Science Club (2012) s01e06 Episode Script

1 THEY SING Lovely, isn't it? Very, very beautiful, you know.
Stirs the heart.
I mean, they're just warming up.
It's actually not a tune or anything, so I suppose it's not music, but it's musical, so maybe that is And it creates an emotional response I mean, music is a real puzzle.
I mean, what is it exactly? We do like a puzzle here, don't we? I'm Dara O'Briain, welcome to Science Club.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Yes, here, in Science Club, we take one topic and we explore it from a variety of different perspectives.
Lighting up the dark, recesses of understanding.
Again, we're joined by our curious audience and our illustrious guests, Acoustics expert Professor Trevor Cox, thank you very much.
Music psychologist Dr Alexandra Lamont, thank you for coming in.
Our reporters are here.
Science reporter Alok Jha and Dr Tali Sharot and James May, you're with us later too, aren't you? Absolutely, yes.
Great, looking forward to seeing more about it.
And materials scientist Professor Mark Miodownik will be doing some experiments.
On the show tonight, we're looking at music.
It's everywhere in our world.
In fact, every human culture has music at its centre.
But what is music? What is it so important to us? And how does it interact with our brains? On tonight's show Dr Tali Sharot travels to the US to investigate a rhythm therapy that reveals a startling connection between hearing and movement.
Journalist Alok Jha looks into music technology and asks whether computers are ruining music.
And who knew, Top Gear's James May originally studied as a musician.
Here, he discovers that his brain's response to music is stronger than he might have imagined.
So my brain is present.
Oh, yeah.
That's reassuring.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
This experiment apparently really worked.
If you want to get involved in the show or follow us on Twitter, the details are on your screen.
So first, let's meet this week's science gurus.
Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford and former President of the Institute of Acoustics, Professor Trevor Cox and Senior Lecturer in Music Psychology at Keele University, Dr Alexandra Lamont.
Thank you very much.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE How are you? Thank you for coming in.
Hi, how are you? Thank you for coming in.
Can I ask you the straight question that I've already It's going to run through the whole show.
What is music? I'd say something that promotes some form of emotional response in the listener.
But music can be loads of things.
I went to see John Cage's Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds, his famous silent work.
You went to see an entirely silent work? I did indeed and my kid couldn't believe that I was spending ten quid to go and sit in silence.
What? You spent money and sat in silence for four minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence.
And it was a great piece of music.
Was it a good performance of it? LAUGHTER Have you seen it more than once? No, I've only seen it once and this was a particular arrangement for three pianists.
Oh Yeah, it's much better than the solo version.
Yes, I get that.
But, psychologically, I mean, we've already gone straight to emotion, we skipped through the science entirely.
Yeah, that's great, cos that's what I'm interested in.
OK, fine.
But still, you know, I mean, cos, an acoustic expert, we may regard you as reductionist to a certain extent, you may now go down to the waves and frequencies and all that.
You're dealing with its effect on the brain Yeah, I would have actually said music is organised sounds, so it's interesting you've come with the emotional explanation and I've come up with the more acoustic one.
But I think music is something that makes us respond.
Music is something that every human culture has and it doesn't matter how good we are at it, we can still respond to it.
So I think it's an essential part of being human.
By the way, does it exist in any animals at all? That's an interesting question.
There's a bit of research on this showing I mean, songsyou know, birds, for example, communicate through song.
But most of that is strategic and symbolic and it's about messages.
It's not for fun, it's not for pleasure.
It's not for the enjoyment and the aesthetic evaluation of, yeah, it's a different kind of thing.
So there are elements of non-human sounds that you could think of as being a little bit like music, but they don't work like music does for humans.
OK, fine.
Well, we're going to explore these issues more as the show goes on.
But even though there're maybe different opinions in terms of how we would define it, yes, it is a universal cultural trait common to all human societies and it has been for a very long time.
How did music begin? No-one knows.
But humans have been making music for a very long time.
Perhaps even longer than we've had language.
There is evidence of our caveman ancestors fashioning crude flutes from bear's femurs.
And by 7,000 BC, in China, we find the first evidence of a melodic flute that could play a scale and carry a simple tune.
Melodies are made by playing notes one after the other.
Play two at the same time and you can make harmony - notes that sound good together.
The story goes that it was Pythagoras who first worked out why this happens.
Walking past a blacksmith's, he heard the ring of hammers hitting iron and did some quick sums.
He reckoned whether the hammers sounded good or bad was down to maths - if one was half, two thirds or three-quarters the weight of the other.
Which might be nonsense.
But he was right that maths and harmony are closely related.
Other great minds of science also studied sound and music.
From Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo.
None, however, are particularly noted for their musical prowess.
By now, music had spread - from blacksmith's forges to medieval monasteries and then, into houses and courts, where Renaissance nobles danced to the latest sounds of the sackbut and crumhorn.
By Beethoven's heyday, performances had gone from quartets and quintets to full-blown orchestras.
Not only were there now trombones on top of the triangles and timpani.
But the orchestra had outgrown private houses.
And music was also going commercial.
At the end of his life, all of Beethoven's symphonies were performed in public concert halls.
Then, one morning in December 1877, Thomas Edison walked into an office and put a machine on the desk.
He'd made the first device to record and play back sound - the phonograph.
By introducing technology, he'd single-handedly kick-started the music industry we know today.
Soon, musical records went on sale.
And then, on Christmas Eve 1906, came the first radio broadcast, which included a festive Christmas carol.
It was a humble start to music radio.
Music no longer had to be performed live - you no longer needed an orchestra in your front room.
Thanks to technology, music got smaller, cheaper and louder.
The phonograph, the gramophone, the juke box, the LP, the Walkman, the CD, the minidisc player and the mp3 have all brought music to our ears.
