← Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies with Alie Ward
Biomusicology (OUR MUSICAL NATURE) with David Bashwiner
01:32:53
Music. Emotion. Brain waves. Whale songs. Toadfish. Distant moons. Loud apes. And why it’s worth it to practice piano. Brilliant and warm musician and assistant professor at Albuquerque's University of New Mexico, Dr. David Bashwiner is a theoretical, neuro- and biomusicologist. Settling into his office (with a baby grand) we covered everything from bird songs to aquatic echolocation, how scales work, major vs. minor keys and their impact on the brain, music therapies, white noise, binaural beats, mole crickets, fandom as identity, spider guitar strings, Baby Mozart, so-called perfect pitch, and so much more. Stay tuned for a bonus episode hosted by Podmother Jarrett Sleeper about getting more creative musically. Go bang on something. Hard.
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- [00:00]
A
Oh, hey, it's your childhood friend who's living his best life selling hot dogs in Miami. It's Alie Ward. What do we got for you? Oh, I'm still gallivanting around the Southwest. I'm getting interviews in person with ologists who are so worth the journey. This one, this episode is as fresh as they come. Okay, it was recorded like two days ago in Albuquerque with a musical theory and neuroscience expert at Albuquerque's University of New Mexico. This person studied psychology for undergrad. They. They got a master's in composition, and they got a PhD from the University of Chicago in the history and the theory of music. Their dissertation, Musical Emotion Toward a Biologically Grounded Theory. So when they invited me to come and chat about music in nature and in the human mind, how we listen, how we create it, I packed my bags, I put them on the New Mexico agenda. So we just recorded this. It was so interesting. I was like, let's get it out there. And I'm going to get to it in a moment. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who support for as little as a dollar a month and submit your questions ahead of time. You too can join up at patreon.com ologies thank you to everyone wearing ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com we have shorter kid friendly episodes available for free anywhere you get podcasts. Just look for the smologies episodes. S M O L O G I E S. They're their own show. We also link them in the show notes. Thank you to sponsors of the show too, who enable us to donate to a cause of each ologist's choosing. Pacifico, the crisp Mexican lager that wasn't brewed to blend in. We were made for the moments when you live like you mean it. When you don't just hear the music, you feel it. When you let the bonfire burn into the night and find places you'd never spot on a map. So when the moment calls, choose to reach for the bright yellow can choose yellow. Choose Pacifico 21 Discover responsibly Pacifico Clara beer imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, Illinois. Okay, so this one time I booked a vacation rental for my husband's entire family. And it wasn't until after the trip was over that they told me a few of the windows didn't open and one of the beds collapsed. I was on the wrong app. VRBO has a loved by guest search filter for their top rated vacation rentals with near perfect ratings for cleanliness and location and all the good stuff. So many. No surprises. What you see is exactly what you get. Search click Done Book today on the VRBO app. If you know you VRBO terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details. And of course, thank you to everyone who reviews the show. That helps us so much and I honestly do read them all. Here's a recent nice one from nasnorb who said that listening to these experts makes them more knowledgeable, wiser, happier and more sure of the goodness in this world. And that's music to my ears. Speaking of, let's get into it so I arrived on campus in Albuquerque with my recorder, blazin and producer, spouse, podmother musician himself Jarrett Sleeper was with me in the parking garage. Out of the corner of my eye a tall, mustachioed and spiky red haired figure appeared stylishly dressed, slim navy trousers with leather suspenders had a warm smile, a familiar vibe. It's good to see you at last. Very stoked. We walked through campus. We passed by some cooing pigeons and some cackling grackles and into the AC of their office with comfy vintage chairs and oh my God, is this a baby Grant?
- [03:33]
B
It is a baby grand.
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C
Holy.
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A
I've been away for like a year and a half.
- [03:37]
B
I tried not to, but I did threaten to quit.
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A
How did they even get it in the door? So we settled in to chat about music and the brain, the order behind what can sound like chaos, frog songs, whale crooners, communication versus music, how primates evolved to sing, white noise, brown noise, binaural beats, identity through musical genres, neurodivergence and music, perfect pitch in utero playlists, major and minor emotions, and a lot more. And then in a very special bonus episode that'll come out in just a few days, there's a very frank and unedited discussion between this guest and Jared Sleeper about creating music, getting over blocks, style, derivations, inspiration, and how making music can click your brain into different gears. Let's tune in with associate professor, musician theorist and absolutely lovely and genial genius Dr. David Bashwinner. Oh my God, I've never heard that
- [05:00]
B
on the David Bashwinner. He him.
- [05:03]
A
I know it's a big question, but like what is music theory? Is it looking at the mathematics of music? Is it looking at why certain chords go together?
- [05:11]
B
Yeah. Okay, so the way I think of it is grammar, the grammar of music. And the way I think of this is like, I think it was maybe 8th grade or 7th grade when like we learned how to diagram sentences in you know, just like in English class.
- [05:23]
C
Yeah.
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B
And I remember we learned about nouns and verbs, and I was like, whoa, I use nouns and verbs all the time. I had no idea that I was doing that. You had this experience too?
- [05:34]
A
Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. Adjective adverb. Yeah.
- [05:37]
B
And it's like no one has to tell you use a noun and then use a verb and then it'll be correct. It's like you do that. Yeah, yeah. So it means that there is some sort of like conceptual background that governs how you speak that you can then learn about, but it's there all the time and you don't think about it. So that exists for music too. There is a grammar to how composers put things together. And even if you're just like singing to your dog or something like that, and like you make up a song, you basically end up following this grammar that's there. So it's sort of like making visible this meshwork of relations that exists. That's what music theory, I think, at like the deepest level. Yeah.
- [06:25]
A
And does that involve also scales and time signatures? And I know that I think about four. Four or three. Three, I think, is a waltz. Are those really instinctual or do those kind of matter more to you? Depending on what you've heard growing up and what. What music is around you culturally? Yeah, it's probably the answer is yes.
- [06:55]
B
No, I mean, well, the reason I like to think about music in a biological sense is not just looking at the music of our culture or something like that. And even just like not looking at what humans do. There's four basic templates for rhythms that exist. And this. It's cool. There's this theorist named Tink Torres in the 1450s, 1470s, and he came up with these symbols. It's a circle with a dot in it. Circle with no dot, half circle with a dot, half circle with no dot.
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A
Okay.
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B
The half circle with no dot still exists today. And we call it. It looks like a C. And so we say, like, that's common time. And so four. Four is common time.
- [07:44]
A
And I am so sorry, but we could spend an entire hour on just Johannes Tinctoris and the mensural notation and. And how three was considered a perfect number before four ever was. But you can also, if you want, after this, take a gander at David's 200 page dissertation for an even deeper dive. Or you can check out the 2016 paper, Music Exemplarity in the Notational Treatises of Johannes Tinctoris. Someone else wrote that PhD. The point is that vibing to music belies this intensely complex system behind the octaves and the notes and, and the
- [08:20]
B
measures 2 and 1 and 2. So that's like 4. 4. That's a March rhythm.
- [08:26]
A
But it is mathematical. But just like there's mathematics in nature, it just kind of exists. And we've come up with this language to identify it, right?
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B
Yeah. So I'm going to give you a little example from outer space and then I promise it'll come back to music.
- [08:42]
A
Okay? I trust you.
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B
So the four biggest moons of Jupiter are called the Galilean moons. They're like discovered by Galileo when he used a telescope. And they orbit Jupiter in like a pattern. It's a rhythmic pattern and it's been the same now since the time of Galileo. But the inner one is called I.O. i.O. And then it goes around like every 1.77 point Earth days, which, you know, that measurement doesn't matter. We're going to call that two for a second. So every two days and then the next one out, Europa grows around every four days and the next one goes around every eight days. So the 2 to 4 ratio ends up being a 1 to 2 ratio.
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A
So a 1 to 2 ratio, David explains, is written in the stars in the moons.
- [09:35]
B
The math works out that it is exact, but where they are relative to one another is always governed by this 2 to 1 ratio. And we'll probably come back to it. But a two to one ratio is. That ends up being an octave in music. So this note, if you count the vibrations of the string, they're twice the speed of this note. And that's crazy because, well, long before we were able to count the vibrations of the string that rapidly, you can just hear that that's an octave. So that means somehow our brains do something like computing the relationship of the number of vibrations of one sound to another. So that's an octave relationship. It's also if you're just playing a drum beat, it's crazy. But those three moons, it's a simple like four on the floor drum beat. So if you're hi hat going and that's your, that's IO, the inner planet. And then you will put the snare drum on the third beat. That's a four on the floor beat. But that is basically that relationship in terms of a drum beat of what you see in those moons. It means that ratio of like 1 to 2 to 4 is something that governs their movement. It's so precise that when scientists in the 17th century were trying to solve the problem of how to keep time when you're at sea. The longitude problem. One of the main ways they were trying to do it is by being able to observe the moons of Jupiter because it's such a precise clock.
