SPEAKER_04 0:04

Please welcome Professor Milton Memicides.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, and thank you so much for coming tonight and supporting me through this series and the whole three years. It's been a privilege and a joy of a lifetime. So, sleep and music, eh? Um, what brings these together, apart from I seem not to get enough of either of them? But there are these connections between sleep and music, there's deep parallels that seem to recur. They both seem essential, foundational to being human. Of course, physiologically we need sleep, but psychosocially, for good mental health and to connect with others, we need music. So it has this essential quality. Also, both of us, both sleep and music leave us somewhat defenseless, vulnerable. Of course, when you're asleep, you're physically unsafe. But also you leave yourself unguarded to all the emotions, your deep fears and lusts come out both in sleep and in music. So our guards are let down for that, for the menagerie of emotions that arrive. Both of them pull back the conscious curtain. We go behind that door of the conscious self. What's extraordinary is that whilst we're making music and making dreams, we are both the creator and the audience. Somehow we separate ourselves from ourselves. So it brings about this altered state, but what I call autocreativity. We are making things for ourselves, and any musician will tell you they get surprised, even the most learned composer, by what comes out of them. We scoop from that same subjective well. And they both have this secret logic to them. There's a sort of dream grammar and a musical grammar. And if you try and explain a dream afterwards, it made so much sense at the time, but afterwards it's just nonsense. It was a man, but it wasn't really a man. Same with music. You can't really explain why that chord works, you just know it does. And there was this these parallels between the segue and these uh lateral references and the literal nonsense and the intuitive sense that both of them make, a sort of metallogic. And perhaps most importantly, both of them are a sort of journey. We leave our physical bodies and our temporal realities, passing through some gatekeeper, sometimes it's a struggle to get through, but we enter this parallel world, realm crossing. So these five, alongside an altered sense of time, give us this essence of what connects sleep and music, which I'd like to explore this evening. The ancient Greeks have these myths. Orpheus, for example, had to uh put to sleep the fearsome three-headed uh dog Cerberus. He doesn't look so fearsome there. I was expecting a little more, but there you go. Um, and so this idea that the altered state, the sense of crossing a realm, um is evident here. And same again with the um the myth of Hermes who lulled to sleep the many-eyed giant Argos in order to rescue across that threshold. And Plato was said to have been able to put animals to sleep with his music, probably in a good way. He is laying down some sick organ riffs. But in the visual arts, also, we have this wonderful sense of the uh collision between the two. I love this uh sleeping gypsy from um Rousseau, because what we get here is a portrait of a gypsy asleep, she's got her um instrument there, and then there's a line, so there's the sense of unsafeness, but also we feel like she's dreaming, and we're looking at it as if she's in a dream, so it has this strange meta logic to it. And Rousseau loved conjuring these sort of um worlds, like in Le Rev, the dream, this wonderful, strange garden we find ourselves. And he wrote this inscription upon it, where he says, In a beautiful dream, having drifted softly to sleep, heard the sound of a reed pipe played by a kindly snake charmer. As the moon shone on river and verdant leaf, the wild serpents lent an ear to its joyful melodies. How beautiful! And if you haven't noticed the reed pipe player before, here he is. Hello. So sleep and music are intertwined, and so it's no surprise really that composers have long been bringing the feeling of sleep into their music, the representation of it. How is this done? Well, there is a whole family of music forms like reveries, nocturnes, lullabies, and berseuse, which are evoking the feeling of sleepiness or of dreams, and they tend to have similarities within them. Family traits, let's say. So, for example, we get an unprescribed structure, not a strict AABA form, not a wild one, but one that follows its own logic. There's a repetitive flow and a sort of rhythmic sway that happens. And what I'll call emotional liminality, which is that we can go to the edge of sadness and the edge of joy in a single phrase. There's blurred grid lines and timbras, and then there's something which I've I didn't, there's no name for it, but I called it a transharmonic melody, which is a melody that seems to just float and soar. It always agrees with the chords, but it's not prescribed by them. It's like this happy accident that seems to be happening, and then these unprepared colour changes that happen out of nowhere, a sort of magic. So let's unearth how this dreaminess is made. A classic of this genre is Debreusie's Reverie, so let's sort of unweave the dreaminess within it. It starts with a simple opening set of notes. Four notes coming up, and then they descend. So four notes ascending and descending. That makes six, so he could have done this a six-eight rhythm just up and down, and called it a day. It sounds perfectly lovely. But for a little more sway, maybe we should make one of the notes longer, which makes it fit into a binary meter. Lovely, but it's not quite it. Because the genius thing he does with a simple four notes is he slides them over by half a beat, as if we're slipping away from waking life. You wouldn't know hearing the introduction, but when the melody comes in, it inserts itself at this realm between notes. And let's talk about that wonderful melody. The white notes here are prescribed by the accompaniment, so they're set. But Debosi has freedom when it comes to those other notes. He could have made them sad, flattering sad. Or he could have made them bright and positive. But what he does with emotional liminality is he mixes happy and sad in one gliding, soaring melody. And therein the magic lies. What about the chords? Well, not to give you a 35-minute analysis, I'll just say this. We can get some sense of how chords feel by where they sit on the circle of fifths. If they crowd near the root, it feels very grounded and safe. If they start spreading out, they feel uneasy. If they drop below this diatonic boundary, you'll get a sense of mystery. That's all I need to say, and I'll play you a little bit. Wait for it.

