So at the end of my first semester, I responded to all the gushy emotions by making everyone in my lab a science-themed mix CD. Yes, I even nerdy enough to print out the tracklisting in a dot matrix font.

This post last month on “The Best Pop Science Song of All Time,” contains a couple of these gems, but for the weekend, I’ll leave you with a modern version of my mix CD culled from Youtube videos.

1. The Dandy Warhols – I am a Scientist

2. Blackalicious – Chemical Calisthenics

3. Freezepop – Science Genius Girl

4. The Aquabats – The Cat with Two Heads

5. The North Atlantic – Scientist Girl

6. Atom and his Package – Lord It’s Hard to be Happy When You’re Not Using the Metric System

7. Tom Lehrer – The Elements

“This might seem useful to some of you someday in a bizarre set of circumstances.”

8. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist

9. Robots in Disguise – She’s a Color Scientist

10. Oingo Boingo – Weird Science

11. The Ex Models – She Blinded Me with Science
I couldn’t find a online link for this song, but trust me when I say this noise cover of the proceeding Dolby hit is INTENSE.

12. Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me with Science

13. The Zanies – The Mad Scientist

This one is well worth the listen.

14. MC Hawking – Entropy

15. Ladytron – True Mathematics

16. Mirwais – Disco Science

17. Professor Pez – Rocket Science
Another song that I sadly could not locate online.

18. Rilo Kiley – Science vs. Romance

19. The Hacker – Scientist

Again, couldn’t find this song online, but here’s another from the same artist that serves a similar purpose.

I hope you enjoy listening to and watching these as much as I did reliving my science-music nerdery from long ago.

I’m just dropping a pointer toward this Bjork performance on Later with Jools Holland for a fun start to the weekend and for a heads up on her show in New York tonight. Bjork has been touring behind her scientifically-inspired album Biophilia for the past month, with stops at the New York Hall of Science and the Roseland Ballroom in New York City.

Tonight at the Roseland Ballroom, you have a chance to see a 24-piece Icelandic choir, instrumental Tesla coils, and Bjork, live and direct. If you miss tonight’s Biophilia performance, the last one is this Monday March 5th. Go to one of them for me, dear readers, since I’ll be laboring over my Master’s thesis on both of those dates.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article that referenced a study by John Sloboda that found people experienced emotional reactions to music when it contained appoggiaturas, a musical device whose definition seems to be as hotly debated as the science and rationale behind the article itself. The WSJ article describes an appoggiatura as “a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound.” Despite being a songwriter, I’m not a music theory buff.  So for a short auditory definition of the appoggiatura and a taste of the controversy surrounding its application to Adele, I’ll refer you to this piece from NPR entitled, “Another take on the ‘Appoggiatura.‘”

But the definition of the appoggiatura isn’t the only thing that is currently being debated. A number of articles have popped up recently protesting the reduction of tear-jerker songs to a simple formula. Of course, not everyone finds the same songs emotionally compelling, and as Isaac Schankler points out on NewMusicBox, the reasons for this can range from cultural to personal. Below is one quote I’d like to pull from his essay (though you should read the whole thing):

There’s one final piece of the puzzle missing. Experiments like Sloboda’s are effective when identifying structural features that are typical, that is, features that are commonly found in a large variety of musical examples. What they are not capable of is locating unusual features: that is, what makes a piece of music unique or special. But great songs, songs that we love, are by definition exceptional—there’s something about them that other songs don’t have. Otherwise every song with the same basic features would evoke the same exact reaction, which is clearly not the case.

In a study I covered on feeling chills in response to music, the researchers requested that the study participants select their own music that reliably gave them chills. Of course, the types of music and songs brought into the lab varied widely, as do the responses to Adele’s Someone Like You. Science can attempt to determine how a similar response (chills) occurs upon exposure to different stimuli (songs), and it can attempt to figure out why a common response (tears) is produced by one particular stimulus (an Adele song), but it will have a much harder time developing a formula that produces both sides of the equation reliably in all subjects (a formula for songs that produce chills or tears in everyone). We as humans are just too different from each other, and our individual reactions to pieces of music are informed by much more just than the formula and structure of them.

While scientific studies will probably never produce a formula for a song that elicits an emotional response in everyone who hears it, the beauty in studies like this is the “wondering why” coupled with the attempt to get a little closer to figuring it all out.

Besides, if science did come up with a proven formula to produce universal teary-eyed listening, the formula would be churned out so often that many people would become inoculated to its effects. The beauty of music lies in its unexpected twists and turns — the shape-shifting that is the basis of what Sloboda says exists in the appoggiaturas in Adele’s song. These constant and slight musical innovations is what will keep new songs constantly surprising us, and yes, bringing us to tears.

Images

“Cry Me a River” by Flickr user sk8geek under Creative Common licensing.

In order to keep up with the reflections theme of the season, here are a few of my favorite posts that I’ve shared since joining the SciAm blog network in July.

Please pay attention to the notes was my first post on Science with Moxie on research from the Kraus lab on musicians’ enhanced ability to hear speech in noise.

My gushy review of Bjork’s Biophilia album and app suite which got tweeted about by Oliver Sacks!

Research I saw at the 2011 Society for Neuroscience conference about the brain’s perception of words, pitch, and rhythm.

For Ada Lovelace Day, I wrote about my undergraduate research advisor and how she inspired me to pursue a research career.

I covered Guerilla Science’s first exciting stateside venture at the music festival, Escape2NY.

And I got up Eva Amsen’s interview on being a scientist and a musician.

For 2012, I’m looking forward to doing more interviews and profiles of scientists and musicians (email or tweet at me if you’d like to be interviewed), finding more interesting events and videos to share, and covering more new research on science, music, and everything in between. I’ve been honored with the opportunity to write for you, and I hope to do more and better things in this fresh new year.

