Music to Whose Ears? Music, Emotion, and Mind

00:00:00 Our Round Table today is composed of an intriguing mixture of musicians producers and theorists all of whom from their unique perspectives have thought deeply about how we might understand the emotional impact of Music where do these emotional experiences arise and are these experience unique to each listener or is there some Universal quality to the way we all react to music in the Helix tradition

00:00:31 we encourage the participants to discuss first by themselves and then among themselves whatever they think is relevant to these issues and we'll see where the conversation takes us let me introduce today's participants um let me start off with Greg calby is a partner and Senior managing engineer at Sterling sound in New York uh in New York City for over 40 years Mr calby has mastered more than 7500 albums in various genres including

00:01:04 the work of rock artists such as John lenon Bruce Springstein Paul Simon and David burn in the Jazz World his credits include Miles Davis David sandborn and Branford marcelis and in the current indie rock field he's worked with such cuttingedge artists as Alabama Shakes and Passion Pit Jesse Harris is an accomplished singer songwriter guitarist and producer of artists all over the world best known

00:01:37 for having written and played guitar on Nora Jones breakout hit don't know why for which he won the 2003 Grammy award for song of the year he has also had his songs recorded by numerous other artists including Smokey Robinson Willie Nelson and Emy L Harris as a solo artist Mr Harris has released over 10 albums including his forthcoming release entitled born away okay Marina corov crane is a

00:02:09 professional pianist and scholar in music cognition her research is focused on emotional responses to music and on perception of melodic transformation her recent work on music in the brain addresses musicianship related brain plasticity from the point point of view of a Music cognistx musician she was trained initially as a Pianist um currently Dr corov crane

00:02:41 collaborates with researchers on Imaging studies in perception of motion in tonal space she is the author of two books the universe of music and music she is the only one to talk with me Dr Gilbert Rose her for many many years on the faculties of Yale University Medical School and the western New England Institute for psychoanalysis he is the winner of the sander laurand essay Award of the

00:03:12 psychoanalytic Association of New York and the founders teaching prize of the western New England psychoanalytic Society he is also and currently a member of The Gardener program for psychoanalysis and the humanities at Yale University he is currently in private practice of Psychiatry and psychoanalysis in rowon Connecticut Dr Rose is the author of several books including trauma and Mastery in life and art necessary illusion art as witness

00:03:46 and between couch and piano psychoanalysis music art neuroscience and the power of form and the power of form uh a psychoanalytic approach to aesthetic form our first book yes first one first book okay finally Alina Rubenstein is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City she's on the faculty of the institute for psychoanalytic education affiliated with the New York University Medical Center Dr Rubenstein was raised

00:04:18 in a family of musicians and has played the piano for all her life she has served as a juror for the first four piano competitions for outstanding amateurs established in 1999 by the van kurn foundation in Fort Worth an avid Chamber Of Music participant she performs in concerts several times a year seven years ago Dr Rubenstein also began studying the cello wishing to explore non- percussive techniques of

00:04:49 producing musical sounds this is our panel and we'll go around in each person we'll we'll start and talk a little bit and then we'll talk among ourselves Dr Rose well let me tell you how it all started being a psycho analist I can try to talk sitting up I was between 10 and 12 something like that and uh browsing among my parents uh 78s I came across something which

00:05:21 knocked me out it was chovy's fifth and sixth Symphonies and I didn't know what hit me so I got in touch with my best friend Eddie Eddie danziger with whom I trade to stamps and other stuff like that and I said listen you got to hear this and I put on the fifth or the sixth and he looked he listened and he

00:05:52 looked very puzzled I said what do you what do you think what do you feel he said is it a steam engine well from then I learned that uh message does not NE that music does not necessarily carry a message or the same message uh to everyone well it was sometime after that that uh when I got acquainted with uh more sophisticated things let's say

00:06:23 at age 14 I discovered that when my elder sister who l became a disciple of Lova was playing the bethoven sonatas am I okay I discovered that the best possible place to listen to Irma playing the BET madas was lying under the piano the sound was fantastic well it was a third Discovery

00:06:53 and that was probably around the same time I discovered that if when I listen to music I would conduct at the same time with the record it was so much more satisfying and so I marched around the house conducting the music Along with whoever and uh I found it very very gratifying now in a deeper sense what I found was that it's all about

00:07:27 motion and later on I found found out that motion and emotion are inseparable so this put me onto another another thing and uh what did it lead to I have some notes here yeah

00:08:01 yeah that with I'll I'll skip what I have here and say something else later on I I found through literature that um music was capable of U releasing jump starting is a better word jump starting people from devastating uh neurological conditions temporary of course there was something about music

00:08:34 that went straight through and now I'm not going to read all of this don't worry I want to read something to you an was in a late stage of vascular

00:09:06 dementia at a much earlier Point she would succumb nightly to escalating panic and agitation uncontrolled by drugs music however could restore a degree of calm now she was no longer subject to panic she was mostly withdrawn and indifferent to music as well as the presence of Intimates whom she may or may not have still recognized she rarely spoke when she did utter a word or two

00:09:39 it was without any affect or any obvious referential content what about art and whenever I have to say about music goes also for what I think about art I think they go through the same way she had been an avid painter and a twice run her own Gallery painters had been among her closest friends one day she was shown colored illustrations of Monet and abstract paintings of Jim urst

00:10:11 an old friend she looked at them all intently for many minutes and with unswerving attention asked what she thought she replied immediately and with the intensity that had once been so characteristic this is really beautiful then more astonishing still it goes straight

00:10:44 through so what goes straight through should I tell you briefly or should [Laughter] I what goes straight through is the implicit motion which is what music and painting is all about not actual motion virtual motion and the internal motion of

00:11:14 affect and I have theories which I won't go into about what is it about each of these in terms of tension and release but I can say this that when the external tension and release buried in the music or the art goes through to the internal tension and release of affect there is an at Oneness there is a

00:11:45 unity and this Unity is at least for some of us part of the experience uh of music there is a Oneness in more technical language there was a increas increased permeability of the ego boundaries of the person so there was I think William James put it best when he said the Arts among other things no he didn't say about the Arts he said

00:12:15 it about varieties of religious experience it said he said they alleviate the Solitude of individuation not only uh it's not limited to music or to Art in an aesthetic moment it certainly is characteristic of times of being in love and as William James knew better

00:12:46 than anybody it was also characteristic of some varieties of religious experience and at Oneness so what what kind of a contribution does this experience make if any beside the moment I think it makes a contribution to one's aect regulation and also a sense of one's

00:13:16 relationship between self and world and I think I'll shut up now um well his uh reaction to chaikovsky seems really pure and um I keep thinking about uh how today music um is much more tied to uh

00:13:46 to popular culture and has a lot to do with uh marketing and and so it's interesting to see how music is marketed and people respond to it based on how it's marketed to them rather and it seems to me like a less pure um connection to it and I feel that music more than ever is marketed for The Listener as opposed to being

00:14:18 um a pure expression and I even think that popular music of the past seemed more um pure at least emotionally than it than it does now and and I think but I think that the the end result is exactly what he said about it alleviates individuation because I think it's exciting for for people to feel connected to a hit song um but sometimes I listen I think are they actually

00:14:50 listening to the music but something about cuz sometimes I listen to Pop radio not cuz I like it but cuz I want to see what's happening and and um you know you notice a lot of songs that are about you know going to clubs and stuff like that and but I think that that music makes people feel really excited um and some I mean for me personally the way I listen to music is

00:15:21 sometimes based on wanting to feel a certain way um wanting to feel I don't know yeah I guess like less alone in a moment but also maybe happy or maybe contemplative you know not necessarily sad but but uh understood by another artist I also think a lot about how I listen to music um I've I prefer to listen to vinyl uh

00:15:54 Records for some reason the sound connects to me more and and um I don't know it just feels warmer and more human I've talked to to Greg about this a lot um but in terms of my own writing um that's something that uh I is more of like a habit I guess and I

