Vsauce!
Kevin here, I’m gonna play a song I wrote just for you.
Ready?
Here we go.
[drill noise] Wait, is this a song?
Is a drill… music?
Actually let’s back up a second.
Like all the way back.
Let’s put you back in the womb.
Hey, can you hear me?
You’re listening to your first song.
That consistent rhythm is the beat of your mother’s heart.
The uterine blood and amniotic fluid flowing around you create that gentle drone.
Consonants and high frequency sounds are filtered by the layers of skin and fat in your mother’s
abdomen, but you can hear a soft melody of low frequency bass and vowels.
Your eyelids are closed until 28 weeks after conception, but you start to hear at week
18.
Before even knowing there’s a world to see, you’re immersed in a world of music.
Ah, you’ve been born!
Welcome to humanity -- and your brain has gifted you with musicality.
While music is a social and cultural construct, meaning that it’s something we create ourselves,
musicality describes the mental processes that underlie musical behavior and perception.
Your brain is trained to respond to emotional and intonational aspects of the human voice,
an important feature of human biology.
Despite only an 8% body mass difference, adult males have a voice about 50% deeper than females.
Your brain adapts to processing information being delivered at different pitches, but
studies show Tweety Bird and the rest of the animal kingdom have trouble with this.
Relative pitch allows you recognize relationships between notes to transpose the same tune in
a different key.
So if you hear “Mary Had A Little Lamb” sung in a high pitch by Mickey Mouse or in
a low pitch by Darth Vader, you’ll still recognize that it’s “Mary Had A Little
Lamb.”
Tweety Bird and Curious George would think they were completely different songs.
Okay, humans notice the nuance of pitch.
But what happens when you lose the sense of hearing or never had it in the first place?
The brains of the deaf and hard of hearing can rewire to feel music rather than hear
it.
The information is processed in the brain similarly to how others hear sound.
Even without the ability to hear, music finds its way into our bodies.
And for some people that experience results in feeling...meh!
An estimated 4% of humans lack musicality.
Amusia is an inability to recognize pitch changes and can include problems with musical
recognition and memory.
This causes difficulty understanding not only the emotion of music, but also nuances of
language.
Like being able to distinguish the pitch change that differentiates statements from questions.
This is a statement.
This is a question?
And their short-term pitch sequence memory deficiency prevents amusics from forming the
story of music in their minds -- to remember the pitches they’ve heard, to anticipate
their repetition, and to be aroused by their changes.
Yet some can process pitch and still not derive any gratification from music.
Most people physiologically react to pleasurable music with higher skin conductance and heart
rate, but researchers found that people with musical anhedonia show no relationship between
musical enjoyment and a physiological response.
While music can give most people chills, a dopamine increase in the nucleus accumbens,
music to them is just kinda...friend-zoned.
These musical disorders show us that music isn’t just about processing sound -- it’s
about using that sound to understand the thoughts and feelings of others.
An education that begins after the doctor slaps your tiny butt cheeks and your mom starts
babbling in your crying cute little infant face.
Baby talk or Motherese is a type of speech marked by exaggerated pitch.
Our earliest understanding of verbal communication involves Prosody, the rhythmic patterns of
stress and intonation in language.
“Mama.
Dada.”
Without that pitch change it sounds emotionless, robotic and kinda creepy.
“MAMA.”
Studies show babies pay more attention when they hear exaggerated pitch, length, and timbre.
Their brains love the excitement of surprises.
Pitch can matter a lot to meaning; it’s so important in Mandarin Chinese that the
same word can have completely different meanings based on how you say it.
“Ma” can mean mother, lazy, hemp or horse.
Before kids learn syntax, they may learn the building blocks of language through The Alphabet
Song.
Which comes from a French folk song Mozart popularized in ‘Twelve Variations on ’Ah
vous dirai-je, Maman’ -- later becoming Baa, Baa Black Sheep and Twinkle, Twinkle
Little Star.
It’s a popular tune.
Not only does musicality help with language and predates the alphabet song, musicality
predates the alphabet itself... and all written language.
By a lot.
Middle Age bards, Beethoven, and Beyoncé didn't invent musical communication.
Before our ancestors developed writing -- values, memories, and customs were conveyed through
song.
Sacred song-cycles honored the Gods, passed down histories and were the essential medium
of memory.
Ethnomusicologist John Blacking suggests singing and dancing preceded homo sapiens by several
hundred thousand years.
Caves are full of acoustic reverberations, like your shower, that must’ve made Caveman
Ugg feel like Pavarotti.
