full interview_daniel levitin_1.mp3
Daniel Levitin [00:00:00] I'm Dr. Daniel J. Levitin. I'm a neuroscientist and musician.
Speaker 2 [00:00:07] So our series is called Confluence, and it is about sort of the intersection of art and science. Okay, looking at it in many different ways, from the art angle, from science angle, some history. Does that strike you as a reasonable source of, you know, a reasonable thing to be investigating, art and sciences, or should those things really be kept separate?
Daniel Levitin [00:00:33] I love the idea of bringing art and science together. I didn't always feel that way. When I started out in science, I was afraid that somehow, by understanding more about the musical world in particular, it would lose its mystery. And what I found instead is that each time I think I've uncovered the answer to one question, four or five more pop up that are even more marvelous. Than the last. And I realized it was a kind of hubris where I thought that I could actually figure anything out or enough of it that it would, you know, make me lose my appreciation. I'm reminded of something that Robert Sapolsky wrote in his book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And it's that science is not meant to
Speaker 2 [00:01:30] The arts are not meant to ruin stuff. I have to have, I have professionals helping me right here. Marsha McLuhan, Marsha McCluhan. Okay, alright, so let's, let's that was good, but let's get right.
Daniel Levitin [00:01:50] I'm reminded of something that Robert Sapolsky wrote, which is that the arts are not meant to ruin science. They're meant to invigorate it. And I've really found that to be true in my own life and my work. They're inseparable to me and they always have been since I was a child.
Speaker 2 [00:02:06] Why do people have trouble, if they do, why do people trouble with these two big concepts? Why do they keep them separate? Why do think of them separately?
Daniel Levitin [00:02:17] I guess as Stephen Jay Gould would say, they seem like non-overlapping magisteria. The arts are soft and the sciences are hard and in the arts anything goes and in sciences you've got this very narrow path. But I would push back against that. Any artist who is creating has a vision and they try over and over again to get there. Look at how many paintings of sunflowers Van Gogh made. I can only imagine that Van Gogh, for some reason, the first one didn't hit it, and so he kept trying. And artists refer to their work as experiments, just like scientists do. There are rules that the artist makes for themselves. Perhaps that's the difference. Science, in the scientific community, we agree on a set of rules. And in the artistic community, a really great artist invents their own or breaks some. But really, I think the one rule in art. As in science, the point of confluence is truth. Artists are seeking the truth, scientists are seeking truth. They go about it in different ways and the thing that we tend to hate is when a musician puts one over on us by lying to us and pretending that they feel a certain way and they really don't.
Speaker 2 [00:03:43] When you say they put one over the other. When they put it over the others.
Daniel Levitin [00:03:48] I think we all have a good BS detector, and when an artist is faking emotion we feel it. We feel that they're trying to manipulate us and it becomes cheesy and we reject it because music gets inside our heads, vision is out there, sound is in here, makes it more intimate, and so we want it to be authentic, whatever that means. Bruce Springsteen is an interesting example, because he is described as an authentic person who, in his own work, describes the authenticity of the working man. But Bruce himself says, I've never worked a day in my life. I've ever had a factory job. I don't wear work boots. But I'm giving voice to all the people I grew up with who did. So there's an authenticity there in the telling of the story. And we resonate to that.
Speaker 2 [00:04:39] So you've made, I don't want to say your life's work, but you know, the center to your work is this kind of emotional thing that happens inside our heads when we hear music. And Moby, we talked to him a couple weeks ago, and he said, I'm going to tell you something, there's no such thing as music. It's just air molecules, you know, which, you know, going through, people are jumping, 100,000 people in a stadium jumping up and down to a song. It's jumping up to air molecules. It could be a power drill on the street, or it could be cello sonata, but it's producing emotion. Now, he said air molecules a lot of people talk to have said sound waves. But what is it about sound that can go through the air and produce a profound emotional reaction.
Daniel Levitin [00:05:32] I'm going to tell you something. There's no such thing as sound waves or air molecules. Those are theoretical, physical, from physics concepts. What there is is your experience. What you have access to is your own experience inside your brain, and it's your brain that takes the raw material of sound molecules vibrating in the air, sound waves impinging on the eardrum takes that experience and turns the wiggling in and out of the eerdrum. Into music. It's constructed in your own head. And to the extent that you can tell the guitar from the bass in your favorite band, or that you could tell the cellos from the violins in an orchestra, the oboes from the clarinets, it's all a construction. And what it is, is that we are.
Speaker 2 [00:06:30] We care.
Daniel Levitin [00:06:34] Press this part.
Speaker 2 [00:06:36] You know, it's cedar, right? This is new. It's just, uh... Oh, yeah, yeah.
Daniel Levitin [00:06:39] Oh, yeah, yeah. The auditory rate, yeah... Oh, that's from the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's for now.
Speaker 2 [00:06:42] Well, we were the first one to talk about it. But then our sound guy over the weekend. Oh.
Daniel Levitin [00:06:45] Oh, I was using that in the 90s.
Speaker 2 [00:06:48] I guess it's become much more accessible.
Daniel Levitin [00:06:55] What it is, is that the act of constructing music in our brains makes it personal. I hear it differently than you. Nobody hears it the same. That's why there's no one song that everybody likes. There's no song everybody hates. Except maybe it's a small world after all. The kids love that. The other thing is, music is... Exploiting a system that evolved to help us connect to our mothers, to recognize the sound of their voice as opposed to another's, and vice versa. The mother recognizes the sound of her infant's voice even if they're not in direct proximity touching one another. Very important fundamental ability. And sound orients us to emergencies, a sudden loud sound. Grabs your attention. There are two attentional systems in the brain. One of them is willful. You're goal-directed. You're pointing your attention somewhere. And the other one is running in the background all the time. And it's filtering out the auditory environment just in case something important happens. So it's paying attention but without your conscious awareness. And, you know, if your name is spoken at a restaurant or somebody This is fire. It's going to grab your attention, or sudden loud sound, and that is governed by pathways that go directly to the brain stem and the cerebellum. I'm saying this because those are the things that make you jump, and that's partly the reason why we move to music. It's short circuits. They see what was that, and just you have to move.