00:16:26 don't think so much about how it it uh necessarily connects but it's strange when some songs connect to people and others don't and that's hard to identify um but I feel like I could just keep rambling and talking in different directions yes uh I would like to make a

00:16:57 small uh remark about your friend for whom I have a microphone just okay uh it's about your friend who uh did not recognize music in the fifth and sixth Symphonies of chikovsky there is a very small percentage of listeners for whom um music is not available it's um it's very interesting

00:17:29 Condition it's called amuser and people just don't recognize anything and they even okay they even don't have uh maybe hold it a little closer to they don't have familiar Melodies because they are not able to recognize patterns of Music uh because when we listen to music we actually listen to musical sounds which have very interesting relationships uh they differ in they

00:18:01 perceive tension it was another very important word mentioned today so when we listen to music we listen to pattern of tones it's like listening um in in distribution of different levels of energy in tonal field I don't want to talk too much about it I I want to go back to amuse so very small percentage of people they are not able to recognize music but everybody else is gifted from

00:18:35 birth we all are experts at Birth because our auditory system is ready before we are born we already listen to music before they are born and even two four months old babies recognize the basic the most important melodic elements of Music consonant intervals and dissonant intervals uh moreover the way thank you the way music

00:19:07 uh convey information is very simple we can say it's primitive it's perceived tension this is why music is available for everybody even for people with very serious cognitive problems we are all able to recognize music it's incredibly gen generous art uh by my um vacation right now I applied philosopher I was trained as a

00:19:38 classical pianist in Russia but then I became a cognitive scientist and it happened that I started emotion and this is the last area I wanted to study because it's very difficult and it's very difficult to talk about emotion in music but we still can measure something which would help us recognize some of the aspect of this magic which we call

00:20:08 music um the the experience of listening to chaikovsky for the first time um the first thing I thought about was when I was a kid my my dad was a uh real blue collar guy had a bread a bread R delivery guy and if classical music ever came on his radio he would always turn he says I hate that suicide music he would always call classical music suicide music so when I so growing growing up the the experience I had besides the suicide

00:20:39 music was the classic music that used to play on the the the morning cartoons but I don't know if any any people who made those cartoons and produced them understands that that was extremely valuable to somebody who grew up in a house where there was no such thing as classical music so the first time that I went to a classical concert it was a Leonard Bernstein young people's con concert and it was an experience which affected affected me for the rest of my life because the the the beauty of it and the the intensity of the that point it was Carnegie H but I'm not 100% sure I was some about eight or nine years old but I remember the

00:21:10 sound of the of the orchestra along with the fact that it was a music that I had found very exotic to me had really carried me into the field that I'm in right now uh and have been for 40 years which is audio engineering um but as far as emotion goes funny in the last few weeks I had I had an experience which um really spoke to what we're talking about here uh I had the opportunity to see this new show on Broadway opening up called mtown and it's just a history of of Barry Gordy who founded mtown records and in the

00:21:43 beginning of the show there's a there's a there's the first scene is The Temptations and The Four Tops you know the guys playing those groups have kind of like a competition with each other and then it just literally plays these songs from my really my teenage years uh you know people on this panel are all different ages but this is a very musically such a formative time when your your emotions and your connection to music happen and um I found myself three or four different times completely tearing up I wasn't sobbing but my eyes were watering I was getting the chills

00:22:15 and I was and I was feeling something I just didn't understand so after the show uh my wife and I went out to dinner with another couple good friends of ours and I said to the to the woman who's a her name is Suzy roach she's a a really a great musician on her own right and I said to everybody I said did anybody find themselves crying and Suzy said to me yeah a couple of times also and we do not know what the trigger was I mean Nostalgia is one thing and I know that if someone grew up in a different time and never heard that music before and listen to it they I don't think they

00:22:45 would be crying and it it also led me back to another situation that happened to me about 15 or 20 years ago in my studio uh a guy that I grew up with uh had really close friends with him in the eth grade he became a Franciscan uh Monk and has and still is a Franciscan priest and we hadn't hadn't seen each other for years and we connected on the phone and he came to the studio and he brought a cassette with him and in the cassette days and it was an artist yes okay great I like holding the mic though it felt it felt so

00:23:17 professional so felt much better so um so Kevin brings this cassette of Yanni and no offense to anyone here Yanni is what I would my in my way of thinking is kind of an insipid form of kind of new Agy kind of music and he put this cassette in and the sound quality of the cassette was it looked like it sounded like he probably had like dipped it in a cup of coffee before he came in and then put it in the machine it was horrendous and and and I was listening to this I was looking at

00:23:48 my speakers which you you know it's professional Studios and and I'm just going oh this is unbelievably horrible and I turned to Kevin and he's got the conducting things in his his hands P pencils and he's he's doing this and he's crying tears are coming out of his eyes and internally I'm laughing because this is the worst thing I ever heard and to him which what he said to me when was over he just said I can't thank you enough that's the most beautiful I've ever heard that now I'm I'm not I'm not criticizing Kevin but I'm just saying that this is

00:24:18 the kind of thing when we talk about music and emotion it it speaks to so much of what music is about the the personal nature of it the emotional nature of it what we bring what we bring to this you know my day-to-day work I frequently get music sent to me from uh from a from Asia more and more recently China um Korea and Japan and uh the other engineers and I always kind of have a you know it's kind of an internal laugh we have with each other but the the Japanese rock is completely like another language I mean it's like you

00:24:49 don't understand the words but you really don't understand what they're doing musically so there's there's no emotion so yesterday just yesterday in my studio I had a Japanese jazz artist a very very talented woman plays Mora like this giant morima and she saw one of these CDs that I had done that was in my mind was awful and she looked at she oh I want this is great this is great and she really had to have this and she's a very sophisticated musician so the relative nature of all this stuff and the emotional connection to me is really fascinating and you know I think with

00:25:19 the group that we have here we really have all different we have different Generations we have different something we bring into this so I'm happy to be here talking about it and see what we come up with you know thank you well I grew up I would say bathed in classical music my father was a concert pianist so I speak um I uh I also started out under the piano excellent place to uh to start and also trying to manipulate the petals and competing with a younger brother for

00:25:50 the pedals and uh don't remember actually when I started to play the piano but uh it just seems like I always did but that's I think probably a very common experience that you you just feel like you all you don't remember when you couldn't play but um it was it was never forc it was never forced on me but I just loved it from day one I played with for hands with my brother it was can you not hear me not too well not too well

00:26:21 not too well and uh well anyway I I uh was sort of considering I I wasn't really considering having a career as a Pianist because I knew only too well the downside of it which is you know traveling all the time and some people love that some people don't it's doesn't make for a very stable life really and um uh and the other part of it was uh my generation was the one that when I was a teenager Elvis Presley erupted on the

00:26:52 scene and um so you can figure out where I fit into the scheme of things and and um it was also a period of time though in in certainly In classical music women were very little representative at that time and the thought of being you know the reviews would say things like for a woman you know she played pretty and you you basically were sort of restricted to you know most most women to Mozart and stuff like that and um wow something

00:27:23 just happened the word Mozart Mozart right um but I I was and uh after a few uh starts in other areas I I was briefly a graduate student in comparative literature um and uh I really wanted to go to medical school but as I was saying before it was also a period of time where not too many women thought especially who came from families that didn't have um you know

00:27:53 doctors or scientists in the background they didn't really think of that but uh I that's what I ended up doing and and I I always sort of was gra gravitated towards um Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis I think in part because I think I'm a reasonably good listener and um I think there was some some uh I can't think of the right word um correlation there between listening

00:28:24 to music and you know as I did and and listening to people very you know carefully but um but in but I've become um even more I mean the other part of it was that since my father was a musician and my grandfather my brother and other family me my mother and sister were both dancers so I mean we were really surrounded by Music in Motion um my and um the conducting went on a lot at home too um but uh I've I've always been just

