Transcriber: Linndy V Reviewer: Kelwalin Dhanasarnsombut
By all accounts, I was a very weird kid.
(Laughter)
I was painfully shy, and if anyone talked to me,
I would just stare at my shoes, which I got to know pretty well.
(Laughter)
I was also daydreaming all the time,
and being accused of being in my own world.
At my first year in school, I was flagged for "special attention,"
after an exercise where we had a list of words,
and we had to organize them into two categories;
"people" and "food,"
Seems pretty simple,
but I was kept back because I put the word "sandwich" into "people."
"Sandwich" to me, was a magical woman who lived on the beach.
Sand-witch, I mean...
(Laughter)
It was fairly obvious, I thought.
(Laughter)
I also had an unsual childhood.
You see, my dad was a nuclear physicist.
He spent a lot of time examining subatomic particles.
And these are the building blocks of everything,
the very fabric of the universe.
And it was challenging trying to communicate this
to my 8-year-old friends at the time.
Because of his research, I traveled the world a lot,
and I kept moving school and country
which made me disconnected from people.
As hard as I tried, I just couldn't understand why it was important
what a local sports team did with a ball.
(Laughter)
But where I did feel connected is when we lived in Geneva.
My dad worked at CERN.
That was a wonderful childhood formative experience for me.
When I visited him at work,
I got to play with these amazing things called "computers."
Me and computers, we knew each other.
But what was the most inspiring thing was witnessing these teams of scientists
discover subatomic particles.
They would get protons and neutrons,
accelerate them,
in an underground accelerator at almost the speed of light,
smash them together,
and they would explode into the new hitherto unseen particles.
And this was so wonderful.
I was struck not only by the intelligence of these scientists
working together, collaborating to further the limit of human knowledge,
but actually this aesthetic beauty of those images like the one you see now.
It was as if the they were creating science and art at the same time.
And another way that I felt connected with others was through music.
My dad played us everything from Bartók to the Muppets,
but when my uncle gave me a cassette tape,
which I don't know if you know, it's a kind of retro MP3.
(Laughter)
It was the Beatles, and on one side it had "Sgt. Pepper's,",
and the other side, it had "Magical Mystery Tour."
And when I heard it, my tiny brain exploded, like a million particles.
There was a particular song, "Blue Jay Way,"
which, not only the lyrics, but the melody and the harmony,
seemed to exactly reflect my feeling of disconnection with people.
And I couldn't understand how these musicians knew how to organize sound
so that I felt this way.
Now to me, as a naive boy,
science and music were actually the same thing.
They were both about wonder took extraordinary skills and dedication.
And they were both about discovery, about the universe,
and about ourselves, our inner worlds.
However, the educational system of the time told me,
in no uncertain terms, that they were, in fact, separate.
They were taught at different times, different parts of the school.
And one was serious, and one was play.
It didn't make any sense to me, and ultimately, I had to choose.
And I chose the sciences. I went and got a degree in Economics.
But by the end of my third year,
my dad lost a short and brutal battle to cancer, aged 51.
And I realized life was short, so I switched,
and I turned to my passion of music,
and went to study at Berkley College of Music
where I endeavored to understand the mechanics of music.
And I learned that in fact, these two worlds were more connected
than people were saying.
When we talk about scales and chords and intervals and the cycle of fifths,
what we were doing is making geometric shapes, mathematical models
out of that music.
Which felt extraordinarily correct.
This, for example, is my analysis of a John Coltrane solo.
Each of these bubbles are a phrase that he played, that he improvised,
and they've been placed in a three-dimensional space,
of all the possible choices he could have made.
And this is the improvisation he took.
What I like about about this is it reminds me
of the bubbles chamber images I saw all those years before.
So, we can reveal patterns from music, but I was fascinated to discover
that we can actually place patterns within it.
The composer Bach was fortunate enough to have a last name
which spells out a four-note melody in the German notation system: "B-A-C-H."
He used it most famously in "The Art of Fugue,"
which turned out to be his last piece.
This piece is dictated from his deathbed, in his blindness to his son,
and you can see how it is incomplete as the melodies trickle away.
One of the last melodies he wrote within that is his own name, "B-A-C-H,"
esentially signing off.
So, we can put names into music. So, how about other things?
And in fact, this is an ancient idea.
Pythagoras talked about the music of the spheres,
a harmony created by the planets' orbits.
And in the early 17th century, Kepler even suggested scales for these,
based on the eccentricity of these orbits.
There is a poet-philosopher called Rilke from the early 20th century,
who wrote an essay in which he observed
that the human skull had this seam
that keeps the parts together, called the coronal suture.
And he noted that it had some similarities to a sound wave,
or what he said, "the groove of a phonograph."
And he posed a hypothetical question:
What would happen if we tricked a needle into playing that pattern?
What sounds would come out, and what feelings would be evoked?
