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.

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: Well, all sounds—all music in particular—comes from vibrations. So the reason why you can hear me speak is because I am creating pressure waves that are emanating from my mouth, compressing the air, then rarifies as it spreads out, compresses again. And that ripple of air ultimately bangs into your eardrum, smashes your eardrum with these molecules of air, going back and forth and your eardrum registers and your brain decodes that. And you have the sensation of hearing. So all sound is a matter of producing those pressure waves, those vibrations in air.

Oliver Sacks: Although personally music has been very important to me from before I can remember. As a physician it only hit me really in the 1960s, and that was when I found myself at a hospital in the Bronx seeing the frozen post-encephalitic patients whom I later wrote about in Awakenings. These were people with very profound Parkinsonism, so profound that sometimes they would stay absolutely motionless for hours on end and could not initiate any movement or speech or indeed thought, although one learned that later, but so much so, “What’s going on with these people?” “Are they there?” “Is there anyone at home?” And it was originally the nurses and people who knew of these patients well who said they could be transformed by music. If there’s music, these people could dance, they could sing, they could talk, they can do things, they can think, they can become almost normal while music is there.

And then I saw this for myself, and I was stupefied. I don’t know what term to use. And 40 years later I find it astounding and it needs to be seen as someone for whom music—someone for whom movement is unimaginable suddenly able to move. But it strictly goes with the music, and when the music stop, they stop. So music therapy for these Parkinsonian patients was my first experience as a physician, and I wondered what sort of music was involved or any music could do so. It didn’t have to be familiar music or loved music. It doesn’t sometimes have to be a conscious attention to the music. But obviously the rhythm and the beat and pulse of music was very important. And this would spontaneously and almost automatically I think allow people to move. So the good music had a strong rhythm, not overwhelming but a strong rhythm. But obviously I think if people like the music, so much the better.

Interviewer: And what have you found out about or what do you believe is going on in the brain that creates this effect?

Oliver Sacks: Well, this reminds me of the way in which all of us want to keep time and tap time, and how children spontaneously start to dance or keep time to music they hear or imagine. And that seems to be a very strong human attribute to have motor responses, movements synchronized with the pulse of music, the sounds.  And uniquely in the human brain, at least uniquely among mammals, one finds connections between the auditory parts of the brain and what’s called the dorsal pre-motor cortex, some of the motor parts. And it seems to be this conjunction of auditory and motor, which is so crucial for all of us in responding to music, but especially if you have something like Parkinson’s. So I think that’s one of the very important thing whether the shape of the melody and the life of the music. Kant the philosopher called the music the quickening art. And music seems inherently alive and to give a feeling of life and emotion and ongoing, and of a journey, a sort of trajectory. And I suspect important all of these could be important as well. It’s just not the rhythm.  Everything in music carries one along.

Also read Concetta Tomain’s article, “How Music Can Reach the Silent Brain.”

Oliver Sacks: And you’ll find that even a few minutes of five finger exercises will make functional changes in the brain, so the brain’s response to music in physiological terms is almost immediate although obviously it would take months or whatever to have anatomical changes. But a year of Suzuki training will produce physical changes in the brain, and there have been studies looking at the brains before and after a year of training. And so whatever gifts a  person has or doesn’t have, musical training seems to be very important, the more so if it’s early.

If music can so alter the brain, at least the musical parts of the brain, when people are young, one would wonder the role of music in education, and whether this enlargement and benefit can spread to other parts of the brain, whether it will facilitate reading, memory, concentration, focus, and there’s quite a lot of evidence that this is the case, and therefore strong arguments for including music in education. But I stress this is something beyond the so-called Mozart effect. A little Mozart under the pillow, a teaspoon of Mozart, while it’s very pleasant and it may introduce people to Mozart, in itself, that’s not enough. There needs to be real engagements with music and a lot of it.

Oliver Sacks: I said earlier that there’s no one music center. And one of the things which is now apparent from brain imaging is that music can involve many different parts of the brain, special parts for the response to pitch, and to frequency, and to timbre, and to rhythm, and to melodic contour, and to harmonic and everything else. In fact you may find that much more of the brain is involved in the perception and the response to music than to language or anything else. One aspect of this is that if one does brain imaging, you can often distinguish the brains of musicians from the brains of non musicians because certain parts of the brain may become so enlarged in response to music that you can see the changes with the naked eye. You can’t say that’s the brain of a mathematician or a visual artist. You may be able to say I think that’s the brain of a musician.