00:28:58 so passionate about it and about hearing it the emotions that it evokes in me and I um connecting to what you said I think that those are very subjective and that that the form the formal aspects of Music lend themselves because there's they can't be translated into words I don't think this is working it is oh okay um lends itself to projecting whatever emotion and or meaning if we

00:29:30 can try to Define that that one wants to if you want to feel a certain way you may know that certain music will evoke that kind of feeling and you'll put it on and and kind of enjoy having the feeling including sad feelings including you know some of the negative feelings um but I think the main thing that uh that I really find um my connection to music is in actually playing it making it making the sounds myself and

00:30:02 um and I've always played the piano and as I I think you said I took up the cello about six years ago which was a little bit uh risky given my Advanced age but um I thought maybe it would saave off dementia among other things but that that wasn't really the reason it was because it's not that easy but um I always love the sound of the cello specifically and I'm always very interested in why people are attracted to certain kind certain particular sounds and I think they are um and also

00:30:38 I wanted to be able to sustain a tone which you can't do on the piano uh and I could go on and and I I had a religious I'm not religious but music is a Rel is a religion for me and playing the bach Suites was another goal that that made me take up the cello and I could go on and on but I won't at the moment com can I can I ask you a question yes so I mean obviously playing Counter your whole life and now cello is a new thing but can is there a way to

00:31:10 figure how you feel I mean it's asking your shrink how how you feel it's funny but I mean is there a different emotion that you get from from yourself when you play cello are you at that level with it where you can actually feel like you're Pro well one one of the other things that I did I that you're reminding me of is the piano is a giant piece of Machinery you know wood and metal and it's you know when you play with other people you're still not sort of in the music in the same way as if you play a string quartet or whatever because you

00:31:40 know the thing has to be away from everybody else and you're usually making the most noise and often in In classical chamber music you never get a break you know you the the the melody instrumentalists you know usually have to breathe or or you know their arm gets tired but we we Soldier on and trying to turn our pages in between the uh you know the you know 16th rest that they they give us and I wanted to be able to play in like a quartet or in in a group

00:32:13 where I vibrate the strings along with the other people vibrating their strings literally and I mean you want to be on the same wavelength to use all the slightly corny metaphors but the other thing about the cello obviously is you can wrap yourself around it it's a very sensual instrument it's not as big as the bass which is a little too big especially for somebody like me but the chello is just perfect it has that shape that allows you to embrace it you feel it the whole instrument vibrating when you play it and you know you can't be

00:32:45 more in the music for me than that I'm sure singers would say that they because their instrument is actually their body literally but the cello is as close as I felt I could get have you found other players to play yeah now now I have it took me about two or 3 years to make a sound that I didn't want to run away from while I was making it but I'm past that thank you I want to uh in Infuse a little bit of Science in this

00:33:15 conversation um you mentioned Dimension uh I I want to go first to to children that recent studies showed that already after six months of studying children show advantage in in memorization on tasks which are related to uh IQ uh we also know today that um people who studied music in their childhood they show

00:33:45 certain um kind of age Defiance in their cognitive functions at Old the age and as a music educator I would say everybody uh don't put a your desire to study music it's never late one of the best cases in my practice as a piano teacher was a 62y old beginner a registered nurse who became a wonderful pianist just in a couple years but she was very

00:34:18 disciplined did you want to say something I'm sorry did you want to say something well it wasn't directly something well but I'll raise it now anyway to to my my colleague here especially um I I read a uh a a PhD uh thesis recently for an institution and it it was about uh well one one specific thing about it it talked at the end about musical

00:34:50 listening and made the point that uh for a therapist to listen music musically was a very big asset and what the point that she made was that you're listening both globally to the overall and at the same time for details and it struck me that this this is uh I I think that I recognize something in that and I wondered from you and your experience as as a as a

00:35:22 therapist analyst as well as a musician U this thought makes it sense to you it makes sense but I don't know that I would necessarily be aware of doing it at the time and I I I I suspect that most analysts listen you know and they they hear repetitions they hear themes they hear variations on the themes all of which are musical you know Concepts and I think that but I I think I'm um I enjoy listening in general so I

00:35:55 think that that's one of the ractions but I also uh I think I'm I like to be aware of the nonverbal aspects of the treatment too which I think Music is More in some ways connected to and I think also connected to the earliest mother child Matrix and and I think you raised that uh point and I I feel like that's something that I'm more aware of attending to as an analyst the silences especially the silences

00:36:27 somebody said that the most important part about music are the rests yeah the spaces between the notes who said that mo mo mo only Moz but but also the silence before and after which I think are not really necessarily thought about so you listen to music in order to restore the silence and listen to The Silence I think that's a very for me that's a very important idea

00:36:59 um uh this is a conversation uh can you hear me yes this is a conversation about theemotion and as educator I just cannot um help myself but try to understand where they begin it's kind of ambitious task but um my doctoral study actually addressed this task uh uh music psychologist when they talk about music they say tonal space so when we listen to music we travel in

00:37:30 tonal space and uh uh and you mentioned motion most important pH thing and actually uh my lectures were called motion interal space as and emotion motion internal space and emotion it's produced by motion internal space uh I want to illustrate just a few little things about the origin of tonal space and for this I will need this piano and I'm sorry to bother you but I

00:38:04 will need to touch the piano yeah I don't of course so in when when we listen to

00:38:35 music we listen musical sounds which actually have a status in this tonal space imagine that in music the relationship between sounds is like relationship within the society when I play a simple scale uh the tones of the scale they differ in their frequency and Pitch but most importantly differ in the attraction to

00:39:08 First note this is very unstable and this is very stable and I want to play you two very short uh samples to explain you why music is something like tonal force field it's going be beginning of a Prelude from well tempered clavier by y Sebastian [Music]

00:39:44 [Music] B and it sounds very peaceful now [Music] so what happened that in the external space we suddenly found ourselves very far away from stability and this is how we perceive music as a pattern of

00:40:16 stability and instability when it's unstable it gives us feeling of tension when it's gives us feeling of release and this is what we listen to music This is why music talks to everybody because the morphological principle in music the way the message the communication is structured is very simple it's understood by everybody it's either sound harmonious or

00:40:47 [Music] not this is what uh four month months B do not like they like this they like this and people don't like this so the music is made uh from tense and relaxed elements but the Magic Begins uh when those sensations of tension relaxations are are sequenced in

00:41:20 time and the best explanation of this was done by Susan ler a wonderful American philosopher she told that in music we have logic of emotion not just emotion but logic of emotion it's not something we suddenly frightened of or we are hungry no in music what is given to us by music it's a complex aesthetic emotion it's like leing through life again we live through

00:41:53 life again in time this is the only art which is so tightly connected to time it's humanized time so when we listen to music we listen to those sequences of um tension and releases they work like triggers for our neurophysiological system and somehow those triggers they create emotion in us now think how we all react to the outside world and not

00:42:23 only we let's say some little animal if something fr light in it would be it would be tension if we you know have a nice dinner or nice friend talking my friend we are relaxed this is the simplest reaction of the living organism tension and relaxation and this is what music imitates tension and relaxation and those sequences of tension of relaxation they create emotional states very strange thing I

00:42:54 think it's really magic what about music that's uh all dissonance or all tension cuz some people don't like to hear consonants they like to hear noise I think I think that's all right and it was actually um a movement kind of aggressive movement in 20th century against the dictatorship of tonality but the first yes it kind of coincided with changes in societal

00:43:25 structures uh that um but what happened when uh shanberg who was called aanal to his great irritation introduced new system which defined the role of tality this tension and relas the system was quite um strict and what is interesting the musician listen to atonal music they still are trying to find some points to uh tie

