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Episode 02: Are There Universals in Music?
176 Plays7 years ago
This week we attempt to find out if there are any universals in music, how the same sounds can go from speech to song, and how our auditory system processes music.
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Transcript
Introduction to Music and the Mind
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Cadence is generously supported by the Germanicos Foundation.
00:00:06
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Welcome back to Cadence, the podcast where we explore what music can tell us about our minds. I'm Andrea Viscontis.
Can Silence Be Music?
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Last time, we asked the question, what is music? And we heard from an ear surgeon who restores hearing, a musicologist, and a pioneer in music cognition research. And ultimately, we decided that it depends, largely on the context, since even silence in the right frame can be called music.
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This
Universal Features of Music
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week, we're going to find out whether there are any universals in music, how the same sounds can go from speech to song, and how our auditory system processes music. Let's start with the one universal feature that seems to permeate all musical genres. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.
The Role of Repetition with Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
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There is no better expert to start that conversation than music cognition researcher Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis. I caught up with her at a conference.
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I guess I felt for a long time like repetition was this elephant in the room that we're kind of pretending doesn't characterize music to the degree that it really does. And in fact, you know, you can look across the history of the way people talk about music and find them trying to paper over what's going on and pretend, say, oh, no, don't take the repeats. Or this idea that maybe repeating yourself is kind of childish or embarrassing. And I thought, you know what, it can't possibly be that something that's
00:01:34
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a cultural universal, so there's no known culture that makes music where repetition isn't an important element. It's just impossible that that's happening everywhere and that there isn't some real reason, perhaps some real psychological reason that it's so prevalent.
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I can think of no better demonstration of how powerful repetition is in terms of our contextualizing sound as music than Diana Deutsch's speech to song illusion.
Diana Deutsch's Speech-to-Song Illusion
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You'll remember that Diana Deutsch is a giant in music cognition. She's a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and she released a couple of CDs of sound and musical illusions. And one of them is the one you're about to hear.
00:02:18
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The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. But they sometimes behave so strangely, they sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely
00:02:45
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Sometimes behave so strangely. Sometimes behave so strangely.
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Let's hear the first phrase again. The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. So just through repetition, we can see that a phrase can sound as if it's been sung. Let's turn to Diana Deutsch once again to understand how the solution came to be.
Effects of Repetition on Speech and Music
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I discovered it sort of by accident, really. One afternoon, I was putting the finishing touches to a CD that I was preparing on Music and the Brain, and I was fine tuning my spoken commentary. Now, in order to detect and correct small glitches in recorded speech, people generally loop phrases so that you can hear them over and over again, and that's what I was doing. I was looping phrases.
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And I put one of these phrases that sometimes behave so strangely on a loop and began working on something else and forgot about it. And suddenly it appeared to me that a strange woman had entered the room and was singing.
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After glancing around and finding no one there, I realized that I was hearing my own voice repeatedly producing this phrase. But now, instead of hearing speech, it seemed to me that a sung melody was repeatedly spilling out of the loudspeaker. So the phrase had perceptually morphed from speech into song by the simple process of repetition. And so I call this the speech-to-song illusion.
00:04:43
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And it is indeed bizarre, because it occurs without altering the signal in any way, without any context provided by other sounds, but simply through repeating the same phrase several times over. Sometimes behave so strangely, so strangely, so strangely, so strangely, so strangely, so strangely,
00:05:08
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And as a further twist, when the full sentence is again played, it starts out by sounding exactly like normal speech just as before. But when it comes to the phrase that had been repeated, my voice suddenly appears to burst into song.
00:05:23
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And this transformation is amazingly long-lasting. Once you've heard the phrase repeatedly so that it sounds like song, it continues to sound like song even after months or years have passed. So in this case, repetition must be acting as a cue that the phrase is being sung rather than spoken because there's no physical change in the phrase.
00:05:48
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And in fact, if you look at music across cultures and if you look at, you know, art music of our culture, you find that repetition is a very powerful feature of music. And frequent repetition appears in the music of all known musical cultures. Now, everyday speech is a striking contrast. In normal conversation,
00:06:12
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When you repeat a spoken phrase several times over, this would appear quite bizarre and would likely cause us to wonder whether you were joking or being sarcastic. The reason for the difference in the amount of repetition in speech and song I think is fairly easy to understand.