Sadly, while technology might allow music to be widely available, it has no control over the quality of the music produced.
By the way, just to briefly say, over the course of the series, we've had a lot of feedback from the audience about those animated histories, people are very fond of them.
Stills are now downloadable as wallpaper for your computer if you just go to our website.
Now, did we evolve music? Does it even have an evolutionary purpose? Well, it's something we can debate.
We don't know for sure.
Yeah.
It might be, for example, a sexual display.
You know, your prowess at making music may make you a more favourable mate.
And as a society, would we have bonded through music? I think that's one of the really powerful parts of music, that it brings people together.
So the ability to be in time with somebody, to be in tune with somebody and to be getting into those sort of synchronised patterns.
I think that's probably a very, very powerful aspect of it.
Actually, if you look at early speech, when the mother talks to her baby, and comforts it or teaches it language, she'll often do it with a singsong while doing it, so I think it has helped to learning languages as well.
So maybe that's the secret.
Do you find, as an acoustic expert, do you find going to gigs and just being angry about how badly tuned? THEY CHUCKLE I try and enjoy it.
I went to the proms, actually, with a bunch of acoustic experts, auditorium acoustics, and they all came out whingeing about the acoustics and I came out saying, "That was a great gig.
" Cos I just enjoyed it.
We were discussing various instruments.
In terms of sounds that complement each other, and that's been a large part of how music has evolved.
Yeah, I mean, it's also economically driven, you know.
In the 20th century is about how many people can get in a concert hall and still have decent acoustics.
When you get a classical orchestra, cos you need to make the orchestra economic.
And some of the disasters of the early 20th century was trying to make the concert hall too big.
Did it change again then, when we started electrifying instruments and putting big amps and You should change your hall when you get electronic reproduction.
One thing that a big decent concert hall has, it has lots of absorbance that you can bring out and deaden the space.
Cos when you've actually got big loud speakers, electronic music, you don't want theyou want to deaden it as much as you want.
So you end up with a very dead space, so you have to have verbal acoustics to deal with, concert halls deal with classical music, but also, with the electronic enhancement and the electronic reproduction.
OK, so central to our elevation of music in our culture has been the discovery of our own ability to make different sounds, sounds that complement each other and can express emotion.
Of course, we've come a long way from the bone flute we heard about to the instrument that's defined the last 60 years of music - the iconic electric guitar of Hendrix and Townshend and Richards.
Many great artists have smashed up their guitar, but usually as a statement of rebellion.
Mark Miodownik is taking one apart right now, but, this time, in the name of science.
The Telecaster, as played by Keith Richards.
The Les Paul, Jimmy Page, the Stratocaster, Jimi Hendrix, and let's not forget the Flying V, Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap.
These guitars have defined the sound of rock and roll and turned their players into rock gods, and that's all down to the unique way they've been engineered.
So, the first thing to realise about an electric guitar is that electricity comes out, it doesn't go in.
So, with an acoustic guitar, when you ping one of these strings, you're creating a sound wave.
That's what you hear, that's the note.
With an electric guitar, it's slightly different.
Although you hear the same kind of note, you're also creating an electrical oscillation, and that is the key to an electric guitar.
'By connecting the guitar to an oscilloscope, 'you can see the electricity that's produced.
' So, that is the electrical wave that we've created by pinging the string, and if I ping another string, I get a different frequency.
Converting the sound wave into an electric wave means it can be amplified, manipulated and distorted.
This flexibility turned the guitar into a revolutionary instrument.
So, where does this electricity come from? It comes from this, the pickup.
The pickup is magnetic.
In the 1830s, the scientist Michael Faraday worked out how to use magnets to generate electricity.
You just need a coil of wire and some wrist action.
I'm just going to push the magnet through the coil of wire, like this.
And doing that, I'm generating electricity.
And that electricity is going through this little bulb and lights it up.
There it is! It was almost exactly 100 years before Faraday's theories were applied to the guitar.
But the principles at work are exactly the same, and to prove it, I'm taking this Fender Telecaster, the first mass-produced electric guitar, to bits.
So, here it is.
Some magnets surrounded by a coil of wire.
This is what it looks like when you take away that stuff.
Now, when the pickup is in the electric guitar, these steel strings vibrate above each one of these little magnets, and that disturbs the magnetic field, creating an electrical current.
So, what this pickup is doing is turning a mechanical vibration into an electrical wave, and that electrical wave travels down these wires into the amp, and that's the sound you hear.
ELECTRICAL BUZZING Now, I'm going to try and simulate that for you, with this magnet.
SOFT ELECTRICAL BUZZING SOUND This affects the pickup's magnetic field, in the same way a vibrating steel string does.
It's a bit bass-y, but that's because I can't vibrate it very fast.
But it's a sound, nonetheless.
That's quite cool! Because the vibration of a guitar string varies along its length, by having multiple pickups, you can generate a range of treble and bass sounds.
And the amount you hear is controlled by these dials.
But the electric signal generated by these pickups is tiny, and so, before it can be converted back into sound, it needs to be amplified.
The amp is the unsung hero of the electric guitar.
Without it, the electricity produced by the pickup is just too small to power a speaker.
Some people would even go so far as to say that the amp is more important to the sound than the guitar itself.
HE LAUGHS That's heavier than it looks! There's quite a few bits of gear here.
These two here are capacitors, and they hold a huge amount of electric charge.
I'm not going to take those apart, because that's actually seriously dangerous.
But actually, this is what I want to take apart.
This is the beating heart of the amp, the valve.
Wait until you see these.
They are beautiful.
Vacuum tubes, thermionic electron tubes or, simply, valves, have been responsible for radio, TV, computers and, of course, rock and roll.