00:43:57 um to find some system of reference because when we perceive this world we always perceive it in some system of reference if it's a visual world it's a cartisian coordinates if it's music it's a scale just simple scale but uh this announces it's a wonderful expressive element uh uh and if you look into if you hear to music by B he predicted a lot of things he predicted atonal music poonal music and uh whole tone scale can find everything but of course then we

00:44:29 had list who was he was tremendous revolutionary Vagner and then uh in 20th century schonberg and Weber and and B and then kind of extreme it was Carl house and um sakis who used tastic music just random numbers and he created some sounds some masses of sounds but not tonal sound when we talk the music today we basically talk about tunel music about Melodies and harmonies and this

00:45:00 music lives in this simple simple scale I'm just wondering with with Jesse and with Greg in terms of popular music in terms of let's say Post Punk music which is um which seems to have no integrate which has no restfulness to it uh which has no scale to it as I understand it how you would see this fitting in with the kind of class as uh as we were going through the different

00:45:31 comp different composers and the different elements in in the classical form I was trying to kind of equate that with my world um and and Jesse's world and and the people who are involved in in popular music and you know all I would say all the way from early 60s up through now which is a huge body of work now and it's actually being studied academically and um and people bring so much uh emotion to what they expect from their music and as far as dissonance I mean there are people that go to Rock

00:46:03 shows specifically to to feel aggressive to feel more aggressive than they are to find a safe place for their aggression if you you know I've always been Amazed by the the people that come into the studio when I'm working on a heavy metal album you you might have noticed this too from the people that you know these are the gentlest Souls that I've met for the most part the gentest people that I meet the most aggressive people that I meet in in my business are the hyper intellectual ual kind of new new music people well the The Poets and the people who are searching to be unique are the

00:46:33 hardest people for me those are the hardest people to deal with those are the people with the edge those are the most insecure people they're looking for a special place in the music but the people who like for example are into heavy metal they this there's a community there's a sense of community I was thinking about this before there was a film that that many of you I'm sure s saw recently called Amore about it was a fantastic film you remember the opening of the film from the stage out into the audience it's a the classical piano did you see the film yeah fabulous fabulous

00:47:04 film but the beginning is a classical pianist gets on stage but you don't watch him you watch the audience reaction and I swear it's about five minutes of just watching people in Stillness and I'm you're looking at this and you're wondering what is everybody thinking what is every each of these individuals doing there and when I go to a to a concert and my wife and I go to maybe two or three a year and done frequent concert goers to me there's a sense of isolation I mean you you're listening and you're you're emoting to the music

00:47:34 internally rock music is not like that rock music is like kind of a a celebration of the artist and in community with the people who are who are there who've also decided to come and enjoy it together and music will this type of music will fuse people together and and this this is across many genres I think uh it's it's it's an appreciation it's a support for the Artist as an individ ual which I'm sure in in a classical show if you really know the performers and you know the chellis for example and you go and watch this fantastic CH and there's you know

00:48:05 there's that feeling but for the most part I think people go to to internalize the feelings of the music this is not Jesse you maybe you can speak to this as well I mean I I find that the communal especially in the 60s there were there were there were groups in the 60s where if you went to see for example the incredible String Band in 1969 everybody in the show was on LSD and you knew that and you knew that they were and they knew you were and there was a community based around this and this to me is the same in exactly the

00:48:36 same thing as if you go to to the abis indan Baptist Church on a Sunday and everybody's singing it's it's a it's a religious type experience and I think that um communion exactly and I I see this when I go out I see this it shows and uh to me it's a very very interesting thing and um because it when you speak to someone else's music or they speak to a music that you don't understand you tend to kind of drift back you know they mentioned you know downstairs we were

00:49:06 Jess and I were speaking and talking about a couple artists that maybe some of the folks never heard this everybody kind of gets in a little corner well I don't know what they're talking about I don't know what they're talking that's what's great about the the classics is that we all have at least some knowledge of that whereas Passion Pit you know most of the people in this room probably haven't heard um you know you know what I mean there about right I totally agree I sometimes it makes me uncom comfortable when I go to concerts cuz it seems sort of like a I don't know like some sort of hero worship or something and and sometimes I feel that people uh think they have to act a certain way

00:49:38 especially these days and even like even some of the way that they cheer the music is a certain type of sound that they make and it makes me uncomfortable and sometimes I don't even think they're listening to the music they're just going to live out the experience that they think they're supposed to you know they they they they act the way they think they're supposed to act I'm being cynical I think but but I do feel you've been around it a lot seen it on the other hand sometimes I mean this is something that's come to mind for some

00:50:09 reason but uh I went to see Randy Newman performed in Central Park once maybe 10 years ago and he just played the opening chords of I think it's going to rain today on the piano and the woman sitting next to me burst into tears literally just burst into tears and shrieked and and put her her in her hands um so I mean popular music can have an incredible impact like that um I keep thinking about how it is today you know

00:50:40 and it again it it it's a friend of mine said to me once it was it was John zor actually he said I think people and he he's someone who makes all kinds of music and for him to say this is is is pretty interesting but he said I think people just listen to music that makes them feel cool he said they they just want to hear you know they just want to feel cool and so they like how you cool cool is I don't know maybe maybe I mean this would be really reductionist but maybe you put on classical music because it makes you feel cultured you know or

00:51:12 you you feel like I'm being I'm sorry I know that there's more to it than that but but but but maybe you feel like you can create your own little world when you put on that music and you listen to it or you play it and then you know you can shut out the rest of the noise maybe you know and for people who like rock they put on the band they like and they feel like I'm cool too you know I can you hear yeah I protested uh first of all the classical music grew up from

00:51:42 popular music you know uh when uh Luther in in protestan Germany uh was working on creating um you know vocabulary of hymns at the churches he some of the songs he used had very questionable content just abene content and he would say we should save it from the clutches of devil uh when you think about the best melodist like Schubert he wrote 600

00:52:12 songs and the main formula that popular music uses it's the same it's the main formula of melodic motion and this is what the uh box uh prudes starts with [Music] this is all it's like the law of motion in Newtonian physics it's three chords in classical music three chords

00:52:42 everything as is derivative so uh there is not huge difference it's just some classical music like say mozer orich orovi it just somewhat more structured and carries a lot of information which is not perhaps easy it's easy but it's just different kind of information that um that um let's say heavy metal of uh what the

00:53:13 popular music can carry it's just different levels but the matter is the same now you were talking before you were mentioning the importance of tension and right after that you were speaking about the importance of release but that's the whole story tension and release patterns of tension and release certain ones will correspond with patterns of tension and release in

00:53:45 different emotions and I think that's what goes straight through the correspondence between patterns of tension and release in in the music and internally with certain effects makes a click it goes straight through I also think that popular music perhaps uses the rhythms uh more aggressively and M and R more more aggressively and it actually just kind

00:54:17 of mins on our physiology because we do have this regularity in our lives so it's it's rather on the side of uh R micity then on side of madism but I don't see any Chasm between them frankly there's a uh a record I was just listening to this morning just I I just think people might find it interesting it's popular music there a young artist named James Blake um and uh it's an

00:54:48 interesting record because it's uh it has all the elements that you're talking about there these long moments of Silence where you think the song is over and then all of a sudden the song keeps going and then and then it seems to stop again and then a beat comes in and some of it is acoustic piano some of it's electronic um I think it's uh worth checking out I just I just wanted to say get back to something you said uh before about um

00:55:19 you put music and other art the other Arts together and I I I'm not sure if I totally AG agree with that I think music of course I'm biased I'm sure but I I think music is different in the sense that first of all it's it's invisible really I mean you know when when it's being played where is it you know it's it's not like something you can touch or look at or anything like that and it it starts and ends in a in time and

00:55:49 therefore uses up time and and that in a certain way sort of mimics what happens to us over time too so I think there I I really don't like to lump it in with the other Arts although you know I'm certainly not as knowledgeable about talking about the aesthetic response the aesthetic response the theory of Aesthetics and in the in my theory of Aesthetics patterns of tension and release exist in music in their own ways in their own language and as they exist