So now that you’re started to move to that beat, what does science have to say about this? Daniel Cameron, a Ph.D. student at the University of Western Ontario who performed this research for his Master’s degree at Goldsmiths University of London, explained to me how his research relates to the question of how a beat seems to make us move. He started with the fact that people all over the world seem to universally move to the beat of music, whether in complex ways like dancing, or simple forms like clapping or tapping their feet. But how can you break this behavior down into something you can study scientifically?

Enter a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS. This technique uses an electromagnetic field to induce an electric current through a person’s skull that can activate a targeted area of the brain. In the case of a previous study by Wilson and Davey in 2002, TMS was used to stimulate the ankle muscle-controlling part of the motor cortex in the brain. So when the electric current from TMS activated the part of the motor cortex that controlled the ankle muscles, the subjects in the study tapped their feet involuntarily. While stimulating the motor cortex, it is possible to measure the motor evoked potential or MEP, which, put simply, serves as an electrical recording measuring how much a muscle is moving. In this Wilson and Davey study, playing music with a strong beat while stimulating the brains of the research subjects to move their ankles and thus their feet to the beat effected the MEP, or muscle response to the electrical stimulation of the TMS.

Cameron wanted to build on this link between the beat of music and ankle-tapping MEP in his study, so he selected a few different pieces to play for his subjects while recording their ankle-tap MEP and stimulating their brains to the beat via TMS. The simplest pieces played were just tones that had either a strong beat or a weak beat. The more complex pieces played were snippets from actual popular songs like the Beatles “A Day in the Life” and the Beach Boys “Wouldn’t it Be Nice.” Cameron took parts from the song with a strong beat and different parts of the same song with a weak beat in order to compare the ankle response to the pieces of music. He pulsed the TMS stimulation to the subjects’ brains in time to the beat of the songs or the beat of the tone sequences while measuring the MEP response of their resulting ankle-taps.

The preliminary results of this study found that the tone sequences with a strong beat invoked a greater ankle-tap MEP response than the tone sequences with a weak beat in three out of the four subjects. This might indicate that a strong beat in music creates a bigger “innate” muscle response to music, but there was a puzzling finding of the part of the study that involved snippets from songs. Even though the tone sequences with a strong beat produced a larger ankle-tap MEP response, the song snippets failed to create a similar significant response to the beat. Cameron explained that this lack of effect could be due to subject familiarity with the songs or other issues that arise when someone hears a complex musical stimulus like a piece of music. Future studies could try to determine what went wrong with the song stimulus by breaking the songs down into pieces of stimuli that more closely mirror the tone sequences. By classifying the differences between the songs and the tone sequences, we could gain a greater understanding of what drives that foot-tapping response to a crazy (or in Swahili, kichaa) beat.

Cameron et al. “Modulation of ankle-driving MEPs by metric Strength in tone sequences and music” Goldsmiths (University of London), 171.07/JJ9

Images:

“TMS” from University of Colorado Denver Department of Psychiatry.

Julia Groh of the Max Planck Institute Leipzig explored these questions during her poster session on the first day of the Society for Neuroscience conference. She explained that most studies on this topic compare the brain’s response to spoken speech to its response to singing. The flaw in those types of comparisons lies in the fact that there are many elements of musical song that can exist in varying degrees in speech. Is speaking in a rhythmic monotone more similar to singing or to speaking? Is varying the pitch of a sentence more like regular speaking or more like singing? How can the brain tell when something is being spoken versus when it is being sung?

One great example of the grey area between speech and song exists in Diana Deutsch’s “Sometimes behave so strangely.” Check out how when the phrase is repeated, it begins to sound like it is being sung (hat tip to this 2007 episode of Radiolab), in an effect that even 5th graders can perceive.

To address the issue of how the brain responds to voices in the grey area between speaking and singing, Groh designed a few different pieces of stimuli to play for the subjects of her study.

She took a short song and created three levels to test how the brain reacted differently to each:

1. Song versus speech that included words, pitch, and rhythm (A recording of the lyrics of the song being sung vs. a recording of the song’s lyrics spoken in a natural speaking pitch with the same musical rhythm, kind of like if you were to rap the words of a song like “Happy Birthday”)

2. Song versus speech that included pitch and rhythm but no words. (A recording of the song’s melody being hummed without words vs. a recording of the song being “hummed” in a natural speaking pitch with the same musical rhythm, kind of like rapping “Happy Birthday”, but without the words)

3. Song versus speech that included just rhythm (a recording of the song’s musical rhythm being “hummed” in a wordless monotone vs. a recording of the song being “hummed” or “spoken” without the musical rhythm in a wordless monotone, kind of like you were the worst rapper in the world because you used no words, never varied the tone of your voice, and had a rhythm [or colloquially, a "flow"] that was just like regular talking)

The idea behind making these different kinds of recordings of the same song was to separate the three elements of singing and speech from each other. This way Groh would be able to tell which particular element activated the subjects’ brains, either on its own or in combination with another element of sound. After creating all six of these recordings herself, she stuck her subjects in an fMRI brain scanner, played them the songs and speech at each level, and took a look at the effects of removing either words, pitch, or both from each recording. She suspected that the different types of song and speech recordings might cause different patterns of brain activity. Her suspicions were confirmed by results that showed different patterns of brain activation for spoken words than for words in song.

The two parts of the brain that showed differential activation were the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Groh found that the IPS was more activated when the subjects listened to the singing pitch of words than to the speaking pitch of words. In the IFG, the left side of the brain was more responsive to words when they were spoken rather than when they were sung, and more responsive to pitch changes in natural speech than to pitch changes in sung speech. The IFG on the right side of the brain reacted in just the opposite way. It was more responsive to sung words and to the pitch of a musical voice rather than spoken words and the pitch of a speaking voice. So in general, the IFG on the left side of the brain seemed to specialize in processing pitch in speech, while the IFG on the right side of the brain was more activated when processing pitch in music.