The valve takes the tiny electrical current from the electric guitar and amplifies it into a much bigger current that can drive the speaker.
In fact, the whole field of electronics only really began when valves like this were invented.
Although valves look complicated, how they work is relatively simple.
The amp gets its power from the mains, and sends a large current to the valves.
The electricity goes for the cathode to the anode, but on the way, it has to go through this grid, which is connected to the electric guitar.
Now, the tiny current from the pickup is what goes into that grid, so it imprints the pattern of the music onto this much larger current, and it's that that gives you the loud sound.
Although valves have now mostly been replaced by transistors, they're still much-loved by musicians, for the unique tone and distortion they bring to the electric guitar, especially when you turn up the volume.
APPLAUSE That's the kind of thing we'll get criticised for, because of people crying over your destruction of a perfectly good electric guitar.
Did it go back together OK? It went back together again in the end, yeah.
It's fine.
They're too expensive to destroy.
The BBC budget is not that big.
Well, it stretched to you smashing a valve with a hammer.
We didn't put that back together.
Now, what the instrument is made of is very important? It is.
I mean, for an electric guitar, it's less important, because you pick up the vibration of the string, and actually, where you change the note is through the amplifier, how you distort it through the amplifier.
Whereas, with a violin, the amplifier is that box, and so, with the violin, you have to perfect that box to get the right sound.
Give me an example of the weirdest thing you've seen an instrument made out of.
Well, maybe a vegetable, which I used to do as a party trick.
I've made a clarinet out of a giant Japanese radish once.
LAUGHTER What kind of parties do you go to that have giant Japanese radish lying around? Sushi parties, obviously! Well, obviously, yes! How was the sound of it? Well, someone once described it as sounding like a mating camel, so maybe not the best kind of sound Yeah, but is that because you can't play, as it turns out, the flute? You're going to make an instrument for us this evening, am I right? I am.
Using what? Well I've commissioned a machine to make it for us.
Is it our old friend? Our favourite machine.
The 3-D printer.
The always impressive 3-D printer.
We'll have it by the end of the show? Yes, should do.
Now, let me talk about another part of this, Alex, about our ability to recognise music.
I mean, it is astonishing how well it's encoded in the brain, pieces of music, how quickly we recognise music.
Yeah, the music that we know We can pick up on very, very short segments and recognise, "That's that track, that piece, that particular thing" And do we do this better with music than we do with say, recognising the first line of a novel? Are we more efficient with the information with music? I think we get more information with music.
I mean, the first sentence of a novel doesn't tell you where it's going.
We're very good at going, "Oh, yeah, that's" You know that rush when everybody gets on the dance floor cos they've heard It doesn't take long to happen.
We can demonstrate this with an exciting new game, which has never featured on television before, where we play a series of very short intros to well-known tunes, and see if our guests or, indeed, the audience, can name them.
I call this, "Name That Piece Of Music," but we're going to work on the title.
So, for example, let's have the first piece of music.
TWO SHORT BEATS PLAY GROANING AND LAUGHTER I think this really could work as a telly format.
LAUGHTER I'm really excited by this.
Go on, you on the couch.
I don't want to admit to knowing it, that's the thing GROANING The artist in question is beyond reproach, all right? It's fine.
Who is it? It was Lady Gaga, wasn't it? No! It's Kylie! GROANING AND LAUGHTER Oh, shame on you! It's Kylie! It's Kylie! Oh, Kylie! What's the name of the track? That's difficult, actually.
Yes! That's the thing.
I find I can't name tracks, there's too many.
Some people are better at this than others.
Yes, one that goes, "Na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na "Can't get you out of my head!" Obviously, when we do this show properly, as a real format, they'll tell the host what the names of the tunes are.
It works less well as a format if I am also trying to guess the tunes.
LAUGHTER Fantastic! Let's try another one.
TWO BEATS PLAY You can redeem yourself.
LAUGHTER I can get it in my head, I can't think what the Do you know, I know that I don't know it.
Oh, for Go! We LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE This is fantastic.
This whole thing was to justify YOUR theory.
"Oh, yeah, it's amazing.
The human brain, given the slightest" It's James Brown! It could be TWO BEATS PLAY Oh, I need a bit more.
BEATS PLAY AGAIN That's Bowie, isn't it? Yes.
Heroes.
Heroes Yes, it is! Did I get it right? You got one right! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Yes, we are very highly attuned to musical nuance, and one of the things that is intrinsic to music is its rhythm.
Now, research into rhythm is turning up some extraordinary results.
Dr Tali Sharot went to the US to investigate.
DRUM BEAT PLAYS Whenever you hear a beat, no matter how complex it is, it probably makes you move.
Whether it's nodding your head or tapping your feet or clicking your fingers, you probably find it hard to resist.
'That's because our brains are wired for rhythm, 'so much so that rhythm has surprising therapeutic powers.
' 'Rande Davis Gedalia was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in 2003.
' Good to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
'She had serious problems with her movement 'until she joined a pioneering New York music therapy programme.
'And it changed her life.
' It was hard to balance and the music kept me on beat.
I walk to the beat.
Before, I had no beat.
Now, it gives me a sense of rhythm, a sense of order, so my movement is way better.
It's way better.
I love it.
Rande learnt to use music from doctors here at the Beth Israel Hospital in the Bronx, where they've been treating patients with music for more than 30 years.
Concetta Tomaino is one of their most experienced doctors.
Parkinson's can lead to a variety of movement problems, from getting the shakes to completely freezing up.
This happens because Parkinson's patients have lost a large number of nerve cells that produce a neurotransmitter, dopamine, and dopamine is critical for co-ordinating our movement.
LOW, BASIC DRUM BEA Strong rhythms help her patients move more fluidly and, together, they work out a playlist they can use in their daily lives.
