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.

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.

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.

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: 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.