These findings align with previous studies that have suggested that structures on the left side of the brain deal with language processing while structures found on the right side of the brain deal with processing musical pitch. Even though Groh found these differences in the activation of the IFG and IPS, she still found that both speech and singing activated both brain regions. The difference here is in the degree of activation for each region. The fact that the left and right IFG have different degrees of activation to speech and song suggests that one side is more attuned to processing one type of auditory stimulus over the other. The study also suggested the IPS as a brain region that processes singing pitch better than speaking pitch. This brings us just a little bit closer to understanding what happens when your brain hears the words of a song and the sound of a sentence.

Poster Session, Saturday November 12, 2011 Society for Neuroscience conference: Groh et al. “Patterns in song and speech” Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 92.14/VV25

Images:

“Inferior Frontal Gyrus” from Wikimedia Commons.

All Dischord aside, I have seen some extremely interesting things at SfN11. I’m going to list a few of the presentations I’ve seen below and get back to more involved posts on the research later.

Groh et al. “Patterns in song and speech” Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 92.14/VV25

Cameron et al. “Modulation of ankle-driving MEPs by metric Strength in tone sequences and music” Goldsmiths (University of London), 171.07/JJ9

Dodel et al. “Emotional responses in music listening are associated with brain-scale functional connectivity modulations” Florida Atlantic University, 171.03/JJ5

Uhlig et al. “What aspects of music grab our attention more? An investigation of the effects of musical structure and performance asynchrony on the perception of leader-follower relations and quality during selective attention to a piano duet” Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 224.11

Esfahani et al. “Player with a single string – Preserved semantic musical memory in an amnesic professional cellist” Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 287.17/TT1

It’s no secret that Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite astrophysicists. So when I saw this morning that he was featured in the latest Symphony of Science video (along with Brian Cox and Carolyn Porco), I was overjoyed. But all the joys of symphonies aside, the real reason I’m posting this is to point you toward this piece Tyson did for NOVA scienceNOW explaining how autotune works. In a little less than seven minutes, we’re shown the history of autotune, how it works its magic (with a good explanation of pitch and sound sprinkled in), and end on Tyson’s singing corrected to a better note. I can’t imbed the video, so check it out here.

If you love Tyson as much as I do and want to know when he tweets things like this, follow him on twitter!

If you’re presenting something that you think would be good for me to feature here, make sure to shoot me an email at princesso at gmail.com. I’ll be at the conference from Saturday November 12 – Wednesday November 16th.

Carolyn McGettigan is a researcher at University College London who studies the neural mechanisms of speech and production. So it was only natural that she teamed up with UK Beatbox champion Reeps One to uncover the mysteries behind his skill at producing percussion sounds with his mouth. She created a short film for the “Brains on Film” contest that details the results of comparing the beatboxing brain scans of Reeps One to those of a novice. I thought the film was a great description of both the technique of fMRI and the results of the study. Check it out here, or above.

This week I returned to those past times of devoted attention to an album as foreground instead of experiencing it like a scented candle floating in the background. But Bjork’s Biophilia has more than just music and static liner notes to absorb. All the stunning visuals of Bjork’s Biophilia app suite accompanied the musical experience as I huddled under the covers cradling my iPod touch in the dark, impressed with these songs and the apps. This is not a music review blog and I’m not a real music critic, so perhaps then I am allowed to gush.

I. absolutely. love. this. album.

The first word that came to mind after taking in all the apps and their songs was “synesthesia,” the neurological condition that blends the separated senses. In the case of Biophilia, the experience of sound and music is effortlessly blended with bright and enchanting visuals through the medium of the iPad/iPhone. The project is born out of a love of music, wonder, sounds, and creativity in a way that’s innovative enough for a device conceived by the late Steve Jobs. You can definitely tell that Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia was a great inspiration for the design and conception of the album as an interactive visual entity.

There are little science and music nerd-friendly gems in many of the apps and song structures. Musicologist Nikki Dibben details Bjork’s songwriting rationale and methods in essays for each song. Tesla coils were used to play the arpreggiated bassline in the song Thunderbolt while Bjork croons the lyrics, “my romantic gene is dominant.”

In the song “Dark Matter” I wondered what the recent Nobel Laureate Perlmutter would think of Bjork singing about the largely unknown entity of dark matter in her equally mysterious self-created language.

A few times I actually found myself gasping out loud from the surprises. In the self-replicating melody Virus, the term “lovesick” is taken to a new level when the nuclei of the cells surrounding an infected cell spontaneously burst into a lipsticked singing chorus. Besides the cell nuclei chorus of pink lips, I was most taken with the animation for the song Hollow. The details in the animation rival those of XVIVO’s Inner Life of the Cell and accurately reflect most things I’ve painstakingly learned in upper-level and graduate cell biology courses. I found myself shouting “beads on a string!” at the nucleosomes and feeling like I was on a roller coaster ride, jumping through the nucleopore of the cell in order to follow a dancing major groove binding protein as it twirled around a strand of DNA to the beat of the song. You can even select from two types of info on the bottom of the screen as you watch the animation: one to display the descriptions of the cell biology visuals and the other to display the the beats per minute, time signature, and beat/measure of the song.

In many of the songs, Bjork took a personal topic that related to science to use as inspiration. I love her attempt to integrate different aspects of being human into one. Our vulnerability to infection at the whims of viruses and disease melds with our vulnerability to destruction at the forces of romantic love and attraction in the song Virus. In the song Moon, the cycles of the moon and its influence on the tides merge with our personal life cycles of failing and starting over again. The result of all the iPad programming, years of planning, and attention to detail is that you really get the full experience of the music and the rationale behind its conception and creation. Biophilia is a marriage of the rational and the emotional, of modern technology and art, and of music and innovation that works extremely well.

Six years ago, I walked down the hall of the Life Sciences Building on LSU’s campus, leaving a neuroscience professor’s office. I was wearing a tan TV on the Radio tee depicting a man playing a flute that gave rise to a wiggly “TVOTR” that I’d freshly procured from the band’s recent show in New Orleans. I was smiling because I was leaving my first meeting with Dr. Evanna Gleason, she’d accepted me into her lab, and she’d also said that she liked my shirt.