00:56:20 in let's say painting matis said a line is not just a line a line is a stroke against the indifference of the background he said to his students try to find out where that line is driving to go he's talking about the Dynamics of it visual Aesthetics just as

00:56:51 you were talking about the Dynamics of the piano the when you play the scale you you you can't leave it at the seventh it has to go to the eighth it has to resolve that's tension and release now it's in that sense that I'm putting them both together I guess I just have always felt that music is much more embod embodied in in a certain way because just because it picks up on our body rhythms and because it's not visible you know and it it it vibrates

00:57:22 in you you know um and I guess to me that makes it I mean and then how do we talk about what it means we there are no words and even with painting it seems to or you know the plastic arts in general it seems as if it might be easier to to talk about them in words um but music is such a challenge and I I just this isn't aside but I I have to say in spite of my um great love for psychoanalysis I never have really forgiven Freud for being a

00:57:54 vienes Jew who had really interest in music I I couldn't I'm sure there's there there was an issue there and he also got rid of his older sister's piano because uh it was annoying him right so I just wanted to get that on the table well he he also confessed that he that he he could not bear to stand any any art unless he knew what the meaning of it was and that's beside

00:58:24 the point right the meaning of it is is the is the reaction you have spontaneously when you first hear it and then all the other meanings that have come in the course of time and the stages that life goes through and have different meanings they're attributed I'm talking about the spontaneous reaction which I think has to do with patterns of tension and release in one language of music and in another language in visual art but it's still tension and release I have very

00:58:55 important things to uh add because we talk about uh pleasure music so I have to talk about neurophysiology of perception of Music it activates biological Reward Center which is also involved in our pleasure of of food and sex and another thing about the um does all music do that to certain kind pleasurable music but that's that's somewhat subjective yeah and it no no no this is what they found it could be music and Miner actually MH still activates a

00:59:27 biological rewards center pleasure Center and just a a a very minor uh addition to conversation about um like these communions when music is very loud um it could be actually dangerous for our auditory system when I see cars with small children and there's a very loud m music it always hurts me because I know that the poor child could and his parents could suffer uh loss of hearing in our very delicate organ of quy in our

01:00:00 in our C we have outer and uh inner cells and outer cells like Celia they work as amplifiers and if they destroyed and they can be destroyed if there is consistently uh loud sound they cannot be restored this is why people can start losing their hear in their 30s if they work in a very loud vents well we we could have an entire seminar about hearing loss and and loud I mean loud is part of the the world right now I mean I

01:00:30 have a the audiologist that I go to says when he started he's in his 60s now he says when he started all his patients he was in his 30s most of them were in their 60s he says he routinely gets people in their 30s now have severe hearing loss people are using the inear headphones and you know running and and spending hours and hours with that pressure on their ears cars I mean I'm sure everybody in this room has left at least one restaurant I've left maybe 10 restaurants this you know 2 years because you couldn't hear the people on the other side of the table I mean that's another you know that's another whole thing but you know

01:01:02 it it really makes you wonder like why why is this why do people like loud there some stimulation from loud I mean otherwise people would shy away from it but so many people I'm not one of them but so many people need loud they need the distraction of loud they need the physicality I mean the guy who comes next to you in the SUV where you hear everything and your car is moving like this and his car is shaking like this he's getting something from that he likes move he likes his his ass moving in that seat and there's there's something really important about the the

01:01:32 physical nature of the of of of music for people but you know the body is not really adapted to this I'm sorry I don't think it was always like that I think it's the technology has developed to the point where you can drive around and you can have you know 150 DB in your car and uh the restaurants now have you know the ability to have speakers everywhere coming down from the top and the sides you know that this know in the 50s and 60s when we grew up with didn't have that so I feel sorry for the kids what it what it it indicates uh with a kind of music which is both loud and we're

01:02:03 tension predominates over relaxation I'm talking about the kind of music that that that you would know which is very different than shonberg you know and it what is it about the times that we live in the period that we live in where this seems to be how people are recognizing themselves in in dys for you know in in painful music almost and a kind of addiction to just to tension well what Greg does dictates a lot of how music is heard you know in uh

01:02:35 in in the the mediums that we have today because when people go to have their albums mastered um what Greg does is the final stage of that and he can change the way the music sounds depending I guess on what people want but most people go to Greg because they they like his aesthetic but but at that final stage you can make make music more aggressive you can make it louder or you can make it softer you can make it brighter or you can have more bass and that has so much influence on your perception of the music and I I've had

01:03:08 certain albums of M that I had to have remastered completely because the first take that the mastering engineer and not Greg by the way um that the F that the mastering engineer had did was too aggressive and he he just figured well I was going to you know I wanted to make your music uh like other people's and bring out that you know that sound and bring it up bring the volume up and when you bring the volume up you you bring up an aggressive feeling if you let the volume go down you know stay at a little

01:03:38 bit of a lower point then you can have music that breathes more but most the records that are made these days I think they go for the highest level that they can get they go for they go for S they kind of put it pushes forward every element kind of becomes equal so that the feeling is kind of like listening being like pushed into a wall where I mean Jesse creates music different than this and the opportunity that I had to work with him a few times you know we try to create music that has when we say Dynamics it means you can feel the the

01:04:08 the variation in the the amplitude of the different instruments so you have much more of a rhythmic you have much more of this rather than this and um people musicians I think I think a lot of musicians have been around music so much and I think that they almost like uh it's like I'll have one sugar I'll have two Two Sugars in my coffee I have six sugars I have sugar six sugars and I'll have you know you know a little bit of 5H Hour Energy and you know just it's like an like almost like an addiction for excitement but you kind of lose the the the perspective so you know I deal with people in a way that I have to

01:04:41 understand what is going to I have to do something that they're going to approve my my work is for the artist to get something that he wants and a lot of these artists need that feeling of excitement and they also need the feeling that when they play something compared to someone else's music that it has as much intensity so in in that in that way that intensity to that person could read forwardness and I've you know I've worked with a lot of musicians lately U who are they're almost deaf in in their 40s I mean it's really unbelievable you know I'll do things and I go like I can't hear what

01:05:11 you're doing it's like I'm been on stage too long or uh you know it's uh yeah it's but you know the thing that strikes me about this conversation that we're having is how you know all our different experiences depend on the of music that we listen to are involved in but you know you keep pointing up the universal nature of the experience and I think that's it's a good combination of what is it about the music and different kinds of music and then I'm sure everybody in this room at times today has kind of like zoned out and then

01:05:41 other people are like oh yeah I got that's that's I I I understand that you know it's a very very person it's a very personal thing our our our feelings about our music well I think one one thing a psycho analyst you may or may not agree about the need for intensity and and volume is in order not to listen to what's inside I do inside your own head as yeah to get away Escape exactly MH I agree we've decided two of

01:06:15 us done consider it settled well music isn't it is an escape into another world into you know when I was a kid my father's Sinatra records that was a visit to you know 52nd Street in the 1940s you know I I had never been to 52nd Street I wasn't born till 1949 I never went to jazz clubs but you know to re to hear Sinatra's world and to hear the horns and everything it just creates a visual like an imagination true and uh these These are little little climates little rooms that we walk into with the

01:06:46 different musics and it's Jesse is is fascinating because you've been doing a lot of international uh recording like you've been in Brazil and you write in different genres maybe you can discuss a little bit of how you you know you kind of write folk genres in in you know in more rhythmic uh you know Latin American South American well I mean what I was thinking of actually was CU we've been talking so much either about classical music or popular music but just about uh ad them maybe more indigenous music or folk music and how that functions and

01:07:18 and also tonally how that functions because a lot of that music has nothing to do with the scale that we've been talking about at all um and uh and and yet it can reach a level of sophistication equal if not more to to to uh to the Western scale and and that has those tensions and releases are completely different um and so that sort of calls into question that basic

