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.

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.

Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin: In my book, The World In Six Songs: How the Music Brain Created Human Nature, what I’m arguing is that certain changes in the prefrontal cortex, evolutionarily speaking, created structures in the brain that allowed for art, and allowed for reflexive thinking, and allowed for music and science, all as part of the same structural changes in the brain.  The musical brain is also the scientific brain, the metaphorical brain, and the brain that was able to create societies, systems of courts and justice and systems of democratic principles, such as welfare, taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves. All this came from an ability to see ourselves objectively, to see ourselves as members of a society, to build societies in which people looked out after each other and took care of one another.

There is no other species that does this. I mean, we look at ant society, and bee society, which is highly structured, but it’s very different. They don’t have systems of courts, they don’t create art, they don’t try to reflect on their own existence.  I think all of these came from a single set of changes in prefrontal cortex that gave us music at the same time.

So what’s the big question driving music research now?  Is it, “What is the purpose of music?”

I’m not sure there’s a single big question driving music cognition research. I think most of us in the field came at it not from the standpoint of wanting to do music cognition, per se, but wanting to do cognition. How does the brain work? How does attention work?  How does memory work? How do we form new concepts, how do we put things into categories? And we use music as a way to get at those questions because it’s a converging approach, it’s another window into these operations.

It’s also a nice way to spend your time, in the laboratory. I think some of us also have bonafide questions about music, and its role in human culture and in human development.  I happen to think that music was necessary for the formation of human societies.

If you look at primates, they tend not to have living groups with more than eighteen males, because there’s too much competition, they can’t sustain themselves. But for at least five or six thousand years, human beings have lived in assemblies of hundreds of thousands, half a million people. Ancient Athens, ancient Rome were big, big cities. Why is it we can do it and primates can’t? One argument is that collective music making soothes some of the social tensions that would’ve created, splinter societies.

What about the Steven Pinker’s argument?  Tell me what it is, and your response to it.

Steven Pinker’s argument is that music was a spandrel or a co-opted adaptation. These are technical ways of talking about evolutionary biology, but the upshot is that language is what evolution selected for, and music sort of came along for the ride, later.

Once we had language, we figured out ways to trick the brain into making music. And he calls it “Auditory Cheesecake,” which is a well-known argument in evolutionary theory.

People say, “Well, why do we like cheesecake? That’s not adaptive, too much cheesecake causes obesity, and can lead to diabetes and things like that. Cheesecake is not healthy.” But the fact is, over evolutionary time scales, you can’t talk about the age of manufactured foods, you know, with the last fifty years, a hundred years- evolutionary time scales are much longer than that. Tens of thousands of years ago our hunter gatherer ancestors had very few sources of fats and sweets, and it was an adaptive strategy, when they found them, to load up on them, to take some pleasure in storing them in their bodies.

Now, where can you just open the pantry, and there are obscene amounts of fats and sweets available, and you don’t have to work for it?  They’re everywhere, and it turns out they can lead to health problems that we didn’t anticipate. Our liking for cheesecake, Pinker and others argue, is a by product of this old evolutionary system that no longer works. He says the same thing is true of music — our liking for music is a by product of an old evolutionary system that’s selected for language.

I think Pinker’s argument is that there isn’t a gene, or set of genes, that sub-serve music.  We’ve somehow tricked the language system into giving us music. He may be right. There may not be a gene for music. There may be genes that serve components of music. And if they’re there, we have to wonder why they’re there- the genome is crowded. In fact, it’s getting more and more crowded each year. Five years ago we thought humans had thirty thousand genes, now we think there are only twenty-three thousand. I pick up journals every month and they’ve, they’ve lowered the number.  That’s not a lot of genes.

Even though most of the story is how genes interact with one another and whether they’re turned on or not, whether they’re expressed or not at a particular point in time. Gene expression is really the frontier of genetics research today. Still, twenty-three thousand genes- it isn’t a whole lot to go around, when you consider all the different ways that human differ from one another. And when you consider that we’ve got ninety-eight percent of our DNA in common with the chimpanzee, there just isn’t a whole lot left over for things like music, and painting, and language, politics, and art. You know, all the things that make us human.

And what do you think of that?

Well, it’s a reasonable argument.  I think the evidence, has to be considered and weighed by each person for themselves. My personal view, not just because I like music, but my personal view of the science of it, is that there’s more evidence on the side that music was first.

Such as?

Some of the evidence is the way in which music activates primitive structures in the brain, that language doesn’t. The fact that music seems to trigger certain neurochemical reactions- they can be taken evidence, either way. You know, heroin is maladaptive, in the long run, and yet people seem to like it once they try it. It’s tricking the pleasure center into thinking it’s got something good. So, the fact that we get this neurochemical happy juice, or burst, when we listen to music, you can say that, well, it’s, “It’s more like heroin, it’s an accident that music triggers these things.” Or, you can say, “It’s more like nutrition. It’s supposed to trigger those things.” That’s hard to weigh.

But when I look at the animal literature, and you look at birds and primates who have calls that are more musical than they are speech-like — that is they tend to have properties that more resemble human music than they do human speech — to me, anyway, that suggests that music was something that early hominids, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, probably had, and language came out of that. You can imagine, as Stephen Mithen does — and this is kind of a cartoon version of his argument — that you can imagine a conversation between Neanderthals that had music, but no speech. You’ve got these musical elements, and sort of speech-like elements. You’ve got prosody, rhythm, tempo, pitch changes-all this without words, right? All of this is being conveyed by what we conventionally think of as the elements of music.

Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin: I’m not sure if I would say the purpose of music was to build community, but it may have been a function of music. We may have discovered that music can help ease and defuse social tensions, and create social bonds. My idea is that in fact music functioned in six distinct ways, throughout the development of our species. That’s the world, that’s the six songs, in The World In Six Songs. Social bonding was just one of them. Another was to communicate knowledge.

Knowledge becomes embedded in music, and it’s more easily remembered. We can remember things set to song more easily, whether it’s how to build a canoe, or, you know, how to prepare a plant so that it won’t be poisonous.  Another one is comfort.  Mother’s soothing their infants, letting them know that they’re here, even when the infant can’t feel the touch of the mother, because she’s out cooking or gathering. From the auditory signal, the infant is comforted by the recurring sound of the mother’s voice. Or lovers comforting one another, or hunters just letting each other know that they’re out there, when they can’t see each other, under the cover of night, or the cover of trees.

Another one would be joy. Just waking up in the morning and feeling really great, and wanting to move your body and sing, and you just, you know, make nonsense syllables as you move around, and I think, you know, there would have been some evolutionary reward for moving your body, for staying limber and flexing it, and music helps us to synchronize our body movements. It’s important to realize that you can’t make music without moving some part of your body. You either have to hit something or scrape something, or at least vibrate your vocal chords. Or you blow into something.

Love is another one. I think that people use music to express love to one another, as the Native American Indians did, as Pete Seeger told me, there would be a special song that a young man would compose for a young Native American woman, and that would be their song. And it would be what would bind them together. And he couldn’t sing it to anybody else, and she wouldn’t sing it to anybody else. That was their song, and we still talk about “our song”, in our culture. It has an interesting origin.

So there’s love, comfort, joy, friendship or social bonding knowledge, and the final one is religion. I think it’s a separate category of how people used music to think beyond themselves, beyond their own existence, to create a notion that there was something larger than themselves. Now, whether we believe in God today or not is beside the point.  We’re talking about tens of thousands of years of evolution, where people either believed in God, or Gods, or, or some higher power, or, some entity, that was larger than they were, larger than their own concerns, and larger than their own family group. Something they would appeal to, to rescue them in times of trouble.  And music has always been there for that.

But, all those uses of music, or purposes of music, are certainly part of daily life; are  an integral part of our existence, which is somewhat different from the way we may think of music today, going to a concert hall and sitting there and listening.

There has been this interesting evolutionary trend or cultural trend, anyway, in the last five hundred years, that, at least in Western society, we’ve set up a situation where most of us don’t make music everyday, and we don’t participate when other people are making music. We pay money, and then the experts entertain us. In fact, we’re told in school, sometimes, “Oh, don’t sing, leave the singing to the other kids. You just stand there and mouth the words and pretend that you’re singing with us, because you don’t sing well enough.”

Now, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first concert halls weren’t built until five hundred years ago, in Europe.  The idea that you would go and pay a class of experts to play for you, and that you would sit quietly with your hands folded in your lap, that’s actually foreign to us, evolutionarily speaking. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing. — I love a good concert as much as anyone, and I admire great musicians and love hearing them do what they do.  But, if we’re talking purely historically, anthropologically, this is something that’s foreign to our species.

How does music, its power to change the brain, have implications in the field of medicine, and also in education?

There’s been, in parallel to the more basic science side of things, there’s been a kind of practical side of music research: trying to figure out if music can make you smarter, or if learning an instrument has ancillary cognitive benefits. And there have been some rough starts in this arena, over the last fifteen years. But the emerging evidence, from carefully controlled studies, is that learning to play an instrument — not just passively listening, but learning to play an instrument early on — can actually confer some cognitive advantages.

It seems from early evidence thatif you learn to play an instrument early, you learn to read at an earlier age, you learn to read more quickly, you’re better at math, you’re better at a variety of scholastic topics, and we’re not exactly sure why this is, but it seems as though learning to play an instrument trains attentional networks in the interior Cingulate gyrus, in a way that maybe other things would do, too. Learning a second language learning to multitask, maybe crossword puzzles. I mean, nobody’s saying that music does it uniquely. But we’re saying that music does seem to do it.

And music uses many different parts of the brain, right?

Yeah.  Music uses many different parts of the brain, so that might be part of the story, too.

And this way that music can affect the brain also has implications for medicine?

There are a number of medical implications for this kind of work in the large picture of things we just don’t understand that much about the normal healthy brain, and how it functions, and how things are wired up. So any information we can get, either using music as a window or athletics, or playing chess- any of that’s helpful. But one of our goals is, that through understanding how music activates different areas of the brain, we’ll be able to map the brain, and be better equipped to come up with programs to help people that are victims of stroke, tumor, lesions, Alzheimer’s Disease, things of that nature.

The other thing that’s interesting is that when you go into old age homes, you find that one of the last things to go is music. Somebody may no longer remember the names of their spouse or family members, and yet, still be able to remember lyrics to songs they knew when they were fourteen.  Music insinuates itself into memory in a special way. This can be a way to reach out to somebody who is otherwise cut off, emotionally or cognitively, from the people around them.