Dr. Poppy Crum

There's a lot more subtlety that goes into how you play with other people and what key you're in or what, you know, the details.

Like if you ask me to sing happy birthday, I'm always going to sing it in the key of G if I am left to my own devices.

And I will get you there somehow if we start somewhere else.

So what happened to me when I was in music school, when I was in conservatory and also engineering school is I was taking, two things happened.

I knew that I had to override my brain because it was not allowing me the subtlety I wanted to play my Shostakovich or play my chamber music in the ways that were, that I was having to work too hard to override what, you know, these sort of categories of sounds I was hearing.

So I started playing early music, early music, Baroque music.

For anyone, I think I said earlier, A is a social construct.

Today, we typically, as I said, as a standard, A is 440 hertz.

If you go back to like the 1700s, A was 415 hertz in the Baroque era.

And 415 hertz is effectively a G sharp.

So it's the difference between...

And what would happen to me when I was trying to override this is I was playing an early music ensemble, and I would tune my violin up, and I would see A on the page, and I'd hear G sharp in my brain.

And it was completely...

I was terrible.

It was really hard for my brain to override.

And I mean, brass and wind players do this all the time.

It's like transposition and they modulate to the key that they're in and their brains have evolved through their training and neuroplasticity to be able to not have the same sort of experience I had.

Anyhow.

Long story long, I was also taking a neuroscience course.

In this neuroscience course, we were reading papers about sort of different map making and neuroplasticity.