01:07:48 feeling of what you know of the the human the universal human response to sound because actually in other places it's not the same but it seems to me that it's culturally determined all over the world I mean there was a study recently uh with people listening to music from different cultures exactly what you just and they found that uh there are there there are dominance people respond to it's just

01:08:20 tiny differences yeah the cultural differences at end but still the most important things are ctured so something about music it's it's really universal language somehow it reaches everybody even if it's kind of very distant culture it still arised to us but I think what what you're suggesting is that the patterns of tension and release are very different and there are all kinds of cultural things going them but that the basics that must be there in every culture that is a way of kind of

01:08:52 integration which human beings can't live without really absolutely quite differently because we listen to we're very used to a a pretty even meter but if you listen to music from other parts of the world you can't even tell where it begins and where it ends um it doesn't seem to have meter some of it um and and it furthermore seems at times to be speeding up and slowing down at the same time and people can they do this just naturally that's how they play and that's how they hear things um but yeah

01:09:24 I mean the sure the the uh the response to music whether no matter what kind of music is is universal yes people are moved by it in fact I would even say perhaps they're more moved by it than some some indigenous cultures because it's more you know it's it is in fact religious um it's ritualistic but I think you have to be exposed from a very young age to

01:09:54 whatever kind of music to really appreciate it and and have emotions and response to it I mean I think if you haven't grown up hearing classical music you know you're with people who love it you know that in that setting you why would you maybe even more or any other kind of music more mysterious than that because I I keep thinking of what you were saying before about you and your father he could listen to something and couldn't hear it at all you listen to something and uh you know it moved you

01:10:25 very very much and and is a kind of mystery as to what it is that even with you that allowed you to hear something and know that it spoke to you and that those rhythms were responding to some difference probably between people between effective organizations that people have what that has to do with education and classes very complicated it is complex I mean I remember in the 60s when you meet somebody know I was in my 20s and and you meet somebody 60 years old and go like I love the Beatles they would say said wow how how does

01:10:57 this person who's 60 years old like the Beatles you know when you know this is like in the 60s you'd very rarely meet someone then they would say something I love that song Michelle or you know one of the real melodic ones you know but there's there's a cultural barrier to cross and I'd be curious in this room how many people have listened to hip-hop then all of a sudden it's like you know that this that that's one hip-hop song I really like that one you know I mean how many people are open to that or how many people just as soon as they hear the genre they hear the the style justop that's not M it's not mine just close right up and you know no matter what the lyrics are no matter how socially

01:11:27 relevant they are no melodically just like that's not my music I'm not going there or is there certain music that we can't hear we literally can't hear listen I wanted to take some if there are questions that people uh would like to ask the participants uh please go over to the mic and uh you could just say who you are and

01:11:57 you want a name that sure Rogers I appreciate hearing that Freud had no experience of music I think had an experience well he he rejected it I and I find that it's a mystery is anyone writing about it I think that's phenomenal do we know if anyone is writing about it I I think it's been I mean I must have read it some do I have

01:12:29 to look at Google for that something about with people being you know locked in with genres that they would would listen to and wouldn't listen to I was thinking of the movie Mr Holland Opus where he played a classical theme it was uh you know you know the minu G you box but they knew it as as a toy as M toown song lovers could chare it out and sometimes it can and

01:13:00 sometimes like Ser like that you just take one song Sometimes to one little piece that just a little bit different when somebody might start to embrace it when they didn't Embrace before because it's uh because just touch touches them you know and um I know that also I mean a lot a lot of the British Rock in the 60s did borrow from you know magicals from classical music from you know uh American Blues you kind of like a hybrid going on

01:13:31 yeah like funny sometimes music can grow over time so and I guess that whether assumtion that that any particular genre is be monolithic and it's not really not because there's always be some variation within any within any type of music and there could be one particular song that somebody heard that from some from either of a group that they know may want to give him uh consider giving particular other kind of music a

01:14:01 another list just give it another chance yeah well you know the modern uh hip-hop music uses samples from all different sources from classical sources Jazz sources you know you hear it all because you know the technology now allows you to kind of construct music is not performed as much as constructed so now it's being constructed from all different kind in a way that's kind of sad thing when you talk about k how the only variation is uh in in volume is that it just keeps increasing but there's no decreases no in and out like just it's just increases louder and

01:14:33 louder and louder and that's that's well that's the tension part but where's the release part coming in question you know I mean how had to get Beyond just you when did when did the release come in when you keep hearing throbbing you in clubs like that's why don't don't go to the club because I don't think I could handle all the that that throbbing p and pulsating I think know for about four measures back thank

01:15:05 you I've never been raised on classical music just like there was never a book in my house but anyway um I was raised if anything on popular music so my question is this don't you think it's easier to like popular music than classical music I'd like especially direct this to you cuz you're just opposite of my background and because the words give you Direction

01:15:35 and I think would help also in some of the things you've been talking about the words themselves forget the emotion of The Words which I think are terrific often uh but don't you think it's easier to like popular music because it comes with words I I think most of the music in the world I think does come with words um actually and I I I think that's that may be true

01:16:06 and but I've I've always particularly been fascinated by non U music that doesn't have words just because it's so it's so mystifying what it is what eloquent it's it's so eloquent and and yet with no words and and how do we understand and what the impact on it not only tions but IDE I mean to my knowledge of speaking about Freud again the the only two

01:16:36 references I recall in his work about to music were both operas because one was an ofenbach one and another one was done gvan by Mozart because there was a plot and words and everything else that he could talk about I'm Jim Rubin uh analyst I'm a member of a group that works with people with brain damage we work uh psychotherapeutically and psychoanalytically and we have been in touch with the

01:17:06 man uh who is both a psychotherapist and suffers from Aphasia he had a he had a stroke his name is Harvey Alter and he runs support groups for aphasics and I've heard him speak he mastered much of his aphasia by singing to himself and he could retrieve the word with the help of the music may I add a little bit uh there are groups right now in melodic therapy

01:17:37 they actually work with people with um damage to their speech center first they start with just couple notes around and teach them to say their names then simple phrases and gradually they uh restore uh Speech and what is interesting they restore speech center in opposite hemisphere which was not damaged uh I'm Henry Earl thank you for a very interesting discussion uh Rubenstein uh

01:18:08 corov what about genetics what about studies in people who humans who are either preverbal or postverbal uh you may have noticed it but uh from Koto uh a group of researchers recently reported three subjects in which they studied sleep and dream what they regard as dreaming uh in the first stage of sleep uh they would awaken these subjects and compare the functional MRI to the

01:18:41 objects that they dreamed about uh that they recalled and they got to the point where they could find a 60% correspondence between the uh functional MRI images and the objects that these subjects Recall now it's three subjects and it's early days but uh I suspect there are genetic factors in this uh I mean one possibility is that Vienna was burned out that after bethoven

01:19:13 and Mozart what was there left from poor Freud the other possibility the other possibility is that there are strong genetic VAR variations in the response to music and I just wondered whether there have been some studies or there being some studies underway to study this uh especially in very young and the Very Old okay I'm not going to give you direct uh answer but kind of in indirect

01:19:45 first of all we know that b family was so huge and they were so successful that their word b became a synonym for musician during his time and on QX are 11 days nonstop yeah another thing uh some 15 years ago there was a great discussion if um if there is uh if uh differences in brain structures in musicians as compared to nonm musicians are related to genetic component however during last few years when uh there were

01:20:16 around several longitudinal studies with children it showed that uh their brain changes are related to Music Experience they're related to um greater thickness of Corpus colosal part which means greater bilaterality which perhaps means better cognitive functions at old age their compensation uh there are all other changes um in for example an articular uh in aruls that connects auditory uh areas

01:20:49 with motor areas and so on so when what I want to emphasize please start making music every day literally every day new studies arrive which say which say it's very beneficial just today read the study which was published this year that people who studied music they they are better on motor tasks not only like on memory task on motor tasks compared with people who never started music but would