Dr. Gleason’s lab was my introduction to neuroscience research and laboratory life. Although growing up with a science professor for a mother meant that I had basically been born into a laboratory environment, my first real taste of a lab apart from that of my mother’s came from the Gleason Lab. In her lab, I learned how to get retinal neurons out of chick eyes and onto their new home on a Petri plate. I cut my teeth in neuroscience by working on an independent research project involving these cells. I even got to travel to a conference with the lab to present the portion of the research I’d worked on.

But the real benefits of working in the lab came not so much from the research and work component as it did from the relationships I formed with my labmates, the graduate students and postdocs in the biology department, and with Dr. Gleason herself. Gleason was always encouraging and supportive of my efforts and aspirations, providing another perspective on a career in research. As young undergraduate, it was sometimes a bit harder to take advice from a parent, so I benefited a lot from Gleason’s additional perspective on the career of a female science professor.

In addition to sharing my love of the band Yo la Tengo and having an adorable little house at which she occasionally had parties for the department, Gleason provided an excellent example and role model of a woman who managed to balance being a academic researcher and professor with a rich family and personal life. Seeing her successfully juggle so many roles in her life inspired me and showed me that it was possible to dedicate myself to both research and a personal life.

While at times I struggle with the fact that I may be trying to do too much, it was Gleason who first showed me the possibility of balancing many different roles with a research career. I thought of her when I started graduate school while continuing to play music with my band, and I thank her for her influence and guidance as I gear up to apply for Ph.D programs in neuroscience. Without that experience in her lab back in 2005, I don’t know if I would have continued in research, or discovered my love for neuroscience, or be making the decision to dedicate my life to its study by applying to Ph.D. programs this Fall. I’m honored to have the opportunity to write about her for Ada Lovelace Day 2011.

Saul Perlmutter is one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this morning. This news is exciting enough, but Perlmutter is no ordinary Nobel Laureate. I learned from Eva Amsen that Perlmutter is also a violinist and teaches a course at UC Berkeley titled Physics and Music. From the course description:

Does the Campanile sound out of tune to you? What does this have to do with our understanding of the Big Bang? And how would thinking about this help me to write a better English essay, defend an innocent person accused of murder, save the world from the next plague, or at least understand why my friend can’t carry a tune?

Physics and Music is a course designed to help students think about how to approach the world with the eyes, ears, and mind of a scientist. We will use the domain of music and sound to ask what we can learn about the nature of reality and the methods that we humans have developed to discover how the world works.

Glad to see a musician, educator, and scientist becoming a Nobel Laureate. Congratulations to Perlmuttter!

What first got you interested in science? In music?

I used to read a kids magazine when I was about 6 or 7. It was called Bamse, and was all about a bunch of anthropomorphic animals. (it’s a Swedish kids’ magazine, and I read the Dutch translation.) It had a huge impact on my life back then: all my pets were named after characters in the comics. I also vividly remember there being a one-page feature about DNA, showing the characters opening a huuuuge filing cabinet that contained all the information of our bodies, and strands of DNA flying out of the cabinet’s drawers. That was probably my first exposure to Biochemistry, and it just stuck with me.

Music came a little later. I liked listening to it, and played around with some home-made music instruments, but I didn’t seriously consider the idea of myself making music until I took my first after school music lessons at age ten. I started violin lessons the year after that.

Can you describe these homemade instruments? What instruments do you play today? Do you still play violin in a professional (or semi-professional) context today?

I vaguely remember, as a little kid, trying to make “guitars” out of cardboard boxes and rubber bands. No, they did not work. The instrument these kids made is very much like the toy instruments I used to make, but much bigger, and theirs is actually tuned and well thought out…

I mainly play violin these days, and currently play with the City of Cambridge Symphony Orchestra here in the UK. Before that I was in various other regional amateur and student orchestras in Canada and Holland. Classical orchestras are everywhere where science is done, so wherever I moved to I was able to bring my instrument along and find a place to play. Violin is the only instrument I play well, but I can also still play recorder if needed, and I’ve taught myself a tiny bit of piano and guitar. (I know where the notes are, I can find some basic chords, and work my way through simple pieces, but nothing more than that on those last two instruments!)

What role do science and music each play in your life?

I think science and music are two separate things to me. During my PhD, I absolutely could not live without my weekly orchestra rehearsals: I needed those few hours completely away from the bench, counting beats rather than cells. If there is a common ground, for me, it would be that both offer both short term and long term goals that I could work at to reach: getting data from an experiment, playing one piece well at a concert, working on my thesis, working on improving skills on violin. In the end, I didn’t like scientific research enough to make a career out of it, but I do still like to play violin, so I’m not sure what to make of that!

What type of research did you do for your Ph.D. project and how does that affect what you do today (scientifically, musically, life-affirmingly, etc.)?

I did my PhD in Biochemistry, but the project drifted more toward cell biology. I studied proteins that were involved in pigmentation pathways in mouse skin cells, and looked at how they affected cell shape, expression of other proteins, or the actual amount of pigment the cells produced. The project was incredibly frustrating because pigmentation is such a robust process that detecting any changes is extremely difficult. But that did make me more certain that I didn’t want to continue working in the lab and focus more on connecting scientists and communicating science.
Musically, my violin-playing improved a lot during the years I did my PhD, because that was something I had more control over. I could spend weeks troubleshooting experiments until finding the one parameter I had to change to get results, and often even that was completely serendipitous, like getting an exceptionally strong batch of antibody from the supplier by chance and suddenly seeing clear differences in protein levels that weren’t visible before. But practicing violin was more reliable: I could practice more, and improve! In the lab, on the other hand, I could go weeks without progress even though I worked super-hard.

You said you didn’t want to make a career out of science research, but now you blog about it. What do you do for a career now?