Speaker 2 [00:08:39] We're following a group called Room Full of Teeth. Do you know them? OK. They're an Akakala group. They won an Akademi Grammy. And they're very beautiful, pure voices, although they use amplification, but they're essentially Akakalas. And there's something about the human voice that seems to really be eternal, you know, in terms of how he was.
Daniel Levitin [00:09:05] In the temporal lobes, which are where auditory processing starts, the signal gets divided into different sub-regions of the brain. Well, not really regions, but pathways, circuits. And each of them processes a different thing. But one of the first distinctions it makes is, is this a human-made sound or not? So we've seen patients who have damage to a particular focal region in the temporal lobe. They completely lose the ability to tell whether, like a drill, an electric drill or a car engine comes from a different kind of source than laughter or crying or speech. But it's a fundamental distinction that the rest of us have. And so, voices, which are all human, they hold a special privileged position in the brain.
Speaker 2 [00:10:02] Does that work for you personally?
Daniel Levitin [00:10:05] I love acapella. I worked with a group here in LA called, they were originally called Sonos and then the speaker company came later but told them they had to stop using the name and so they did and now they're Aurora. But they're fantastic. We did a program together at UCLA when my book, The World in Six Songs came out, a very talented director had the idea that we would set some of the concepts of the book to acapellas music and dance. A Los Angeles dance company did free-form dance. There was the a cappella music and me talking, and it was this multi-modal experience. I love a cappa. Lately, Bobby McFerrin moved to San Francisco. He and I have written some songs together, and we go way back. We've on Mondays, every Monday at noon, performs with four other singers at a club called The Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. And I've been there a few times to see this completely acapella performance, and it's transformative. I mean, not all acapellas have that effect on me, but Bobby does. Because no two Bobby concerts are the same. He's never phoning it in. He doesn't know what he's going to do until he comes on the stage. And the particularly interesting He doesn't know what he's going to do until he comes on the stage. And the particularly poignant aspect...
Speaker 2 [00:11:41] Just drop it. Yeah, right by your foot. Little ring there. It may have come off of a... Yeah, it came off of something. Okay, fine. It's time to work.
Daniel Levitin [00:11:59] And a particularly poignant aspect of this is that he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. It's degenerative, it's getting worse. But when he's singing, the symptoms completely disappear.
Speaker 2 [00:12:15] There's something just, I don't know, it's like watching somebody on a high wire record. There's just something very essential to me about a cappella. You know, I mean, obviously great instrument, you know, instrumentation is fantastic. But when you just have, like, this is what a human can do. Like a human standing in front of you. It's like going to live theater as opposed to watching a movie. You know there's just, there's something in me to see there. Just, I dunno if you want to talk about that a little bit more. Or maybe you don't have maybe maybe your acapella is something that's pleasant to you it doesn't particularly you know kind of transform which is okay
Daniel Levitin [00:12:58] All live music is kind of a high wire act, it's like a train that, you know, could derail at any moment, and that's part of the excitement of it. Part of the excitement also is being in a room of other people, and experiencing it together, and some work in our lab show that when people listen to music together, their brain waves literally synchronize, they they get on the same wavelength, literally, and They also release oxytocin among the group, a neurochemical that promotes social bonding and trust. The interesting thing about acapella is that the human voice is something we all have and so you know you can look at a tremendous saxophone player and say oh well yeah I have no idea what they're doing or how they do it then it's just sort of that's some other domain. But when you hear a singer, and we all have that, when you hear a senior do incredible things, it fills you with awe and wonder at the limitless talent of humans to come up with things. There's this theory, too, that music evolved as part of a way to signal to potential mates. The musician is valuable. And this comes from the peacock's tail theory, right? The peacock, the male peacock has this wonderfully showy display. The pea hen has no such thing. And what the peacoc is signaling to the pea hen very clearly is look at all the resources I have. I've got access to a Great food source with plenty of nitrogen. Which, you know, results in this showy display, and I'm agile enough that even though this attracts predators, I haven't been eaten yet, and so you should choose me because I have the good genes. And when we hear a fantastic singer, so the theory goes. At least evolutionarily, implicitly, we're thinking, wow, they must have a lot of resources and food and shelter because they've been able to devote their time not to hunting and gathering, but to this showy display that has no other purpose than to amuse me and seduce me. This is why guitar players famously have so many girlfriends.
Speaker 2 [00:15:36] That's true. I'm still waiting. Okay, going from that, another story we're doing about pipe work.
Daniel Levitin [00:15:45] Type ordnance.
Speaker 2 [00:15:49] There's something, to me, the most magnificent instrument to actually be in a church or a big space listening to. And we were first attracted to it when we were thinking of stories. It's because, like in 1750, it was the most complicated machine in the world. You know, bad in the steam engine, side by side. And deep engine was, obviously produced a lot of practical effect. Pipe organ, not so much, obviously yielded something else. I don't know if you saw as much about pipe organs or if you haven't.