Rhythm works incredibly well.
People with Parkinson's sometimes perceive rhythm differently, so you really have to work with each individual to find out what pulse or what tempo is going to work best for them.
It drives motor function almost immediately and I've seen this time and time again.
When rhythm therapy works, the effects are immediate, and that tells us something rather astonishing about our brains.
Jessica Grahn is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies music and the brain.
She's arranged to put one of her students in a brain scanner while she listens to music, to show me what's going on inside our brains when we hear rhythm.
OK, Ruth, now we're going to move onto the rhythms The results are striking.
The auditory cortex is active, as you'd expect, but so are the motor regions of the brain.
All of these areas are areas that tend to respond to the control or initiation of movement and these are very responsive in her brain, even though she's staying perfectly still.
That's quite amazing, because we see very robust activity in all of these motor regions when people are not moving at all, and not consciously thinking about movement, just listening to music.
Yeah, we were really surprised the first time we saw it, too.
So, what did these responses tell us about Parkinson's patients and why music therapy is so helpful for their movement? What we think might be going on with listening to music and rhythm is that this can bypass the faulty part of the circuit and allow Parkinson's patients to then stand up and move.
So the music goes straight into the motor cortex? It looks like it, yeah.
It seems our auditory and motor cortex are so deeply connected that rhythm alone really does get us moving.
But rhythm therapy wouldn't work at all without a very special skill called beat induction.
It's the ability, once we've heard a rhythm, to predict the next beat.
Laurel Trainor is trying to find out if it's something we're born with or something we learn, by measuring the brain waves of babies while they listen to simple rhythms.
SLOW BEEPING Early results suggest that babies have this ability, which means it may be something we are born with.
So, the red colour here shows there's activity just before the beat? That's right.
So, that shows us that they're predicting the beat Yes, absolutely.
Extraordinarily, beat induction seems to be unique to humans.
It hasn't been seen in any other primate.
So, what is the function of perceiving the beat, and anticipating it, in humans? There are probably two main reasons why we have it.
One is that when you can anticipate a beat, you can dance with another person, you can move with another person.
When people move together, they bond socially.
A second reason why it's important is because it's a necessary condition for the evolution of language.
We have to hear the rhythm of the language, but we also have to produce the rhythm of the language as we talk, so we need this interaction between the auditory system and the motor system in order to do that.
As a neuroscientist, I was really surprised by how close the connection is between the sound system and our motor system, but now that I think about it, it's all around us.
It's in my step when I walk, it's when I speak, and it may just be fundamental to what makes us human.
APPLAUSE In some ways, the results of that are astonishing, and in other ways, they seem like the most obvious thing in the world.
We all listen to music as we walk along.
Since the Walkman, our generation has soundtracked ourselves, knowing that it can increase the step But it literally is bypassing a damaged area of the brain? Yeah, what's really interesting there is that if you have one structure that's damaged, or one pathway that's damaged, and you lose a function, whether it's movement or language, there might be a way to bypass it, by using a different trigger.
Alex, were you impressed by this kind of work? Yeah, I think it's tapping into what we know about the idea of synchronisation being really important in music and somehow providing that in a different way.
And I like the approach of saying, "OK, we have a limitation with Parkinson's.
"Let's try and find another way round.
" So, yeah, finding something that is also intrinsically enjoyable, and I think the idea of getting through pain and getting through difficult situations with music is one of the reasons why it's so useful for us.
Is this a uniquely human thing? Interestingly, monkeys don't have the same musical abilities that we do, which is interesting, because they are our closest genetic relatives.
But they can't do it.
They can't distinguish between different types of music.
They don't have music preference, like we do.
They actually prefer silence to music.
Really? Yeah.
Tamarins, particularly, have been shown to prefer If they're in a situation where they can choose where they go, if there's some music playing and some place where there isn't music, they always go to the place without music.
Lovely.
Now, I know we're bombarding you with lots of information, but you can always get involved by following us @bbcscienceclub, or by visiting our website APPLAUSE So, we've seen some of the effect that music has on the brain, but it's a physical process.
It's just a change in air pressure around us that we hear arriving in waves.
And like any waves, there's a spectrum of frequencies.
Not that we can hear them all.
We can only hear a particular range, am I right? Exactly, yes.
Do you know what the uppers and lowers of these are? Well, it depends on your age.
You lose certain frequencies as you get older? Yeah.
Basically, when you're 20, your hearing is as good as it ever gets, and it's downhill from there, and you gradually lose high frequencies.
You don't notice that, probably, until you get into middle age, when it starts just edging towards speech frequencies So, the higher frequencies are the ones that go first? Let's get a sample of what we're talking about.
This is an app, by the way, that's been driving all this stuff.
LOW ELECTRONIC BEEP So, this is a note.
Can everyone hear that? How many hertz is that? That's 1,000 hertz.
OK.
Basically, if you can't hear this, there's a really big problem.
We're going to test you.
That's 1,000 hertz.
All hands up if you can hear that.
Now, that should be That's pretty much everyone here, including ourselves.
No, no, leave them up.
Leave them up, please.
Right, 5,000.
HIGH-PITCHED BEEPING Everyone hear it? Fantastic.
10,000? Young crowd Right, who can hear that? We haven't lost any hands at all.
13 I can't hear anything.
Can't hear a thing.
Can the rest of you all hear that? That's amazing.
It's really weird! It's really strange.
Right, let's try 15 It's going to turn into a weird auction.
The winner is the person with the best ears.
Wow! Really?! Are you just doing this? Is it part of a gag? LAUGHTER OK, what are you up to now? This is 17,000.
Oh, we lost a few people at 17,000.
OK.
No, we lost most people at 17,000.
You're still hearing it? Really faint? OK.