unknown 10:04

Just a little longer, please.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Some tenderness and it coolness and a little mystery offset. So he's painting with these emotional colours, and they just feel so deliciously dreamy. So it's no wonder that this sort of sleep placed in music finds its way in a way to lull us to sleep. So not sleep and music, but music for sleep. It's the lyrics, we don't have the music to uh lull a child to sleep. Actually, the title of it is Ritual to Quiet a Child, which sounds a bit more desperate and instructional. But lullabies are these incredible musical forms. For a start, every culture that has music, which is every culture on earth, has a lullaby. So it's universal. And although they're very diverse, we humans are very good at telling what a lullaby is even from another culture, even when we don't know the language. Yes, they work on infants and they reduce their arousal levels, heart rate, and pupil size. But what's interesting is that they also do so for unfamiliar lullabies from different cultures as well. So we've built this language to lull. But there's this other edge to the lullabies which isn't often talked about, which is that it's an emotional release for the caregivers also. Because singing lullabies is a way to calm and regulate our own emotions. It slows breathing and it promotes bonding. And across many traditions, it's a socially acceptable space to vent, essentially, to share anxieties and frustrations, grief, and so on. When the bow breaks, they're a useful outlet. So beneath this tenderness, there's warnings, laments, and these darker themes that emerge. The emotional burdens of caregiving. Take this ancient Cumbrian or Welsh or both lullaby Dinnigan Smok, where the lyrics talk about a father in the past sense. So is there grief to it attached? But they also include instructions of where to find food. So perhaps it has dual purposes of instructional and both keeping a memory alive. My very first lecture here, I shared this lullaby from the Solomon Islands, which is not a lullaby from a parent to a child, but from an older sibling to a younger sibling when their parents have passed away. It's utterly stunning and beautiful. It says, Do not cry, little one, though our parents have left this world, they still watch over us. Their presence lingers in every corner of the house, every shadow of the garden. And within this endless lullaby, I sing to you. Actually, since I presented this in the first lecture, I've had several people saying that they've used them this lullaby for their own children, which is really gratifying. What I didn't mention in the first lecture, which I can't get off my chest, is that this sample, which was the first tape recording tape recorder, portable tape recorder, ethnomusicological uh collection, the sample was um used by this electronic dance band in the 90s without permission, without uh credit, without remuneration, um and misattributed to uh the pygmy people of Central Africa, which is about 5,000 miles away. Um and to make matters worse, they won the best world music prize for this. I don't know why I said that, it's depressing, but uh we should take care of such treasures, I believe. But lullaby is also held hold up this cultural mirror for centuries. There's been a culture of very young girls in Japan being sent out to uh babysit to become nursemaids. Look at them and this image, they're hardly older than the children there babysitting. Um, and so their lullaby's are full of homesickness, loneliness, and resentment. This gets me. Hush now, little one, do not cry. Though you cry, I cannot feed you. And it's fair that they should share these resentments. But I love this one, it's delicious. Um my mistress is like an unripe person, it's kind of a fruit, beautiful to look at, but bitter inside. On a happier note, the Acca tribe of Central Africa have a real communal sense of caregiving. And Acca fathers are the most physically involved with infants of any society studied, spending almost half the time within arm's reach of their children. And the lullaby reflects that. Listen to that interwoven, beautiful, familial spirit. It's gorgeous. And the legacy continues. We've used technology now to lull ourselves to sleep with um apps and our own playlists and so on. We're making our own lullabies. And I feel that the strange habit of uh listening to true crime at bedtime is just an extension of that, of when the bow breaks, a reminder to be safe. So we've created music to send us to sleep, but does music exist whilst we're asleep? Well, this is the interesting thing. When we cross when we cross the boundary from wakefulness to sleep, we shut our eyes, but we cannot shut our ears. So our brain has to somehow act as a gatekeeper to decide what sounds come in. Of course, it lets in things that could be sounds that could indicate physical danger. It lets in easily our own name, but it turns out it also lets music in. Our brains respond to the harmonies and the rhythms of the music we're listening to even when we're asleep. But not only that, we carry music with us into our sleep and dreams. Most of all, um, musicians will know this that there's the music anxiety dream. I still have exam nightmares. I had a nightmare that I was late for my daughter's exam, so it never it never ends. But musicians have a particular anxiety dream. Um here's some examples taken from friends and colleagues. A recurrent nightmare where I'm on stage and my mind is empty, can't find the music anywhere, quite standard. Um, I can't get to the stage on a cruise ship, weird. Uh and also all the toilets are engaged. So it's this surreal specificity that happens. That you have to remember that point. This is when it gets fun. I'm in a concert performing some something I haven't practiced at all, and I'm wearing my mum's gardening trousers. So there's this accumulation, and it usually involves trousers. I'm about to play the Rodrigo guitar concerto, walk on stage, and sit down to find I have a trombone in my hands instead of a guitar. I want to hear that. And perhaps my favorite, short and sweet, playing guitar naked. I don't even play guitar. So a double humiliation there. And if you've never had a musical anxiety dream, these 30 seconds are the perfect encapsulation of it.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

What's the matter? I've never played this before. I've never played this piece before. I've never practiced it. I don't know it. It's great.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

I don't know it.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

I've never played it.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

You're gonna love it. I've never even heard it. It's for Rostropovich. You'll be fine. But where are your pants?