Daniel Levitin [00:16:28] Pipe organs are interesting. The Greeks had pipe organs. It's an old instrument. One of the things that interests me most about them apart from the clearness of tone for any individual key, very very close to a sine tone for an individual pipe, is the low notes. It's very difficult to produce very low tones because the wavelength of a low note is very very long. So, if I play a low note on a guitar, you're not getting the sonorous, full effect of the lowest note on the guitar. Even on a piano, the string isn't really long enough to get that full power. But a pipe organ, the lowest note, I don't even know how many feet tall the pipe is, it shakes the room in a pleasant way, it vibrates, and vibration is a very fundamental part of listening to music. It's one of the reasons people like loud rock concerts, because their bodies are vibrating, the floor is vibrating, all of that. It gives us a sense of disorientation, a slight... It plays with our vestibular system, which, by coincidence, is inside the ear. And it's sort of like being dizzy in a pleasant way, like when you're drunk, not dizzy when you think you're on a rollercoaster. But that pipe organ is the truest... Instrument I know of for getting real low tones. The reason that's important is that our ear is drawn towards the lowest notes. Our understanding of the harmonic structure of the piece, even if we're not a musician. Just based on what the lowest note is. That's why bass players, although most, the average person doesn't notice them, why they're so fundamental to jazz and rock.
Speaker 2 [00:18:21] What's it like to sit in a grand church space and listen to a pipe organ? What does that feel like?
Daniel Levitin [00:18:32] There's another aspect to music listening which gets to an evolutionary issue, which is spatialization. Our ears, although probably not as good as a bat's ears, are able to detect where something is in space and how far away it is, largely by interaural time differences, the way in which the signal reaches the ears differently, differences in the frequency structure of the signal. It's what causes us to orient very quickly if there's a loud sound. Our heads turn automatically or our eyes turn automatically. And some spaces, a well designed concert hall, a church. A long echo time, a reverberation time technically, allow the notes to smear together in a very pleasing way. It kind of tricks our spatial orientation system in a nice way, similar to being dizzy a bit when you're hearing loud music. And that smearing is comforting. And we think it's because we spent tens of thousands of years in caves. Where sound echoed and it bounced off the walls and it enveloped us and of course after the age of 20 weeks the infant, well the fetus in the womb, is hearing sounds from the outside and it's in this kind of cave-like, well womb-like church-like environment. You know I've been during the pandemic I decided I had some extra time because I didn't have to drive anywhere. And a lot of meetings were canceled and performances and such, conferences. During the pandemic I decided I wanted to get reacquainted with the piano. Rather than take on something really difficult, like Rachmaninoff, I thought, I'll take some pieces that are technically easy, meaning my fingers already know where to go, and devote my time to trying to make them expressive.
Speaker 2 [00:20:43] This is actually going to get up to you a little re-wrap that I wanted to do at the very beginning, which is that the world has somehow gotten convinced that there's this kind of left-frame, right-frame thing, too much art and science. And I understand that it's no longer really the way you also just think of things. Yeah, he didn't be able to see you, basically.
Speaker 3 [00:21:22] Oh yes, should I go? No, no, you just have to be out of the language.
Daniel Levitin [00:21:29] Yeah, the whole left brain right thing owes to a very early study, a series of studies by
Speaker 2 [00:21:38] Would you mind just saying, you know, people think, oh, the left brain, that's the math part. Just give us the context and then you can try to construct it.
Daniel Levitin [00:21:48] There are so many myths about the brain. One of the ones I hate is that you're only using 10% of your brain at a time. No, that's crazy. You're using all of your brains all the time. And another one is this left brain, right brain distinction, and it seems to have taken over. The left brain is the logical, analytic part. The right brain is artistic part.
Speaker 3 [00:22:18] Cool, let's try that again.
Daniel Levitin [00:22:20] The left brain is the logical analytic part, the right brain is the artistic part, left is science, right is everything like literature and beauty, love, but it's completely false. Both hemispheres of the brain are handling all of this stuff. Language, if you're a right-hander, tends to be somewhat mostly localized on the left. For left-handers, you know, it could be either way. You know, there's no straight rule about lefties. But the idea that art is just confined to some part of the train is discredited. Art is a whole brain activity, and in fact, in our lab, when we do brain scans of people listening to music, particularly music they like, the whole brain lights up. It's the front, the back, the left, the right, even parts that you wouldn't associate with music perception 30 years ago. In fact, more parts of the brain light up when we listen to music than almost anything else we know of. We don't really know why it is that the whole brain lights up when we listen to music. We don't really know what that is. It's, um... It's partly that it's constructed. Music is constructed in our heads, that old saw about if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, did it make a sound? I would say no, because sound is here. Out in the world, there's just molecules moving. And so music is constructed here. If it wasn't, and it just existed in the word, then all other animals would respond to human music, and they don't. So, there are birds that don't even recognize their own songs in transposition. So we are an active part of constructing the musical world. We're also an active of constructing a visual world, but the difference is that the musical world has a tempo. It's like we're riding a horse, and it's moving along whether we're moving with it or not. And to the extent that we attend to it, we're on a ride. We're on a roller coaster. And it can be a pleasant one, it can be an unpleasant one, we can choose to get off. But I think it's more engrossing because it's temporally bound. The engrossing part of being temporally bound is the brain is constantly trying to predict what's going to come next. Whether you're a musician or not, whether you know it or not. When you hear music, your brain is trying to figure out, okay, I think I know when the next beat is gonna be. What's it gonna be? Is it gonna something new? Is it going to be the same? And there's this part of the brain here that I've been studying for 30 years, this thin little sliver of tissue called Broadman Area 47. If you're interested in Broadman 51, we don't talk about that, Area 51. But Area 47 seems to be devoted to trying to predict anything that's patterned, what's going to happen next. Visual patterns, auditory patterns, and it comes alive when we're listening to music. If the musician, the composer, gives us something we expected, we get a little reward because we predicted right. If we get something unexpected, and it's even better... More pleasing than what we could have imagined, then we get this huge sense of pleasure. We've learned something new. Dopamine gets a lot of credit for this, more credit than it's due perhaps, but we get the shot of dopamine. This is, wow, I learned something and I love it.