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The purpose of conversational speech is to transmit information about the world. The spoken words are useful in that they represent objects and events. The sounds themselves are not informative. Indeed,
Repetition in Literature and Politics
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conversational speech that contains unnecessary repetition is counterproductive since it slows down the process of information transmission.
00:06:56
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I do think that repetition is a fundamental component of music because the repetition is very persuasive, not to drive home the meaning because it doesn't make any sense to do that, but rather because the sound of a repeating phrase is mesmerizing, as you can see in Chance, for example, and other forms of course,
00:07:18
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And so when repeated in chorus, it serves to solidify and strengthen bonds between the people who are, say, chanting. And that isn't the case necessarily with speech, though there are examples of speech where that does happen, though not normal conversational speech. For example, in poetry and in political speeches,
00:07:42
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In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when Brutus addresses the crowd to justify Caesar's assassination, he employs repetition as a device to convince the crowd.
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Who is here so base, but would be a bondman? If any speak, for him have I offended? Who is here so rude, that would not be a Roman? If any speak, for him have I offended? Who is here so vile, that will not love his country? If any speak, for him have I offended?
00:08:16
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Now, in the 20th century, Winston Churchill was a very famous orator. And at the beginning of World War II, he gave a fantastic speech in the House of Parliament to inspire people to fight. And he said this, we shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans.
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We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills.
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And Martin Luther King also used repetition a great deal. For example, in a speech on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, he decides an answer to his own question would be like this.
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How long not long? Because no lie can live forever. How long not long? Because you shall reap what you sow. How long not long? And so, again, it's interesting to actually listen to these speeches because not only are the words repeated, but the cadence of the pitch pattern is also repeated.
00:09:49
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And this makes the speeches very persuasive. In fact, Diana also pointed out that political rallies use repetition and speech very effectively. From Mexican farm workers chanting, Huelga, Huelga, or Si se puede, translated in English to, yes, we can, President Obama's rallying cry. We see it on both sides of the aisle, with lock her up being a case in point.
Personal Impact of Repetition on Diana Deutsch
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Diana even had the bizarre experience of repeated speech, making it hard for her to talk.
00:10:19
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I can give you another example of a personal experience that I had. Years ago, when I was working with Lee Ray, I would produce a vowel sound, like I would say Mike, and then Lee would chop off the M and the K, so you would just hear the I sound.
00:10:37
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And then we would enter it into the computer, the software would analyze it, and then I'd play it on the synthesizer to confirm that indeed it was the pitch that the software produced. And we kept doing this, actually, for hours. And at one point I realized that I was no longer hearing speech. I was actually hearing sung words. And I was even having difficulty speaking.
00:11:06
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And I said to Lee, I said, I'm having difficulty speaking. And I said, this was some difficulty. I am having difficulty speaking. Let's quit now. And Lee said, the same is happening to me. Let's quit. And we both packed up our things and left and we never had a session like that again. But we still haven't gotten an answer to why the speech to song illusion happens. Is it just Diana's particularly melodious voice?
00:11:35
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I think there is something special about this phrase. Some people said it's because I speak with a British accent, but the effect occurs among speakers of British English also. But anyway, I tried to find another phrase in my spoken commentary for that CD and couldn't find another phrase as good. I believe that this phrase is exceptionally well sort of placed for producing that.
00:12:01
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So here's one of the things that I'm thinking is that it works because the phrase as I speak it there is very close in terms of the pitch pattern to a tonal melody so in deciding are you hearing speech are you hearing music some sort of.
00:12:22
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let's call it a gatekeeper, you know, in the auditory system, makes that decision by asking itself certain questions about the phrase. And if it can fit well into a tonal melody, if the pattern of pitches fits well, then okay, that's evidence that it's music. If the rhythm fits well, then that's some evidence that it's music. If both the pitches and the rhythm fit well, then it's strong evidence that it's music.
00:12:52
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And what is my favorite explanation for why this particular phrase works so well is that if you take the pitches, they're very similar to the pitch pattern of the Westminster chimes. And the rhythm is pretty much identical to Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.
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If it's not every phrase that can be turned into music through repetition, what is it about repetition that turns it into music? Here's music cognition researcher Elizabeth Helmut Margulis again.
00:13:37
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I think one of the things that happens across repeated listings is that more and more we kind of tend to mentally sing along with what we're listening to. So we can anticipate the note that's coming next. We get connected to the music in a way that sometimes can prove powerful and overwhelming even. There's some really interesting work by a Swedish psychologist called Alf Gabrielsen where he just documented thousands of people's peak experiences of music.