Are you bluffing? Let's try 18 Is that everyone? There's one there in the front.
Look! Oh, you as well.
You're still in.
Gone.
We lost you somewhere between 18,000.
Well done you, though.
Give her a round of applause, that's fantastic.
APPLAUSE This phenomenon became very well-known, by the way, because some company marketed an alarm that shopkeepers could play outside their shops to clear teenagers from in front of the shop, because only teenagers could hear it.
My favourite thing about it is that the teenagers recorded the tone and used it as a ringtone on their phone, because teachers can't hear it in school.
So, they can actually phone each other in class, which I think is genius.
So, that's the frequency.
What are the physical effects? I can show you a particularly nice example here, where you can actually If we can find the resonant frequency of a wine glass GLASS TINKLES So, that's its resonant frequency.
That note is what you'd want to achieve, yeah? If you then force it to vibrate at that frequency, then it will vibrate so violently that it will break.
Fabulous.
Great.
I'm into that in a huge way.
In theory! I meant to say, in theory.
Yeah, no, let's just keep doing it until we get it to break.
Everyone ready? Do you have your fingers in your ears or something on? By the way, this trick used to be done by opera singers, didn't it? It's actually really difficult to do.
To do it, you have to If I just nick it for a second You have to get it that close to your mouth.
As we shall see in a moment, when the glass goes glass in your mouth is a really stupid thing to do.
So, we know we're at the right frequency if we get the piece of paper to vibrate? Yeah, so that's going to vibrate the glass, which will make the paper jump.
So, the minute the paper jumps, you just crank up the volume? Right.
OK, are you ready? PITCH OF NOTE INCREASES How exact do you have to be here? Very exact.
Can you see that going? I can, yeah.
That is spooky.
HIGH-PITCHED BEEPING It's quite loud.
I can even see it vibrating.
Oh! Oh, oh, oh! LAUGHTER APPLAUSE Wow! I'm loving the tension of the build-up.
You took a long enough to get there, didn't you? We have You did wrong with a proper high-speed camera.
So, our institute did one a few years ago with a slow-motion camera.
This is it.
Wow, it wobbles quite significantly.
Bottom bit goes first.
How is the top bit holding together? Yeah, that's incredible.
That shows you just how fast the frame rate is.
Imagine if that was near your mouth and was tumbling that way.
Yeah.
So, not recommended.
No, but cool! Hey, if any of your glassware smashed during thattweet us.
LAUGHTER As you're just brushing them around No, hopefully it didn't.
I've always wanted to do that.
Thank you very much, Mark.
APPLAUSE Still to come on tonight's show, Alok Jha investigates whether computers are killing music.
But first, the most remarkable thing about music is how these wave forms and frequencies are translated into tangible emotional effects by our brains.
To find out how a piece of music moves us, we sent James May to have his head examined.
MUSIC: "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" by Bach Many years ago, I did a music degree and I came away convinced of one thing, that music has a real emotional grip on us that's hard to explain, and I've always wanted to know why.
Why is it that a simple chord change in a pop song can have the capacity almost to burst your heart? Why is it that a single, supposedly wrong, note in Chopin can turn mere organised sound into something that seems to scratch at the very kernel of human self awareness? So, to see if science has an explanation, I've come to Berlin.
My first stop is the Technical University, where Hauke Egermann is a music psychologist.
I haven't been allowed to bring any of my own music to this experiment.
Nothing that I love, nothing that I'm familiar with.
I have to listen to something I've never heard before, and then we will measure my reaction to it.
Right, you want to attach electrodes to me? Yes, please.
Have a seat.
These clips and electrodes are going to monitor changes in my skin's electrical conductivity.
Apparently, it's a scientific measure of involuntary emotional arousal.
So, when it starts playing, I want you to press the left mouse button and then continuously rate how the music makes you feel, OK? OK.
CLASSICAL PIECE BEGINS TO PLAY This is composed by a Frenchman called Edgar Varese.
It's a bit strange, but I rather like it Is that the end? That's the end, yes.
How did I do? HAUKE LAUGHS Well, we'll see.
Am I dead? You did fine.
We can see that there are actually some moments here where, especially, your skin conductance response is really reacting to individual events in the music.
This could be that something surprised you, or you had an intense emotion linked to certain events in the music.
It seems all of us respond in roughly the same way to acoustic changes in music.
But that doesn't explain why we respond emotionally.
When I put this to Hauke, he played me this MUSIC: "Symphony No.
4 in A Major" by Mendelssohn .
.
and then these voices.
'I won the lottery, and I still can't believe it!' 'I've finally bought the car I've always dreamed about.
' That "da-deh-deh", which I tend to think of as being a sort of hunting, horse-riding motif in music is also, actually, now you point it out, very similar to that AMERICAN ACCENT: "Oh, my Gaaad!" What you're sort of saying is, major keys sound like people speaking positively and excitedly.
That's the point.
So, have you got a clip in a minor key and then someone saying they've lost their lottery ticket? Yes.
'It only took a moment for the accident to happen.
'We were laughing and joking about things 'when the truck crossed the median and hit us.
' Now, this gets very interesting now.
Had that been a German woman talking in German, I would have still known she was talking about something sad.
The idea is that these expressive features, they're supposed to work in different cultures everywhere in the world.
But all of that was with music I didn't know.
Now, we're going to see how I react to music I know and love.
All right, James, let me lead you through our scanner room.
I'm going to have my brain scanned by music psychologist Stefan Koelsch.
Close your eyes, please To see just how deep my love of music really is, I'm going to listen to my absolute favourite piece of Bach, his toccata in G minor.
MUSIC: "Toccata in G Minor" by Bach Are you feeling OK in there? 'Yes, I am.
Very relaxed.