I’m Online Editor for the journal Development, and Community Manager for the Node, which is a website where developmental biologists can share news. It’s set up as a blog, but we invite any developmental biologist to join and write for it. I do a lot of the writing there myself as well. Before that I spent some time as freelance science writer, both during and after my PhD, and I’m really interested in the concept of “the scientific community” – how people interact with each other, both online and offline, and how the whole system works (or doesn’t…)

How’d you get into blogging?

In 2000 I did a four-month internship in Quebec City, and I hand-coded a website to update my friends and family back home. I made it so that each entry linked to the one before and after it, and there was a page with a list of all the entries, and a guestbook to respond. A few months after I returned from that trip, I discovered blog software, and just *had* to play around with this system that was exactly what I needed half a year earlier! Between then and now, I must have had about 5 or 6 different blogs. My first science-only blog lasted for about five years, from 2005 to 2010 (I consider it pretty much dead now), and I still have a blog at Nature Network since 2007, and then the Scientists and Musicians blog which I started specifically to keep track of my interviews with scientists and musicians. Oh, and I blog for work as well. That takes up most of my blogging energy these days…

Edit from Eva in the comments: The only thing that changed [from last year] is that I don’t do as much blogging for work anymore because we’ve attracted a lot of other talented writers for the Node in the mean time.

Thanks so much to Eva for doing this interview. You can also follow her on Twitter @easternblot. If you are involved in both science and music and want to be featured in my SciMuses series of interviews, shoot me an email!

Anyone who ever chances to ask me to recommend  a podcast or even something to listen to on a long drive always gets to hear a long monologue on my love for Radiolab. Tucked in between the parade of famous and fascinating scientists that Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich* bring onto the show on a regular basis and the wonder you feel infused into every second of random sound effects and deftly Jad-composed music, the show seems to fulfill a basic human desire to take big questions and try to find real answers, all the while reminding you that in many cases the journey to the answer is more than half the fun.

To celebrate, I want to share with you one of the program’s “shorts,” a twenty minute long story of a man called Bob Milne, a ragitme pianist whose uncanny ability to…well, I don’t want to completely spoil the program. But I will say that testing the validity of his strange ability involves a neuroscientist and a fMRI scanner. Listen below, or go to the Radiolab site to download for later.

*Lame claim to fame: I got to meet and talk to Robert Krulwich early this year at ScienceOnline 2011. Obviously it was a total fangirl moment.

I’m pleased to present the subject of the first Scientist-Musician series of interviews, Toaster Sunshine, who is a self-described immunologist, hacker, and musician. This guy is doing so many amazing things that it’s hard to not be inspired by his creativity in multiple areas. I’m honored to have him as the first interviewee.

First of all, where did you go to school and sort of research are you doing?

I did my undergrad at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor in Cell and Molecular Biology with an unpragmatic minor in German. I am still working on getting into grad school and am still awaiting word on many of my applications out in this current cycle. I now do research in adaptive immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Specifically, I am studying the dynamics of T- and B-cell proliferation in non-lymphatic organs in response to infection. This means I grind up a lot of organs and run them through a flow cytometer.

What got you interested in both science and music?

I was interested in music before I realized I was interested in science as more of a career than as school classes. In fact, at one point in high school while I was in both the school’s jazz band (upright bass) and a death metal band (bass guitar) I viewed college as a fallback career if the music I did after getting my degree didn’t work out. Heh.

I also played chamber music (and some industrial jazz) through college on cello, but have had to lay the cello aside due to how technically demanding it is to focus on science and making stuff. I also make computer music with Reason 4 and have amassed several hours of finished music. Some of it smashed classical instrumentation together with hip-hop/industrial beats while other bits are more like dubstep.

Do you have any additional projects outside the lab?

When I’m not in the lab, I’m usually working at the hackerspace I am helping to found in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We’re called All Hands Active and we maintain a common pool of tools and parts where anyone can build anything they want to. I hope it also becomes a start-up incubator.

In this space, I have built a 2-string slide electric guitar out of a glass bottle, wooden plank, copper wire, and drywall screws and am currently trying to build some flex sensors to be the variable resistors in an Atari Punk Circuit. This latter is a prototype for the suit of flex sensors I intend to build to feed through MIDI to make music based upon my movement.

Lots of the other hackers at All Hands Active make musical stuff as well. One of them recently made a tonal drum out of a propane tank (link to a video of it here!), others are building carbon fiber instruments, and there’s one guy who likes to tape piezos to old speakers and route it through an amp, then modulate the resulting feedback by tearing holes in the speaker cone with chopsticks.

Where do you see your multiple interests taking you career-wise? Is science still more of a “fall-back” career for you? Or do you plan to create a career out of a combination of all your interests?

You’ve asked a good question that I’m wrestling with right now. The biological engineering programs I applied to for this coming fall don’t seem to have worked out, so I’m currently trying to suss out the flaws in my plans and records. I really like immunology, it’s complex and chaotic and runs all over the place like pancake batter through a sieve. But at the same time, I really like mathematics and computers and building robots and things that go “blwtaga;gb!”. I want to merge all of these things together into 1 career of awesomeness, but as of yet I haven’t found a viable way forward that encompasses all of these things. Computational immunology seems like a possibility, but then again at the same time I’m currently trying to figure out if I’d rather go for founding a start-up company or whether to continue polishing myself on paper to get into grad school and then worry about possible entrepreneurship afterwards.

Thanks again to Toaster Sunshine for volunteering for the first interview of the Sci-Muse interview series. For more of his creative undertakings, you can check out his blog, Mad Scientist Jr. here. All Hands Active was recently featured on the Make Zine Blog, so check that out too!

If you’d like to participate in this interview series too, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

I ran across this extremely well-done video on the science of sound, frequencies, and pitch via the lovely people on my Twitter feed. This video is an excellent, fun, and engaging explanation of how sounds change from vibrations in the air to things our brains can perceive and interpret. Vi Hart seems to have made many other videos on mathematics and science, but of course this one is my favorite because of the relation to science and music!