00:14:05
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went with a survey and asked people, what was your most amazing experience of music ever, describe it. And then he looked to see what commonalities might exist among all those responses. And there's a key strand among a lot of them that had to do with sort of a sense of losing yourself or merging with the music, feeling like you are the music. And I think there's a lot of complicated things going on to make an experience like that possible.
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But I think that really one factor there is repetition, is this idea that as you listen to something more and more, you get connected to it and temporally oriented with it in a way that's very different than
Engagement with Music Through Repetition
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you do on first listening. Margulis doesn't just write about other people's work, of course. She's done plenty of research herself. For example, she has this one study that involved changing the compositions of two well-known contemporary composers.
00:14:56
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I took some pieces by these real scions of contemporary art music and played them again for people who are not aficionados of this particular style of music. And I could play them in either their original form or in a form where I'd gone in
00:15:13
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and digitally manipulated them. I got in and chopped them up. I'd taken out a little bit and then reinserted it later so that now this music that tended to avoid repetition in literal ways would just, you know, say something and then say that thing again and then go on to a new thing and etc. And I simply asked people after each excerpt how much they enjoyed it, how interesting they found it, and whether it was more likely to have been composed by a human artist or randomly generated by a computer.
00:15:39
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And so in all three of those dimensions, there's very clear fact that they preferred the repetitive examples, which really shouldn't be the case because, you know, I'm a random person messing around with my computer program to add in some repetition. And, you know, Carter and Barrio are total geniuses.
00:15:55
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So this isn't really to say anything about how people who know a lot about Berio and Carter enjoy them. Of course, that's a special kind of experience, different than the one I'm describing. But it does say, OK, if you've got some unfamiliar music, if you simply just add some brute force repetition, people can engage with it in a much richer way. She makes an argument in her book that repetition might signal intentionality.
00:16:18
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That is, if I say something again, I intentionally meant to do that. I have something that I'm trying to communicate and that makes people engage with the material in a different way. If I tell you something, Andre, like if I say, you know, look over there and you kind of look over there and you don't see much and you look back, I might say, look over there. And when I say that again, what I mean is no, you didn't get it the first time. There's really something you need to look at. So if you want to blow your friend's mind, you just
00:16:46
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sit down for 60 seconds and say the same word again and again and again. And something happens where you stop being able to access the word's actual meaning and you start having this kind of trippy experience related to the actual component sounds in the word where you're listening extra hard to those and it's really because
00:17:05
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You're done with this one level of meeting, and you're really working hard to try to find some other level where something interesting is going on. And in speech, maybe that's not so useful, right? Because we don't really care that umbrella has an M before a B. We don't really need to meditate on that for extended periods of time. But let's say you're listening to jazz improvisation, right? Maybe there really is something subtle going on in some temporal movement of a string or some way you're
00:17:35
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vibrating around a note that really is where a lot of the musical meaning lies. And repeating that a number of times can help a person get down to that level and start accessing it. So how does our brain turn speech sounds into music? Back to Diana. This is an example of extremely rapid and extremely long-lasting plasticity, right? I mean, you hear things one way, and that has to be represented in the autocortex.
00:18:02
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or somewhere, one way. And then, because of this manipulation, you hear that very same thing maybe forever, who knows, certainly for years in the experience of several people I've spoken to, a different way. So this tweaking of the pitches is amazingly long-lasting, and I don't know of any other example of plasticity
00:18:28
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that is so rapid and so long lasting in either the visual or the auditory system. To get a better idea of exactly how our auditory system works, we turn to ear surgeon, otolaryngologist, and jazz music creativity researcher, Charles Lim.
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As an
Physical Reality of Hearing with Charles Lim
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ear surgeon, I'm always amazed whenever I'm doing surgery on the temporal bone, which is where the inner ear is and the eardrum is and the middle ear is, because it makes you realize that rather than being abstract ideas, all of these things are physical realities in the world. For example, the eardrum, which is essential for most of us to hear pretty much anything, it's just a membrane. You can see it, you can manipulate it, you can dissect it.
00:19:17
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The whole world of surgery to me is a very kind of clear reminder of the neurobiology that's at play when we talk about something like music and how even though in the end music seems almost abstract and philosophical, it starts out from this really very real biology. Now when somebody doesn't hear well, they have a defect in some of their apparatus, whether or not it's the portion on the brain side or if it's a portion of the hearing nerve or the eardrum or the hearing bones.