Speaker 2 [00:26:19] Yeah, it's that kind of unexpected. We have a private composer and performer, and he essentially, in real time, annotated a Bach fugue. OK, and it was actually about, like, the expected. Now Bach comes in with a dramatic chord, you know, of a certain thing. And yeah, it was very much kind of a real lesson, because it had to work. I mean, ultimately, it had work for the fugue, even if it was unexpected. Yeah. He's about to take me out of some place.
Daniel Levitin [00:26:53] So musical pleasure, the reason we like the music we like is that it hits some delicate balance between being predictable and being novel. So if it's too predictable, if it was just bup, bup bup. Yeah at some point that's not interesting. Unless you're an infant maybe, you're just trying to work out the structure of the world. If it's to novel, say Schoenberg. Tone row music. We have no idea what's going on, we reject it, so there's this sweet spot in the middle. It's different for everybody, it can change over the course of your life, but balancing that predictability and surprise is the job of the composer and the job of the musician.
Speaker 2 [00:27:36] It's changed our history, doesn't it?
Daniel Levitin [00:27:39] Certainly, what we consider pleasurable has changed over history, and it's cultural. What we find pleasurable is different than what somebody raised on Chinese opera would pleasurable because it's learned.
Speaker 2 [00:27:56] Where does acoustics come into it? We, you know, obviously working on listening to music in our headphones or we can do music in our house. But we also go to rooms that have been designed to listen to music. And it seems to be a fairly sophisticated science, but it's also an art. I don't know if you, what your experience is you have worked in the studio. I'll give you a little bit more background for the story and thinking about it. You can connect to it about it from John Stork. We took it to Symphony Hall in Boston. It's just kind of this perfect shoebox shape. And he talked about that. And then he talked another one about what is it about sound hitting me? How do I know? I can measure it. Is it really measurable, ultimately? You know, it's kind of a debate. Just wondering, when you go to a place, you've performed, obviously, and you've also produced. And what's... What are you listening for? Can you tell? Does the space have its own personality that has to be brought into account? Acoustically. Yeah, it ripples a little bit on that.
Daniel Levitin [00:29:18] Every space we're in has its acoustical signature. We like some better than others. There are individual differences in what people like, but there are some commonalities. A good concert hall is one in which you can hear the individual instruments if you choose to, but you can also hear the totality of it. It's a delicate balance. The science of acoustics has come a long way, but it's still, there's an art to it. And if it was all science. Then all halls would be built the same. There would be a magic formula. And actually, I don't mean to denigrate the science. There is a science, but there are all these other factors that we can't control. Humidity, the availability of materials. If I use wood, some wood's gonna be denser than other wood. The foundation on which the hall sits. We sometimes build a box in a box to isolate it, the way in which the room resonates. There's so many variables, it's impossible to replicate a hall. And why we like some halls better than others really has to do with that imaging. Where is the sound coming from? Is it smeared? Is it clear? I have a little home studio here and. I had George Ausberger, who's in his 80s, one of the great studio tuners of a room, and he came by to tune the room, and for 300 bucks... He brought a lot of instrumentation with him, and he put on one CD, a James Taylor CD that he knows really well. And he walked around the room and he listened for about 15 minutes. And he told me to move one speaker an inch to the left and half an inch back, and then to move my computer monitor over about a quarter of an inch. And it was remarkable. Instruments that I couldn't locate in the stereo field suddenly sounded like they were coming from a very precise place. And he also asked me to add a diffuser on the ceiling and things like that. Nothing major though. Best 300 bucks I ever spent. But the imaging is part of a good hall or a good space. The room we're in now, my living room, is very reverberant. It's nice when I'm playing the piano. Not so nice if we're trying to have a conversation because it smears some of my words into each other. That smearing can be very pleasant. So at the beginning of the pandemic, when I had a bunch of time on my hands, I thought I would... Do something new on the piano that I hadn't done before. And maybe the obvious thing to do would be to tackle Rachmaninoff, which is very, very difficult technically. But instead, I felt I needed some comfort in my life. I was cut off from everybody, we all were. And I thought, I'm gonna take some pieces where my fingers already know what to do and work on getting the emotionality out of them, the expressivity. And so one of the pieces I took up is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which is not technically difficult. You know, if you've been playing piano for about a year, you can certainly play the first two pages of it. The difficulty is getting it to sing. And there's a notation on the score that has been debated by musicologists about how to pedal it. Pedaling is a whole other world. If you use the right pedal, the sustain pedal, you're smearing the sound. Hopefully in a pleasant way, but if you overuse it, then the notes aren't distinguishable. And the debate among musicologists is, do you hold down the sustain pedal the entire time and let everything smear together, or is it that you're supposed to just hold it down each time a chord changes, but hold it down throughout? And I've been playing with that, and it completely changes the emotional quality of the piece. It changes the emotional impact and when I'm holding the pedal down the whole time it'll make me cry because the transitions become a little less obvious and a little less pronounced but they're embedded in the fabric and it's extraordinary. When I play that piece... I feel as though I'm behind the wheel of like a Ferrari that's got all this great power and if I don't know how to drive it I could easily spin off the road and crash. It's not going to drive itself. And at the same time I feel that if I drive it properly I'm going to see scenery I've never seen before. I don't know any other way to describe it.
Speaker 2 [00:34:32] Great. That's great. Now we're going to have to film you playing it. Don't do that. I'm not ready. You're not ready? Oh boy, okay. Well, you can if you want. Well, we might need a recording of it. I don't know if you have a recording. Baron Boyd. Baron Boyde. He played the pedal, pedal, full pedal, whole pedal jacket.
Daniel Levitin [00:34:49] Hard to tell, but yeah, I'll give it a try.
