Oh, that's up. It was down yesterday. This is commonly up. Up, no? All right, we can fight about it later. And this one here. Down? Down. Okay. So the interesting thing is there's evidence to support that we're all different, but how we choose to hear it, it depends on where we're from. In fact, how our mother talked to us. Isn't that extraordinary? And the biggest difference here is between British and Californians, and you can see why there might be a pitch issue there, is on the G to D flat one. So your mind, these are not sort of freakish lab experiments. This is sort of the essence of musical thinking. For example, if we take a whole turn scale that descends and take one that ascends, you'd think that if we place them together, we would hear an X as they cross. But they resist crossing. They sort of bounce against each other. And even though I'm gonna interleave them, the rhythm stays the same. For me, I feel this flip happens as they bounce against each other and as if they reflect against their trajectories. I find it hard to follow it all the way down. Maybe like speech. We can turn the whole thing upside down and we get a similar effect. But here's the crazy thing. If we put the red pattern in one ear and the blue in the other, and this works on headphones also, something else happens where we don't get these bouncing whole tone scales, but we get this these bouncing chromatic scales as it tries to make sense across the board of these curves. The whole tone disappears for me. So this is what is happening at the top, and this is what you're perceiving. And I say before that this is the essence of music. It's not a bug of music, but it's perhaps a feature that allows us to create perceptual blurs across the objective reality of the sound coming in. For example, this piece by the great classical uh guitarist, composer, who happened to be severely visually impaired, uses this musical illusion by playing a bass note with a thumb and then three repeated notes with fingers. And you'll notice there's a gap there between those repeated notes. Now, this should sound like just a sequence of events, but when under the hands of an expert player, and when sped up, we start to hear those blue notes connect and those red notes connect so that you hear a soaring melody under this accompaniment. Here's the process being sped up. Still individual, still here the gap. Here's the script. And this piece uses that illusion to create this beautiful melody as it is. This accompaniment on just one guitar, as if the notes player together. So this illusion is the music itself. Someone obsessed with this way of thinking about music was Tchaikovsky. And he loved this motif and used it in many of his works called the cross motif, and he associated it with the crucifixion, Tristan, himself, and the Shakespearean concept of star-crossed lovers. Because it makes this cross shape a sequence of perceived relationships. So although it's four notes, it's actually holds a perceptual symbolism. And he used this throughout his last symphony, his last completed symphony, number six. Right in the introduction, in fact. And because of his um the risk, the shame surrounding and the social stigma surrounding his homosexuality, perhaps, there was this pain to this idea of star-crossed lovers in his work throughout. He was a had a very beautiful but troubled mind. He tore up his symphony number five because he didn't think it was good enough. It's very good, by the way. But when he wrote Symphony Six, he adored it and he said it would be a riddle to everyone, and it was completely saturated with himself. And I certainly shall not tear this one up. The very last movement, which is often a vast movement, but he chose this adagio lamentoso, this sad slow movement, is extraordinarily scored. He writes this strange angular melody for the first violins, which at that time would be seated on the left. Emerging from the slices of both sides, so it forms in the listener's mind. And this is exactly what Tchaikovsky wanted. A conductor friend of him was arguing that he should play, just score it like this, because it's easier to play and that's what he wants to be heard. But no, he wanted the sound to be emerged through this star-crossed effect. Let's hear it. And so music itself are these projected relationships which the musician, the composer hears, and so does the listener. In fact, it taps into our deep-seated human survival nature to hunt and to find and to learn. An emotion, in a way, are these attractors wanting us to hunt, find out, and learn in this cycle. Here's a young girl called Olive who will demonstrate each of these parts when her brother performs a magic trick for her.

SPEAKER_05 38:12

Two three.

SPEAKER_06 38:34

It doesn't work out. So there was this joy and surprise in anticipating something, having a clue what's going on, and discovering something new, something better. And we are this inner child when it comes to music as well. There is the joy of a musical surprise that happens. This is Huron's Itfra model, which says that music builds our imagination when something's coming, brings up tension, and then we react to it in various ways. We make further predictions and appraise, and it's this constant movement through this cycles of emotion, hence our whole grain response to it. And so we like a little bit of surprise. We like things that we can expect, and we like those moments of surprise. In fact, there's this inverted you that you know neuroscientists have found, where if you give people highly predictable music, they don't gain much pleasure or want to move to it. When it's chaotic and unpredictable, similarly so. But there's this sweet spot called the inverted you. I like to call it Mount Groove, which we all react to and we hunt to and we're surprised to, even if we've heard music, the same music over and over again. But music does more, because not only does it delight, it also tells a mind that another mind is there. And that's why so many parents who have never sung before start singing to their children naturally, regardless of their voice and quality. We find music where words end.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

Mammy's gonna sing you a song. You want me to sing a song? Let me know how you feel about the song, okay? I don't want to come up here no more. I'll bear you from a sea. You don't know how strong my weakness is, how much it hurts me.

SPEAKER_06 41:10

This wonderful quote from Mendelssohn, who says, People complain that music is so ambiguous and unclear about where words are understood by everyone. But he says for him, it's exactly the opposite. What the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not too indefinite for words, but rather too definite. Others have echoed such sentiment as music expressing emotion or things that cannot be said or the unknowable. Here's this lovely clip from Joni Mitchell trying to explain what each note in a chord she's come up with means.

SPEAKER_09 41:47

There's always what I call inquiry notes in the voicing. On this inquiry, doubt, possibility, resolution. So that's a complex emotion, isn't it? You know, back to a pure uncomplicated emotion. Uncomplicated, joyous, positive, happy. This was now I don't know the name, maybe that's a saucer. I don't know like the letter alphabet names of all this stuff, but so I identify it more by how the chord feels.

SPEAKER_06 42:43

With such complexity, it's easy to forget that the brain is a naturally emerging object, and just like nature, it produces patterns. On the top left is a puff of fish which makes this beautiful harmonic nest for its um mate by swimming around in a circle and doing these little curves. And we see similar patterns all through nature, through oscillations and murmurations. Turns out the brain itself, neuroscientists have found that it too has modes, fundamentals that happen spatially across it. Just like so many other things in nature. They then find an increase in higher picture, in higher frequencies, like pulling out all the stops. When we have expert egoist meditation, when we feel joy, when we take psychedelics, and when we engage in music. But the brain is more than an instrument. Eurosight would say it's more like an orchestra because you have specialized parts. And what it needs for it to function best is to invent a conductor, which is ourselves, to orchestrate consciousness. So while some say that music is auditory cheesecake, I say that it gives us something more. Because in order to appreciate music, we must behold the miracle of our own consciousness. But further we get to communicate with others. So not auditory cheesecake, but the food of love, perhaps. And so we realize that we have a mind, but so does the person we're making music with us. We are not alone. And so I say, play on.