00:19:47
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The inner ear is the most common sort of site of a defect for deafness, for example, where the hair cells stop functioning. And so there's something called a cochlear implant. You can put essentially a wire, an electrode into the inner ear and electrically stimulate the hearing nerve, which happens to work surprisingly well for speech, but not yet that well for music. This is something that's fascinated me for a while. How can we restore hearing for speech, but not music? It begs the question of what it sounds like to have a cochlear implant.
00:20:17
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It seems like if you are born deaf and then you get a surgery to restore your hearing, you've never really had anything to compare sound to. And so that becomes your, quote, normal hearing environment, whether it's through an implant or not.
00:20:32
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And I think that right away, people that are in that situation, they don't really feel a sense of loss because they don't necessarily know what the sound was supposed to sound like. So I think for the case of something like music, it becomes a bit of a curiosity because I think a lot of people that have coconut implants don't intuitively get
00:20:50
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why this musical experience is so compelling for people who have normal hearing. You know, on the other hand, I think if you lost your hearing, you know, if you or I had normal hearing as musician our whole lives and lost our hearing and then had a cochlear implant, I do think we would be pretty frustrated by the experience. We'd be grateful for the fact of having something to hear the sound of our children or, you know, to be able to communicate.
00:21:11
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But I think ultimately, we would want the sound to be better. And what happens is that the pitches are no longer really intact or pitch relationships are distorted. And so, in fact, you can imagine that when you're listening to music that has distorted pitch relationships, that there's all sorts of unintended or unwanted distances, for example, and that something that would resolve normally doesn't resolve. And so that there's a certain sense of a lack of musicality
00:21:36
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or even musical sense to some of the information that's coming in so it can, I think, mitigate some of the reward mechanisms that are naturally at play when one listens to music. Which brings up the question, to what extent is our appreciation of music innate? I mean, after all, it seems like you play music to a baby and it immediately seems to respond. Or does appreciation only come after exposure?
00:22:01
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There's an idea that the musical brain, that the human brain is hardwired to hear and maybe seek music. And if you look at all human cultures, all historical episodes, there's always been music. So there's something about the human experience that lends itself naturally to wanting to seek music. But I think that deafness is the one condition where it kind of throws a big wrench into the idea of the brain being musical if you were born deaf.
00:22:26
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I do think that every brain has the capacity for musicality, but it does have to be whatever innate abilities are there. It has to be kind of developed. And if you're growing up in a deaf world, your brain doesn't really develop the capacity to process music the way it would if you were able to hear that sound.
00:22:48
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I got laid off and find my wife agreed to let me try to get sick because it would take over a year to get rehabilitated and so forth, whatever. I finally got the implant. It's a real struggle at the beginning. But it worked hard at it because I had been enough group to know that motivation's important, rehabilitation's important, and I tried hard. And like the first time I had it, I go to church and I hear a guitar playing.
00:23:18
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That's not a guitar. How did you know it wasn't a guitar? Because you had heard it with your hearing aids in the past. Because I don't have high frequencies. Basically, my high frequencies fell off about 1,000, 1,500 Hz, about 1,000 Hz, down all the way off.
00:23:38
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Part of my rehabilitation I found was really enjoyable was going to YouTube, finding songs that I kind of knew. I must have heard, you know, I never heard the words of a song that kind of made me know a bit of the melodies. And I really enjoyed looking up those songs and reading the words and trying to embed the words in my mind. I'm actually hearing the words.
00:24:08
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I spent hours and hours and hours falling asleep later. My main focus really is trying to improve my speed comprehension more than anything else and music was sort of a side to get there.
00:24:26
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But I do enjoy music. I do make a point of going to a music concert, the free ones. I don't hate to spend money in the park and so forth and just sitting there and trying to enjoy it. I always feel like I should be enjoying it more. I'm enjoying it, but I don't really know what I'm listening for.
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Cochlear
Understanding Cochlear Implants
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implants have always seemed science fictiony to me. You just put a wire in somebody's ear and all of a sudden their brain reinterprets that signal as sound? There's got to be some steps missing. Here's Charles Lim again explaining how they actually work. When it first came out, it was almost viewed as a preposterous idea, meaning you do some surgical procedure and drill a hole into the inner and put a wire into it and hope that somebody can hear.
00:25:14
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Somehow, that simple idea had some kernel of truth to it in that if you literally put a wire and put some current inside your ear when you're deaf, you have an auditory percept. That percept has no other basis in reality other than the fact that you're sort of turning on the hearing system through some artificial means.