Speaker 2 [00:34:53] Yeah, no, it was very emotional from our standpoint. Oh
Daniel Levitin [00:35:09] On the subject of acoustics, one of the things we try to do in the recording studio is to... Well, there are two philosophies. One is you have a room that sounds good, and you put a band in there, a jazz combo, and you get the sound of the room, and people like that. The other philosophy is you try to record everything completely dead. That is, no room sound. So that the room disappears. You put the microphones really close on the instrument and then the engineer and the producer can create a venue of their choosing. The difficulty there is that when we listen at home on speakers, as opposed to headphones, our speakers are playing in a room that has its own sound and it's what's been called the second venue problem. How do I reproduce the sound of the studio? How do I reproduce the sound of the studio, whether it was initially dry and a room was added, or it was an initially a room, in another room? It's why headphones are so attractive, because they don't introduce that new confound, that new room. And the difficulty, though, is for musicians playing in a dead room. Heather? We can hear all that. Do you need a few minutes?
Speaker 2 [00:36:42] It was pretty, it was pretty tough right, but now that we're getting, you know, now we have the mic. Yeah.
Daniel Levitin [00:36:51] Oh, they say don't worry about it.
Speaker 3 [00:36:57] Too far away. Okay, so while we're talking about the roof.
Daniel Levitin [00:37:02] The problem with a dead studio is the musicians aren't getting anything back from the room like they would in a concert hall. I just played a show in North Carolina at Guilford College and it was the best sounding room I've ever been in. Roseanne Cash and I played together, just the two of us and we were just astonished. It just sounded good. I can't explain what it was. It sounded good when it was empty. It sounded good when is was full. It made us play better. And it was... I guess it was kind of like... Kind of like walking into a church and feeling that you're enveloped by the sound, but it's not smeared.
Speaker 2 [00:37:58] You were talking earlier about the brain looking for a different tempo, you know, that people seek out the beat. And we're doing something with, we're working with some jazz guys, but one of the guys is a really accelerated drummer.
Daniel Levitin [00:38:17] Which one?
Speaker 2 [00:38:26] There's something about drummers that set them apart. It's what you talked about with the bass, something about the drummers. I just wanted to talk about what drummers bring to the hymn. Both the music and the humanity. If I could go small, go big.
Daniel Levitin [00:38:43] There's so much to say about drummers. So somewhere along the line, somebody got the idea that what was a percussion section, somebody hitting a kick drum, who was separate from the person hitting a cymbal, who was different from the person hitting the military snare. Some band leader wanted to save money. Figured, I'll just have one person do all of this. And the drum set was born. And the drummer's job, of course, is basically... Basically analogous to the conductor's job to let everybody know where the beat is and a good drummer like any good musician is listening to what other people are doing and responding it's like improv where you're not supposed to act you're supposed to react and even if you know a song well i think it's exciting when you are performing and something serendipitous happens and the and the drummer is the engine that's driving it and there's so many different kinds of drummers and different styles. I used to be fascinated by Charlie Watts and the Stones because... Bye sweetheart! You want a hand? Have a good trip. Uh, various. I've always been fascinated by the stones because the rhythm section sounds like a train that's about to jump the tracks at any minute. It's thrilling because of the chaos of it. It just sounds like it's going to spin out of control. It never does, but it really feels like it will. And Stuart Copeland and I were talking about this, and we were saying, well, Charlie must be really swimming around in the time. And then we got this idea, you can get isolated Rolling Stones tracks now on YouTube, and you can measure what he's doing. And so we got the drum tracks into Pro Tools, and it turns out he's not playing around with time or swimming all over. He is so precise, he is twice as precise as the average drum machine. So what it is, is it's the guitar and bass. That are kind of swimming around in time, that give the excitement to it. I had no idea. But there are drummers who swim a bit. Art Blakey is a good example. Buddy Rich is very rigid. Art Blake is very free. Stuart Copeland is very frey. He speeds up and he slows down. And this was one of the biggest points of contention in the police. Was that Sting found it difficult to play to Stewart's conception of where things should speed up and slow down. It's not that Stings didn't think they should speed up or slow down, they just had different ideas about it. So the act of drumming is different depending on the drummer's own predilections and depending on the band and what the band wants to do. And It depends on, I guess, what the band is capable of. So the Stones, you've got a bass player and a guitarist who can create that organized chaos.
Speaker 3 [00:42:19] Try to watch the original. He was also a kind of a jazz drummer in some respects, right? Oh yeah, he was... That kind of makes a difference in that, I think. He would add things that you... Typical rock drummer just didn't do.
Daniel Levitin [00:42:32] Yeah.
Speaker 3 [00:42:34] Well, it's time to have to be the case with that.
Daniel Levitin [00:42:36] I'll tell you, my favorite drummer I've ever played with, actually two of them, one is Greg Field, who is now a very well-known session drummer and arranger. He played for Count Basie when he was 16. Real jazz, big band drummer. The other guy who I just love playing with was a performer at Disneyland. Senior moment.
Speaker 2 [00:43:17] You okay? Haps method. I don't want to ask you before, it's about the nature of technology, which we're looking at technology in some of the other arts, you know, for example, the development of paint and tubes in the 19th century made it as impressive as possible for people to go outside and paint, when they are painted. And, you know, obviously, famous photography changes. There's only two. Music seems to be particularly, there's an entire series on Apple about this, but music seems to be particularly a field where technological innovation yields creative results. One of our key theories in the show is that what artists do is they take a technology that was invented for one purpose. And eventually they go off label and they use it for something else. That's kind of how things get advanced. I don't know if you can put that into the context of the music.