Now in 1919, this was a purely hypothetical question.
But in 2004, using my old friend the computer, that's exactly what I did.
(Music)
What you're hearing are sounds converted from a Victorian woman's skull,
who would have lived at the same time as Rillke.
What I love about this is that never in a million years,
would I have composed this
with a stack of blank paper and a lot of coffee.
It's as if it was music that was in the universe
that I could pluck
Very shortly after I finished this piece, a tiny event would happen to me
that would have a huge impact on my life.
In the DNA of one of my white blood cells,
two parts of chromosome, nine and 22,
happened to break off and do a little dancing, switch places.
And that created a new gene, which had one instruction: replicate.
And what that meant for me is I acquired
a rare, very fast-growing, and very dangerous form of leukemia.
On Friday, I was teaching at the Royal Academy of Music,
on Monday, I was in an ambulance, being rushed to hospital
where I would live for several months,
receiving a strict regime of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
I was put in isolation because my immunity was shot.
So my poor wife, family, and friends
could only visit me wearing gowns and masks.
So, stuck in that isolation ward, alone, first of all, I invented a memory system,
so I learned all the reigns of the British monarchy.
And then I did a hundred artists.
But then I noticed that everyday, I was given my blood cell results
as my disease progressed,
and I started noticing ins each of the population of blood cells,
some really interesting, actually musical patterns.
So what I decided to do is just do what I did before.
I let the blood cells compose a piece which I called "Bloodlines."
So each day, I wrote a second of this music .
One second at a time, just to pass the time.
I say I wrote it, but actually, my blood cells wrote it.
I just received the royalties on their behalf.
(Laughter)
So I'm going to play you a little portion of it now.
(Music)
Today, and another day.
That "Whoosh" at the beginning was my leukemia crisis,
and now it's descending because of the chemotherapy I've been receiving.
Now thanks to the frontier of medical knowledge,
and thanks to a bone marrow transplant
from my sister,
which turned my blood type from O+ to O-, from male to female,
and incidentally makes me resistant to malaria,
(Laughter)
which is quite nice, it has its benefits,
I recovered.
And also, some fast-thinking doctor,
on the day I was diagnosed,
required me to produce a sample
in case I survived, a sample of a personal nature.
This was kept on ice for eight years.
And now my wife and I have a beautiful three-year-old daughter,
called Chloe, which is a Greek word for "little shoot of life".
When I look at her, I realize
that her existence is even more improbable than mine.
I went on to do a PhD in composition, and connected with people
because I collaborated with space scientists,
getting the harmony of distant planets, distant galaxies.
I've worked with sleep scientists, turning sleep patterns into music,
mine are particularly funky with a three-year-old in the house,
I can tell you.
(Laughter)
I've worked with mathematicians, I've worked with climate scientists.
The melody goes up, by the way, in case you're wondering.
(Laughter)
I've even worked with sociologists and psychologists,
because, in fact, there is a pattern to even human behavior,
even when we're acting intuitively, we have our ways, we have our patterns.
I'm trying to think of an example.
Like when you guys walked in today, you had to pick your seat,
and that was based on various things: whether you have a good view,
you didn't want to be too far away from someone you knew to be rude,
or too close to a stranger to be weird.
(Laughter)
You might have shifted your position because you might have redecided,
and we could even write a piece just of you guys coming in,
and the music of your independent thoughts, your own worlds.
I say, "Could have," but that's what we did.
(Laughter)
When you walked in, we, from the top, filmed you coming in.
And then I went to a little room and worked quite hard.
I told you I was weird.
So, if you imagine this as a strings on a harp,
from low to high, from left to right.
So as each person sits down, or shifts in their seat,
you'll hear a bell-like tone.
The height, by the way, is the volume.
There's another element which is as you're seated,
you'll produce a string sound, a nice, warm string sound,
and it gets warmer.
Seems appropriate.
And one more thing, mobile phones, anyone browsing on a mobile phones
producing a light, adds this extra resonance.
(Laughter)
So, let's have a listen.
He's the first guy.
(Music)
Top right, he keeps moving, he keeps playing different notes.
(Laughter)
Feel the warmth? Feel the warmth of your seats.
That's high siren, that's the mobile phones.
Shifts ahead a little bit as it's filled up.
Look at all those phones, you naughty people.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I'm not sure why you're clapping me, it was your piece.
(Laughter)
I just transcribed.
So through this musical approach,
I've rediscovered something that I instinctively knew
as a nine-year-old gazing into bubble chambers,
and listening to The Beatles.
Music is more profound than love songs and mere entertainment.
And there is music in everything around us.
Everything we do is music,
from the galaxies, down to subatomic particles,
and somewhere in the middle, our little lives, loves, and pains.
These are not disconnected, but interwoven melodies
in an infinite and beautiful cosmic symphony.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you very much. Thank you.