CHILLS.

I’m one of the people who gets them when I listen to music I find really, really enjoyable. In fact, there are a whole range of emotions I can go through while listening to something I really like. Last Saturday night, I definitely was on the peak end of experiencing intense music-related emotions while watching my bandmate and favorite drummer, Jessica Caesar play during this song at The Dirty Little Heaters’ CD release show. Take a look:

So what is this whole “chills” thing about anyway? What makes listening to music so pleasurable and fun? One theory that a group of researchers decided to test was that music is so much fun for us to listen to because the pleasure we feel while listening correlates to a sort of physical emotional response.

The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal

In order to test this, they got twenty-six suckers experimental subjects to agree to be hooked up to this machine that takes measurements of all kinds of bodily responses that basically told the researchers how psyched the people were to be listening to different types of music. Here’s what that machine looked like:

These robotic-looking hand and torso machines measured the listeners’ heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, galvanic skin response (GSR), and blood volume pulse (BVP) amplitude. The music the subjects listened to was music they had picked out themselves that they really enjoyed, so much that it gave them the chills. As a control, the researchers selected music that the subjects rated beforehand as neutral or “boring” in order to compare the subjects’ physical response readings from that dull music to the chills-inducing music. The experiment took place as the subjects sat in a sound-proof room, listened to the music, the machines took their measurements, and the subjects pressed buttons on their robot-hands to indicate what they were feeling during each moment that the music played. The ratings ranged from “meh” to “pleasurable” to “whoa, I got chills.” But, of course, the ratings were on a more scientific and quantitative rating scale of 1-3 (1 =”neutral,” 2=”low pleasure,” 3 = “high pleasure,” and a fourth button = “chills” because, as you can see above, they only had a thumb to work with).

The results were pretty interesting. In all the physical markers stated above (i.e. heart rate, respiration) they saw significant differences in readings between the music the subjects found boring and the music they found pleasurable. The pleasurable music got a higher physiological response out of the subjects, while the boring music didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the markers of emotional arousal. This makes sense because my heart isn’t exactly pounding when I hear some boring elevator music in a department store.

They also found that the chills were reported at the same moments in the music that the subjects reported ratings of highest pleasure. In fact, 80% of the chills occurred at the highest moment of pleasure reported. Again, this makes a lot of sense to me because I don’t exactly get chills when I’m feeling that the music I’m listening to is good, but not great. I get chills when I can’t tear my attention away and a musical experience feels all encompassing and highly pleasurable, and it seems that was what the subjects in the study were feeling too.

The most interesting thing they found was that the chills the subjects reported matched right up with the peak readings from the physical markers of emotional arousal. Check it out on the graph below:

The different boxes show the different physical indicators of emotional arousal of which the machines took measurements. As you can see, they all peaked at the moment when the subjects reported experiencing chills. The two exceptions here are skin surface temperature and BVP amplitude, but these actually got LOWER instead of higher like the other factors.

So basically, the researchers came away from this study with a strong correlation between subjective emotional response and objective physical response to music. When we get chills or feel intense pleasure when listening to music we enjoy, there is an actual range of bodily responses that go along with that! This seems like common sense, but this is important scientifically because having an actual, quantitative measure of the changes our bodies go through when experiencing good music opens doors to scientists thinking about other questions like, “why is music so unique that it causes actual emotional and physical arousal?”

Usually emotional responses have a definite function, such as joy from eating good food serves to keep us alive, or bonding with friends keeps us happy and connected to our fellow humans. Feeling these emotions helps us by making sure we keep doing the things that are good for our survival and well-being. But music is one of the only things that makes us happy without having a clear beneficial function to our survival as human beings. I think that makes it pretty special and interesting, and that makes me content to consume and play it.

P.S. Another fun thing to do with the paper is to check out what music the initial pool of subjects picked for the study as their favorites (this link opens a doc file with the full list). As with any wide pool of people, the results range widely!

Salimpoor VN, Benovoy M, Longo G, Cooperstock JR, & Zatorre RJ (2009). The rewarding aspects of music listening are related to degree of emotional arousal. PloS one, 4 (10) PMID: 19834599

Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips standing with a giant brain that Guerilla Science placed at the Green Man festival.

Guerilla Science is a group that puts on science presentations at music festivals in the United Kingdom. Notably they’ve done the Glastonbury festival and the Secret Garden Party. But Escape2NY was the first event that Guerilla Science has done in the USA. I was able to speak with Zoe Cormier, one of the directors of Guerilla Science, who gave a lecture on music and the brain at Escape2NY.

Cormier’s enthusiasm for her lecture shone brightly throughout during the time we talked and it was great to speak to someone who was equally excited about music and the brain. She told me of how she came from studying zoology to being a science writer to working with Guerilla Science after being a long time fan of the energy and excitement of big music festivals like the Secret Garden Party. Her goal was to bring science to these big music festivals in a way that matches the “smorgasbord of cultural offerings” provided at the larger festivals in the UK. Guerilla Science aims to dazzle festival-goers who might otherwise think that science belongs in a sterile laboratory or in the reductionist confines of a classroom.

“[Science is] not really taught as something that people can carry with them for the rest of their lives,” Cormier elaborated. “For example, if you studied music [in school], you probably won’t become a professional musician but you’re certainly going to enjoy music and maybe even play it for the rest of your life. But science doesn’t seem to be taught that way.”

Cormier teaches people that science can be fascinating through a lecture on the evolution of music. In the lecture she details how modern advances in neuroscience that have shown how the brain processes and perceives music and explains how these advances give us insight on the unique effects that music has on the brain. One example she uses to dazzle the crowd is that music is unique in using many disparate regions of the brain, from the higher levels of cognitive activity like the prefrontal cortex to more primitive areas like the brainstem. Cormier also speaks on the “exquisite illusion” of musical perception: the fact that human brains can transfer sound vibrations into an enjoyable, entertaining experience. In the past, philosophers could only theorize about the nature of music, but in current times scientists have tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) that allow us to view the specific effects of music on the mind and brain.