Daniel Levitin [00:44:25] I think one of the biggest and most important technologies in music was the invention of the microphone. So prior to the microphone, you would have to sing louder than the band that was backing you up, and they had this huge horn that would capture it like the reverse of the horn on the old RCA Victrola's. And you know, Bessie Smith had to shout. When the microphone came along, look at the difference between the way Bessie Smith sings and the way Billie Holiday sings. Billie can sing this close. You get all kinds of subtle expressivity that you never got before. She can seduce you with her voice. She can whisper, she can shout. You can pick up textures that otherwise would be lost unless she was right next to you. And Billie Holiday, together with the microphone, set off a whole era of musical intimacy. So it no longer was the case that the composition had to be intimate, like Satie's Trois Genre Appetit, or Chopin Preludes. The intimacy didn't have to come from the chord structure or the rhythms. It could come from the voice. And it sounded like your lover was right next to you whispering in your ear. And you add headphones to that, and it's extraordinarily. Personal. And so one of the things that musicians started doing it, it was making sounds that otherwise would be impossible to hear in the real world. So I can put a microphone inside the piano and it sounds like your head is in the piano and the low notes are coming from the left and the right note the right side has the high notes. I can mic each individual drum And it sounds like you're on the drummer's seat, and the tom toms go around you, and the hi-hat's here, and the floor tom is here. It's a position you wouldn't ordinarily have. And simultaneously, listening to the same recording, you can be the drummer. You can have your head inside the piano. You can your head in side the guitar. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Because it's mic'd so closely and it surrounds you and I call that a kind of a hyper reality where musicians are inventing not a landscape but a soundscape. My other favorite drummer my other favorite drummer is Dick Hardwick who played at Disneyland for years and there's just he's got this enthusiasm this this it's just he's having so much fun and he's not a fancy but he's just so responsive. It's amazing. In recording studio design, there are two factors of course. You're designing the room the band is gonna play in and you're designing a control room on the other side of the glass and both have their own problems. And I got to work in a studio that John Storick had designed in Marin County. And the room itself was great, but what particularly impressed me was the control room because those are unwieldy. You've got a lot of equipment which makes hard surfaces. You've got that glass, which is a hard surface, and, you know, hard surfaces are bad for sound. They make it harsh and it bounces around a lot. And what engineers and producers talk about a lot is a room that is true, and they mean the control room. If I hear it in the control room, is it going to sound the same? Or does it sound like I want it to in any other place? Can I maximize the number of venues, somebody's car, their earbuds, a radio station, FM or AM, you know, and that room in a place called The Site in Marin County, that had a very true control room.
Speaker 2 [00:48:20] Stark says you can mentor it and do all that stuff and one of his favorite expressions. At the end of the day, I don't know why. This is something that was said from the very beginning, but the fellow who annotated the barbeque, that he made check here. He said, it's all due respect to Daniel. We don't know, you know. We've been talking about the dopamine, we've been thinking about all these things. And I'm wondering whether, we've encountered this when we talk about AI and stuff with some composers and other things, where there's. I don't want to say unwillingness, but there's a resistance to the sort of a data-driven approach to understanding why music, that the kind of music works, and it takes the best way. You alluded to that at the beginning, maybe you just talked about telephone.
Daniel Levitin [00:49:22] I think that there is this feeling among musicians and producers and engineers that music can't be reduced to an algorithm and you can't use a data-driven approach to studio design or to composition or any of that. But I would push back on that idea because you are using data. It's just not data the way you think. Bach was using the data of his brain. Does that sound good or not? He would listen or he would imagine, I mean, unless it just spilled out of him, as it was reputed to spill out of Mozart without any thought behind it, which I doubt, he's experimenting, he's testing things and he's making decisions and the data may be subjective, But that doesn't mean they're not data. In fact... A lot of what we do in neuroscience is subjective. We say to somebody, how much pain are you feeling on a scale of 1 to 10? We don't have a way to objectively measure your pain. We can tell whether your heart rate is going up and we can look at brain waves. But really, what it comes down to is scale of one to 10. How much pain you are in? And it's subjective. So it's data. I think, along with the left brain, right brain distinction, which is... Now known to be false, this idea of data has to be out of a computer or out of a measurement instrument is false in that the human brain is the greatest measurement instrument we have. The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to change. It is a giant change detector. That is its primary job. So if the tiniest little change to the sound of your refrigerator happens, you notice the hum. Of course, you habituate to it if it keeps humming for a long, long time, but then if it changes again, you'll notice. You notice the tineest change of pressure on a stringed instrument. So... We're attending to it. It's data. We're processing it.
Speaker 2 [00:51:29] Roller coasters, and a change completely to a new topic. What's your experience with roller coasters? And thought about why do you love them? Those folks who do, there's probably people who do it, not me personally. Why do people love them, what's the experience they're getting when they get on a roller coaster?
Daniel Levitin [00:51:49] I know nothing about roller coasters.
Speaker 2 [00:51:54] End of story. Okay, and another one for you. Food. What do we eat? One of our stories is about this Indian meal called the Tali. You know what Tali is? P-H-A-L-I. It's about multiple things. It exists in many different iterations.
Daniel Levitin [00:52:11] Oh yeah, I always get the tally.
Speaker 2 [00:52:13] Yeah.
Daniel Levitin [00:52:14] It's got a little bit of dal, and benganbarta, and nafratan korma, and you get the naan. I always figured if you eat the naans bread and then some regular bread, they cancel each other out, no calories. Because it's non-bread.
Speaker 3 [00:52:34] Got it, got it, I had it.
Daniel Levitin [00:52:45] It's like, it's like eating pasta and antipasta.
Speaker 2 [00:52:52] What's going on when we, the thing about Indian food, a lot of Indian dishes, food, as Chesa told us, is that it's not about complementary flavors. It's about flavors that actually, well they are complementary ultimately, but they, but it's like, you know. They bounce against each other. You've got something salty and something sweet, you've got orange and something green, and it's all kind of working together. What is it about when, you know, is this, here's the question, people say we're talking about the story, we're talking about musicians, we are talking about physicists, we talk about scientists. We're also writing this story about the topic, about Indian cooking, and they go, what's that got to do with art? Do you have a question, does that make any sense to you that there's some art and science there?