' Oh, right.
And for comparison, music that I have absolutely no emotional attachment to Jedward's Lipstick.
You say you're on it, but you just don't know You're spending money like you're on Death Row HE LAUGHS Thank you for the Jedward.
'Time to find out what happened.
' So, my brain is present? Oh, yeah.
That's reassuring.
Wow, look at this.
Wow, beautiful.
Thank you.
This experiment apparently really worked.
Stefan's team have laid both my listening experiences on top of each other.
Red is my response to Bach, and Jedward is represented by the practically non-existent blue.
Yeah, it's a very clear result here.
So, I've got Krakatoa of Bach reaction there, but only a sort of faltering cigarette lighter for Jedward.
Is that fair? Yeah, that's correct and that shows us that you had much more pleasurable experience to your preferred music than to the unpreferred.
And it seems the pleasure gets me right in the deepest, most primitive parts of my brain, the amygdala, the hippocampus, and a reward centre called the nucleus accumbens.
This is the structure where dopamine is released in the brain.
And dopamine does? It is released in situations where we feel great pleasure.
For example, if we drink a glass of water when we are thirsty, when we are having sex, when we eat something when we are hungry So, if you could put two people having sex in the scanner I know there isn't space, but you would get the same bits of their brains glowing as you do when they listen to music? Which means music is, scientifically speaking, orgasmic.
Yeah And scientifically proved.
Here it is.
It is, yes.
APPLAUSE Ladies and gentlemen, James May.
APPLAUSE So, James, it turns out that at a very fundamental, basic level, almost at a primitive level, you're a musical snob.
Yes.
What's your problem with Jedward? Well, I don't have a particular problem with Jedward.
Well, I do, actually.
It's the inevitability of the sort of HE IMITATES REPETITIVE BEA I know it will always go HE IMITATES BEAT AGAIN So, you can predict the rhythm, like a six-month-old child.
LAUGHTER But it did prove something that I've always suspected, which is that outside the sphere of regular musical appreciation, which is sort of intellect, culture, experience, learning, all those things, there's a sort of grey area where it appeals directly to the emotions, this most widely documented but, I think, least understood bit of the human existence.
And I found that very reassuring.
It does mean that the music that you get off on is a fundamental need, along with eating, as you were saying, drinking, orgasm, ejaculation or a really good kebab.
LAUGHTER This is the basic stuff of life, basically.
And one hell of a night, by the way! LAUGHTER But the order would have been slightly weird.
I mean, buy her dinner first, for God's sake(!) It always ends with a kebab, Dara.
But, yes, it is, because it is very deep recesses of the brain.
This is very fundamental.
Some would say stuff that was there earliest in our evolution, that music is appealing to.
Yes, which is probably why it's in every human culture and why it's so important, because you can't explain it, you can't express it terribly well.
And, like James says, we're still really figuring out how this all works.
And we're more naturally likely to speak in a major key when we're delivering happy news? It depends what you're saying.
Speech is atonal, it doesn't fit into keys.
That's a construct.
But, broadly speaking, you were in a major key there.
But we're simplifying it massively, because music essentially in major key will still move through minor keys as part of its musical dialogue, as part of the sense that it makes, and then you get contrasts and, you know, "Oh, that was a pity, but, hey, never mind.
" Of course, you're responsible for a great deal of "music as a motivational tool" with the 18 and counting Top Gear Driving Music albums, which have been released to date They were nothing to do with me, though.
But tracks like Don't Stop Me Now by Queen, I think, was voted on some Top Gear website as the best Neurologically, what do you think you are achieving with this body of work? LAUGHTER UmmI don't know.
But driving music is an interesting idea, because the rules are different in the car from the rest of life, and that's bodily hygiene, opinions, music that you listen to, all the rest of it.
And it's .
.
they're lower.
One thing is, you can't listen to, say, Schubert's string quartet in the car, because most cars are too noisy.
The dynamic range of classical music is too great, whereas pop music is reasonably level, for the most part.
Music with a regular beat, a regular form, chorus, you know, refrain, middle eight, and all the rest of it, suits the sort of slightly banal, but very involving, act of driving.
Yes.
Does that make sense? That makes perfect Put that on the liner notes on the sleeve of Top Gear 18.
You wouldn't put it like that.
You'd put, sort of, "25 gut-busting, tyre-smoking tracks.
" LAUGHTER That is kind of the shtick, all right.
OK.
Do any of you own a top Gear album? No.
That's fine.
The weird thing is Don't get all snooty.
Don't you get all snooty! Because you'll own the tracks, you'll definitely You'll own the most of those tracks in some shape or form, because that's really the way it's evolved, because of technology.
Music was first recorded in 1877, and the amount of music we have access to has changed and grown dramatically, as you might have guessed.
Here's the data.
Technology has transformed the way we consume music.
In the 1980s, it's reckoned the average 16- to 24-year-old had a record collection that consisted of 150 songs.
By 2009, that figure had grown to over 8,000 songs.
A vinyl LP plays for around 45 minutes and holds about 12 songs.
The C90 cassette tape holds 22 songs.
A CD plays 21 songs for about 80 minutes, whereas a 160GB MP3 player can hold 40,000 songs, that's 160,000 minutes, almost 16 weeks of continuous play.
The MP3 player weighs 140 grammes.
If you were to carry around that amount of vinyl, it would weigh 640kg, which is the equivalent of carrying a large horse in your pocket.
APPLAUSE Now, if we were to ask you who the most influential person was in electronic music, you might have said Robert Moog, for his synthesiser, or Brian Eno, or Kraftwerk, or the Chemical Brothers, but none of these, really.
It's a woman called Daphne Oram, who arrived at the BBC as a sound engineer in 1943, and began to experiment with the effects that she could create with the equipment there.