- [11:20]
A
So common time and a lot of pop music is 4, 4. But why do some people feel less comfortable making music? Like, even for me, clapping in unison makes me anxious. I never know when the audience is gonna gradually, like, trail off of the clapping or if the musicians are like, no, don't. This is not a clapping song. Knock it off. Or if I'm doing it on the wrong beat. And I saw this old video of Herrick Connick Jr. Appearing very sweetly exasperated at an audience who was doing their best, but clapping on the ones and threes, which are the downbeats and not the twos and the fours, which are upbeats. And this apparently comes historically from a conductor low their little stick down on the downbeat, and then up on the upbeat. And in a lot of pop music, a band will be listening for the drummer to hit the snare on the twos and fours. So clapping on the ones and the threes will mess them up. Hence, some musicians that are cursed with an audience clapping on the ones and threes might even noodle with the time signature for a second to get everyone back into 4, 4. And to steer the audience onto the twos and fours. Have you done this at a concert? Have you seethed at people who have I asked David why I must choose between either silence or ruining things for other people?
- [12:38]
B
I mean, if you go to church every day or, sorry, every Sunday, and nobody claps, then you're not gonna learn to clap. You're not gonna learn where to clap. If you go to church every Sunday where everybody's clapping on the songs all the time and it's participatory, then that's just gonna be partly what to do. So it really is church. I ended up figuring this out. But, like, church is, like, the best training for musicianship. It's really weird.
- [13:05]
A
That makes sense because I grew up with Catholic mass, and we don't do any. Any of that there. Yeah. What about. Let's say you weren't raised in a church. You weren't raised with music because you are a bird or you are another animal that isn't human. How much of that is music versus communication? Where is the line between, you know, if you hear an owl hooting or, we heard pigeons when we walked in, or there are these grackles in New Mexico that make these absolutely bonkers Alien sounding calls. So what is communication and what is song?
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B
Yeah. Okay, so there's many animals that don't hear. We talk about insects for a second just because they're like, not related to us. Meaning hearing evolved in insects separately from how it evolved in vertebrates. And it evolved like a bunch of different times in insects. So many of them have ears on their legs or on their body parts. The praying mantis has ears like in its abdomen.
- [14:18]
A
Yeah.
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B
And that derived from like pressure sensation, from being able to sense substrate vibrations with their leg parts. And then it ends up getting sensitive to sound. So if you imagine, like if we're a species and you are, let's say we're praying menaces and you start being able to detect substrate vibrations as sound in whatever way, then I can start signaling, I can start making substrate vibrations and manipulate you. In mammals especially, you're my infant. And I can manipulate you to help you sleep, to help you focus so you can learn things. So if you look across all animals, right, this has to be super general, but there's sometimes when things seem like with most animals, it seems like they all have something that's like speech. And even with fish that have only like three possible types of vocalization, like there's a fish called the Midshipman that I spent a lot of time like researching, and it has a hum vocalization where it goes. It does it for like an hour or more, all night long then. And it has two other sounds that it makes. So it does that by shaking its swim bladder. And that's like a roughly a hundred hertz pitch. And it shakes the muscles at about 100 times a second.
- [15:41]
A
And if you, like your father, who is me, love music, but are unfamiliar with the hows and the whys of it. So sound waves cause things around them to vibrate and the vibrations have a frequency that's the amount of times the wave vibrates in a second. And that's measured in hertz. So lower, deeper sounds have low frequencies of that wave. It makes fewer ups and downs per second, while higher pitched sounds are in the thousands of hertz or kilohertz. And humans can hear between about 20Hz to 20Khz. But something below our hearing range is called infrasound, and above our hearing range is ultrasound. Oh. And amplitude is how tall those waves are and thus how loud. And that's measured in decibels. And if you need more music basics, there's a great site called howmusicworks.org that's helping me A bunch. But okay, yes, back to this groaning toadfish.
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B
But it can do that same thing. It can go. And that's like a grunt train. And it has one more vocalization, which is where it's modulating both the frequency and the amplitude. And that latter one is called the growl. So the grunt and the growl are both. Call it agonistic in science, but it's like, get out of here. Yeah. And the hum is alluring. And that is much more like that thing. Even though it's one tone, it's not complex. It functions like an attractive beacon. And so that is like a song. The other two things are regulating the behavior of just others that are near them.
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A
So grunting, not a song, but a low hum to attract mates could be considered just a banger in fish terms.
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B
I had this revelation when I was reading this really cool article about the zebra finch. So zebra finch is, like one of the best studied birds, and it's a bird that learns its song. So when you're talking about how the learning process works for birds, the zebra finch is just like a perfect creature to study. And they have only a single song, and so they make about, like 12 other different types of sounds. Some of them are just like, I think of, like, things like when you're in the nest and you're just like, hey, what's up? How's it going? And then to the kid, when the kids are like, mommy. Or like a long call, which is when the kids are like mommy and the mom's far away. Aggressive vocalizations to one another, aggressive vocalizations to other species, warning vocalizations. There's all these things. And then the song is much longer,
- [18:43]
A
it's stereotyped, and each male again composes his own.
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B
And it's like, acoustically more complex. And if you try to figure out the motor structure, if I try to figure out the learning structure of how the bird learns this, it's more complex in that sense.
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A
Feel free to enjoy the paper. Developmental alters Information coding in auditory midbrain and forebrain neurons in the journal Developmental Neurobiology, which found that developmental to vocalizations shapes the information coding properties of songbird auditory neurons. So hearing things as little babies shapes how they sing in the future. Zebra finches, they start to learn to sing from a tutor, from an elder, at about a month after hatching. And then they kind of start with some nonsense tunes like a baby just going, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, as they get the hang of it. And then over the next two months, this baby zebra finch, they Continue to learn the males and compose their own little tune. And apparently the audience is tough to please. Females select mates with more complex tunes and faster singing rates. And the songs also help the birds recognize their relatives.
- [19:56]
B
That's the moment where I was like, oh, those other things are speech. And this one thing that stereotyped, that's a display. It's one sided, it's a monologue. It's always the same and everybody can hear it. That is like the song.
- [20:16]
A
Do you think that human beings speech started with song, with notes and evolved to really specialized sounds? There's this game I've seen played online where a group of people try to get one person at a party to do something very specific. Like to do the worm on the ground while flapping their arms or something like that. Okay. So everyone decides while the target person is out of the room and then they come back and they try to guess what they're supposed to do. It's a people pleaser's dream. And so the person just tries to do things that are close to it. And the whole group goes, mmm hmm. When they get farther away from, you know, if they're like, take this vase and put it on top of the record player. So the whole group as a whole just goes mmm when they're doing the wrong thing. And I was thinking about you when I saw that because I was like, is that song or communication? Because they are communicating with song. I mean that's why songs in music is so emotional. And I don't know if there are any hypotheses about whether or not speech came from song or came from something more musical or tonal or if I should write my dissertation on it.
- [21:34]
B
Yeah, you could. Okay, people do write about this question
- [21:41]
A
and then you can bust this flim flam if need be.
- [21:44]
B
It's not. I mean, I'm going to give you an answer.
- [21:48]
A
Okay.
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B
So like what a human is, is really like, it's both the thing that we think of as a human, but also something that is like shared with chimpanzee.
- [21:58]
A
Yeah.
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B
Like we have 99% of our same genes with chimpanzees.
- [22:01]
A
Yeah.
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B
Like you can look at what chimpanzees do vocally and they do do gestures. Like you're saying they're not using vocal gestures as much. But there's something weird about the great apes and not vocalizing. So if you go back a little bit further to say like gibbons are our next ancestor and all of them are singers.
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C
Oh,
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B
So great apes, you know, gorillas orangutans chimpanzees, they make noise. And sometimes they do those displays that they're trying to purposely make a lot of noise and they shake things and it's almost like a dance. Like sometimes they do like drumming, so they'll use noise, but they, they are, they're really communicative with gesture and they're able to learn sign language and stuff like that, but they just don't do it as much vocally.
- [23:03]
A
Okay, so great apes not singing, but drumming. So then why do some primates sing?
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B
And that has to do something with animals that live on the ground as opposed to in the trees. That's something that comes from Joseph Jordania, who's like an ethnomusicologist, just brilliant, brilliant guy that talks about relationship of music to how we would have had to evade or scare away big cats. Oh, and he actually compares us to skunks.
- [23:34]
A
So Joseph Jordania of the University of Melbourne wrote a book titled why do People, Music and Human Evolution, as well as a 2023 paper, Music as Aposematic Signal, Predator Defense Strategies and Early Human Evolution in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. And he notes in that that a long standing question that comes with this suggestion is why do terrestrial apes not sing? He says, I propose that the question should be different. Why did early humans not stop singing, as virtually all the arboreal species do when they visit the ground? Many singing and noisy arboreal species, like birds and monkeys, maintain silence whenever they visit the ground as a cryptic defense strategy from potential ground predators. However, humans, loudmouths, do not. And he proposes that singing, kind of like snake venom and stinky, stinky skunk butts, is a warning to keep us alive. So roaring is hard on the vocal cords, but singing can go on for hours. And as Jordania continues, musicality, sense of rhythm, bipedalism, one, long head hair, long legs, strong body odor, armpit hair. And traditions of body painting and cannibalism are explained as predator avoidance tactics, like a warning display defense strategy. So human beings in his hypothesis, are just out there being weird and that is what saves them. So while you've been thinking that you sing to attract love and to celebrate the vibrations of the universe and to harmonize with other souls, it just may have kept you here because you're loud and you taste bad. What about whales? Are whales just out there jamming? Are they just doing it for the stem of it? Are they just like, just because they love it? Do we know?