Daniel Levitin [00:53:55] You know, I think there are two kinds of people, people who think there's two kinds of people and then everybody else, seriously, two kinds of people. There are people who really treat food as a sensual experience or as an esthetic experience, and there are people just eat, and you know, and it's a continuum. It's not really, those are the extremes. The Dalai Lama. Who lives an ascetic lifestyle, tries not to derive pleasure from food. He's supposed to avoid the bodily pleasures. And then there's certainly people, gourmands, who will try to find the finest restaurants. I remember having a pizza once at a restaurant in Napa Valley called Brick. That pizza is so normal, it's so ordinary. And I went with my girlfriend at the time and it was a blue cheese pizza and it's was a local blue cheese, farm to table kind of a thing. And Napa has this famous sourdough, Bay Area has this sourdoug. Um.
Speaker 2 [00:55:16] What's the start of it?
Daniel Levitin [00:55:18] Yeah, it's a sourdough.
Speaker 3 [00:55:21] It's like a yeast pool or something.
Daniel Levitin [00:55:23] Spores.
Speaker 3 [00:55:25] Four, four.
Daniel Levitin [00:55:27] The same as sourdough. The berry has this famous sourdough that comes from yeast that's 100 years old, a very special flavor. That pizza made us cry. We'd never tasted anything so good. And it had, like good music, this sort of temporal aspect, which you sometimes get with a great wine, where it starts out as one flavor on the tongue and as your digestive juices, sorry, not digestive juices. It has this thing where it starts out as one flavor on the tongue, and then as the saliva begins to break it down, there's some chemical reaction, and it tastes like something else. And then as it moves around your tongue where there are these different taste receptors, you get different flavors. And then there's the texture, where the top part is soft and the underneath is firmer. And it's... You know, a good meal is an esthetic experience for those who are attuned to it in the same way that, you know, some people, they look at paintings and they go, yeah, that's pretty. It doesn't mean anything to me. They consider food the same way, or maybe they love food, not paintings. There's a lot of individual differences in what we like and what we don't.
Speaker 3 [00:56:47] Yes, sir.
Daniel Levitin [00:56:49] It's like my grandfather used to say, if everybody liked the same thing, they'd all want to get with your grandma.
Speaker 3 [00:57:01] Okay, I can remember now.
Speaker 2 [00:57:11] And my grandmas were not really kind as you'd want to be, but, okay, I think we're pretty much, I'm pretty much wishing there was anything else that... Yeah, this is one thing, these are very, very high, 10,000 foot question, but it's about creativity and where does creativity come from? Can we talk? What is the nature of creating?
Daniel Levitin [00:57:59] No, I just want to think about it a minute.
Speaker 2 [00:58:01] Thank you.
Daniel Levitin [00:58:09] Where does creativity come from? I think all of us...
Speaker 2 [00:58:13] Thank you.
Daniel Levitin [00:58:15] Yeah, sorry.
Speaker 2 [00:58:17] No, I didn't intentionally, I just forgot for a moment.
Daniel Levitin [00:58:21] Where does creativity come from? Most of us are born creative. It's a necessity in order for us to learn language. Babies are babbling, and they're not just babbling with speech sounds like ga ga goo goo. They're babbling with rhythm and melody, ga ga ga. They're creative beings, and if that creativity is encouraged, you end up with an artist or a scientist or an explorer or an inventor. If it's not encouraged, you end up with somebody who feels very constrained and that they have to, you know, toe the line. And it's a very natural human tendency. It's evolved because it not only helps us to learn language, but to solve problems. Uh, you know, I, I've... I've encountered this river. How am I going to get across it? You know, I've got to create a solution if I don't want if I can't walk through it because it's too deep Creative problem-solving is is evolutionary. It's a biological necessity There are wonderful videos of crows using tools Solving problems. So creativity is certainly not limited to humans And then I think the desire to create, in addition to being instinctual, is supported by neurochemistry. We have a reward circuit, a combination of neurochemistry and neuroanatomy, we have a well-known reward circuit that if you drink water when you're thirsty and you eat when you are hungry, that reward circuit kicks in. and it kicks in when you learn something new because learning is adaptive. Not learning can get you into a lot of trouble. There's this whole Darwin Awards. They give it to somebody who did something really stupid and died in the process. It's called the Darwin Award because you can't pass on your genes to another generation and perpetuate this stupidity. So, learning, experimenting are part of what makes us human. And then beyond that, we look around the world, we listen, and we think, I wanna try that. I wanna know what it's like. And then our brain just runs with it and plays with it. And I think most composers will tell you that they're writing music based on what they heard and they don't know where it comes from, but their brain is just sort of turning around the things they've listened to. Chrissy Hynde, who wrote a wonderful, Pretender's first album, a wonderful creative work, she said she locked herself in the room with Kink's records for a month, and that's what came out. Katie Lang said that when she made Anjanu, her breakthrough album, she had listened to a bunch of records, often two at a time, records that didn't go together because she wanted to hear new timbres and interactions. So I think that's where it comes from.
Speaker 2 [01:01:20] We're all standing on the shoulders of other people. Right, we're all taking things from everybody else, by putting it all together somewhere, right?
Daniel Levitin [01:01:29] One of the most interesting things to me is when we talk about who's the most creative musician. I mean, one name that comes up all the time is Mozart. Another name that come up if you're talking about contemporary people are the Beatles. We see them as outsized creators, creators of phenomenal importance or innovation. But Mozart didn't invent the symphony, Haydn did. I'm not sure that Mozart invented anything. It's what he did. Within a pre-existing structure that caused us to recontextualize it and realize it was bigger. The Beatles didn't invent rock music, not by a long shot. They didn't invent the notion of power ballads or of screeching electric guitars. It's the way they worked within this framework that all of us thought was only this big and showed us that it was this big. So, generally, we recognize as creativity not something that is so profoundly revolutionary, but in fact is evolutionary. It's evolved from what came before, and we recognize it as that. And it's like, I would liken it to a joke, that, you know, a comedian comes up with a joke and you hear it and you go, wow, that is obvious, why didn't I think of that? It's been out there for all the world to make. Why didn't I think that that is very creative, that this person saw it and made the joke?