SPEAKER_01 19:47

That's a specific thing when someone asks you about it's for Rostropovich. But we also in our dreams have what more musical, ecstatic dreams. Just as strange but more inspiring. I've tried to couple together the ones that I had when I was a teenager, which was sort of like this, and music like this. It's nonsense, but it's beautiful. Beautiful. And here is a collection of anecdotes from these dreams. Yes, I had a dream that I was in a quintet and the trumpet player was absolutely burning. So you get there straight ahead, people are amazing dreams. But then you get advice from artists. I had a dream where Bowie taught me how to write music using samples. Apparently, I got the composer explained to me, you think of the samples as harmonies functioning dominant chords. And apparently, this composer wrote lots of pieces, got his master's thesis out of it thanks to a dream and Bowie maybe, I'm not sure. I remember once collaborating with Drake in a dream, and the song was very vivid and catchy. However, when I woke up, it was gone. And I also remembered I don't like Drake at all. I was jamming with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Johnson. I wasn't playing my best, the even numbered strings were missing, of course. But they complimented me on my tone feel, which was think of the phrase takes one to no one, so I just started jumping. And then I was playing some big concert with Pat Matheny and improvising. Woke up pretty sad that was only a dream. Lines carried on sounding in my mind for a little while, but I didn't manage to take down more than a few notes before they disappeared. And this is interesting, there's a sense of evasion when it comes to these ideas before they disappeared. Would it be possible for us to somehow tap that well more deeply and tap gather music from sleep itself and all the strange imagination it? Holes that we can't seem to grasp in our waking life. Well, examples abound of composers inspired by dreams. The most famous perhaps is Tartini, the Italian composer, who lived at the time of J.S. Bach, who had a dream that he was visited by the devil who granted him any wish. And so Tartini wanted to hear him play the violin, so he handed him a violin. And the devil started playing with such exquisite art and technique that he was completely flawed. And he he awoke up immediately and grabbed some manuscript paper to try and capture this glorious music. But um he said it was the best music he ever wrote, but it was so inferior to what he had heard in the dream itself that if he didn't need it to do music for a living, he would have broken his he would have broken his violin and given up completely. But still we have this wonderful piece by Tartini from that dream in 1713. Well Hector Berliot, whose um Symphonie Fantastique is essentially a seminal large-scale dream. Based on his own visions, it tells of a protagonist, an artist who has an opium-induced hallucinations in five movements, and the artist falls in love and then eventually witnesses his own execution and crosses to a realm beyond. And there's this one theme that just recurs and recurs in a very dream logic status. It's a sort of strange musical self-portrait inspired by a dream but put into a dream itself. Jimi Hendrix was throughout his career inspired by one particular dream of his mother, who was riding a camel through a wooded area, and he describes really vividly the light coming through the trees and dappling on her face. And he wrote Little Wing with some deference to her, but particularly Angel, just a few months before he two passed. And he says that he never would forget that dream.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

I woke up one morning and there was this tune in my head. And I I I was uh I happened to have a piano by my bed. It was a little uh apartment. And uh so da da da what's this? What is this? So I thought it's it's just some old tune my dad must have played, or I've just uh heard it yesterday, you know. And so I went round to all my friends, to John first. What's this? What's what's this, Jim? I don't know. So I went to uh George Martin, a producer. George, what's this? You know a lot of songs, what's just a turtle? He said, I don't know. So after about a couple of weeks, I decided it was mine. No one came out of the woodwork.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

Music could also trigger dream memories. The guitarist Joe Setriani, during a period of personal loss and great stress, uh, picked up a guitar which happened to be in this strange tuning and played a couple of chords, just fell under his fingers. Instantly brought back to a time in his youth where he had the recurring dream when he was flying. Flying in a blue dream, in fact. And so he composed this piece and it's all about realm crossing. Um you can hear the floaty Lydian nature. The unprepared modulations, but he also picks up feedback from the feedback goddess he calls it, and also stray radio signals on his guitar pickup, like it's channeling other realms. Okay, good. Now I could go on for ages talking about um artists and composers who have attributed dreams to their um to their music, and I would l like to, but I think it's more important to say that music comes to everybody in their dreams. Meet Jennifer. You won't know her as a musician. She is an administrative assistant at OHSU's Night Cancer Institute. Excellent job. And she misses music.

SPEAKER_03 27:24

I want to play music again. Anyone want to start a band with me? Please.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