- [25:32]
B
So like with the whales, there's the two different kinds. There's the ones that are dolphin like that have really high pitched vocalizations that use echolocation. And there's the ones that are big and humpback like, and they have really low voices.
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A
So, yes, we need a cytology episode all about whales. But meanwhile, there are baleen whales. They use a big internal mouth mustache to filter and eat little critters. And then there are the toothed whales. Think of an orca biting your ass. And if you need some summer jams, by the way, you can cue up Paul Winter's Songs of the Humpback Whale. It was Produced by Legend Dr. Roger Payne on Bandcamp. We'll link to it on our website. And these whale recordings are from the late 1960s. But not that much has changed in the last several million years.
- [26:18]
B
We're still learning, and scientists typically think of them as not using echolocation. I have to believe that they must be right. But I, when I listened to humpback whale song, I feel like it has to be doing some echolocation functions. So, like, low sound travels much better in water than in the air. Five times faster and farther. And then the sounds of whales can travel like halfway. I mean, it's like 5,000 miles. It might be halfway around the realm world.
- [26:52]
A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
So they, you know, the way humpbacks do stuff is at the summer they go to the poles and they go eat. At winter, they come to the equator and they mate, and that's where the singing happens, but the singing starts happening before that and presumably it can be heard at the poles. And so it's like an attractive beacon. And there's like these different places. So I like to think of these, like, music festivals. Like, if everyone's like, are you going to go to Coachella this year or are you going to go to Lollapalooza or outside land? So if you could imagine people that decide to go to Bonnaroo, get there early, start singing, they learn from each other and are singing each other's songs. Like, it's still a mystery why they don't do it in unison. If they're singing the same song, but they learn from each other what the song is of the season, and they're singing that, and that's functioning potentially like a beacon that can be heard from extremely far away. So that when other whales are deciding, and especially like female whales ready to mate are deciding, you know, which feeding ground to go to, they're being influenced in some way by those songs.
- [28:10]
A
They're like, where's the party at?
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [28:12]
A
So, yes, some of the notes in the lowest frequencies, even below our threshold of hearing, in whale songs, those can spread between groups nearly 8,000 kilometers apart. According to a 2022 New Scientist article titled Whale Songs can spread between groups nearly 8,000 kilometers apart. And while toothed whales make sounds with a vocal organ that's in their nose, baleen whale voice boxes have been a bit of a mystery until this 2024 paper, Evolutionary Novelties Underlie Sound Production in Baleen Whales, published in Nature, which explained how scientists were able to harvest three big, floppy dead whale larynxes from sweet beached individuals, and they were able to pass air through models of them to understand just how these quote, unique laryngeal structures for sound production evolved. And whales make all kinds of noises for communicating and even herding fish, but just the males make these really long, rambling songs. And I would love to tell you all about the 2025 paper. Whalesong shows Language like statistical structure, which applied methods based on infant speech segmentation to eight years worth of humpback recordings. They had a back catalog, they ran some numbers, and it uncovered in whalesong the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language. Now, what about David's theory that whale song is also used for echolocation? I feel like a whale scientist should probably weigh in on that. But Waite, professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo and the director of the Neural and cognitive plasticity laboratory, Dr. Eduardo Mercado III, has just proposed in his new book, why Whales Sing, that what whale scientists have been calling songs are actually a sophisticated form of echolocation similar to what bats do. So if you want more on that hypothesis, you can check out why Whales Sing by Eduardo Mercado iii, also Eduardo Mercado. Three times, almost a song, and I'm loving it. But, yeah, we need a whole episode on whales.
- [30:28]
B
So the song is a little bit. I mean, it must be somewhat individual for the individual whale, somewhat unique to the invisible whale because it contains aspects of other songs they have known before. But it also is very much like trying to match the current song of the group that the whale is in. And then the songs, they have structure that's kind of like motive, phrase, phrase, group, and that makes sense.
- [31:00]
A
What does that mean?
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B
So it's almost always structured like an A and a B. So like that's your A and then your B and it'll go. And the way it might change even within the phrase is. It might, like develop within the phrase, but then also over the course of months, it can Develop in that way by adding or subtracting elements. So the whale songs are highly structured and they do have function. And then anything additional, like how much they enjoy it, is like, that stuff matters, but that isn't. That isn't going to be the thing that. That's something that's kind of like, invisible to evolution.
- [31:57]
A
We can't interview a whale yet, and so maybe we'll find out later. Now, what about why do certain types of music appeal to different people? Is that mostly learned and cultural? Like, my sister's married to a thrash metal guitarist. My mom is into Motown. I got a niece who loves K pop. My cousin Luke plays the Italian accordion, and I was goth. Is that identity based? Or do some people maybe with different neurodivergences, like, really, like, fast, fast beats and others, it might be overwhelming. Do we have any idea why people gravitate towards certain genres or beats or minor versus major keys? Nature or nurture? Well, let's get back to nature.
- [32:44]
B
One thing that articulates us nicely is if you think about frogs. And frogs are super vocal compared to other animals, and they mate it at nighttime, and because it's night, they are distinguishing themselves, like, solely from the voice, at least from far enough away.
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A
David said that frogs will even use the equivalent of a stage, and they'll slime up to higher ground to get the word out. And the word is, I'm horny. Let's make more of me. So in the dark. How do you know, though, if you're trying to mate with the right gal?
- [33:22]
B
The thing that most dramatically changes to mark their different speciation is their vocalizations.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then the other cool thing about this is, like, most animals, they often only have, like, a really simple noisemaker. Like, they can't make all these notes. In a sense, it's kind of like, with us too, there's not that many notes we can sing. But if you change the rhythm, the rhythm and the patterning, you can make your song really different from someone else's. So, like, the way that you mark who you are sonically, vocally, allows groups to separate from one another. So if you think about, like, kids in high school as using music in that way, first of all, they're doing, they're going out to the pond of the lek and listening for music that's different from what their parents play. Right. Like, that's really important.
- [34:13]
A
Yeah.
- [34:13]
B
And then you're gonna. If, like, with the goth thing, like, it might be the clothes that attract you first, and then you pay attention to how to. In a sense, like, the arbitrary patterning of the. Of the sounds that the goth people are doing because you like those people. You fit in because of clothes or for some other reason. So in that sense, it could be totally arbitrary, but you're still going to say, like, oh, I'm a goth person. I listen to goth music. And then the more you listen to goth music, that's becoming part of who you are. So now you, Ali, as you walk around in the world, like, whenever you hear one of those songs, you're like, it has a connection to you, and you're like, oh, these are my people in some sense. So it's. Yeah, it's possible for music to just try to be different in an arbitrary way, just so that that separation of groups can happen. And it doesn't have to happen with species, but it's really valuable in culture for you to have, like, you know, for the jocks to be separate from the goth kids for both of them.
- [35:16]
A
If you want to somersault into an identity crisis with me, you can feel free to read up on the death of monoculture. It has its own Wikipedia page, but essentially, back when there were three 13 channels on a TV and disc jockeys on coke curated the hits, big giant groups of people tended to have the same cultural reference points. So there was then a need to say, not me. I'm a little different. Thanks so much. But now that your algorithm pays more attention to your desires than the devil himself, and trends come so hard and fast that you might as well be dead and buried if you don't have a middle part. Unless you're above that. Like Zendaya. Honestly, 1 million people can log on in the morning, see a photo of you, and declare you chopped. So we're essentially like singing frogs in a melting pot. We don't realize that our identities are so siloed that we've been tricked into longing for conformity via purchases guided by tech companies. So who are you? What do you actually, like, go sit under a tree and think about it. You can be anyone you want, or you can just. You are who you are, and it's okay to be that little weirdo. But do minor keys versus major keys? Do those appeal to different moods or different people? And if you want to play a minor versus a major key, just in case people.
- [36:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, like a little.
- [36:40]
A
Like, versus.
- [36:43]
B
Okay, I'll do major.
- [36:44]
A
Okay, major.
- [36:45]
B
Oh, should I. Do you want to guess?
- [36:47]
A
I won't say what you guess. Okay, make me guess.
- [36:49]
B
Oh, I was going to say you don't look, but it won't matter.
- [36:51]
A
If you look, it won't matter. Minor.
- [36:56]
B
Yeah. I'm gonna do it in a different place.
- [37:02]
A
Minor, that's major. What?
- [37:06]
B
Yeah, but this is hard because I changed the. I changed the register and everything like that.
- [37:09]
A
I was like. That sounds depressing. I like it. Minor.
- [37:13]
B
That's minor.
- [37:14]
A
Okay.
- [37:17]
C
Minor.
- [37:18]
B
That one's major.
- [37:19]
A
I can't tell.
- [37:20]
B
It's okay.
- [37:21]
C
It's okay. I can't tell you. Major.
- [37:24]
B
Yep.
- [37:24]
C
Okay.
- [37:25]
A
You made that easy.
- [37:26]
B
I didn't.
- [37:28]
A
Major.
- [37:29]
B
That one's minor.
- [37:31]
A
What's the difference? I mean, quickly.
