Mark Changizi

speaker

236 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Mark Changizi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi · 28 Nov 2024 podcast

And the humans are the most important stimuli in our lives, which is why colors are so important. Colors are ultimately emotional and evocative because they're about human skin and bodies and emotional health, so forth. And the sounds of music, I hypothesize, and this was, I guess, 15, 20 years ago, are the sounds of humans moving in your midst.

In fact, this has been an old idea, even since the Greeks said music has something to do with movement or some sounds of, but trying to make it rigorous. So working out, okay, what do humans sound like when they move? Well, one of the most basic things is there's a gate. There's the footsteps. Sure. And that's just the beat.

And then, of course, there's loudness modulations, which is the fortissimo down to pianissimo. And there's the scales at which those things change. And you can work out what are the scales at which those things change.

That's right. You wouldn't be able to dance. So it's not like some accidental side effect that you're able to dance to it. No, it's literally designed to be the sounds of a human mover moving evocatively in your midst. And another thing that happens when things move through the world is you actually hear their Doppler shifts. Now, Doppler shifts, you know, right?

And the faster it is, it's bigger Doppler shifts for faster moving things. Now, even the movements of humans, which are a little bit, they're much smaller kinds of Doppler shifts. But my claim in that book was that the kinds of patterns that you end up with the Doppler shifts, which are exaggerated Doppler shifts as if it's moving faster, still have the fundamental signature of movement.

of human movement. And so, for example, if you're moving faster, there's a bigger difference between high pitch and low pitch because of the Doppler shift. But also, if you're moving faster, the tempo of the song is going to be faster. It's going to be a higher, faster tempo, right? Those two, the faster moving things will have a bigger difference between top and bottom.

In music, that's called the tessitura, the difference between the top and the bottom. But also, so the prediction here is that Um, faster tempo things correlates with higher, bigger tessitura sort of in real world movement. Is that true in music?

Do higher, bigger tessitura songs actually tend to be more bigger, faster in tempo or, and vice versa, which is not what you want when you're the piano player. When, when someone says, Hey, here's a much faster song. You're like, great. Hopefully it's a really small tessitura. Cause I can just, no, in fact, The faster the song, the tessituras get wider and wider, for example.

So these are these kinds of predicted regularities between these different kinds of patterns of modulations of loudness. beats and rhythmic things that are connected to the time lock to the beat, as well as to... So, there's like 80-something different kinds of regularities you can show. For example, how fast do humans turn? And so, we got data from soccer players.

How many steps do they take to turn 90 degrees? And so... At the top of the high pitch is when it's coming directly toward you. Low pitch is when it's moving directly away from you in a tessitura. So typically, people, when they turn 90 degrees, take about two steps to do it on average. They can go, obviously, faster if they just go one way real quickly.

And so to go from toward you to away from you quickly would still be about four steps. And so that would be about four beats. It typically takes a measure. So you can actually look across thousands of songs and ask, is it usually the case that you move a half a tessitura in about two beats.

And in fact, you can show yet, these in fact determine the baseline time ranges of how quickly melodies move through the test stores, things like that.

Sit still.

It's not always just one guy or gal walking. It's often complicated duets and different things. And in some sense, what I work out in the book is sort of the baseline boring dialogue. here's the baseline kind of things that humans do. Any good composer is deviating from that baseline to create interesting stories, right? Sure, of course. So I'm not the artist type.

I'm trying to like, here's the typical baseline. That's what determines the average across all these songs, none of which would be potentially very good if they actually stuck to the average that I'm finding, right? So they're all deviating from that. Right, right.

But the bigger story about these kinds of cultural harnessing of us, I call this harnessing, by looking like nature, sounding like nature, is that we often think of ourselves as the speaking animal, right? Or as the music animal or the artistic animal. This is what often we define what it is to be human by a lot of these things, the arts and the ability to talk, the ability to be literate.

But up until just a couple hundred thousand years ago, and it's exactly unclear, we didn't have language at all. We certainly didn't have writing. We didn't have music. We may have had some vocalization stuff that people did, but probably a million years, we may not have even had that. All of the things that we mistakenly think of ourselves as human aren't human 1.0 at all.

All of the stuff that we take to be human today are really human 2.0s. These are things that are products of cultural engineering that now is harnessing us and giving us all these modern powers. So, you know, it always was remarkable. You've got chimpanzees with their encephalization quotient, you know, and it's a little bit bigger than these other great apes and so forth. And then you've got us.

Again, it's a little bit bigger on a log scale. But it's not... you're not looking at it, you're going, oh, this totally explains the difference between us and chimpanzees. No, chimpanzees are like super dumb compared to us because look at all the stuff that we can do.

We can ride, drive cars, and we can like do math and all the crazy stuff that we can do in our real lives makes us seem like we're literally off the page and, you know, miles away. So how can you make sense of the fact that we're only just a little bit higher and yet we're, it's because biologically our human one point ourselves are just this little bit higher.

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