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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Oh, hey, it's your childhood friend who's living his best life selling hot dogs in Miami. It's Hallie Ward. What do we got for you? Oh, I'm still gallivanting around the Southwest. I'm getting interviews in person with ologists who are so worth the journey. This one, this episode is as fresh as they come, okay? It was recorded like two days ago.
In Albuquerque, with a musical theory and neuroscience expert at Albuquerque's University of New Mexico, this person studied psychology for undergrad, they got a master's in composition, and they got a PhD from the University of Chicago in the history and the theory of music. Their dissertation, musical emotion toward a biologically grounded theory.
So when they invited me to come and chat about music in nature and in the human mind, how we listen, how we create it, I packed my bags. I put them on the New Mexico agenda. So we just recorded this. It was so interesting. I was like, let's get it out there. And I'm going to get to it in a moment.
But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who support for as little as a dollar a month and submit your questions ahead of time. You too can join up at patreon.com slash ologies. Thank you to everyone wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. We have shorter, kid-friendly episodes available for free anywhere you get podcasts. Just look for the Smologies episodes, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S.
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Here's a recent nice one from Naznorb who said that listening to these experts makes them more knowledgeable, wiser, happier, and more sure of the goodness in this world. That's music to my ears. Speaking of, let's get into it. So I arrived on campus in Albuquerque with my recorder, Blazin, and producer, spouse, pod mother, musician himself, Jarrett Sleeper, was with me.
In the parking garage, out of the corner of my eye, a tall, mustachioed, and spiky, red-haired figure appeared, stylishly dressed, slim, navy trousers with leather suspenders, had a warm smile, a familiar vibe.
It's good to see you. At last.
Very stoked. We walked through campus. We passed by some cooing pigeons and some cackling grackles and into the AC of their office with comfy vintage chairs and... Oh, my God.
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Chapter 2: How do music and emotions connect in the brain?
And I remember we learned about nouns and verbs and I was like, whoa, I use nouns and verbs all the time. I had no idea that I was doing that. You had this experience too. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Adjective, adverb.
Yeah, and it's like no one has to tell you, use a noun and then use a verb, and then it'll be correct. It's like you do that.
Yeah, yeah.
So it means that there is some sort of conceptual background that governs how you speak that you can then learn about, but it's there all the time and you don't think about it. So that exists for music, too. There is a grammar... to how composers put things together.
And even if you're just like singing to your dog or something like that, and like you make up a song, you basically end up following this grammar that's there. So it's sort of like making visible this meshwork of relations that exists. That's what music theory is. I think it's like the deepest level. Yeah.
And does that involve also scales and time signatures? And I know that I think about 4-4 or 3-3 I think is a waltz. Are those really instinctual or do those kind of matter more to you depending on what you've heard growing up and what music is around you culturally?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's probably the answer is yes.
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Chapter 3: What role does music play in animal communication?
I mean, if you go to church every day, or sorry, every Sunday, and nobody claps, then you're not going to learn to clap. You're not going to learn where to clap. If you go to church every Sunday where everybody's clapping on the songs all the time and it's participatory... then that's just going to be partly what to do. So it really is church.
I ended up figuring this out, but like church is like the best training for musicianship. It's really weird.
That makes sense because I grew up with Catholic mass. And we don't do any of that there. What about, let's say, you weren't raised in a church, you weren't raised with music because you are a bird or you are another animal that isn't human. How much of that is... is music versus communication.
Where is the line between, you know, if you hear an owl hooting or we heard pigeons when we walked in or there are these grackles in New Mexico that make these absolutely bonkers alien sounding calls. So what is communication and what is song?
Yeah. Okay. So there's many animals that don't hear. We talk about insects for a second because they're like not related to us. Meaning hearing evolved in insects separately from how it evolved in vertebrates. And it evolved like a bunch of different times in insects. So many of them have ears on their legs or on their body parts. The praying mantis has ears like in its abdomen.
