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.

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.

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.

Brian Greene: When we talk about vibration in physics, we have an interesting set of equations, mathematical equations that govern how a system vibrates. So if we have a string on a violin, we have an equation for how that string will vibrate. And that equation is one we can study mathematically and predict for a given string, what it will sound like based in the mathematics. And this set of equations, the equations for what we call simple harmonic motion are the most ubiquitous equations in all of physics. They’re the ones we deal all the time in a wealth of different systems, in cosmology we deal with them, in astrophysics we deal with them, in everyday settings we deal with them. Those equations are the bread and butter of physics.

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: 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.