One question that Cormier always asks the audience members is what kind of music monkeys enjoy. Inevitably, someone always replies, “jungle,” but the real answer to the question is silence. Previous studies have shown that while monkeys can appreciate their own brand of music , they seem to prefer silence to Mozart. Add this to the fact that certain people suffer from a condition called amusia in which they find music sounds as aggravating as the noise of clattering pots and pans, and you get the sense that there is something very special in the ability to appreciate music. The concept of amusia sounds very strange, but if you ponder it for a minute longer, it’s a lot stranger that most people are able to interpret the sound vibrations of music as anything other than just random noise. “If you can hear music, that’s your brain doing a marvelous trick for you,” Cormier said.

Escape2NY was Guerilla Science’s first American festival, but hopefully not the last. Cormier says that they’re looking to do more American festivals in the future, and I hope to get a chance to catch her fantastic lecture as well as all the other Guerilla Science presentations at some point in the near future.

One very unique thing about this new album is the theme of science, nature, technology, and music that surround each song. It’s also being released via a series of iPad/iPhone apps, the first of which opens with a narration by an illustrious voice of natural history, David Attenborough:

Bjork’s pulled out all the stops for this one, from designing the apps for each song to creating unique musical instruments for scientific-themed live shows to releasing her first music video for the album directed by Micheal Gondry.

Bjork states on her website, “Another way this project’s been different is that it started with a lot of research and a lot of reading books and a lot of figuring out where nature and music meet, and structures in nature and structures in music where they are similar, and then going in and writing the songs.”

I’ll be following each song and its accompanying app as it is released in advance of the album’s full release on September 27, but this weekend will definitely be spent playing around with the album’s apps.

If you’re like me, you follow World Science Festival on Twitter and constantly marvel at the new videos they add from prior festivals. One in particular sparked my interest as essential viewing for anyone interested in the intersection of neuroscience and music. It’s quite a long video at just over an hour and a half long, so the link above will take you to the full length version if you have the time for a leisurely weekend viewing. If you’re a bit more pressed for time, I’ve summarized the highlights of the program below with the above video broken up into five shorter sections.

But If you watch nothing else,watch the part from 74:00-98:23 of the longer video! It’s not featured in the series of short clips below and it’s the most fun part of the program. Bobby McFerrin and two other volunteers get hooked up to a galvinic skin response (GSR) machine to measure their reactions to different types of music. This is the same technology that the featured study used in my old post, Musical Emotions: Chills Edition. Go watch that part first, then if you have more time and interest come back and check out the clips below.

0:00 – 9:42 Musician Bobby McFerrin opens with vocal scatting.

Afterward we’re introduced to the other panelists consisting of  host John Schaefer and scientists Daniel Levitin, Jamshed Bharucha, and Lawrence Parsons.

14:19 – 20:50 A discussion of pitch, rhythm, and timbre. The panelists discuss the definitions of each and demonstrate them with the help of a cellist. Cognitive neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha describes his research on the types of tone patterns he’s found in sad and angry speech. I also have to admit that he completely earned my respect when he busts out a violin at 16:53 while discussing his research. The money quote: “It’s very important that you detect negative emotions because there are consequences.”

4:23 – 11:40 The most exciting part of the program! Bharucha describes his research on the brain’s tendency to “fill-in” notes that aren’t present in unfamiliar scales. The clips of the experiments are fascinating.

1:49 – 4:35 Bobby Mcferrin does a moving scale demo. This is also fantastic and a highlight of the program. He cites that no matter where he is, when he performs these actions “every audience gets that.”

98:20 – 105:45 An EPIC ending with all the participants jamming out together.

Expect some posts from me on some of the research outlined here soon!

The Kraus lab at Northwestern has spent time working on the effects of musical training on the brain. A few months prior, they published a study that showed that among aging and older people, musicians had a better ability to hear speech in a noisy, distracting environment. This ability to pick out speech in the face of many interfering noises or competing speech is a cognitive ability that tends to decline in most older people, so the fact that they found that musicians were better at it was promising evidence for the positive effects of musical training on age-related decline.

They build on that promising finding in a new paper where they explore the wider implications of ability to pick out speech in a noisy environment, or as they call it, speech-in-noise. The next step in their experimental process was to determine how this greater attentional ability to speech-in-noise translated to actual differences in the brains of musicians versus non-musicians.

In order to measure attention objectively, the Kraus lab recruited people who were willing to put on a strange-looking cap that measures the electricity of brain activity through the scalp.

The technique of measuring and recording electric activity through the scalp is called electroencephalography, or EEG for short. The experiments consisted of getting two groups of subjects, one with musical training and one without, and strapping those lovely caps onto their heads. Next, the subjects were placed in a room with two speakers on opposite sides. A voice reading a story was playing from the speaker on one side of the participants, and a different voice reading a different story was playing from the other speaker mounted on the opposite side of the room.  They were asked to listen to one story and not the other, and then given a short quiz on the story after the readings. While they listened to the story the EEG cap did its work recording their brain waves.

The two big questions that this study wanted to answer were 1) whether paying attention to one voice over the other would produce an increase in attention that they could measure using EEG 2) whether this measured increase in attention would be greater in musicians. In other words, can we measure how much attention these people are paying to a voice despite the noisy environment in which it exists? And can musicians pay better attention to this speech-in-noise than non-musicians?

The lab was looking closely at the attention networks of the brain while the people tried to focus on one voice over the other. They were specifically looking for how much the activation of attention centers in the brain varied over the eight minutes that the two competing voices played. They had a fancy name for how much the EEG recordings of the attention centers varied over time: response variation. Any time the variation in activation of attention centers is LOW, it seems that people are paying a greater amount of attention to one particular thing. So low variation in attention, or low response variation, is a good thing. It means that the subject’s brains are paying better attention!

