Stephen Mithen: The Neanderthals—there’s no evidence that they had language. But they must have had a sophisticated form of communication. They were just like humans, they might would have had to have told other people how they’re feeling, they would have had to look after their children and nurture them. They had to have made plans for group hunting and general movement. So what sort of communications system did they have? Now I came to the conclusion which must have been based on high degrees of musicality. Because we can see traces of that in our nearest living relatives. This seems to be the only form of communication with that language that would have been complex to allow them to have function as a social group, and yet not gone that extra step to modern language. So I think they communicated by using sets of phrases, almost like musical phrases that would have had semantic meanings, phrases such as something that would translate into “Let us share meat,” “We’ll go hunting” or “How are you feeling?” but would have been expressed in musical tones, different types of pitches, different types of rhythms. They might have used these also to build a sense of group identity, very much how we use music today, especially for caring for infants, you know just like we do today with our youngest children before they got language, we sing to them and move them rhythmically . I’m sure the Neanderthals would have been doing exactly the same.

Oliver Sacks, MD, FRCP: We are wired for speech, we are wired for spoken language, for expressing and understanding spoken language. That’s to say any human being who is exposed to language at a critical stage of development in their second or third year will acquire language without any explicit form of teaching. Comsky above others has spoken wonderfully about this, but basically exposure to language activates language parts of the brain. However we are not wired for written language in the same way. Written language only goes back five or seven thousand years. There is no built-in circuitry in the brain for written language. But a circuitry is developed through learning to write. A circuitry which may be somewhat different in different people. In other words what is already in the brain is recruited and pressed into a new use when one learns to write. So in this way is music like speech? Or is it like writing? I’m inclined to think, but here only one can speculate, that both of these are involved. I think there are certain aspects of music which do not have any equivalent in speech, in particular the pulse of music, the steady rhythm, and its synchronization with movement.  I think there is good reason for supposing for that is built in, and there are anatomical connections, which are strongly and almost exclusively developed in human beings.

Brian Greene: Albert Einstein dreamed of finding what he called a Unified Theory. By that he meant a single idea, a single principle, maybe even a single equation that might describe everything in the universe. He worked long and hard many decades to try to find the theory and he never did. Since his passing many physicists haven take up where he left off, and many of us believe then an approach called String Theory may be the Unified Theory that he was looking for. And the basic idea of the unified description of all matter is pretty straightforward. If you take any piece of material, say a piece of wood, cut it in half, cut it in half again, keep on cutting it to ever smaller pieces, the basic question is what’s the smallest piece that you get to? What is the finest uncuttable constituent? Now we all know if you cut fine enough you get molecules, if you cut them up, you get atoms, if you cut them up even further you get other particles, electrons going around the nucleus with neutrons and protons, even though the neutrons and protons are smaller entities called quarks. The conventional idea stopped there. String Theory comes along and says “There may be one more layer of structure: inside an electron, inside a quark, inside any particle you have heard of, according to these ideas, is a little tiny filament. Looks like a tiny little string, that’s why it’s called String Theory, and the little strings can vibrate in different patterns.”

So the idea is that, according to this theory an electron can be a string vibrating in one pattern. You can call it a middle C if you want, by the musical analogy, a quark could be a string vibrating at a different pattern like an A. So the difference between one particle and another is simply  the note that its string is playing. And this is the unified description that this theory puts forward: everything can be reduced to the notes these fundamental strings are playing. Now that’s metaphorical. There’s math behind this, that allows us to see all of the key elements of physics can find a home in this description, but in a nutshell that’s what this theory says.

Dr. Joanne Loewy: The fetus hears the mother’s heartbeat 26 million times before the baby is born. So with this Gato box we could actually recreate the heart sounds.

The Gato box is actually a drum, but we use it without the mallet as a box. And we try to entrain to the baby’s heart rate so we could create a rhythm for the suck, much like if you went to the gym and you went on the treadmill and you play music, you would entrain to that beat. It would help you work out, the rhythm would support your movement.

We use it without a mallet because it would be too jarring. You’ll notice it’s a kind of quiet sound and it’s enclosed, much like the baby would experience in the womb.

We expect the heart rate to go up a little bit in the transition, so we saw that at the beginning. It was high 189, 190. But then very soon the baby was stable transitioning from quiet alert to almost a sleep state.

Ronit Azoulay, flautist: The flute is to work with her breathing. I’m breathing as I play the flute. I’m noticing her breathing rate and matching it with maybe one or two note phrases, maybe longer. She is on a respirator. One of the things that can be a struggle on a respirator is that it can be uncomfortable. So we’re both looking to influence the rhythms but also the relaxation in the body.

Research has demonstrated that we entrained to sounds outside of us and rhythms. The word entrainment is from physics originally, and in this context it means is that we synchronize with external rhythms in music.

Doctor at Beth Israel: We wanted to study whether or not music therapy would impact on quality of life, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation. The challenge of having chronic lung disease very much has to do with breathing and breathing correctly and training people to breathe as well as possible. When engaged in that effort one can see better oxygen levels, less shortness of breath.

Ronit Azoulay: During the relaxation the heart rate when down back to around 84-85  is what I had noticed when I was playing. And now after the session it’s back at around 90.

Doctor at Beth Israel: We’ve engaged with 20 patients as a pilot study. And the first observations are that [inaudible] rates do go down. Oxygen levels we have to look more closely at. It’s data accruing.  Hopefully it will have some positive outcome.