- [37:34]
B
Yeah. No, if I. I'll do. If I do them all in the same octave, like, it sounds like what you're doing, you're hearing brightness. Like up here, this is brighter than if I played it down here. But this is the same Ch. It's just up here, it sounds brighter. Here, it's darker. Okay, so. But if I do both of the chords within the same octave. So this is C major and this is C minor.
- [38:06]
A
Okay. This is a side 17. I've been trying to write it. Jake has tried to explain it to me. Joey has also tried to explain it to me. I've talked to Jared about it. Jared has agreed to walk me through it. This is Music Theory Basics. If you know a lot about music theory, this might amuse you if you know nothing. This is just a tiptoe through the tulips of how it starts. And just a heads up, this explanation applies to Western classical music specifically. It does not encompass the whole world. And our very kind, brilliant editor, Jake Chaffee of jecmusic.com went in and added the illustrative piano in here. And Jarrett wants you to know that Jake is much more proficient and talented than him. Jake, thank you so much. Okay, let's dive in. Jarrett, what's going on?
- [38:50]
C
Okay. I'm going to do my best because it's confusing to me as well. For some reason, we've decided to make the language of music incredibly confusing. So here we go. Simply as possible, buckle up. Okay, first of all, all of music is just 12 notes looping indefinitely. We're just going to start with whole notes. Okay. There are seven of these, and we name them by the first seven letters of the Alphabet.
- [39:14]
A
Okay?
- [39:14]
C
A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Okay.
- [39:18]
B
Love.
- [39:19]
C
They loop forever. So after G, you just go back to A. Okay. In between most of these notes, there is another note dividing them, a note halfway between the whole notes. That's how we get all of music being made with 12 notes. Now, I'm sure you are thinking 12 notes. Hang on. You just said seven notes. And if there's one in between each of those, it should be 14 notes. Yes, that's why I said most of these notes and why music is so confusing. There is an extra note only between most of them. So between two of the notes from B to C and from E to F, there is no middle note.
- [39:52]
A
All right?
- [39:53]
C
It's just one step up instead of two. So this, for me is one of the most confusing things and why I find music theory so hard is because, like, why is it randomly and I can't keep the numbers straight, but maybe a lot of people feel that way. All right, to make this even more confusing, the note in between the whole notes can be named two different things, because, yeah, we name the note in between only in reference to the note on either side of it.
- [40:16]
A
Rude.
- [40:17]
C
Yes, it's very horrible. So, like, between A and B, for instance, we would call that either a sharper version of A, an A sharp. Or we could call it a flatter version of B and call it A B flat.
- [40:30]
A
It's just. But it's the same note.
- [40:32]
C
It's the same point in between A and B.
- [40:35]
A
That's like when someone calls me Mrs. Sleeper or. You know what I mean when you're defined.
- [40:40]
C
Yeah, technically.
- [40:41]
A
Sure, sure. Yeah.
- [40:44]
C
That's a great reference. Okay, so all the music comes from these 12 notes. A, A sharp slash, B flat, B, C, C sharp, D flat, D, D sharp, E flat, E, F, F sharp, G flat, G, G sharp, A flat. And then for the whole octave, we would land back at A but higher.
- [41:02]
A
Okay.
- [41:03]
C
Okay. You may be asking yourself, why don't we just say they're 12 notes and they're ABCDEFG, H, I, J, K, L. Or just call them numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Yes, and I also agree. I have no idea why they don't do that. It seems like it would be easier to grasp, but that's just how it is.
- [41:17]
A
Chaos.
- [41:18]
C
All right, so that's. We're starting there. Keys. Now, what are keys? A key is a collection of seven notes that all sound good together. You'll notice when we play those first ones we did A, B, C, D, E, F, G. They don't sound quite right. Together, we're going to start on easier one, the most common one, C. If we start on C and we go C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and land back on C, it sounds quite good. This is the C major scale. A ton of songs are written in this. It's very familiar to us. In fact, if you only play the white keys on the piano, you're probably going to be playing in C major
- [41:55]
A
and you're just playing those notes in the whole song. That's like the, the palette. That's like your, your color palette.
- [42:02]
C
You're going from.
- [42:02]
A
That's the key.
- [42:03]
C
We've decided those all play well together. Now, there's no rules if somebody does a little funky thing in there, but yes, for our purposes, yes.
- [42:10]
A
Okay.
- [42:11]
C
Okay. We've identified these patterns of notes and the way we figure out what those seven notes that work well together are. I think the easiest way to remember is this phone number method, they call it. You just remember 2, 21 2, 2, 2 1. And each of those numbers is a step up in the notes of those 12. Now, step is a confusing word to use. We're just going to throw this part out, but just for the people because they'll often say a whole step, which is actually two notes or a half step, which is one. Okay. But just let's not worry about whole half steps. We're just going to think 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1.
- [42:45]
A
Okay.
- [42:46]
C
And that those will make a seven note scale. Scale, which is a key.
- [42:52]
A
Okay.
- [42:53]
C
Okay. So if I want to play a seven note scale in the key of C major, I would start with C. That's the first note in the scale and that's where the scale will get its name from.
- [43:03]
A
Okay.
- [43:03]
C
And then we do our phone number for major scales. 2, 2, 1. 2, 2, 2, 1. So C go up 2, skipping C sharp, D flat to D. Then go up 2, skipping D sharp, E flat to E. Now we go up only one. We don't skip here to F. Then we go back to 2. Skip F sharp or G flat, whatever you want to call it. G2. We skip again G sharp and A flat to A. Then we go two. Again skip A sharp to B and or B flat, whatever you call it, to B. And then that's seven. Then we could finish back our final one back to C. That's 2, 2 1, 2, 22 1. And it's a whole octave, eight notes. Everything feels right in the world. Again, land back home.
- [43:45]
A
And that is the template. 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1. So imagine it like, like if your phone number were like 555221.
- [43:53]
C
Yeah. If you wanted to call up your major friend. 2, 2, 1. 2, 2, 2, 1.
- [43:59]
A
Nice. Yeah, it sounds like a. It also sounds Like a car insurance jingle.
- [44:04]
C
Exactly. Yeah. I think it makes it easy. That's also where Doremi fa.
- [44:08]
A
So Latido is that 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2.
- [44:11]
C
Basically, 2, 2, 1, 2 or 2, 2, 2, 1. I guess. CDFG A, B, C. All right.
- [44:18]
A
Okay.
- [44:18]
C
So you can create any scale by just starting with the first note, where it'll get its name from, and then doing the same phone number pattern. 2, 2, 1. 2, 2, 2, 1. So, like, we start with E. It would be E2 to F sharp, 2 to G, 1 to A, 2 to B, 2 to C sharp, 2 to D sharp, and then finally one back to E an octave up. Okay. Okay. Now, confusingly, that could also be called E, G flat, A flat, A, B, D flat, E flat, E. But whatever, that's fine. That's fine.
- [44:43]
B
Just forget all that.
- [44:44]
A
I can't.
- [44:45]
C
So what's a minor key? We just take the same formula, but we flatten the third, sixth, and seventh notes. So if C major is C, D, E, F, G, A, B, then the key of C minor would be C, D, E flat, F G, A flat, B flat. We also were supposed to cover chords, so I'm just gonna. As fast as I can. Major and minor chords.
- [45:08]
A
Okay, okay, okay.
- [45:09]
C
Long as short as a long, long, long story. Short as possible. Geez. Okay. A major chord is a collection of notes in the same scale that sound good when played together. And a chord is named for the first note in the sequence. This is the root note, which we'll say is one in the formula, and then is joined by the third and fifth note in the same scale, all played at the same time time together to make a lovely harmonious sound. And then if you want to make that chord A minor, you would just flatten the third one down half a step. Now it sounds sadder and spookier. So C major is C, E, G. And C minor would be C, E flat, G. But you could also call that E flat, a D sharp. And I actually hate that so much.
- [45:48]
A
I understand. I also do.
- [45:50]
C
Yeah.
- [45:51]
A
But I appreciate it for its mystery.
- [45:52]
C
We're just going to stop there because there's sevenths, there's ninths, there's something called sus suspended. I just. I can't deal with it. It gets really weird. We're just gonna stop there. And that's chords.
- [46:01]
A
And you're doing a bonus episode this week that you. When we were with David, you guys talked about creating music. When you're tinkering around on the piano, are you thinking about any of this?
- [46:14]
C
Sort of. Okay, I'm really bad. I can really only do C major. I basically just memorized a few chords in C major. Like, there's this whole joke about, like, most songs are like, C, D minor, F and G. It's like, those are C major chords and C scale. And like, so many songs you can make with those same notes. And I love that Sam Elliott thing about, like, all music's just 12 notes.
- [46:38]
A
Jack talked about how music is essentially 12 notes between any octave.
- [46:44]
B
12 notes and the octave repeats.
- [46:46]
C
It's just true. And I don't know you can make anything with it. But then lately I've been trying to free myself up from it and just not think about it and just like, play it when I can. But I find it probably the reason music theory's made like this at all is cause really it's useful for remembering what I played. Like, you know, trying to come back and go, like, what was that thing? What was that? Now I can write down the things and recreate them.
- [47:09]
A
Yeah. Like you go in reverse and make a recipe after you've tinkered around.