And that derived from pressure sensation, from being able to sense substrate vibrations with their leg parts. And then it ends up getting sensitive to sound. So if you imagine if we're a species and you are, let's say we're praying menaces, and you start being able to detect substrate vibrations as sound in whatever way, then I can start signaling, I can start making substrate vibrations. And
manipulate you in mammals, especially if you're my infant and I can manipulate you to help you sleep, to help you focus so you can learn things. So if you look across all animals, right, this has to be super general, but there's sometimes when things seem like with most animals, it seems like they all have something that's like speech.
And even with fish that have only like three possible types of vocalization, Like there's a fish called the midshipman that I spent a lot of time like researching. And it has a hum vocalization where it goes. It does it for like an hour or more all night long. Then and it has two other sounds that it makes. So it does that by shaking its swim bladder. And that's like a roughly 100 hertz pitch.
And it shakes the muscles at about 100 times a second.
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Chapter 4: How do major and minor keys affect our emotions?
feel free to enjoy the paper Developmental Experience Alters Information Coding in Auditory Midbrain and Forebrain Neurons in the journal Developmental Neurobiology, which found that developmental exposure to vocalizations shapes the information coding properties of songbird auditory neurons. So hearing things as little babies shapes how they sing in the future.
Zebra finches, they start to learn to sing from a tutor, from an elder, at about a month after hatching. And then they kind of start with some nonsense tunes, like a baby just going ba-ba-ba-ba-ba as they get the hang of it. And then over the next two months, this baby zebra finch, they continue to learn, the males, and compose their own little tune. And apparently...
The audience is tough to please. Females select mates with more complex tunes and faster singing rates. And the songs also help the birds recognize their relatives.
That's the moment where I was like, oh, those other things are speech. And this one thing that's stereotyped, that's a display. It's one-sided. It's a monologue. It's always the same. and everybody can hear it, that is like the song.
Do you think that human beings' speech started with song, with notes? and evolved to really specialized sounds. There's this game I've seen played online where a group of people try to get one person at a party to do something very specific, like to do the worm on the ground while flapping their arms or something like that. Okay, so everyone decides while the target person is out of the room.
And then they come back and they try to guess what they're supposed to do. It's a people pleaser's dream. And so the person just tries to do things that are close to it. And the whole group goes, hmm, hmm, when they get farther away from, you know, if they're like, take this vase and put it on top of the record player. So the whole group as a whole just goes, hmm, hmm.
When they're doing the wrong thing. And I was thinking about you when I saw that because I was like, is that song or communication? Because they are communicating with song. I mean, that's why songs in music is so emotional. And I don't know if there are any hypotheses about whether or not speech came from song or came from something more musical or tonal.
Or if I should write my dissertation on it.
Yeah, you could. Okay, people do write about this. Okay. And then. You can bust this flim flam if need be. It's not. I mean, I'm going to give you an answer.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of music therapy in mental health?
based on infant speech segmentation to eight years worth of humpback recordings. They had a back catalog. They ran some numbers and it uncovered in whale song the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language. Now, what about David's theory that whale song is also used for echolocation? I feel like a whale scientist should probably weigh in on that.
But Waite, professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo and the director of the Neural and Cognitive Plasticity Laboratory, Dr. Eduardo Mercado III, has just proposed in his new book, Why Whales Sing, that what whale scientists have been calling songs are actually a sophisticated form of echolocation music. similar to what bats do.
So if you want more on that hypothesis, you can check out Why Whales Sing by Eduardo Mercado III. Also, Eduardo Mercado, three times, almost a song, and I'm loving it. But yeah, we need a whole episode on whales.
So the song is a little bit, I mean, it must be somewhat individual for the individual whale to somewhat unique to the Invisible Whale because it contains aspects of other songs they have known before. But it also is very much like trying to match the current song of the group that the whale is in. And then the songs, they have structure that's kind of like motive, phrase, phrase group.
And that makes sense.
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Chapter 6: How does music impact cognitive development in babies?
What does that mean?