So she wants to do music. She used to learn violin and she misses it terribly because work got in the way. So she has a dream of starting a band, but more than that, she has a dream of music, a particular music. She dreams about the sound of earth from space. She has it ever about once a month, and the beating of drums and wood and metal and making these melodies and harmonies. Now she hasn't got the language to say it, but it's really perfectly described, growing quiet as we've as my view travels away from the pale blue dot into the void beyond. She can close my eyes now. I hear the melodies in my head. They sound like every tune I have ever heard at the same time, something new, which is a beautiful way of putting it. Very queen-like in the multitract nature of the harmonies. And one can only imagine what she heard. It was privy to herself, and she must have composed it. Perhaps we all compose in our dreams. So today I'm announcing the start of please. The DR DMRA, the Dream Music Retrieval Agency, where anybody can come to this agency and get their dream music retrieved with the help of composers' techniques and training in lucid dreaming and so on. So I've done an initial sketch for her using her descriptions. So maybe we're going to listen to a little of Jennifer's music. So we can draw music from sleep, but we can go further still, because perhaps we can dip into sleep itself and see what music it has. What do I mean by this? Well, we have rhythms for our sleep. If we are sleeping well, lucky you, what happens is you sleep the same time every night, and um there's something that guides our sleep. It's sort of like this um siren that calls us, which is our melatonin peak. If our melatonin peak happens at the right point, it keeps us in check. So what I've done here is circle uh real data of a good sleep and uh play notes for the uh nighttime sleep, daytime sleep, and where the melatonin peak lies, and you can hear how consistent and consonant it is a little bit of a nap, Kiki. Come on, have another nap. Oh, never mind. You can see how even those melatonin peaks are, and if we drag it out like this, you can see there's a stable melatonin peak and uh nice sleep. I am jealous. However, there's two things, many things that fight us these days. Um, but there's one inbuilt issue is that although there's a day clock is 24 hours, for some goddamn reason our body clocks are slightly longer, 24.5. So without the help of the melatonin uh adjustment calibration, we tend to get to sleep later and later each night. So we start sounding like Steve Reich. Add to that artificial lights, caffeine, and Netflix, and we're it's a disaster. So, and what comes out of such as night sleep sounds more like Steve Reich than consonant music. Wrong place to have a peek.