- [47:14]
C
Right. Because otherwise I go nuts.
- [47:16]
B
But being like, what was I playing?
- [47:18]
C
And because I'm not good enough at playing sounds like if I just record it, it's very hard for me to reverse engineer because I'm just not that good at music. But I think the liberating thing about it is, literally, if you can just learn some C major, a few chords at C, you can play so many songs and just iterate on those and it's really fun.
- [47:35]
A
Well, let's get back to minors and majors with David.
- [47:38]
C
Yes. And apologies to any actual music theory people who are going to. Well, actually me. And I really hope I got that right enough for you. It was really hard for me to learn that over several years of trying.
- [47:46]
A
Yeah. And let's remember, this is not a PhD. This is a podcast. Be kind to us. We are doing our best. Or how are they used to convey emotion?
- [48:01]
B
I can play the Ologies theme song in major.
- [48:04]
A
Okay.
- [48:10]
B
I don't know how to do a Sparta major. Okay.
- [48:13]
C
Yeah,
- [48:24]
B
That's hard.
- [48:25]
A
I've never heard it in piano.
- [48:29]
B
Yeah, that's.
- [48:35]
A
That's so beautiful.
- [48:36]
B
I gotta do it in minor just so you can. Because I can do it a little bit better in minor.
- [49:01]
C
Well, just because it sounds very apparent that this song is minor.
- [49:05]
B
I know.
- [49:06]
C
Yeah.
- [49:06]
B
It's because curious. I'll try it one more time.
- [49:08]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [49:09]
B
In major. I'm going to do it slower. It's Funny, just because your composer. The composer does some, like, really funky chords.
- [49:31]
A
All credit to Nick Thorburn, his band Islands. Great band, but. So I never even realized that that was a minor key.
- [49:39]
B
Yeah. I mean, you don't. Yes. Like, you don't. That is the thing of, like,
- [49:44]
A
you
- [49:44]
B
didn't notice you were using nouns and verbs all the time.
- [49:46]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [49:47]
B
Right.
- [49:47]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so do you think that different. Like different keys and tempos, do they affect the brain in ways that can, you know, lift or change our moods? I know that there are sometimes when, if I listen to certain music, I run faster and longer. And if I'm depressed, I can put on an old song and cry my brains out.
- [50:13]
B
Okay, so I'll do tempo first.
- [50:14]
A
Okay.
- [50:15]
B
If you think about all the rhythms that you have in your body in some sense, like, if there's a tempo on the outside world, there has to, in some sense be, like, tempo detectors inside you. So it's basically like if I'm snapping and we were managed to look at EEG of your brain, we would see that your brain is responding to each of these things in two ways. First of all, like, the lead up the. Like, your brain is expecting the next tap, and that's like in the beta range, like a crescendo up to the tap. And so that if I left one out, your brain is still going to have the crescendo up to it, but then it doesn't have the second thing. The second thing that happens is every time I snap, your brain goes after the, you know, at the moment of the snap, and afterward it does something else. I think maybe in the gamma range. And so if I left one out, we know that you're anticipating it because you have beta leading up to it, but there's no response at the gamma frequency.
- [51:20]
A
And just quick, quick. So brainwaves, textbook definition. These are oscillating electrical voltages in the brain. They measure just a few millionths of a volt. And when they get into rhythms with external sources, it's called entrainment. So According to the 2022 paper review of Electroencephalograph Signal Approaches for Mental Stress Assessment, published in the Journal of Neurosciences, these EEG waves are what your brain is cooking up. And they're delta on the low end, starting at around half a hertz up to theta, alpha, beta, and then gamma, which gamma can go up to 80 hertz. Why you're asking, God, are those not in actually alphabetical order? Because alpha was the first one discovered, and then they Just sort of cobbled them on from there. But what do your brain frequencies do? Well, they respond to stress. Which surprises you? Not at all. But let's take a, a quick tour. So according to this paper, delta waves are observed in high levels of deep sleep and are found in the frontocentral brain areas. And remember, these are the slowest ones. So these waves are associated with tiredness and early stages of sleep and with healing and regeneration while we sleep. And this paper says a few minutes of allowing our brains to tune into delta waves can decrease overactivity and stress of anxious thinking. So next up are the theta waves. And this paper says that they show up in situations requiring focus and hypervigilance or during meditation, prayer, and awareness. So theta waves, that's a little bit faster than delta. They're also detected in anxiety. And this paper says that excessive theta waves are observed in hyperactivity and impulsivity and daydreaming. So moving up from there is alpha. That's your normal awake state. And regular meditation and relaxation have been shown to enhance alpha waves, say the scientists. People with traumatic stress don't have as much alpha waves as a baseline person. Now on to beta. These are getting higher frequency. Those kick into high drive during problem solving and decision making during stress, during overwhelm. Too much beta gets you wired and unable to relax. So if you're opening a news app and you start feeling something different, say hello to your beta waves. Finally, we've got gamma waves. These are the highest frequency and they involve thinking and learning. And a 2024 article out of MIT announced that there was evidence emerging that gamma rhythm stimulation can treat neurological disorders through some non invasive sensory modalities, like, yes, music.
- [53:58]
B
So those frequency bands, delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma, those are things that terms that scientists use. And as you're listening to a tempo, it's like your delta waves will synchronize with that pulsing. The beta in this example was being used. It's much faster, but it's being used in a sense to help the brain coordinate with the delta timing. In a sense, if we looked at just your delta rhythms, like a slower tempo is going to entrain the slower delta rhythm generators that you have. And that slower delta set of rhythm generators end up just like if you have slow waves on the ocean and faster waves kind of ride on top of the slow waves in that sense, or even buoys on top of the slow waves, that happens in the brain too. So that your slow waves will entrain with that slow rhythm and everything else becomes Almost like, yeah, falls into slots. So that answer is like, definitely. Different tempos do things different. And then connecting it to emotion is. It does connect with emotion is just. There's more steps in that process.
- [55:23]
A
Lucky you. There's a hot new 2025 study published in Nature Scientific Reports titled Music Tempo Modulates Emotional States as Revealed through EEG Insights. And it wants you to know that slow tempo music induced higher theta and alpha power in the frontal region, while fast tempo increased beta and gamma band power. So slow music, lower frequencies, fast tempo, higher frequencies. And between tempo and loudness and pitch and key and melody and rhythm and harmony. Tempo, it says, is one of the most important factors in creating emotional responses. And the paper continued that soft, slow, non lyrical music with harmonies and a lack of percussion can significantly lower blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory rate. And increased tempo resulted in higher arousal levels. So, yeah, there's this wide spectrum of effects and there's even a spectrum of colors of sounds. We're going to get to that. What about minor major? Does that affect emotion?
- [56:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huge. I wrote my whole dissertation on that. The simple answer is that things that are in major, for whatever reason, sound happier and the things that are in minor sound sadder. And it's possible to make music in such a way, like with the Ologies theme. Like, no one would listen to that and be like, that's sad. And that's in minor. So that's like, actually a good example of the case. Like, it's not always the case that minor is sadness.
- [56:58]
A
And to quote David's thesis, Musical Emotion Toward a Biologically Grounded Theory, two sets of intervals, major on the one hand and minor on the other, differ from one another in a mathematical sense. He writes, the former set major is harmonically derived and the latter minor arithmetically. So the major imperfect consonances, this one theorist he quotes declares, are arranged according to the nature of sonorous number. So minor imperfect consonances are arranged contrary to the nature of sonorous number. In his thesis, David notes that musical theorists point out that the brain greatly enjoys proportionate things and it despises and abhors the disproportionate. He quotes. But clearly this is not a one key fits all moods type of situation. And I just looked through my email archives. I went back to 2017, I can't believe that's almost 10 years ago. And a note that I sent Nick Thorburn, who wrote our theme music, and I was asking for an eerie electro theme and the type of music that would be playing If I'm creeping around a museum at night, just in case you needed a visual for the vibe of our theme music. So of course our theme is in a minor key. It makes me happier.
- [58:17]
B
I think it really helps to not put labels on things and then try to figure out what is going on in a brain. Like why what is major doing in the brain that ends up being different in some way and like changing the affect that you experience in some way. In a very subtle way, presumably. And then what is it that composers do to like enhance the minor ness of a passage? Do one more example.
- [58:49]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [58:50]
B
Okay. I'm going to do this in minor. And if I just play this chord, it actually does kind of sound sad by itself. I'm technically still in a minor key. But if I do, I can like do certain things to like, almost like bring out the minorness more so in. Yeah, just doing that with.
- [59:43]
A
Oh, that's so beautiful. It's, you know. I want you and Jarrett to talk after this about creating music because I can enjoy it, but my brain doesn't quite create it. But first, can I ask you some questions from listeners?
- [59:56]
B
Yeah.