So it's almost always structured like an A and a B. So like, that's your A and then your B. And it'll go. And the way it might change even within the phrase is. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. It might like develop within the phrase, but then also over the course of months, it can develop in that way by adding or subtracting elements.
So the whale songs are, are highly structured and they do have function. And then anything additional, like how much they enjoy it is like that stuff matters, but that isn't, that isn't going to be the thing that that's something that's kind of like invisible to evolution.
we can't interview a whale yet. And so maybe we'll find out later. Now, what about, why do certain types of music appeal to different people? Is that mostly learned and cultural? Like my sister's married to a thrash metal guitarist. My mom is into Motown. I got a niece who loves K-pop. My cousin Luke plays the Italian accordion. and I was goth.
Is that identity based or do some people maybe with different neurodivergences, like really like fast, fast beats and others, it might be overwhelming. Do we have any idea why people gravitate towards certain genres or, or beats or minor versus major keys? Nature or nurture? Well, let's get back to nature.
One thing that articulates us nicely is if you think about frogs and frogs are super vocal compared to other animals. And they made it at nighttime. And because it's night, they are distinguishing themselves like solely from the voice, at least from far enough away.
David said that frogs will even use the equivalent of a stage and they'll slime up to higher ground to get the word out. And the word is, I'm horny, let's make more of me. So in the dark, how do you know though if you're trying to mate with the right gal?
the thing that most dramatically changes to mark their different speciation is their vocalizations. And then the other cool thing about this is like most animals, they often only have like a really simple noisemaker. Like they can't make all these notes. In a sense, it's kind of like with us too.
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Chapter 7: What are the effects of different types of noise on the brain?
There's not that many notes we can sing. But if you change the rhythm, the rhythm and the patterning, you can make your song really different from someone else's. So like the way that you mark who you are
sonically vocally allows groups to separate from one another so if you think about like kids in high school as using music in that way first of all they're doing they're going out to the pond of the lek and and listening for music that's different from what their parents play right like that's really important yeah and then you're gonna if like with the goth thing like
It might be the clothes that attract you first and then you pay attention to how to, in a sense, like the arbitrary patterning of the sounds that the goth people are doing because you like those people you fit in because of clothes or for some other reason. So in that sense, it could be totally arbitrary, but you're still going to... say like, oh, I'm a goth person. I listen to goth music.
And then the more you listen to goth music, that's becoming part of who you are. So now you, Ali, as you walk around in the world, like whenever you hear one of those songs, you're like, it has a connection to you. And you're like, oh, these are my people in some sense. So yeah, it's possible for music to just try to be different in an arbitrary way, just so that that
separation of groups can happen. And it doesn't have to happen with species, but it's really valuable in culture for you to have, like, you know, for the jocks to be separate from the goth kids, for both of them.
If you want to somersault into an identity crisis with me, you can feel free to read up on The Death of Monoculture. It has its own Wikipedia page.
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Chapter 8: How does neurodivergence influence musical preferences?
But essentially, back when there were 13 channels on a TV and disc jockeys on Coke curated the hits, Big, giant groups of people tended to have the same cultural reference points. So there was then a need to say, not me. I'm a little different. Thanks so much. But now that your algorithm pays more attention to your desires than the devil himself.
and trends come so hard and fast that you might as well be dead and buried if you don't have a middle part unless you're above that like Zendaya. Honestly, one million people can log on in the morning, see a photo of you, and declare you chopped. So we're essentially like singing frogs in a melting pot.
We don't realize that our identities are so siloed that we've been tricked into longing for conformity via purchases guided by tech companies. So who are you? What are you actually like? go sit under a tree and think about it. You can be anyone you want or you can just, you are who you are and it's okay to be that little weirdo.
But do minor keys versus major keys, do those appeal to different moods or different people? And if you want to play a minor versus a major key, just in case people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like a little like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding versus ding, ding, ding. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, I'll do major.
Okay, major. Oh, should I? Do you want to guess?
Yeah, okay, make me guess. Oh, I was going to say don't look, but it won't matter if you look. It won't matter.
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