SPEAKER_03 32:13

Now you'll hear it phase.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

More interesting musically there. Some consolation. You're sleeping terribly, but you sound great. So if we drag this out, what's beautiful is that um you can actually see that um curve that occurs. There you go. Come on. There you go. And that's sort of what a lot of us are fighting, is this Steve Reich drift. But we should also discuss not just when we sleep, but how we sleep. And I don't know if you've seen this polysomnography or PSG. It's basically a sleep study which takes from a sleeping patient a number of uh data streams, breathing, um where you are in your sleep, uh in the depth of your sleep, movement of your legs, and so on. And it turns it into what they call a score. I'll zoom it in here. So this PSG data is coming in, it's having over time these uh events. Now, anyone who's done any music will suddenly see that it looks exactly like a score score. It looks like Perez, actually, with his blockiness. So, what happens if we take sleep, put this data in, and pass it through a system where it spits out uh instrumentation on the other side, where where we sleep is a flute melody. It seems right, it tells us how long we sleep, and we fall asleep down a scale. Breathing issues, apnea and so on can be percussion and pits. Uh it seems right that oxygen transfer is a string ensemble, wide open chords when good, close clusters when poor. Um, our body position, a bass line, and so on. What's extraordinary is that I can feed this data into the system, and without caressing any of the effects, it sounds like the sleep that the person is having. This is real data and a real translation here. So we've got flute, percussion, flute playing, how deep we're falling asleep, percussion and pits if there are any breathing issues. Uh, strings is nice and open here, uh, with a wide open transfer, and how we move is the bass line, which doesn't move very much. And we get sort of filmic uh music here. Oh, you lucky bastard. See how it easily goes to sleep. Dreaming here, a little breathe breath with a dream, falls asleep again, shuffles around the bed, nice baseline, rolls to the right hand side, wakes up for a moment, put back in. A nice long dream now. Seems to have breathing issues when dreaming, so you can kind of hear and diagnose at the same time. Let's take a sadly contrasting example, someone with sleep apnea, which has deep problems with breathing during the night. You'll notice here that in this flute melody it hardly ever falls fully asleep, so it has this frustrated melody that doesn't cadence, loads of percussion and pits, and then this thick Klependeretsky type chords. Um, and you'll see also that for snoring I gave it to the timpani for some reason, and what you get is basically mid-20th century modernist music. A lot of wakefulness, snatches of sleep. There. Again, the collision of the dream and the breath. Not noticed that before. Well, it's extraordinary is I know this person's night's sleep, which was just one night, uh, like I know a piece of Bach now. Restless leg syndrome is another extreme um sleep condition. Um, what I've done is given leg movements to the wood block, so you'll get that timpani for the snoring again. But what's fun is that the person here forgot to put their sensor on for their breathing, and you can see them definitely put it on there, and you get a lovely heart glissando at that moment. Look at that body movement in the bass line. Bass shouldn't move so much. And this insistent um light-level sleep, which seems to mirror the experience. But we can go deeper still. Because sleep itself is not just falling, it's just like four stages. As we know, there are different qualities of sleep and and different ways of getting to sleep. It turns out then rather than this four-stage system, it's more like a network of states that interlink together. And it's like a labyrinth. You can go, there are dead ends, you can go, there are one-way streets. There are 19 states to be in. If you want to get