- [59:56]
A
Okay. We're going to do this as a lightning round, but first let's donate a little money to a cause of his selection. And David picked the APS International High School, which is a small public school transforming learning for immigrant and refugee students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And through culturally grounded project based learning, students and teachers collaborate to solve real world challenges, all while building students English language skills and global knowledge. So that donation is headed to Albuquerque's International High School, a small school with gigantic dreams. So thank you to sponsors of ologies for making our donations every week possible. So, Ollie, which is one of my favorite vitamin brands, I eat them every day. They just launched a new line of probiotics and they're made to deliver benefits beyond just your gut. They have this new precise probiotics. They're made with clinically studied strains to support not just the immune and your gut health, but your metabolism, your skin, skin health, even your stress response. So your gut, as you know, we've talked about this, it does more than just digest food. It's at the center of all these different systems and functions in your body. So as science gets smarter about this, you can get more intentional about giving your body what it needs. And precise probiotics target specific areas of your gut microbiome that are connected to all sorts of other systems in your body, like skin and cortisol levels and metabolism. I'm a big fan of my gut and I want to take care of it like the friend that it is. I also love Ollie so this is exciting for me. You can shop precise probiotics with skin stress response or metabolism support at a Walmart near you. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. We have to say that this podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all in one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built in tools for scheduling and inventory, invoicing, an email, all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com ologies for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, you can do it. Hi besties, it's Tinks. If you need a little inspo, a little tough love, or just someone to tell you that everything is going to be okay, come hang out with me on my podcast. It's me, Tanks. We talk dating, confidence, friendships, healing, leveling up, and all the things we're working on together. I share my frameworks, your questions, and yes, plenty of chaotic stories. New episodes drop every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So whether you're on your hot girl walk, commuting, or hiding from your ex on Instagram, I've got you. Listen to It's Me Tanks. Wherever you get your podcasts, some flavors
- [63:01]
B
can only be crafted by nature. One sunny day, a honeybee discovered a mysterious apple blossom and carried its pollen to a honeycrisp tree. Months later, something extraordinary was born. The Sugar Bee Apple. With notes of honey, caramel and molasses, balanced by bright sweetness and an extra crisp crunch, Sugar Bee apples elevate everything from charcuterie boards and salads to baked treats and everyday snacking. Ready for some inspiration? Download our free recipe book and discover delicious ways to enjoy Sugar bee apples@hellosugarbee.com, sugar bee apples. From bee to you Carter's has your
- [63:33]
A
family covered for every summer first first steps, first swim lesson or first sleepover. Our clothes help kids and parents have their best summer ever. Thanks to comfy design and easy dressing details. Generations of families have trusted our must haves for babies, toddlers and kids designed to shine season after season. Visit Carters.com to shop the latest styles or find a Carter's store near you. Okay, let's get into questions you submitted via patreon.com ologies and the one that we picked first was smileykilly mica raccoon and protectheran's lives asked do plants and fungi make music that we can't hear? You know, I've seen those things. You can hook up some electrodes. Is that music or does everything kind of have a bit of a rhythm in responding to its environment?
- [64:30]
B
I would say like, I mean I would love to get the data that comes from an EEG that's attached to a plant and like to look at what's going on. And they have cyclical processes, but I think you could get into what those processes are and you could really, I think you can learn a lot about your plants if you could listen to those rhythms that are going on and figure out how they responding to how much sunlight they have and stuff like that. I mean, yeah, so I think it's a great question.
- [64:58]
A
And if you need to make this your next hyper focus, I get it. It's called plant bioacoustics and it's a field that looks at how plants cell walls make noises when they grow or they burst, and how plants can detect each other via sound vibrations and even the phenomenon of certain flowers releasing pollen only in the presence of both buzzing that matches the flap of the pollinator wings. So a 2023 paper in the journal Cell titled Plant Bioacoustics, the sound expression of stress leaps out of the gate with this whopper of a dinner party fact. It says plants are not exactly known to be great conversationalists. In this issue of Cell, a new study highlights that when stressed by desiccation or cutting injury, tomato and tobacco plants can produce a airborne ultrasonic emissions. These sounds are loud enough to be heard by insects and can be analytically categorized using trained neural networks pointing to their potential informative value. Are leaves screaming? Are petals ears? Is anything real? The world is a mysterious place. Let's Try to take care of it. Well, it'll continue to evolve even after we're all dead. But if you want to hear how your plants and fungi are doing, or if you're just fully stumped for a gift for your sister in law, there are these little devices. There's something called plant wave that you put these like little electrodes essentially on a plant. It picks up on tiny changes in conductivity on two points of a plant and then it translates those electrical signals into a wave, which is translated into a pitch. This is a process known as data sonification. It sounds like this. That was a sound interpretation via plant wave of electrical signals from a staghorn fern. So your plants are giving you oxygen and a song. From ferns to babies. Sarah Chips, Luke, protect friends lives. Grace Conroy, Shirley Luzanovo eating dog hair for a living. Hannah Riley, all wanted to know, in Grace's words, does playing music for a baby have any effects on brain development? Is the Mozart thing real? How do we know how babies respond to music? Either with headphones on the belly or.
- [67:21]
B
So apparently babies can hear at least in the third trimester. Music is always good for babies.
- [67:29]
A
I asked my sister Celeste, AKA Sauce, if she played thrash metal for her two wonderful kids when they were but tots. And she said we play metal in the car sometimes. And Lee, her musician husband, used to play riffs in his studio for the kids. We have an old video of Sophia rocking out to scorpions at about 18 months old. James, my nephew, will sometimes sing Rat or Dio lyrics from riding around with Lee. So also has my niece Sophia played a flying V guitar on stage with her dad in Japan. She has. So take that harpsichords.
- [68:02]
B
One of the main things I think is really important. Like I was. It's gonna. It's re. I feel like it's really, really important for parents to sing with their babies. And it doesn't matter, like, not as a performance. Like it does not matter what it sounds like and doesn't matter if you don't have any songs, but just to kind of like share in that way. I feel like in our culture we have this idea about like virtuosity. Like we associate people who do music as like having some special gift. I think it's that I think is like. Yeah, I worry about that so much. I feel like it's really important to. For everybody to make a little music to like coexist with their baby vocally and like through little rhythmic games and stuff like that. And those things do really help the nervous system and they're just like special. They're beautiful. And that's Anthropologist named Ellen Desniacki has focused on addressing this question about emotions in music solely through mother infant communication and about how much magic goes on in there and how much of what we do in theater and music as adults is really just grows right out of parent infant communication.
- [69:21]
A
Oh that's so sweet.
- [69:22]
B
I know, it's beautiful.
- [69:23]
A
And to think about alloparenting, where you think about not just a parent and a child but a group of people helping to parent, just think about how much richer that is. And if you don't have access to a rock star in your home, if you're like, wait, what was the baby Mozart thing? I'm going to catch you up really quick. So this 1993 paper in the journal Nature titled Music and Spatial task performance involved 36 college students given IQ test spatial tasks three times. Once after listening to this piece by Mozart, Once after listening to 10 minutes of a relaxation tape, and once after 10 minutes of just silence. So IQ test scores in these college kids were highest. After listening to the Mozart piece, this news took off and Gen Z kids listening, your parents may have purchased classical music CDs in hopes of you solving climate change one day. Did it work? Well, it's 110 degrees in Paris now. A 2010 paper in the Journal of Intelligence titled Intellectually Mozart Effect Schmozart Effect a meta analysis says that a transient enhancement of performance on spatial tasks, so temporary in standardized tests after exposure to the first movement Allegro Conspiro of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, KV 448 is referred to as the Mozart effect since its first observation in 1993. And it continues that these findings turned out to be amazingly hard to replicate, thus leading to an abundance of conflicting results. On the whole, it concludes, there is little evidence left for a specific performance enhancing Mozart effect. But don't go yet, because a 2014 study in Frontiers titled How Musical Training Affects Cognitive Development, Rhythm, Reward and Other Modulating Variables notes that musical training in children is associated with heightening of sound sensitivity as well as enhancement in verbal abilities and general reasoning skills and executive functions. But before you go, duct tape your child's hands to a bassoon, researchers want to remind you that, quote, motivation, reward and social context of music education. So how it's delivered are important yet neglected factors affecting the long term benefits of musical training. So you've got to like playing or else you're just going to be playing the blues. Speaking of the blues, this is such A great question too. Maddie Bix, Christopher Blueball, Han the Bee wanted to know. Maddie Bix, first time question asker asked, is there any data or studies done on whether any of the color of the noises like white noise, brown noise, pink noise have any effect on the brain? They use white noise to read so they have a clear head. But is there anything more to it? Are those just different? Different Hertz.
- [72:15]
B
Yeah, it's different. Or white noise is like all frequencies and then different colors of noise just filter out. Like they make quieter in certain ranges. Almost like if you put your hands over the speaker and kind of muted it in some way, you would still hear some of the frequencies coming out and some of them would not be, I don't know. I listen to brown noise just because it's like the deepest, like. But I usually have to drown out. Can't focus while I'm hearing music. So if I work at the cafe. Really, I know it's ridiculous.
- [72:47]
A
What do you wear at the cafe? Do you have.
- [72:49]
B
I have really loud noise canceling. I have really loud noise coming through noise canceling headphones. This is so stupid in my ears.
- [72:55]
A
What kind of noise? Like brown noise?
- [72:57]
B
Yeah, I listen to.