So what did they find? People with musical training were better able to hear the speech-in-noise than people without musical training. Musicians also had a better recorded EEG auditory attention score than non-musicians. All this data was pretty much old news from the last paper the Kraus lab published on aging adults, but the really interesting stuff comes from more of the data from the EEG recordings.

Here in a figure from the paper, red indicates a greater amount of attention paid to the correct voice (the “attend” labeled in the graph) in the study. Notice that only musicians have red scores in the front of the brain, where the prefrontal cortex electrical activity is measured.

When looking at the data from all of the study participants, the lab saw no overall differences in brain response variation between musicians and non-musicians. It seemed, at least on the measurable brain activity level, that both groups were paying equal amounts of attention. But the one brain area that seemed to be “listening harder” in musicians was the prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex is often called the “CEO” of the brain. It’s responsible for higher judgements, planning, focusing attention, and control of social behavior. It’s the part of the brain that develops the most slowly throughout life, not maturing fully until age 25.  In non-musicians, there was no difference in prefrontal cortex EEG recordings between attention paid to the intended voice versus the unintended voice. But in musicians, the EEG of the prefrontal cortex showed it was paying better attention to the intended voice!

The most fascinating part of this study was that the magnitude of the effect correlated to how long the musicians had played music. People with more years of musical training had a prefrontal cortex that “paid better attention” than people who had less years of musical training. It seemed that people who had spent more time training their brains via musical study had prefrontal cortexes that were better at locking their attention into the intended voice.

This paper has some exciting implications. It’s the first paper to present direct evidence that musicians and non-musicians have different patterns of brain activation when paying selective attention to speech. It shows that the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is thought to be greatly responsible for attention and control, gets better at voice discrimination with more musical training. This could mean that music training at an age before the prefrontal cortex fully develops could potentially strengthen attentional capabilities, which might be helpful in the treatment of disorders like ADHD. As is often the case in science, more answers lead to more questions. Exactly how does musical training shape the attention centers of the brain? Is there an age at which musical training fails to cause this effect in the brain? I’m looking forward to reading more studies that attempt to get at these answers.

Strait DL, & Kraus N (2011). Can you hear me now? Musical training shapes functional brain networks for selective auditory attention and hearing speech in noise. Frontiers in psychology, 2 PMID: 21716636

I started this blog in 2009 on a bit of a whim and out a lot of admiration for the science blogosphere. I’d been reading science blogs while in college, and I kept reading science writing on the web through my time as an lab tech. I gave thought to contributing but always hesitated. It wasn’t until I tweeted this sentiment that a friend replied back, “If you’re even THINKING bout it, you’re better informed than the rest of us cretins – DO IT!!” That was just the push that I needed.

And so Science with Moxie (SwM) was born during my first semester of graduate school.  As a fledgling musician and long-time music lover, the nexus between neuroscience and music seemed like the perfect spot for my little blog. But I never imagined that small push of a friend would lead to writing for a scientific publication that I admire as much as this one.

Scientific American boasts a long history of superstar contributors. Standing in the shadows of giants like Albert Einstein made me feel a bit intimidated. I wondered if anyone else had felt unworthy or scared of writing for SciAm. Then I ran across Douglas Hofstadter’s essay on Martin Gardner.

I’ve been reading Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid since the beginning of the year. Its aim to connect mathematics, art, and music into a multi-layered study of humorous logical paradoxes and cognitive science left me mesmerized. Even though I’d known that the Hof (as my book club has affectionately dubbed him) was a former Scientific American columnist, I was not until I read his essay that I realized he felt much the same as I when starting out:

“Only a year or so later, Martin decided to stop writing his column in order to have more free time. Could someone be found to carry on the “Mathematical Games” spirit? I believe it was Martin himself who suggested to Scientific American’s editor and publisher, Dennis Flanagan and Gerard Piel, that I might be a plausible person to consider. When Flanagan and Piel approached me with this thought, I was both overwhelmed and frightened. I had in the meantime become a professor of computer science and was seriously engaged in artificial intelligence research. How could I continue to do my research and also do justice to the column that Martin Gardner had created, which by then had turned into an international institution?”

Hofstadter’s tribute to Gardner, a man whose column he’d read and admired for years, lead me to realize that if even the Hof can be “both overwhelmed and frightened” at the prospect of writing for SciAm, it might be okay if I feel that way too. Trepidation or intimidation should never be a barrier to effort, growth, and creativity.

This ties into what I love about both music and science: people can appreciate them on many levels despite the fact that some of those levels may seem intimidating or complicated. I was intimidated by playing music in a band at first since I knew very little music theory, was unsure of my skill or talent, and had never played with other people before. But I knew I loved live music, I loved creating, and I found some awesome people who were willing to take a chance on me. I feel that I’ve grown and learned so much in the few years I’ve been playing music in my band, Pink Flag.

I try to remember those old feelings of fear or inadequacy about my musical skills when I write about science, because I never want anyone to feel like science is only for a certain type of “smart” person or that it’s too difficult to understand and appreciate. I believe that human curiosity is as abundant and natural as the enjoyment of music, and I aim to write these notes on science to pique your curiosity, stimulate your wonder, and remind you that we all search for answers.

To give you an idea of the ways I’ve tried to do this in the past, below are a few of my posts:

What happens when you get chills when listening to music?
Ozzy Osbourne and the sequence of his rockstar genome
Can rock music boil an egg?
Double brainbows all the way!

What I want to do here in this new space is similar. SwM covers music, science, neuroscience, and the intersections between all three. Occasionally I post interviews or profiles of people that I call SciMuses: those who have interests in both science and music. Other times I might bring up topics related to science and art, culture, or politics. But I always want to keep SwM interesting and fun, and I invite every one of you to learn with me. I won’t let intimidation stop me, and neither should you!