Sing, Brain, Sing

But we still do most of our learning via language. What does music do for us that mere words can ' t?
As Helen Vendler says of poetry, music is not a news report. Except for these knowledge songs, it's not usually intended to represent objective facts. What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states. It's rarely the case that we feel just one single emotion. When was the last time you felt pure joy? More likely it's joy with a bit of apprehension, happiness with a bit of sadness. There are only seven notes on the major scale, and seven on the minor, but the ways in which those notes are strung together can convey different emotions. It has to do with predictability, where your brain is trying to guess the next note. If I play notes in a predictable fashion, initially, there's no tension—it's comforting. But if I do it over and over again, tension will build.

Because you ' re expecting some variation.
And that leads to complex feelings of tension and resolution, comfort and arousal. It's not that far from humor—it has to play around with your expectations of what's normal, and then violate them.

You said that " music sticks in the head, " and in fact I ' ve turned off the Stones but I can still hear Mick going " oooh " in my brain. Why do songs get lodged in there like that?
Maybe it's meant to get stuck in your head. Having "music in the head" allows you to experiment with variations. A lot of people report that when a song gets stuck in their head, the tempo will change a little, or the notes will. So it could be a kind of a game for exercising the mind. When a song gets stuck, it's not the whole thing; it's usually about 20 seconds of it. That's about the same length as auditory short-term memory. And the songs tend to be relatively simple ones. It's more likely Rihanna that's in there and not Stravinsky or Mahler.

There ' s a common belief that people who are good at math are also good at music. But you disagree with that.
As far as I can tell, it's an illusory link. Yes, there are a bunch of people who are good at both, but there are also a bunch of people who are good at one and not the other. There are also a bunch of people who are left-handed and redheaded, but I don't think one causes the other. Although music and math are both in some sense languages—so maybe if you have an aptitude for languages, you're good at all three.

You ' re also a composer, and you produced for Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder (congrats on those platinum and gold records, by the way). When you write music, do you try to apply anything you ' ve learned from your scientific work?
I've been trying in my own writing not to think about any of the laboratory lessons. Instead, I think more about the lessons I've learned from my songwriter friends. I played two songs recently for Joni Mitchell, and I had a songwriting lesson from Rodney Crowell, who has a number of top-10 country hits. They seem to think the musical side is fine. It's the lyrics I need to work on. I need to be more specific. Instead of "the girl left me," I need to say, "the girl left me standing on the corner with a hole in my shoe," or "the girl left me on our anniversary." Something that has some emotional truth, even if it's not literally true. We're sort of numb to generalities—"I had a bad day today" doesn't move you. But "I stepped on a nail," or "my boss screamed until he was shaking and the veins in his temples were bulging"—

It puts an image in your head.
That's it. Rodney also says I need to be more conversational. Don't try to be Shakespeare. I'm looking through you/ Where did you go?/I thought I knew you/ What did I know? That's not Shakespeare, but it's a great lyric.

You obviously love music. Are there some people who don ' t like it at all?
There are a lot of people who don't, but then we humans differ in so many interesting ways. The estimates are that with music, as many as 10 percent of the population just don't get it.

Really? I ' ve never met a person like that.
That's because they've learned not to advertise it. People look at them funny. But hey, there are people who don't like chocolate, and I don't understand that. There are people who don't like sex.

© 2008