But Ugg couldn’t just make noise - Ugg needed notes.
Unlike noise which features sharp, erratic waveforms, notes are repeating ripple patterns
of sound.
A hammer hitting a nail creates an irregular ripple of air pressure while a flute can create
a consistent ripple that repeats over and over.
An easy way to produce notes is with a column.
Flutes and clarinets vibrate the air within a column.
Strings are columns that can vibrate.
Pressing a tightly-stretched string against the neck of an instrument shortens its length,
which alters its vibration and pitch.
The consistent whirring of a spinning drill produces a musical note and sustaining it
is a form of drone music.
Controlling notes and creating music make audible order out of nature’s chaos.
Darkness is scary and overwhelming because you can’t see what danger may be lurking...
but you can renew your comfort with light.
Silence reflects the absence of life.
We often say it’s, “Dead quiet.”
But you can fight back with sound.
And in that battle, you form a relationship with people you’ll never meet.
As the language of emotion and physiological arousal, music is a fundamental method of
connecting you to others.
Preliterate tribes used music to unify the group in times of danger; songs are used in
religious services to coalesce the group.
In music, collaborating becomes proof that the sum can be greater than its individual
parts.
Music welds you together with others at parties, clubs, weddings, work, and even funerals.
Concerts are a celebration of collective cultural unity.
In movies, music reinforces and heightens the emotion of the scene.
National anthems reflect the history, values, and dreams of entire countries made up of
millions of people past, present, and future.
Music unites what you see, what you hear, what you think, and what you feel -- literally.
Sound physically touches you.
My voice is touching your ear drums and causing them to go in and out.
I’m moving part of you with every word.
Music is so intrinsically tied to our motor systems that children have difficulty remaining
still when singing.
A study of music’s effects on exercise showed cyclists who synchronized their movement with
music required 7% less oxygen than those who didn’t.
The rhythm and tempo of music can unlock the body for sufferers of Parkinson’s disease,
freeing them to move despite the disease freezing their movement.
It’s the soundtrack to our motion and behavior - consciously and subconsciously.
Background music in stores influences shoppers to stay longer and buy more.
If classical music is playing in a liquor store, you’re more likely to buy more expensive
wine.
If French music is playing, you’re more likely to buy French wine.
Music drives cultural behaviors -- and connects us to time, which is why songs arouse a strong
sense of nostalgia.
Your head is like a jukebox with eyeballs.
The songs you know become part of your mental catalog, and you’re able to recall them
with incredible accuracy.
Earworms are those catchy, bits of music that repeat over and over sometimes called “involuntary
musical imagery.”
It’s also possible to remember almost nothing but music.
In his book, Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells the tale of former renowned musician and conductor
Clive Wearing who, after a brain infection, had virtually his entire memory erased.
Retrograde amnesia left him unable to recall his past and his anterograde amnesia only
allows his short term memory to last only up to 30 seconds.
After every handful of blinks, Clive’s eyes open to a brand new world.
His subsequent loneliness, confusion and constant fear left him feeling robbed of consciousness.
He says, “It’s like being dead.”
In an attempt to regain control of his life, he started keeping a journal.
But the entries amounted to simply repeating the same sentiment and crossing out the previous
one.
This time properly awake.
This time finally awake.
This time completely awake.
One of Clive’s only portals back his life is his wife, Deborah.
To him, her visits to the facility where he lives are a miracle, resulting in sobbing
and clinging to her presence.
But within minutes of her departure he leaves messages for her saying, “Please come and
see me, darling -- it’s been ages since I’ve seen you.
Please fly here at the speed of light.”
She would’ve had to travel at the speed of light to get there before Clive forgot
that he needed to see her.
The only other gateway to himself, the only thing that holds him in the state of being
Clive -- is music.
He plays the piano, sings, and learns new songs.
While eating a chocolate bar, he is constantly surprised by how the bar is changing because
he forgets that he has been eating it.
But as he plays music, his symptoms are suspended temporarily.
Music allows a precious moment in which Clive Wearing is…
Clive Wearing again.
The momentum of the music briefly keeps him afloat before sinking back down into that
lost place.
Through music, he stays awake...completely awake...until the song is over.
An 1886 painting by George Frederic Watts depicts Hope as a blindfolded woman sitting
on the globe, clutching a broken harp and desperately listening to the sound of a single,
frail string -- the only one that remains.
As long as you have music and the ability to embrace meaning from the sounds around
you, you cannot be alone.
That is…
Hope.
And as always - thanks for watching.