Winner: Sujan E. Bin Wadud, “Instinct Tells Me”

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Runner up: David Minnick, “Small Enough”

Chosen for the very creative use of all samples and stems, nice harmonization, and production value. Download the mp3.

Runner up: Boback Salehi, “Storm-Instrumental-Lama mix”

Chosen for the beautiful composition using violin and Persian Kamancheh over guitar sample. Download the mp3.

Runner Up: Dana “MiztaKlean” Essex, “Miztaklean’s Music Instinct Theme”

Chosen for the original, slower tempo used with the guitar sample and his nice piano work over guitar theme. Download the mp3.

Runner Up: Justin Nation (Jus Bus), “Music Instinct Theme”

Chosen for the mix’s great rhythm and well-chosen loops. Download the mp3.

During the broadcast premiere of The Music Instinct: Science & Song on June 24th at 9pm (ET), Dr. Daniel Levitin, co-host of The Music Instinct and author of the best-selling books This Is Your Brain On Music and The World In Six Songs took your questions about the show live via Twitter. Daniel Levitin’s Twitter account can be viewed and followed here.

Dr. Levitin can be asked questions directly through Twitter by including “@danlevitin” in your tweets (as Twitter messages are known), and we ask that tweets about the show include the hashtag #musicinstinct.

Twitter is a free, real-time short messaging service that allows individuals to post messages of up to 140 characters in length. Conversation is filtered through the use of descriptive words known as “tags” that allow anyone on Twitter interested in a particular subject or conversation to see only those messages (i.e. “tweets”) pertaining to that topic. During the live Q&A, viewers can view the online conversation in real-time by going to the following web URL: http:://search.twitter.com and typing in the tag: #musicinstinct into the search box.

In addition to the use of tags, conversation on Twitter can be directed to particular users of the service by using the @ symbol in connection with their Twitter ID. Dr. Levitin’s Twitter ID is danlevitin. Any questions for Dr. Levitin about the Music Instinct should be directed to Dr. Levitin by including @danlevitin in that Twitter message.

Why do we hear music the way we do? Why do human beings make music in the first place? Are its various components things that can even be explained by science? These were topics covered in just one of the events, “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” at this year’s five-day World Science Festival from June 10 to 14. The festival was packing them in at events on topics like fMRI brain research, dark energy, quantum mechanics, microbiology, and behavioral science. Many of the presentations were affairs bringing together experts from diverse fields to bring their joint creative focus to commuter traffic, the earth’s atmospheric levels of CO2, and the question of nothingness.

So judging from the sellout response, New Yorkers are pretty interested in science—as entertainment, anyway, with renowned scientists mixing it up with Hollywood actors and poets and journalists and Juilliard-trained musicians in a sort of cross-cultural musico-scientific extravaganza. In the New York Times, Dennis Overbye covered the opening-night gala on June 10 at Alice Tully Hall honoring biologist Edward O. Wilson, often referred to as the father of the environmental movement. That starry event featured names like Alan Alda, Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Glenn Close, and Anna Deavere Smith, and Damian Woetzel. Woetzel directed a multimedia performance of Frans Lanting’s LIFE: A Journey Through Time—setting the imagery of National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting to a score by Philip Glass, performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Marin Alsop.

Bobby McFerrin

A few nights later, I attended “Notes and Neurons” at CUNY’s Gerald W. Lynch Theater, moderated by WNYC radio host John Schaefer, where for two hours Bobby McFerrin—singer/performer/unclassifiable noise creator—and assembled experts addressed the questions like human response to music (hard-wired or culturally determined?) and the reaction to rhythm and melody (universal or influenced by environment?). All of them—scientists Jamshed Bharucha, Daniel Levitin, and Lawrence Parsons, and musician Bobby McFerrin—are among the experts who cover these topics in the new PBS documentary The Music Instinct: Science and Song.