- [72:59]
A
So yes, there are many colors of noise. But don't pay too much attention to what the hue is. Since white noise was representative of white light. That's a misnomer or whatever. That's how it got its name. It's actually not correlated. But yeah, there's white, brown, pink, red and blue noises. Just hop on YouTube and listen to some, see if any chill you out. Oh, and if you are wearing headphones, you can also sample some binaural beats which deliver slightly different frequencies to each ear. And that is to modulate the frequency of brainwave oscillations like this delta and theta and alpha and gamma we talked about. Does it work though? I know you want to know. According to the 2021 Frontiers in Psychology paper, personalized theta and beta binaural beats for brain entrainment and electroencephalographic analysis. Apparently no different mental conditions seemed to be achieved, they say. But this was a small study with only 20 volunteers, and the binaural beats were targeted to each individual. So there's this other study, 2023's binaural beats to entrain the A systematic review of the effects of binaural beat stimulation on brain oscillatory activity and the implications for psychological research and intervention. This one essentially said this is very interesting stuff, but the 14 studies on record for it are all really Different. We need to get our shit together if we want to know if this could work for people. And David echoes that. He told me that maybe don't listen to the idea that a certain Hertz of binaural beats is like the frequency of the universe, because it's really not true. But ye try it out, see what you like. And a lot of times these binaural beats have, like, funky music tracks behind it, he says, and you might just actually be liking the music, which is cool. Totally worth experimenting. Let me see. I'm looking for some. Gilly Nadal, Sarah with an H, Saldor, Mick Gurley all had questions. Gilly said, what is the connection between music and neurodivergence? Why do so many musicians have autism or adhd? Sarah with an H, says, my ADHD brain requires music almost all the time. Is there anything in the realm of stimming or in keeping brains focused that are prone to sort of boredom or wanting more stimulation?
- [75:19]
B
Yeah, it's a beautiful question. The one thing that I find really interesting about this, it might be a little bit irrelevant if you're looking at, like, the neuroscience of creativity. Older people, when they go through a phase of frontotemporal dementia, often go through a creative, really creative period, and it's often musical. And that probably has something to do with a little bit of reducing inhibition from the frontal lobes back to, like, inhibition onto the temporal lobes. And so that frees up the temporal lobes to be a little bit more deep, generative of melodies. So might manifest in earworms. Right. Like tunes that repeat in your head. But it could conceivably manifest in, like, generation of ideas, melodic ideas, especially if you have some training and sort of, like, know how to capture those. Or your brain is already practiced in that. So the specific answer to that question is, like, more generally, brains need a certain amount of noise to work on. There's a certain amount of noise that we need, and noise in terms of both sound and visual and other people talking and trying to distract you. And it's really different for different people. I think it's cool to tune into what is that right amount of noise that helps you do the thing you want to do?
- [76:43]
A
Yeah. I always wondered. We always joke about how Jarrett and I can hear electricity a lot. And we're like, is that. Do we have normal or abnormal brains? I'm gonna probably say abnormal, but maybe not everyone can hear that. And if your hearing is sensitive to the sound of someone chewing with their mouth open and it makes you want to eject Yourself into space. You may love our misophonia episode. In case you didn't know that there was a whole word and a study for that. We'll link that in the show notes. Many of you though, wanted to know about the aging brain. Specifically Ariel Calbury, First Time says, how does music affect the brain with focus of dementia? Okay, I thought this was a great question. Greg Lewis said after reading a New York Times article six months ago about how learning a new art might slow cognition losses for aging people, I decided to learn to play the piano at age 77. To encourage myself, I invited 30 plus friends to a recital three months in advance. I had a good time. The recital was fun. Is there any chance that I will keep more of my marbles?
- [77:43]
B
Yes, definitely. Definitely.
- [77:45]
A
That's so cool.
- [77:45]
B
Whenever I play the drums at my house and I'm like, if I'm learning a beat from a book, I'm always like, there should be drums in every nursing home. Because I feel like it's so good for my body. And I'm like, this has gotta be. Yeah. So there's a book, it's about a guy who's maybe 40 and he decides to learn the guitar for the first time. And he makes himself play. His goal is to play a show a year later.
- [78:08]
A
This book, side Note, is by psychologist and cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, and it's called Guitar Zero.
- [78:15]
B
And like that book, he goes in and interviews all these people, including, like famous people. But it's really beautiful. I think it's like, yeah, it's again, this idea that we tend to think that music, that you have to go to some fancy music school for music to be a part of your life. But I feel like it's really important, first of all, to not think about music in that way. Like, the way of what you're doing is you're learning in a completely different way than you learn, say, facts you're learning with your motor system. And when I mentioned drums before, it's like, that's great because it's fine to do piano or guitar, which uses just like fine motor skills. But if you can be using your four different limbs and just, you know, it doesn't matter. Once you can play drums, who cares? But the act of working with your large limbs to try to make them do something at a certain point in time relative to one another, I think that's gotta be really good for your full body cognition, for like, integrating all the parts of yourself.
- [79:21]
A
More tips? You might love our Salugenology episode with Julia Hotz. On why human beings need hobbies. We also have a fun ology episode with Katherine Price. And yes, that is a word. But I am in the trenches working on a menopause episode, which is why this episode came out so quickly, because the menopause episode is killing me. But it's gonna be great. But that episode, when it comes out, will scare you into some real bone building activities. We gotta help our bones, all of us banging on stuff is also what we need sometimes, because life is not always perfect. But Mariah Carey's pitch is. How about perfect pitch? Who's got it? What does it mean?
- [80:01]
B
So relative pitch is probably like the impressive thing. And when I have students that do have perfect pitch, I have to find ways to prevent them from using their perfect pitch in order to get them to be able to hear other things that people without perfect pitch can do naturally. So when I was mentioning before, I was playing like a little chord progression, I mentioned that's a one chord and the V chord and the four chord, whatever. They have these different feeling tones. Basically, in a really extreme, logical sense, if someone with perfect pitch heard me playing that, they would never have to figure out that such and such is the I chord. They could just be like, those notes are C and E and G and the V chord. They wouldn't have to hear it as functionally related to the I chord. But having perfect pitch is somehow confused in popular culture with being a good musician. And it is the case that the earlier you study music, the more likely you are to have perfect pitch. So you often have really good musicians who have perfect pitch, but it's probably not causal.
- [81:18]
A
Oh, wow. Okay. So first off, perfect pitch, it's actually called absolute pitch, and it means that you can hear a sound and identify the exact note. Relative pitch, however, is when you hear a note knowing what it is, and then you can identify the next note relative to it. Absolute pitch, much more rare. Ella Fitzgerald had it. Jimi Hendrix apparently tuned his guitar just by ear. That's very hard to do. From what I understand, Beethoven, Celine Dion, Stevie Wonder, Yo Yo Ma, Brian Wilson, and Mozart by age 7 had absolute pitch. Should you develop it over the summer as a party trick? Maybe if you're like five, because apparently it's one of those things you have to be gifted for and develop at a young age, or else your brain is like, I'm not doing that. I've moved on, so you gotta kinda start young. Also spread speaking a tonal language that relies on pitch variation to get different meanings of words, like dialects of Chinese or Vietnamese. That can also make your discernment of pitch much sharper. So can autism, some researchers think. And there are some studies going back decades that show study participants with autism demonstrated superior ability for single note identification. Who else tends to have better pitch? According to a 2013 paper, absolute pitch exhibits phenotypic and genetic overlap with synesthesia. In the Journal of Human Molecular Genetics, about a fifth of people with absolute pitch also experience synesthesia, where input of one sense like a sound, triggers a totally different sensory experience, like a color or a taste. So one person's bug is another's feature. Last listener question. Synesthesia. Let's talk about it in a real quick nutshell. Claire McManus. Karen Oskar. Madeline Stanton. Megan M. Mezzo. In the middle. Natalie. Synesthesia. Abby. Kelly Di Morgantini. Greg Lewis. Wife Fern. Claire McManisette. As a synesthete who experiences chromaesthesia, or musical synesthesia, seeing colors and shapes while hearing music, I'm curious what you think is happening in our brain. They've always thought of it as a way of seeing or interpreting sound waves. And I understand. I have a little bit of synesthesia, too. I understand that there's different parts of the brain are kind of talking to each other, that maybe not everyone has those kind of wires connecting.
- [83:51]
B
You have that too.
- [83:52]
A
I do have it for, like, different numbers and gears are different colors. And sometimes experiences will be different colors. And I feel like it's very fading a little bit as an adult. And maybe that's just because my brain is too consumed with my phone or something. It's not creating as much. But do you have any kind of synesthesia?
- [84:11]
B
No, I don't think I do. But I do have a student who's a really brilliant student. She's blind and she plays piano and composes music. And she has an incredible ear, by which I mean if I play a note, she doesn't just hear that one note, she hears all the upper resonances of it and has conscious access to them, which, you know, that's very unusual. And so she experiences the. Can't remember how much color is a big deal for her in hearing sound, but texture and smell and taste.
- [84:53]
A
Yeah.