to the deeper state, you have to go through a certain um pathway through it. You can see these arrows here. So, for example, somebody might start at four, go to four fifteen, back to four, fifteen, then jump across to a deeper state like this. And when a friend showed me this, it struck me how similar this is to harmonic diagrams. This is an analysis of the film composer James Horner, who uses these sort of techniques uh intuitively to create these wonderful pathways. And he too has um two direction likelihood, one direction less likely, and so on, connections between points. So you might go from between D and F sharp minor and occasionally jump from F shape minor to F, which is a more magical movement here. So guess what? We can map these likelihoods of motion between chords to sleep states so that getting deeper asleep has a sort of harmonic cadence to it. This feels like a magical move. So this gives us not just music but a template to make music. For example, if we start awake and we want to end up with a deeper sleep, we have multiple pathways to get there. And in fact, I've just written a code that uses the same chances of moving on, and it can generate music for as long as you want to. This is the first one that was made with it. So we have what's called EEG data, electroencafylograms, that are basically saved as audio files. So you can play them back if you're feeling brave. And there are various ranges like an equalizer, graphic equalizers, to do with various experiences whilst dreaming and awake. Some we can listen to, some go too low. So, for example, here's a gamma, the gamma band associated with sort of light-level sleep and wakefulness. And then we'll go to the beta and then it'll disappear even though it's playing. Unless you happen to be a blue whale, in which case you're good luck to you getting home. Hold on to your trousers. Your gardening trousers. Anyone hear that? I can't. You can hear them all together though. Excuse me a second. So, how do we get to hear these waves without bringing them up octaves? Well, in fact, music has this trick because we can turn frequency of a pitch into a frequency of change of something else. So we take it like a carrier signal, like a chord, and we can slow it, we can um make it go loud and soft at the speed of the waveform. Um, so here we can get together a sense of how it feels to go into deep sleep as we go from theta to delta at rates. So we could take the pure waveforms that are coming out of our brains whilst we sleep, and using the right tools and filters and um some techniques, uh turn those waveforms into, I'll call it music, but it's sound design at least. And what I want you to do to do is see if you can tell the difference between different states of of of sound. Sleeping, they will be marked at the bottom. Good luck and see you in one minute. You'll be humming that all week. I must bring to your attention the fact that sleep does in fact have another sibling in Greek mythology, that of death. And they seem to come together, sleep, death, and music in this triptych with a special bond. Hypnos was the god of sleep, Anatos, of death, siblings in Greek mythology. What do these all share? Well, they have a realm, let's say, beyond the waking world, beyond the physical body, and beyond the self. Somehow music seems to remain present through all of them. We see this in the composers who were interned in the Second World War, like Victor Ullman, the composer who was taught by Schoenberg, spent five years in a concentration camp. And as he said, it deserved to enhance, not to impede his musical activities or will to live. On the left is a piece who wrote shortly before he was murdered in Auschwitz. There's something of his spirit that remains on the page and can't be held in by those walls. So sleep allows us to hold on to ourselves when ourselves no longer exist. And it seems that music also serves as a function, something that we can cling on to as we pass through different realms and different experiences in life. In this world. Thank you so much.