There is something fundamentally amusing about watching three top-level scientists, a musically knowledgable radio host, and a comically endearing oddity like Bobby McFerrin, all arrayed on the same stage to talk about sound perception, pitch, and other music concepts as they relate to humans. The first thing McFerrin did when he got onstage was smile out into the black-box theater audience and do a mouth-popping noise. A few people in the audience mouth-popped back at him. Then he sang some improvisations, working in a bit from “Sweet Home Chicago” and another that sounded like “Flight of the Bumblebee.” His more-than-three-octave vocal range, plus the sheer range of sounds he can make with his voice and body, is always astonishing to witness. McFerrin conducted brief experiments with the audience to show how easy it is for people to follow cues about call-and-response type singing—audience as lab rat. Then scientists started throwing around ideas about music as a whole nervous-system activity (complete with a multi-colored chart giving an overview of psychological and brain processes for music), the evolutionary adaptive value of music and dance, downward pitch slopes used in human language to indicate negative emotion. At times when the science got a little heavy (there was a long explanation about the theory of expected auditory pitches from different parts of the world, focusing for a period on the flatted second interval), McFerrin would hum or make his unique sonic contributions (no other way to describe) from the stage. One discussion of human development of auditory systems centered on babies being able to hear music before they are born, meaning music preferences and expectations could be established quite early in life. This prompted a crack from Schaefer: “So if your mother is the female Milton Babbitt…?”

The most entertaining part of the evening was a demonstration by one of the scientists of galvanic skin response (GSR) to hearing different types of music. McFerrin and two people chosen from the audience became subjects, and were hooked up to a device that recorded their excitement reaction to music by measuring the skin through electrical conductivity. Devices were attached to their hands, a screen set up for us to watch live GSR data being created for each of the three, while they listened to four different kinds of music: Prince’s “Delerious,” Strauss’s “Traumerei,” Penderecki’s Threnody, and a bit of a Chinese opera. Though reactions varied from person to person, graphs generally indicated moderate excitement at the Prince song, very high excitement for the Penderecki (with its screechy string polytonalities … think of the opening music of the movie There Will Be Blood and you get the idea), and calm reactions to the Strauss. Reactions to the Chinese opera bit varied the most between the three (intended as a type of cultural-listening experiment). Three underutilized musicians seated onstage—a cellist, tabla player, and sarod player—played a short improvisation for the last few minutes of the evening. They were jointed by McFerrin and Levitin, who is a saxophonist. (Bharucha, a violinist, played earlier on during some demonstrations.)

One of the neat differences between scientists and musicians is how they demonstrate what they have learned to the public. Scientists spend hours, weeks, and years doing labs and field work, producing at the end some tangible evidence of research—graphs, charts, numbers, statistical analysis—that proves their view on a particular topic. Musicians spends hours, weeks, and years in practice and rehearsal rooms, emerging to perform publicly for audiences. But in a live performance, there is nothing tangible to hold onto after the last note sounds, no permanent documentation, no “lab report.” At that point, it’s all about perception and memory.

Missed this first contest? Enter our second contest to mix The Music Instinct Theme here.

Winner: David Minnick, “Ignition”

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Rationale: Very good musical use of SFX throughout the whole piece.  Well developed.  Created very good use of water sounds for the rhythm bed.  Extremely musical use of the sound effects provided for the contest.

Runners Up:

Andrew Westphale, “Groovolution”

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Rationale: Nice development in the beginning. Wonderfullly creative use of manipulated wolf howls as organ sound. Great chimp loops as rhythm.  Creative the use of the balloon effects.

Randy Colby, “PBS Science & Song (RC Breaks Mix)”

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Rationale: Good musical development.  Love the open with the bubbles mixed with the dinner triangle.  And loved the apes at the end. Good use of thunderstorm as break.  Interesting use of ping pong sound for the last part of piece.

David Cutter “Passing Windows”

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Rationale: David Cutter created a very nice mellow groove and very creative use of varied sfx with the rhythm.  The piece was very musical -particularly the use of the electronic beeps.  Good use of laughs throughout.

Royal Beatsmyth, “Ambassador Lassiter’s Phantasmic Antiquarium”

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Judgement Rationale: This artist created a good groove with edge.  Interesting use
of cheerleader fx, nice use of vocals.  Creative use of telephone as a melody in last part of piece.

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.

Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin: One of the things about musical memory is that, in some respects songs stick in our head, and maybe that’s because they’re supposed to. It’s difficult to talk about these things without talking about evolution. When you can remember a song so well, maybe it suggests that evolution wants us to. Maybe songs played an important role in our evolutionary history. A lover out on a hunt for a long period of time wants to be remembered while he’s away, she wants him to remember her, they have their song that they sang to each other, and, you know, that sticks in the head, and it keeps them faithful, and, you know, there’s some evolutionary advantages in that, in terms of raising the kids and, and so on. I’m interested in what attributes of music stay stuck in the head. Is it rhythm, it is pitch, what is it? It turns out to be all of it.  The average person has an extraordinary memory for the components of music. Even when there’s no theoretical reason why they should.  So, take the song “Happy Birthday”. Every time you sing it, you sing it in a different key. It’s still the same song. Whoever it is that’s in the room that starts, they just start any way they feel like, they may not even think ahead. And then you all join in, and some of you are synchronized in the right pitch, and some of you aren’t, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s still the same song.

In fact, it was the Gestalt psychologists, who noticed in the 1890s, Christian Von Ehrenfels and Max Wertheimer and others, that there’s this funny property to songs. You can sing them with any group of notes, and they’re still recognizable as the same song. Even when you change every single note, it’s still the same song.

It’s because songs are defined by the relationship between pitches, not the absolute pitches. Nevertheless, if you ask the average person in the street to just sing their favorite song, they tend to sing it with the right pitches. Their memory has encoded this information that isn’t necessary for maintaining the identity of the song, but it’s there.  Why would evolution create a brain mechanism that holds onto the stuff that it doesn’t need? It must’ve been important, throughout evolutionary time, or it must be that memory is more efficient, if it can hold onto all this detail. People don’t just remember the absolute pitches, but they tend to remember the actual tempo, and a lot of the little nuances of the singer’s voice. When Michael Jackson goes, “Eeh, eeh!” or Madonna has a particular growl in her voice, people remember all of that, and they replicate it when they sing.

So describe how you do this experiment to study this.

One of the ways that, that we study this is we just bring people into the laboratory, or stop them on the street. We ask them to sing their favorite song. And then we analyze their production, and compare it to the CD. Now, in order for this to work, they can’t be singing a song like “Happy Birthday”, or the National Anthem, or “Deck The Halls”, where there is no right key. But if they sing a pop song, a song by U2 or by Backstreet Boys, that song exists in the world in only one version, and it’s the version that people have heard thousands and thousands of times. There is a correct answer to the question, “What is the tempo of that song?” or, “What is the, the right pitch, starting pitch?” You just record them, you compare it to the CD, and you, you look at the pitch and the tempo and you see how close they got.

So, coming back to emotion in music- what are the possible theories about why music affects us emotionally?

There are a lot of different factors that go into our emotional appreciation of music.  Some of it is the memories we have of a particular song, which we heard at a particular time in our lives, or it reminds us of a song that had those qualities. Some of it has to do with just the beat, the pulse. Music like James Brown or March music, for that matter, can be invigorating. It makes you want to move your body. Other music can make you, uh, just sort of melt and relax.  It’s, it’s either composed to have that affect, or it’s performed to have that affect.

We do know that listening to music releases certain neurochemicals. If you listen to music that you enjoy, it releases dopamine, a so-called “feel-good hormone”. It can also release prolactin, the comforting hormone that’s associated with mothers lactating and feeding their infants.

There’s another hormone called oxytocin that’s the so-called “trust hormone.” This is the hormone that’s released when two people- well, if a person has an orgasm, oxytocin is released, and it makes them bond to the person that they’re with. If two people have an orgasm at the same time, they bond to each other. There’s an obvious evolutionary advantage for this. Oxytocin causes feelings of trust with the person. For reasons that we don’t fully understand, when people sing together, oxytocin is released. People trust more, people that they’ve sung and played music with.  So there’s all this neurochemical change that occurs, in response to playing and listening to music.  And we’re just at the beginnings of trying to sort it all out.

Do you think in a very broad sense, that it’s more because we associate music with something that creates an emotion, or because there’s something structural about the nature of music itself?

I think music contains an enormous amount of information. And I mean information in the technical sense of information theory, the amount of unique content.  That there’s more information than speech.  It’s more complex a signal. And so I think that although music doesn’t convey information like, “Hey, would you open the window over there?”, it conveys emotional information that’s very nuanced, and we’re sensitive to that. I think that music was probably an early form of emotional communication between humans, and the reason it lasted even after the introduction of language, is that it’s much better at some forms of communications, in some feelings that you want to communicate, than language is. It’s much better at communicating the dynamics of human emotion.

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.