Do you see that? My head bopping? Obviously I can control myself and
stop, but there is something that makes it feel… ooh! On certain songs, we want
to move, to snap your fingers, to tap our feet to the rhythm, and for the less shy
among us, to dance our heart out.
But how? How can music create this desire to move within us
- without even going as far as dancing, I am referring to a simple movement of
the head, hands or feet. And second question... given that we would not dance on a
military march, or on most classical music... What makes some tracks
more danceable than others?
There you have it, not a preview, but my entire musical repertoire
which I worked hard on at school. I knew that it would be useful to me someday. The flute is
the oldest musical instrument we have been able to find so far. 60,000 years old.
So this is 60,000 years' worth of perfecting.
Music is so common to all peoples throughout time, that one can almost
consider it as a human characteristic that is rooted in there.
I spoke with Benjamin Morillon, who is a researcher at INSERM in neuroscience
of hearing. What is interesting is to see that we
don't dance in response to other stimuli, only to sounds. No one is dancing while watching
a movie, looking at a painting, eating chocolate, being massaged, smelling flowers...
That said, some ads still try
to make us believe that we would start dancing after smelling a shampoo,
eating something... I'm sure you know this already but I would like to point out that
obviously, that’s not true.
So it's just sounds, it's only auditory. There is this very particular link between the
hearing system and motor system. The same, we don't know why, there are several hypotheses.
Maybe our ears, we can't close our ears
but we can close our eyes. So the ear gives us objective feedback from the world.
It could be because the first thing we do when we are born is that we cry,
we produce an action and we hear the feedback of that action. Maybe that's why,
but this is speculation.
Let's look at a specimen in its natural environment... No, not the microscope...
We don't know what she's listening to but observe the repetition frequency of her
movements. See how stable it is. Her movements follow a tempo.
She beats time with her head. So, this specimen is a bit simple because we know that she does not have
any musical knowledge whatsoever. Her movements are instinctive, primitive, and
have not been influenced by any mastery of rhythm... believe me... But other,
more sophisticated specimens who would have received musical training, could do
more complex movements by adding off beat movements, or by moving other
limbs, etc... but let's stick to musically simple people.
Oh look! She's changing her music.
She's listening to a military march. And unsurprisingly, nothing is happening anymore.
No movement.
However, since we have just seen that movements are linked to the tempo of music,
well... If there is one music style that we can easily beat time to, that's a
military march. It’s as if it had a built-in metronome. So how come
a military march don't get us moving?
If the music is too predictable... we get back to the notion of ​​expectation. If a rhythm
is too..., for example, a military march, it’s very fast-paced, very rhythmic. In fact,
we never dance to it because we get to completely anticipate the rhythm. On the other hand,
the music that makes us dance is music where there is syncopation.
Syncopation. You know that every song has a tempo, which I will represent
with a metronome. Each "tik" is a beat.
We can play a note on each beat.
(I did it *. *)
But we can also play notes systematically outside of the tempo, that's called off-beat.
(I think I did it * o *)
And syncopation is when, from time to time,
there are notes that are not on beat.
**Panic**
I don't know how to do it... Why did I venture into a demo…?
I don’t know what to do.
I do not know how to do it.
Uh… Roll the syncopation preview!
I could do pa, pa, pa, pa... it doesn't
make you want to dance. On the other hand, if I do pa-ah, pa-ah, pa-ah, pa-ah,
normally you feel like dancing on this one. Alright. But why? How does hearing
a sound that is not placed where we expect it to be, get us to dance?
Our brain is mainly a prediction generating machine. It makes
assumptions about the world. It has a model of the world. And afterwards, perception allows it
to confront this model of the world and to see whether it works or not. It's all about beliefs
in a way. If I say Little Red Riding, everyone expects me to say hood,
but if I say, Little Red Riding Camembert, there is a big surprise because everyone
expected another word.
Surprise ! (Oh that was LAME.)
Surprise: this is what syncopation does, it surprises us. (We won't talk about the quality
of the surprise I just did...). Basically, since our brain had understood the tempo of
the music, the fact that there is a note that's somewhere we did not expect...
it tickles our neurons. And of course, musicians, and people
who write music, play a lot with this. We see that a lot. If we listen to
a piece by Chopin, he plays within a certain rhythm, but all of a sudden he shifts
a note. It doesn't come, and everyone knows that it must be this note at
this frequency which is supposed to arrive at that time. And he shifts it further and further, that
creates an expectation. When will he play the note? Then again, you can't shift it too much because
otherwise we get bored, that's all the finesse in playing it at the right time. And then it's
the same for frequencies, you play a series of chords, we expect the next chord.
And then all of a sudden you play something unexpected. And in fact the
pleasure will come from... When we have an expectation, and what we hear does not match
what we expected. So, we are surprised. But it still respects more
general musical rules. For example, harmonics or things like that. If we
hear that all of a sudden, our music has a drilling sound, it's unexpected but
it's not pleasant. While if we're hearing a chord that we weren't expecting
but which works well in the song, which respects a kind of wider musical guideline...
Then, we will experience a lot of pleasure. We can see it with children, they
listen to nursery rhymes, but when we're adults, we find them boring because
we are able to anticipate them completely. So in fact, it isn't fun for us because
there is no game, there is no surprise.
That’s the pleasure that syncope brings... but we're missing something, that doesn't explain
our small head bops or foot taps we make to the music. Benjamin explained this link
to me but I would like you to find it out for yourself
(so that means that you need to participate now, otherwise there is no point to this part.)
Choose a tempo. Slow, fast, medium, whatever
you want, and clap your hands to that tempo. Go for it.
Clap your hands at the tempo you want.