Ronit Azoulay: Music therapy is a field that is continuing to grow.  The research in the feld is getting more and more sophisticated and understanding how music—does it influence quality of life? Does it influence breathing? Does it influence heart and breathing rhythms as well? So it’s continuing to grow.

Concetta Tomaino, D.A., MT-BC, LCAT: One of the reasons, and one of the exciting reasons, why music therapy has so much promise for people with neurological conditions is that music accesses the networks in the brain in a complementary faction (fashion) or differently than the function that a person has lost. And what I mean by that is we can stimulate the timing mechanisms, we can stimulate word finding ability, we can stimulate recognition memory, even short-term memory function through using music in a specific way that makes available to these patients function in the brain that’s still there but maybe they can’t get at independently because of the inhibition that has taken place due to their brain injury.

So music is an enriched sensory stimulus that allows for, I believe, the disinhibition of some of the inhibited function that has been lost in these individuals. And by stimulating these complementary or parallel networks, we see this type of ability come back.

David Rothenberg: When I began to realize when you hear a bird song slow down like this, you really hear why bird song is music, it just doesn’t like music. But it really is musical utterance. Why do I say that? Because it’s a pattern of sounds with a beginning, middle and end with a real shape that is performed. Each species is performing a different song, each species is doing it a different song, one kind of particular sound that it needs to do. The song of a blue jay isn’t going to work for a mockingbird. A song of a cat bird isn’t going to work for a thrasher. They all have these different things. Yet the purpose of the song is pretty much the same: males are singing to attract mates and defend territories. People who read my books sometimes say “Rothenberg doesn’t believe male birds sing to attract mates and defend territories.” That’s not true. It’s not that I don’t believe that. That’s what the song is for but that’s not what the song is. Many bird song scientists stop asking what the song is once they decide what it’s for. But what is it? It’s really music, a series of pattern sounds that must be performed a certain way. It’s not like language, it doesn’t have a complex meaning that’s hidden in the syntax. Like some other sounds birds make do have that, like chickadees have 20 calls, they’ve all been studied and identified. A certain sound means I’m hungry, another sound is a general warning sound, another sound is a specific warning sound only if a hawk flies overhead. These kinds of sounds have very specific meanings. They’re more like language. What is remarkable is that these sounds are instinctual. They are kind of learned from birth. The birds know them. They’re not learned—they have those abilities to make those sounds and understand them from birth. But the songs, which are really these musical utterances, they have to be learned. Most songbirds learn their songs from adult male birds. It’s fascinating that they already have the ability to understand the songs that are like language with real specific meanings but these musical kinds of songs whose complexity cannot be explained by their purpose. These things they have to spend time learning. It seems to me it should be like the reverse. Why should you have the take all this time to learn  something whose purpose is so simple.

Stephen Mithen: Our conception of music in the West can be rather narrow. I think in the West it got tied up with expertise, Who does music? It’s somebody who stands on a stage and performs to others. It’s something that is done on special occasions. If you look at traditional societies they remind us that music is something that just pervades everyday of every person’s life. You know, kids just singing and dancing right from scratch. It’s just what you do. It’s not something you do on a special occasion, it’s not even something that you have to be trained for. You do it when you work, you do it when you play. Now that doesn’t mean they don’t have expertise, they don’t have special performers and people who got particular talents, but it’s something that pervades everything they do. And that reminds us that music isn’t a special elite form of activity.

Ofer Tchernichovski: For the male has nice colors and they can sing, and the female is grey and she cannot sing, they don’t even have a song system in their brain. This is a completely different brain. This brain is the brain that creates the songs, whereas this brain is the brain that judges the song. Their selecting males are also based on how beautiful and nice the songs are. So there is a transmitter brain and a receiver brain.

Let’s put them back.

I don’t know if bird song and music songs are the same but I think they share something. David Rothenberg will tell you that bird song is music. And I tend to agree on a personal level that the songs are very beautiful, they’re very appealing, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. But what is it? You can come up with an explanation that songs just as a function…female or tutor other birds in the territory. I’m not so much interested in those questions.  I’m much more interested in how the songs come about, how the songs develop. And I’m interested in it because songs are so wonderful.

So here you see is a plastic bird with a speaker inside it. And we can play sounds from that bird and get him to interact with the flight bird. And you can teach the bird to sing using this robotic hand-controlled bird

So here we developed software that record all the sounds that the bird sing. You can see here on the monitor you can see the bird calling and singing right here, something in real time right there. Each of those computer is controlling eight of those training boxes independently. And you can see here the specter analysis of those songs. But doing all of this together allows us to look at every sound they ever make. So you can look at an entire development of a bird song and ask what happened to those sounds?

So we can look at the entire process of song development. And that’s very, very useful because we can then get an image of an entire song development.

Brian Greene: Perhaps the most familiar kind of interval in music is the octave where you have C and another C They sound kind of the same but the second one is higher pitch relative to the first. Mathematically we know how those two waves, those two vibrations relate to one another. So when two notes are an octave apart the wavelength of one is twice the wavelength of the other or said differently the frequency of the higher one is twice the frequency of the lower one. So that is a very simple relationship between how quickly the note, the string if it is producing that note is vibrating, and if it’s vibrating twice as fast, it’ll be an octave higher.

There’s a lot of math in music in that the relationship between vibrations can be phrased mathematically. The art of music of course goes beyond the math in doing things that don’t really come out of a formula, don’t come out of some well defined system of going from one note to the next but using sort of creative genius to do things unexpectedly. That’s where I think the music happens.