00:25:35
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Now, a cochlea implant is basically the natural evolution of that idea, which is that the wire is now a wire that has several different contact points or electrode contacts, and each point of contact has a specific frequency range assigned to it. It turns out that the sort of snail shape of the cochlea is arranged that way partially to allow for a spatial arrangement of frequencies. And so it's called tonotopic arrangement. So what that means is that if you kind of go up the spiral of the inner ear
00:26:04
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The closer you get to the tip of the spiral, the lower the frequencies are. And so you can take advantage of that arrangement by putting the low frequency information to that part of the cochlea, or at least to that electrode that's closest to that part of the cochlea. So wait, how does that work? The wire is still connected to the eardrum and it's still, in terms of the physics of it, how does it work? You have an internal implant, which is the part that's placed surgically, and then you have an external part that's almost like the hearing aid.
00:26:31
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The external part is getting the sound with the microphone and then breaking it down, sort of separating it into different frequencies. It's communicating through the skin by magnetic induction and then sending those different frequencies to different electrode points. Now, the electrodes are in no way connected to the eardrum. In fact, it ignores, it could care less whether there's an eardrum or any hearing bones. It goes right directly into the inner ear. And so it's essentially wrapping around the hearing nerve
00:26:59
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by virtue of the shape of the cochlea. And then it's stimulating the nerve directly. Is there a learning curve that patients have to go through in order to allow that electrode to be transduced into a neural signal and interpreted by higher areas of the brain? There's a big learning curve. So we always counsel patients to expect about a one to two year learning curve. Now, there's the occasional patient that as soon as their implant is turned on, they're really doing very well. They can hear speech right away. But most patients describe sort of a gradual improvement
00:27:26
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in their understanding of what they're hearing. It's certainly not immediate. So what can we learn from patients with cochlear implants that can inform us about how those of us who have had perfect hearing for our entire lives process music? The way I sort of perceive this is that music might be the hardest thing there is to hear. In fact, there might be no type of sound that is more acoustically challenging and demanding for the brain to process. And as a result, I think the ability of
00:27:55
Speaker
scientists and physicians to restore hearing in the deaf is most challenged by music. And so I kind of view it as the pinnacle of hearing. And I also believe conversant, if you can hear music, you should be able to hear anything because almost any sound can be included in music, whereas it's not true for something like speech or for environmental sounds. Now, that would suggest to me that if we in the biomedical field were to choose one target to be what we're going to model these
00:28:24
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hearing solutions towards, I think we should try to model them towards music and then everything else would follow. So after learning to use his cochlear implant, does George Shin suddenly find music pleasurable now? Has he ever had the experience of just listening and enjoying it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's moments like listening to classical music and
00:28:46
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and the roll, the drum, the emotions and so forth. And right now I'm doing that program that Dr. Lim and the piano music and have this, the piano teachers apparently from the conservatory, you may know him. And this is my second day today. He's actually telling me to view the music.
00:29:16
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trying to get me away from the mechanicals. I did about a year of piano lesson by accident because my youngest daughter, maybe about five or six that time, didn't want to do it, want to quit. And we're trying to end up, okay, you do half, I do half. 50 minutes, 15 minutes. I did a year of that. But the time was trying to learn the notes, learning motions and stuff like that.
00:29:45
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And here's suddenly a totally different approach. And to hear his feeling describing the music, it's meaningful. I like it. Probably going to do more of it. Great.
00:30:03
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George Shin has been part of a study in which scientists have tried to train people with cochlear implants to play the piano.
Preview: Piano Lessons for Cochlear Implant Patients
00:30:12
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And one of my students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Kevin Sun, is one of those teachers. Next time, we're going to learn what Kevin Sun was trying to accomplish in his lessons and whether or not he succeeded.
00:30:30
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Cadence. You can find us online at the ensembleproject.com slash Cadence, at Facebook slash Cadence podcast, and on Twitter at Cadence podcast. You can also get in touch with us at cadencemind at gmail.com.
00:30:46
Speaker
Cadence is produced by Adam Isaac and me, Andre Viscontas. I also created and write the show. The music in this episode was provided for us by acclaimed New Zealand composer, Rian Sheehan. Check him out at riansheehan.com. You can find me on Twitter at Andre this. Join us in two weeks for our next episode in which we continue our exploration into what music tells us about the mind.