Normally, unless you are trying to be a smartass just to contradict me,
you will tend not to be that fast:
* super fast tempo *
nor even to be that slow:
* ultra slow tempo *
In fact, our movements, our
gestures have a rhythm which is roughly that of walking: 2Hz, 2 movements per
second. And for us, the most natural is this tempo: 2Hz. And music is
also in this same order of magnitude. So chances are that you clapped
to more or less this rhythm:
* medium tempo *
It remains very approximate,
this is only an order of magnitude.
Their operating speed is quite similar. They drive at the same speed.
So that explains why we dance to music and not
to speech. We speak about 5 syllables per second. It's way too fast.
He means the spoken word.
But rap, singing, slam, they are musical lyrics, which have placed themselves into the
rhythm of music. And then, yes, of course they can get us dancing.
But right now, as you're listening to me, I'm sure that no one is dancing... What's important to remember,
is that we have a concordance of rhythms between the movements and the music that is
compatible. Which is a basic condition for two very different things to be
linked together. This concordance, in reality, is quite logical,
it's obvious. Music, at its core, is created by physical instruments.
Each note corresponds to a movement on our part—our fingers, arms, feet... Music
is therefore intrinsically linked to the rhythm of our body since it is our body
that creates the music. This is a necessary yet insufficient condition for the creation of
our movements. We know it and we have seen it, music does not always lead to
to a desire to dance.
And so, if I'm always off-beat,
the syncopation rate is maxed out. It doesn't get us dancing either. If I'm always
on beat, the syncopation rate is zero. It doesn't get us dancing either. And we,
as well as other researchers, have found that there is an optimal syncopation rate, which makes
us want to dance. It's a bell curve. The syncopation rate increases. If there is none,
we don't feel like dancing. Here we want to dance, and then we no longer want to.
I think the best example is to listen to some
music that was composed in Benjamin's lab to assess how
groovy a track can be. And you'll see, it's really obvious. First let me
lower your expectations, this is music created for research purposes
within a scientific experiment... not to be the next summer hit, okay?
Here is the first song, see if it makes you want to dance.
Here is the second.
And the third.
I didn't even tell you which song was which,
because I'm sure that you intuitively feel it.
But for those who have doubts, the first song was here on the graph, it has a low
syncopation rate, so there's very little desire to dance. The second here, a medium syncopation
rate and a good desire to dance (given that it's music made for research
purposes). And the last one had a very high syncopation rate, to the point where we
no longer understand how to dance to it. There is therefore an optimal grooviness rate,
to ensure that the crowds move. The big question remains. The question of:
What for? Why would we need to move? What is this automatic link?
Looking at neural activity in participants who listen to this music,
we realized that the urge to dance is there to make up for a lack.
If the rhythm is obvious, if it is present in the sound, we don't need to process
the sound, the rhythm is there. If the syncopation is too high, the sound is too complex. We
can't seem to figure out what's going on. We get lost. But if it is a little syncopated,
it's a small challenge that we get to understand. There is a little complexity in the rhythm.
Our auditory cortex cannot understand what's happening on its own, so it
connects with our motor system which will help it understand what is happening.
And basically, we move to make up for a missing sound.
Since we did this interview with Benjamin, I've been particularly aware
of my movements when I listen to music. And it's true. I surprised myself
to have a rhythmic movement, at a regular tempo, but sometimes I would make a move
when there were no notes, it was during a silence that I made this movement.
And in fact, my movements allowed me to keep my instinctive understanding of
the tempo. I particularly noticed it on the song “Under Pressure” which I
cannot play right now for copyright reasons. Go listen to it.
Let me know if it has the same effect on you. In conclusion, we recreate a rhythm with
head bops because... The rhythm of the music and the rhythm
of our movements are compatible. Our brain likes to be challenged a little, but not
too much, with little intricacies of rhythm. There is an optimum rate of syncopation. Finally,
we move to recreate the rhythm and/or to compensate for a note that should have been
there but isn't. This whole story made me think of something other than music.
Syncopation is ultimately a way to break up the rhythm, which forces
the brain to be in active listening mode, to be on guard, no longer passive at all.
When I make science communication videos, that's something that
I am actively seeking. I try to “syncopate” my videos, to create surprises, so that
your brain doesn't fall asleep in monotony and to avoid you from
passively listening. It translates to shot changes, to variations
in my voice, different background music, illustrations, a different amount of
information throughout. All these are things that I do consciously to
this goal and that I'm trying to fine-tune to find an optimum. Sometimes I succeed,
sometimes not! It's a subtle mix. The same is true for comedy shows,
dancing, or even oral presentations... to keep an audience's attention, we
have to syncopate what we're presenting. Add some contrast, some rhythm. So,
we bring rhythm but not to the point where we would manage to create a rhythmic movement
in people's heads (as we've seen, the spoken word has a rate that's too high to be compatible
with the natural rhythm of our movements). But we will probably manage to titillate
the brain just enough to force active listening.
We've reached the end of this video. If you are able to summarize it, I congratulate you
because that means that you have paid attention, and I congratulate us, Benjamin and
I, for having succeeded in syncopating this video enough for you to stay intellectually
active without too much effort. And if you don't don't even know what we were talking about anymore...
well I still have some work to do to find the optimum rate (or maybe you were doing
2 things at the same time).
A big thank you to Benjamin Morillon for explaining his research to me but above all,
in the description, you will find our complete interview and I really urge you to go watch it.
We talk about a lot of things, in particular the difference in the rhythm of language
in relation to music and how part of our brain is optimized for
language when another part is optimized for music; the way that our sensors
allow us to see the world... It's really fascinating, make yourself a tea or coffee
and go listen to it.
If you liked this video, don't forget to... leave a comment. And we'll see each other
next time, bye.