01:21:19 that be true if someone who to took up drawing or painting at an older age no music just and my explanation to it is that we are dealing with such a um integration of different modalities we have Vision hearing motor it really affecting thank you for coming today um I'm not in your field so uh the terms I use may be the wrong ones but perhaps you can my name is Joseph kadu um I read

01:21:52 a review of of a recent book by ol ofer sacks that had to do with um hallucinations and the point was made that with advances in recent brain imagery they found that people having hallucinations that the part of the brain that was activated was quite different than uh the part of the brain that's activated during dreams and the part of the brain that's activ activated during dreams is that part which has memories its function and the part

01:22:23 that's motivated for hallucinations is that part that not being in your field I'll call preperceptual or before there's the naming of something what distinguishes us from other species our capacity to name things but the moment we do we eliminate all the possibilities for what it could be otherwise and there's a distancing and so here's my question uh and also as a musician um I mean just someone who's played music I found that once I master the notation of something I can go back to that pren

01:22:56 notation state of a motive or when I'm um uh impr you doing improvisation that that there's a return to something more basic not something more advanced so here's my question is there anything in brain Imaging or Neuroscience that suggests that musicians that the part of the brains that is employed for a musician playing is different for a musician listening or for a regular person

01:23:28 listening uh they are not as as as kind of you know you're talking about dreams and hallucinations what I'm not what I'm going to talk it's much more mundane for example in musicians uh the auditory uh areas like recognition of sounds they little they do little bit differently than non musicians and also their perception of music is more a left side activated because it's more Analytical in musicians uh they're more related to

01:23:59 musical structures but what is interesting that responses per se they're about the same it's the yes the differences in in white and grain matter musicianship related but responses emotional responses uh are not differentiated in musicians and non- musicians a couple little anecdotes and then a question um I used to hate hip-hop music

01:24:30 and then I started taking hip-hop dance classes and now I really like hip-hop music and I mean that quite seriously I wasn't able to access any of the emotion of it or any of the music of it until I tried to do it and then I could understand the vocabulary and the feeling that they were using you know and similarly um I went recently to an Icelandic music performance where somebody was really the performance was this on the computer and there was this kind of wall of sound that was produced that was the concert that we were at and so there was very little motion involved in that and so I was just wondering if

01:25:00 you could comment a little bit on motion and its relationship with music both in terms of how you take things in and out of the music to create those feelings but also in terms of the Neuroscience systems in terms of overlap of perceptual modalities I you know I can't speak to Neuroscience because don't know much about it but I I I do know that in in my work uh I do find that my body is always moving in in in the work um people comment sometime and my

01:25:34 foot is either tapping or I'm kind of I'm just kind of I'm kind of reacting to it I can't I can I can totally understand that that the reaction to the hip-hop because you know you're really connecting with it at that point you really it's it's it's it's it's it's obvious that the music is a physical music it's it's and you know I I haven't been to some of these big gigantic Raves that that you see that people are having now but there you know sometimes you have thousands and tens of thousands of kids and the music you know it's just a pulse it's a pulse of physical movement

01:26:06 you know and uh again you you know you don't you don't see much movement when you go to Carnegie Hall and go to a classical concert but it's a there's a different there's a different thing there's a different thing going on there so I mean I I personally in in my work and I you know I only do the the end product of the work I don't create the work you know Jesse a record producer he creates the work from and also a songwriter so he comes up with the idea for the song and then creates an environment for the song to exist and then in my work I kind of take that and

01:26:36 I try to enhance whatever emotion that I'm feeling and over doing it for 40 years I kind of can connect with with the the other creative person who's who's come up with something I can enhance what he's trying to do but um I think physical physical is a big part of what you come up with when you produce a record right I think I think the classical audiences have been sort of tamed over over the century because they didn't used to be so passive that and I certainly am not I always sit in the back row because I can't sit still

01:27:07 during the music and I don't want to be I've been actually kicked out once I wasn't making any sound but I what were what were you doing when you got kicked out pardon me what exactly were you doing when you got kicked out this I want toar well I was just asked to you know I was shushed and asked to leave if I couldn't contain myself it's a little uh I feel exactly I feel exactly the same way that

01:27:38 I think it's barbaric that you have to sit at the concert and not move it's ridiculous and I have and I have I have a private theory that one function of the conductor aside from his relationship to his orchestra is that he is the symbol for all the Motions that you want to make right and you clap as much for having allowed him by by proxy to express I I canot say anything about from the point of view NE science but I

01:28:09 want to T say something from point of view of social cultural that societ cultural music does um Express gesture and with time just just change so when you think about amuno mozer you know you it's very easy to imagine you know ladies with kralin yes and it's very different today so uh it's I think it's wonderful that you you found uh uh hip

01:28:40 cup yes okay my name is Herb klitzner um I found the probably the most satisfaction in listening over the last 30 years been to what broad thing called Al alternative music and within that uh you have ambient music and that is peaceful and it doesn't go very far and yet it's very rich and it it's shifting and changing and uh I just thought it should be mentioned here and I just wanted any reaction to either you know that or or

01:29:10 alternative music more broadly as as uh trends that have been in the society that are uh meeting points that anyone can listen to and yet you know have substance so that's for the most part is your ambient music is without without lyrics this this is or or maybe like Gregorian chant kind of music or the I meant without lyrics without lyrics briano kind of thing things to follow there well you know again you know there's so many individual I mean that's that's an ex thank you that's an excellent example for a music which brings another whole set of you

01:29:42 know of emotions and you know this very medit I mean that's that's meditation I mean I think we've all had the experience of going to a to a massage or whatever and somebody put something on and it's like and you go like well no that's not going to work for me because I know you know and could you put something else so you know that's but that the brings you emotionally when you listen to to that kind of music where do you get with that emotionally when you listen to theic it opens me up and it it relaxes me and then I mean I

01:30:13 in making music mixes which which I've done has been broadcasting on Estonia radio um I I uh alternate in in a a larger scale tension and release using let's say an ambient piece and then something that's very different and I get a reaction from listeners that way that keeps things fresh and moving and their alert and uh so everything I do is eclectic with four or five genres you know within an hour and a half uh music mixh so there listening can be rich

01:30:44 richer than it really is on on radio ordinarily so you have a show you you you have a a I I I did 10 years ago uh it was it was periodic special occasions but about 12 of them from about 2001 to 2003 and uh I was challenged in a very constructive way taking the 911 experience which happened in the middle of it and so I was known already to the audience and and finding this this kind of thing that would from Estonian culture and from American culture would would represent tensions and releases

01:31:14 and uh that you're in a safe place ultimately and it was the program was repeated after a couple weeks from the response mhm so that's great yeah thank you what kind of was he refer to well well well there there's U music in Estonia it's classical it's it's a vocal by V toris especially and other composers he had a piece called um curse upon iron and I played that there's a destruction that takes place in that and

01:31:45 that represented for me the Tower falling which I witness myself from some blocks away and I helped work on the foundations for the Center I had helped to design I made a computer model of in 1966 for I worked at the Port Authority and then so was a life cycle of a building that I was witnessing and now it was coming down but actually the the one thing that that remained that was not damaged was was that foundation wall but it was waiting for a new building to you know to fill it and connect so I did a program on that

01:32:19 sure Alexi C is sumon analyst um I think everybody's doing a great job doing something that Elvis Costello said was like uh writing you know talking about music is like dancing about architecture it's very difficult to do um but uh I have a developmental question about music both for the analysts the musicians and the uh cognitive scientists um you know I think we've all alluded to and and seen how musical taste changes over time uh the song that

01:32:52 moved us when we were five you know a different song would do that at 15 and if you if I go to the Opera and I look around at the median age I know that uh all those people there were not at the Opera when they were 30 so it it The Taste changed over time I'm curious in in other fields in in psychoanalysis we sort of privilege the first five years of life as determining so much that happens afterwards in language uh so much we believe that that