She then set up the first radiophonic workshop, which basically initiated sound effects and electronic music, and this was done almost as an after-hours hobby of hers.
In fact, she was regarded so strangely that she actually appeared in a news story from 1962.
You should just see the scepticism of the reporter and, indeed, the fantastically clipped Received Pronunciation.
Have a look at this.
ELECTRONIC BURBLING Welcome to Tower Folly, this lonely oast house on the North Downs of Kent.
Well, as far as I know, this house isn't haunted, and there isn't a mad scientist in sight.
This is, in fact, a music factory, where they can literally make music out of electronic sounds.
And the woman who makes it has just been awarded a grant by the Gulbenkian Foundation to help her research.
She's here at her control box, Miss Daphne Oram.
Now, Miss Oram, how did you get involved in this kind of work? Well, it dates back, really, to 1944, I think, when I read a book which prophesied that composers in the future would compose directly into sound instead of using orchestral instruments, you see.
Now, I've made a little loop of tape here with varying pure tones on it, varying pitches.
Here we are.
ELECTRONIC BURBLING, BEEPING Good night.
LAUGHTER APPLAUSE I'm sorry.
If for no other reason, enduring that face from a reporter but mainly, because of her, we have Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx and Fat Boy Slim and a lot of people whose work I've really enjoyed.
I normally put my people on this wall here, this sort of semi-wall of shame here.
I'm putting Daphne front and centre.
Well done, Daphne Oram, loving your work.
Who else would you like to add as an unsung scientist? Well, I'd like to add Athanasius Kircher, who was a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who had the most fantastical acoustic devices, some nice and some unpleasant.
His unpleasant one was the cat piano.
And this was a piano which You have a line of about seven cats in little cages and when you press the keys for the piano, it drove a nail into the tail of the cats.
Oh! These screech and you play tunes on it.
But surely you can only play each note once, twice? At some stage, the cat's tail wouldn't take any more, surely? Well, there's some doubt about whether it was ever made, but it was done for psychiatric patients, was his idea.
It was meant to shock them out of their condition.
He did actually invent some nice things as well.
Very good.
Who would you like to add, Alex? Music psychology is a very new field, so this is a hard question, but I decided I'd pick one of our living scientists Professor Alf Gabrielsson has spent his whole career working on music and emotion.
He's retired now, but he worked in Sweden, and he's got this enormous archive of people's emotional experiences with music.
Fantastic.
What's his name, again? Alf Gabrielsson.
And this excellent man here? Athanasius Kircher.
Fabulous.
Well worked, Athanasius, with the cat piano.
OK.
Has technology in music come too far? Alok Jha asks if computers are ruining music.
Computers have been used to make music almost from their beginnings.
Synthesisers opened up a whole new world of instrumental sounds.
Sampling brought on the creative cross-fertilisation of genres.
Not even the human voice has escaped the influence of computers.
Thanks to automatic tuning, you no longer have to be able to sing to record a flawless song.
Estelle Rubio is a singer-songwriter who teaches studio production at the Tech Music School, London.
Here it is.
Wow! I have to say, I was expecting a bigger mixing desk than that.
Well, this is the days of digital, you see.
'Can automatic tuning really turn a bad performer into a good one? 'To put it to the test, we need a bad performance.
' OUT OF TUNE: # Baa, baa, black sheep Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, Three bags full Surely THAT is beyond help.
And one for the dame So, what are we looking at here? We can see the notes I actually sang.
Yes.
What we tend to do is go to the nearest note that you were singing.
So, "Baa, baa, BLACK" Let's just see.
RECORDING: Baa, baa, black sheep So, you're going through, and you're drawing lines where you want the pitch to be? Yes.
Baa, baa, black sheep Automatic tuning literally drags off-key singing back into line.
But does it just polish up something that shouldn't have been recorded in the first place? Yes, sir, yes, sir Three bags So, you can see now, you're sounding in-tune, but in a way, we've lost the essence.
The quality You've lost the quality of the voice.
Do you think that all of this editing and changing Do you think that's cheating a bit? I still think there are great singers, but why not let everybody have a chance to make music? Music's about universal language, it's about sharing You know, why can't everybody have a go and play with their voice and make themselves sound better than they are? In studio recordings, computers are definitely here to stay.
But there's one area of music that humans must be able to call their own - composition.
Can computers reach anywhere near the creative heights of composers? Alexis Kirke is a research fellow of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at Plymouth University Basically, he makes computers make music.
COMPUTER PLAYS PIANO NOTES This is a system that I have.
I call it IPSIS.
It's a bunch of musical intelligences inside a computer who sing to each other.
They sing each other very simple tunes, but when they sing, they pick up each others' tunes.
So, the tunes that they have get bigger, bigger, and bigger and turn into musical melodies.
Starting with just a single note fed into the computer, the intelligences build up a tune together.
But do artificial intelligences singing to each other actually sound any good? Alexis has a composition called Ash.
COMPUTER PLAYS SIMPLE TUNE AS IF ON PIANO So, if you close your eyes, it's like a four-year-old playing piano Yes.
.
.
learning how to play a piano.
Yes, it's very plodding Its very, kind of, precise in the rhythm.
No human would play this tune this way.
It might not sound like much, but to write a pleasant melody from scratch, computers have to draw on something they just don't have - feelings.
Alexis had to give his algorithms emotions, but they also need another form of human behaviour.
As well as compose the music, the system can perform the melodies in an expressive way.
So, there's kind of two layers to this, there's a layer where it produces the notes, and there's a layer where it takes those notes and it tries to express them in a human way.
Although, at the moment, it hardly sets the pulse racing, the potential for computer algorithms to replace human composers is huge.