- [84:53]
B
Go along with notes. So the other thing that's really interesting, like it doesn't matter what instrument is playing the note. So I'm just going to play here just one note. This is. And that note, it wouldn't matter if a different instrument was playing, Would still have that feeling tone. But if you play that, that was a C If I play a C an octave up, it ends up being a different. Yeah, a different synesthetic experience for her. Or an octave down. So it's not like all Cs have the same one. And then I've asked her some things. I remember this in this case was a D. And I think she said that this D combined with this B flat ends up being something like blueberries. Yeah, cereal. Cereal and blueberries. And then. But I was like, okay, what, so what happens? So if you play that, it ends up being like cereal with blueberries. And I was like, what? If you keep these two notes but you play this one instead, that changes it technically from a B flat major chord to a D minor chord. So a different chord, but you still have these notes. And then that ended up being something like blueberries and cream. There's some way in which it's still like similar ingredients, but it still changes. And these things are consistent for her from day to day, pretty much. So it's not really. She's not making them up. Her brain is somehow really using all of these sensory systems to pay attention to sound.
- [86:44]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [86:46]
B
And I mean, you would think that someone who's blind doesn't use their visual cortex, but the visual cortex is not really visual cortex, it's like spatial cortex. So people that are blind are using different senses to flesh out what's going on in space.
- [87:06]
C
That.
- [87:06]
B
Yes. So that's what echolocation does in other animals. It's even like what spiders do with their webs, which is a kind of new thing. There's Beth Mortimer is this scientist at Oxford that published a couple years ago about how orb weaving spiders tune their webs like guitar strings. Yeah, it's really brilliant. And sort of know where. Know what kind of animal is in their web and where it is based on what ends up being like, auditory perception.
- [87:38]
A
And the mole cricket, According to the 1970 paper the mechanism and Efficiency of Sound Production in Mole Crickets, this little cute little baby builds a double mouthed horn shaped burrow for singing. And it contains a bulb which probably tunes the horn to act as a resistive load to the vibrating wings. So what they do is they dig a burrow. Right. The entrance is in the shape of a trumpet. It's like if you mounted a bullhorn on your chimney, stuck your head into the fireplace and screamed, I'm single. But yes, back to beautifully crossed wires. I have a friend, Micah, who has no sense of smell, but he's a musician and when he's mixing music, he can tell when Something is too flat or too sharp because it tastes metallic to him. He's just. He has such a gift for that. But worst thing about the job, Worst thing about what you do.
- [88:42]
C
Any.
- [88:43]
A
Or a song that you cannot hear.
- [88:46]
B
I do have. I mean. Yeah, the earworms, you know, like. Yeah, there's. I don't know. I get to do whatever I want, but I. I'm not very good at grading papers or I'm not good at answering emails. I don't know. Everything is bad. Everything is bad.
- [89:03]
C
Everything is.
- [89:04]
B
But I don't, like. I don't blame that on the job. I think it's like, there are certain things I am not good at for the job.
- [89:10]
A
I think grading anything in an art space is probably.
- [89:13]
B
Yeah, but I don't. I purposely don't teach composition for that reason. I teach theory because theory is like. Did you spell the chord? Is the chord major or minor? Yeah, it's not like, why'd you do a major accord there? Maybe you could have done, you know, something else.
- [89:26]
A
It's more mathematical.
- [89:27]
C
Yeah.
- [89:28]
B
Yes, exactly.
- [89:29]
A
What about what you love about it?
- [89:32]
B
Is that the final question?
- [89:33]
A
Yeah, final question before I. Before I put you and Jared on the mic.
- [89:37]
B
Oh, yeah. So taking that example of the spider, like, the web ends up being this extension of not just the spider's body, but extension into space of your sensory apparatus. And by tuning into, you know, cognitively to, like, the vibrations, you can figure out what's going on around you. And there has to be resonance somewhere inside the spider to be able to detect those vibrations and then do a logical deduction on them through your system. And the spider doesn't know that it's doing it. So I think, like, yeah, the. The way general culture tends to see music is to imagine that it is something that's just invented by humans and we just like what we were raised listening to and that it's just hedonic pleasure. It's just like pleasure seeking and that it doesn't have any function. But I think of it much more like. Yeah, almost like the spider thing and going back to, like, parent, mother, infant communication. They're not separate beings. The music is like a thing that makes them a meta being. And if, like, the three of us all played music together right now, that makes us a kind of, like, meta being for a moment. Yeah. There's a scientist named Victoria Mueller, can't remember where he's from, but somewhere in Germany, and he studies brains of two people simultaneously with eeg. And so he studied it with people kissing and with them playing music together. And in both cases, what happens, what you see is if you look at the EEGs across two people's brains simultaneously, when they're doing something that coordinates them, you end up seeing that there's some parts of your brain, say, that are more coordinated with parts of my brain than they are with even other parts of your own brain.
- [91:46]
A
Oh, wow.
- [91:46]
B
So that's really this concept that you and I fuse when we're playing music, when we're talking, presumably when we're sharing ideas, there's sort of like a third being that is the combination of. Of the two of us.
- [91:58]
A
And you can enjoy the 2026 paper non linear coupling dynamics within and between brains during romantic kissing as compared to joint passive tasks. But yes, this phenomenon is called interbrain synchronization. And it's observed not only during music making, but also in playing computer or chess games, collaborating with a team, making decisions, and sucking face.
- [92:25]
B
I think music is more than just, you know, a pop song on the radio. It is somehow the language of connection between people and the things that you know that matter about that connection.
- [92:38]
A
I would love to explore making more music. And it's something that, for some reason is a real challenge for me. In college, I found, like, organic chemistry easier to understand and I was bad at organic chemistry, but my synth composition class was.
- [92:59]
B
You took a synth composition class? That's so cool.
- [93:01]
A
I mean, this is Santa Barbara City College. City College all the way. But it was really difficult for me and I would love for you to talk to Jarrett if you would, because you're both music makers. I love what you do.
- [93:15]
B
Thanks.
- [93:16]
A
Will you talk a little bit about creativity with the mother of Pod Parrot Sleeper? Okay. You're the best. So ask smart people not smart questions because listen, nobody knows everything. I didn't know a lot of this episode and so thank you for learning along with me. And also, if people love something, they love sharing it. And thank you very, very, very much to Dr. David Bashwinner for opening up his office on a Saturday morning to jam through all of our questions. An absolute delight. We love him. And for more on him and his work, see links in the show notes so you can find him and say hello. We are logies on Instagram and bluesky. I'm on both as A.L.I.E. ward. Ali has one L smallogies are our shorter kid friendly episodes available for free wherever you get podcasts. Just go on a podcast app and search for smologies S M O L O G I E S and tell your friends with kids or students that they exist. You can. Well, that they the people exist, but also that our episodes exist. You can join our Patreon to submit questions for the ologists ahead of time. Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com Aaron Talbert admins theologies podcast Facebook group Avileen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly A.R. dwyer does the website. Keeping us on the beat is scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth. Conducting our business is managing director Susan Hale. And taking my notes and making sweet music, our editors, Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Special thanks also to Joey, who lent their musical expertise to try to help my brain understand scales and chords. And of course to Jared Sleeper for being on the interview and for conducting the whole bonus interview that we are gonna put out this week on Friday talking about musical creativity, getting over creative blocks, derivations. It's a great conversation and I just got to sit on the couch and listen and pipe in here and there. So that'll be out on Friday. Also, he's editing this one with the help of Jake and Mercedes. As we are in a hotel on the very last night of our road trip. We're doing the home stretch from Phoenix back to LA today to get back to our gremlin doggy. And oh, Nick Thorburn creeped out the theme music very museumly. And if you stick around to the very end, you know I tell you a secret. And so we've been on the road for I think 10 or 10 or 11 days. We've done four interviews and one of the first nights we were at this great restaurant at Los Poblanos. It's in Albuquerque. Hello to Chris and Tatiana and Josh and Kiran that all work there, who are wonderful and lovely. But the chef, Chris, came out to say hello and asked what we were up to for the week. And I showed him my calendar and I was like, this is where we're gonna be. And I realized that I had three days blocked out that just said menopause. And I didn't realize until after I showed him that because I'm working on this menopause episode that is kind of killing me. It's gonna be so good. But there's, I think, five different experts. It's a two parter. We keep putting it off week after week because we're like, I'm gonna tweak more to it anyway. So that meant while being on the road I was gonna be writing it and working on it, didn't realize till much later that I just had three full days on the calendar blocked out too. I'm sure Chris thought I just experienced menopause. If only it were so easy. But no, we're writing about it. So I hope you like that when that comes out, it's gonna be a good one. Meanwhile, we've shifted this one up to come out earlier to buy me some more time and also because this interview with David was just amazing. So please enjoy Friday's bonus episode, hosted by Jared Sleeper, a musician and talking to David about creativity and how music is made and what happens in your brain. It's very free flowing and fun. Okay, that's coming out soon. All right. On the road back home. We're back. This is what they call classical music, isn't it?
- [97:27]
C
Yes.
- [97:28]
A
I could tell because there's no vocal. What's up, sports fans? I'm Rachel Demita here to tell you about my show, Courtside Club. If you love hoops and hot takes, then you're in the right place. Want to hear about Caitlin Clark's unstoppable rise in the wnba? How stars like Wemby and Luka Doncic are dominating the NBA? Or maybe you just want the tea on this week's most viral sports moments. Don't worry, we'll keep you updated on all of it. So grab your popcorn and come hang with us courtside. You can listen to Courtside Club wherever you get your podcasts. Ooey and Ah. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of Angie from roof repair to emergency plumbing and more. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well. Angie the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project@angie.com.