01:33:24 happens needs to happen in the first years of life is there a science of Music development uh which would take into account both the cognitive uh changes and of receptivity at different ages that we have also take into account the uh aspect of community and mass experience at concerts and so on and uh other things like when we're older I mean I used to listen to the as's first album ad nauseum loud and I

01:33:57 can't do that anymore uh and I listen to other things now that I never would have listen to because they were too wimpy when I was 20 so um what are the kinds of things is it you know is it possible to put together some developmental idea of of how we experience music one of the pros has to take it um okay you know uh I I can I can talk from from a

01:34:29 perspective of being a teacher so you have children uh they're coming to study piano and some of them are so incredibly perceptive a child at 7 at 8 seems understands everything about music it's universal language the universals melodic universals are very simple and they are given to us by nature but then understand uh the emotional content in incredible form incredible way uh I I find it very

01:35:01 difficult to discuss how it's related to age um and to development of taste uh I only can tell you that we all are very sensitive to music uh for example um in my study I found that people non musicians and I did this study in in the Heart of Texas and it was multiethnic group people from around the world and they recognized differences between Romantics and the

01:35:31 first F school when I saw the results I could not believe my eyes I had uh melodic simiz short musical phrases I I selected them from musical compositions played them and they listened I had very different task for them but by one of the byproducts of this study was the discovery that people basically know no training in music they're very sensitive to the finest details of Music they recognize like for example they put

01:36:02 Shubert with Romantics and with Classics and this is a very esoteric knowledge which is is for example it's known by uh people studying piano at mosow Conservatory that you can take shert as a classical composer or a romantic composer depending on the structure of your performance but it's not common knowledge so when I saw the loading plot with this results it was striking we all are gifted for music but just just

01:36:34 listen just listen just enjoy I think though that that uh what the thing that you're speaking about specifically of getting older and having different tastes in music I'm not it seems more like what you that your personal needs for music change more than your taste change cuz I'm sure I know for myself that the records that I usually the records that I didn't like as a kid I still don't like cuz I I go back sometimes I think excuse me was I wrong about that record cuz people

01:37:06 really still talk about this one record and I know when I was 16 I didn't like it and I returned it or I sold it or whatever and I'll go back and listen again and think nope I I didn't like that I still didn't like it um sometimes I go back and I realize I was wrong about things but I think it's more that as you you know speak what you said specifically instead of wanting to go to say A Clash concert you would want to go here a symphony I think that's more cultural and more about um just where you are in

01:37:36 your life it's more just to to simplified more of a pleasant evening to go and and and go to a a beautiful concert hall and listen to some beautiful music and have dinner rather than go to a a crowded club and crowd your you know and and get knocked around by a club and have your is blown out it's just but but in terms of the actual music I wonder how much actually it changes I know that uh you know people who are young they when they hear things for the first time that they were never exposed to they you know someone who may

01:38:08 like Beyonce but never heard ARA Franklin suddenly hears ARA Franklin says wow you know that's amazing um I I I think people can like music at any age it's just more about what their personal needs are maybe or what they want from it and what they were exposed to yeah hi I'm Reena Kazi uh I'm a music supervisor for documentaries and what I've been hearing today is two parts it's mostly western

01:38:41 music it's mostly classical or popular a few people have spoken about indigenous music and I think it's important to stress that in much of dous Music both dance and The Sound of Music go together and that tension and release that we you spoke about earlier and today really has to do with the tension and release of physical embodiment and physical action and when we sit in a

01:39:12 concert hall some people may sit in the back and get rhythmically excited but most of us are not allowed to dance and or don't wouldn't even think of it in Carnegie Hall but going to a a jazz concert or a rock concert somehow permits you to release that and get out in the aisle and dance around and I I think we need to reflect a little bit about how important uh it is necessary for bodily

01:39:45 physically to feel the excitement about music hi very interesting conversation uh my name is R rafhael I'm I'm an artist visual artist and also musician and um music has a very deep uh scientific basis uh sematic uh simatics which is the study of uh the patterns that are made through music frequencies has shown

01:40:16 that uh sound has an organizing power and also there's a very deep metaphysical aspect to music uh we see that in religions throughout the world throughout history now Dr Rose you touched upon you said the um music alleviates the Solitude of individuation which I think goes to the very core of what communication coming together as one that music allows and and I think that has to do a lot with the I think that uh Miss kren has mention the

01:40:49 neurophysiological uh nature of music but also to you mention the fact that music creates uh uh an emotion and emotion in tonal space which is I think at the heart of communication and of the eling of this uh alienation this wanting to come as one as actually we're doing right now I think that human beings want to come together communicate commune and so could you talk a little bit more about this uh and possibly this

01:41:19 connection between creating uh emotion and emotion tonal space and the alleviation of uh of the uh what did he said the alleviation of the Solitude of individuation yeah I was quoting William James so I wish I wish I had said it but he said I'm old but not that old I want to say only only I I thought I wanted to say one thing about it um no it just it's just escaped me I'm

01:41:50 having a senior moment um yes um one thing I could say is that as as an analyst one of the first things an analyst would think about this is that this at Oneness that's created by music self and other merge probably in some very very dim way recalls the very

01:42:21 earliest moment of Life The Very earliest years of life which were wordless because language has not yet come and this would be the symbiosis of the mother nowadays could be father a child relationship so on some very very deep level now one one difference between present analysis and the analysis that I was brought up on is that we would find far more significance

01:42:55 in the present and recent and cultural contributions rather than immediately go back to what you what do you what do you remember about being in your mother's arms but that doesn't mean that isn't important that's that's the earliest basis of wordless understanding and security and loss loss of the sense of self because you are safe in this what we call holding environment where you are being held doeses that come close to answer

01:43:25 your question yeah you know this idea that this U this power of sound this power of frequency yeah in sound that uh in a sense we uh we want to reunite with I think one of one one of the basic ingredients of metaphysical ingredient in music and you know science finds that into one of the basic ingredients in

01:43:56 matter in the formation of matter in the universe mhh yeah in some some early early poetry I read someplace that the uh a the love song in some culture which I've forgotten about the the words the highest form of love you could express would be to say to your partner oh I there is no difference between self and other oi is like pretty pretty

01:44:28 narcissistic huh but it's the fusion I'm talking about the fusion the Oneness for one more comment and then we're G have to stop hi my name is Amalia and I have a question about laughter and recorded music um since I was a little kid I'm always amused by singers who would just burst out to laughter and as I've gotten older I realized that it wasn't always haha that's fun funny or more ironic or a commentary I'm thinking of like Bill Withers Hell Up In Harlem and he ends

01:44:59 the song ha ha ha Harlem you know Hell Up In Harlem and so commentary about Harlem and thinking about that and so I haven't fully come up with a conclusion about this laughter and so that's why I'm here to get some thought about what kind of emotion might be tired well there's all kind of theories about why we laugh in general but I'm wondering about in recorded music and some of your thoughts about that well I don't know I just think of this at leise Regina she's a Brazilian singer there's this song where she bursts into

01:45:30 laughter in the middle of a line and there's Bob Dylan songs or early recordings where he starts laughing and he's responding to his own lyrics laughing at them I mean to me it just always reflects a very natural moment in the music um from artists who are so good that they're so inside the moment of of the song and inside the meaning of the song that that it's almost as if they're not uh singing it themselves and and they they have a like almost an

01:46:02 objective sort of uh reaction to the music um but otherwise I never really thought about it that much but I have noticed it and I always like it when I hear it and the only thing I can say is that the few times that I've seen uh live performances where somebody has a laugh that laugh better be good because if it's it's not good it's just it destroys the whole song it's got to really it's got to really be got to really be sincere so that's a hard I think is that's a very difficult you

01:46:32 know only a really T I'm sure Bill Withers could do it but there's not too many Bill Withers around I'd like to thank the whole panel thank you [Music] [Applause]