I believe in maybe ten years, maybe that soon, you will have many computers that can compose music that 80% of us, we won't be able to tell the difference between that and music composed by a human composer.
Computers are undoubtedly a democratising force in music, taking the elitism out of composition and performance.
But music is, by nature, an artistic form of human expression, so is there ultimately any point in taking ourselves out of the equation? APPLAUSE Alok, obviously, firstly, thank you so much singing on camera for us, which was brave I played guitar too.
I don't know where that went.
Well, judging by your singing, I can guess where it went.
Did you leave thinking that there was anything in this AI music? Well, one key question for me is, "Will any of this ever replace people?" Whether it's composers or people performing.
And, I think, you know, when it comes to listening to music, as you've discussed already, you kind of want to think that someone has slaved away, either producing it, or playing it There's some emotion there that's a bits missing.
Now, you can programme computers to have some sort of emotions, as Alexis Kirke has done and you can do a facsimile, but it always will be a bit of a facsimile.
But that's what I think.
In 20 years, 30 years, if this stuff is all over the place and we're hearing computer-made music and it moves us in the same way, then what's the difference? We can actually test it.
I mean, that was a fairly simple example there, but we have two pieces of music that we're going to play for you now.
One of them is computer-generated, and one was written by a human.
The We're not going to tell you which is which.
Let's play the first piece of music.
COURTLY TUNE PLAYS And let's play the second piece of music VERY SIMILAR TUNE PLAYS Now, we'll take a quick vote on that.
You heard them both.
How many of you thought that the computer-written one was the first piece of music? I'm with you on that.
I thought that was the one.
And then, how many of you thought that the second piece of music? The computer-written one was the second piece of music, that's what you're going for? OK.
The majority, including our experts You're wrong.
LAUGHTER Ah, but, it's not a fair call, because that's a style of music that's very, very rule driven.
Really? It's really easy to generate something according to rules.
By the way, the "computer-generated piece," as you thought, that was actually by Bach, just so you know.
Just to rub it in.
I actually knew that.
That's why I didn't vote.
Because it was cheating.
To balance this debate slightly in favour of science, we're going to introduce an artist who creates musical works that simply wouldn't be possible without technology.
Please welcome Imogen Heap, ladies and gentlemen.
APPLAUSE God love her! How are you? Now I should say .
.
Grammy award-winning artist, Imogen Heap.
That's right.
And it was actually The Grammy was in Engineering.
.
.
engineering, yeah.
So, you were already working very successfully with the whole decks and bodies of equipment that people would normally have Yes.
But you have a new system that you've actually pioneered yourself? Yes.
In between touring and making albums, I've been developing these with a team of people Just have a quick look here Within there, you've got gyroscopes, accelerometers What's the cabling here? This is the bend sensors.
Bend sensors, so you can All of these motions, up, down, left, right And also, the stage, I'm mapping, using a Kinect.
We're in a Kinect here? Yes.
Well, somebody's found a use for a Kinect, rather than pretending to be rafting.
And then also, you can flick through different modes, so you can record with it, you can feed in the sounds Yes.
Shall I give you an example? Yeah, I genuinely would love that.
A full piece, or just a quick thing? A quick thing.
First of all, I'm just going to demo going now into playingsome notes.
NOTES TINKLE And for those in the audience who can hear, it's going to the right side and to the left side of the speakers.
And then I can also play a bass, if I wanted to.
So BASS NOTES PLAY So, I can change the filter, the kind offiltering sounds, and I can mix between two different types of sounds as I move up and down the scale.
So, it's giving me lots more freedom.
I can also take I can say, like "Dara O'Briain" HER SPEECH ECHOES AND DISTORTS And I could, "La, la, la" SPEECH ECHOES So, I can change the grainspeed and I can again pan it to the left and the right and then the volume is here.
But I can map anything to anything.
Wow.
OK, well, we'd love to hear something.
Ladies and gentlemen, Imogen Heap.
APPLAUSE SHE SINGS, SOUNDS ECHO AND DISTOR TINKLING, THUMPING SHE WAILS, SOUND ECHOES ELECTRONIC BUZZING, OWL HOOTS CHEERING AND APPLAUSE So Obviously, that's only a short taste of Imogen's work.
You can go to her website to find more about her.
I'm sure she has a web presence herself.
It's worth seeing longer pieces to see what she achieves with that.
It's impressive stuff.
It's very beautiful stuff.
Now, we were making a slightly less sophisticated instrument with a 3-D printer.
Mark, do you have it there? I do.
Lovely.
Wow, this is Yes.
Yeah This is, apparently Oh, that's It's that.
It's a whistle.
It's a penny whistle of some description.
Fabulous.
Great.
Have a go.
OK.
Grand.
It's not just an ordinary one.
HE BLOWS TUNELESSLY Wow, yeah, it's not ordinary, is it? It's amazing(!) It creates some of the most beautiful sounds we've ever had.
Wow, this is how we finish the music show?! With these notes?! Thanks to all of my guests tonight, to Alok Jha, Tali Sharot and Mark Miodownik, as ever.
Our special guest James May and our science gurus Dr Alex Lamont and Professor Trevor Cox, ladies and gentlemen.
APPLAUSE And, of course, our thanks go to Imogen Heap.
Now, how to wrap this up? Cos it's been an 8,000-year journey, to be honest, in terms of music.
We've seen the later stages of it here.
Musical instrument played with the hand alone, the inside of James May's brain, we've smashed glasses in the name of science, so many great things.
But what will stay with me is the fact that this journey started with a flute made out of bones from a mammoth, and 8,000 years later, we've made this HE BLOWS TUNELESSLY That is as far as it's gone, ladies and gentlemen.
We should be very, deeply impressed by that.
Have a wonderful New Year.
We'll see you again.
Good night.