Speaker 2 [01:03:05] Well, yeah, you know, people always talk about creativity that way, but it's... It's also extremely difficult to find, you know, where did it come from? Everyone's kind of talking about, how did that happen, right? And what you're describing is the sort of a process that has just simply been going on a long time. And if you didn't have, you honestly know, we've told this before, if you did have something to contain you, or something to like play against, or something to. Then you would not know where you were, right? You just wouldn't know what was going on. Not everybody makes things up out of nothing.
Daniel Levitin [01:03:53] I remember sitting down with Paul Simon and asking him about some of his songs that just sounded to me like I couldn't relate them to anything else. He said, well, I was just clever at who I stole from. And then he played me some records and I went, oh, oh yeah, yeah, that's right. That's where you got it. And, you know, there are these occasions where... Something will just fall on the artist. Roseanne Cash describes it as sticking up her catcher's mitt and the song is just there. But part of that is you have to be ready for it. When it comes, you have be ready to do something with it, to write it down or to record it into your phone or to somehow remember it. And if it's incomplete, you'd have to keep going with it. Paul McCartney had the first part of yesterday, but not the rest. He had to finish it. And so sometimes the song finishes itself. It's not that you're playing the song, the song is playing you. But other times, you have to sit down and go, okay, where am I gonna go from here? I could do this, I could this, I could to this, same with writing. You know, writers, well, what am I going to do next? And you try a few different things, and you're experimenting, and then the data are these different things. And your sense for, well this one is right, or this one serves my purpose, or it pushes it forward in a way I want it to go. That's the craft. So, I could have the most amazing idea for a bassoon part, but if I don't know how the bassoon operates, I don t know how to play one, I dont know how write music, I guess I have to find a bassoon player and hope that my idea works and that it's not outside of the range of the instrument. But craft is definitely a part of it.
Speaker 2 [01:05:56] Okay, good. That's great. So let's get going, Tim. What do you want me to do?
Daniel Levitin [01:05:59] Yeah, let me talk real quick about neurochemicals in case you use it. One of the things that we neuroscientists get a bad reputation for is talking about neurochemistry in a kind of reductive way. Ultimately, all experience is a product of the brain. If I scoop your brain out of your head, you're not going to hear music even though your ears are intact, or you're going to feel anything even though you still have a finger that can get burned. So the brain is mediating all this and neurochemistry is a big part of it. We have about a hundred neurochemicals, but we only have the technology to measure about seven of them. And so those seven get a whole lot of light shone on them that they don't deserve. We just, we don't understand how they interact with the others. And the brain is not simply a bag of chemicals. You know, when one level changes, it influences a whole bunch of others. And because we can't track them, we talk a lot about dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin, but really, it's unfair. It's sort of like if you lost your keys in a city street and you're looking underneath a lamppost and it's not where you lost them but that's where the light is.
Speaker 2 [01:07:21] Where are the other 43 chemicals?
Daniel Levitin [01:07:26] We've been identifying them, but you can't measure them in the brain unless you actually stick something in there to measure them, and they don't cross the blood-brain barrier, so simply taking a blood test from you won't reveal them.
Speaker 2 [01:07:39] So someday there will be technology, presumably, to do that, but it doesn't happen.
Daniel Levitin [01:07:42] We can do it in animals to some extent, but we know a lot less about what animals are thinking because they don't talk to us yet.
Speaker 2 [01:07:51] As a scientist, for example, I just suggested a scenario where we don't know how to do it yet, but you know that it could be done at some point, or you can imagine it could done. You may or may not be around to see that. Which is different than saying I wrote a song and I can play it, you know, a week later, a month later, or I'm going to an opera, a five-year-old. What is that like as a scientist to not necessarily arrive at the end point of your inquiry.
Daniel Levitin [01:08:24] It's interesting when you contemplate the limits of science right now, knowing that there will be further developments. I've always been inspired by what Galileo said, which is that the job of the scientist is to measure what is measurable. Galileo said, I've always been inspired by something Galileo said, which is that the job of the scientist is to measure what is measurable and to render measurable that which is not. And so a lot of what we do is try to come up with ways of measuring things. And we run into brick walls. So my colleague, Vinod Menon, and I, Vinode's at Stanford, we've done all my neuroimaging studies I've done with him. We've come to the conclusion that there isn't much more to learn from fMRI, functional MRI scans anymore. We've kind of answered all the questions we can answer with that technology, and we need something new. And we don't have it yet, so we move on to other things. We're doing some computational modeling and that's been very fruitful. I've been working with neurochemistry manipulation where I block a neurochemical in a person and find out how it affects their music perception or I promote one. But yeah, the next thing will come along and we'll use it and maybe it'll work and maybe won't. I don't find it frustrating because there's so much to do that, you know, if you can't do this, you do that.
Speaker 2 [01:09:52] I guess it's always probably, you know, when we're talking about Einstein, everybody's always trying to second-guess it. We're always trying come up with something, well, the spring wasn't exactly right in this particular way. And, you now, however, it endures.
Daniel Levitin [01:10:08] Well, we make mistakes. Phrenology was a big thing in the 1800s. Feel the bumps on somebody's head, and you can glean their personality. It was totally pseudoscience. And yet, the idea that different characteristics were localized in the brain is what got picked up decades later with modern neuroscience. So the method was wrong, but the idea had some merit.
Speaker 2 [01:10:36] Do a little bit of a look, we'll get the rest of them up.
Daniel Levitin [01:10:39] All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.
