October 3, 2025 • 25 mins
Bradley Jay fills in on NightSide
Have you ever asked yourself why you love music so much? What’s the science behind that? Why do different people like different types of music? Music has a way of emitting emotions in us that is sometimes unexplainable. Dr. Robert Zattore, a neuroscientist and expert of musical cognition and its brain mechanisms, will join us this evening to answer these questions and explain how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses.
Have you ever asked yourself why you love music so much? What’s the science behind that? Why do different people like different types of music? Music has a way of emitting emotions in us that is sometimes unexplainable. Dr. Robert Zattore, a neuroscientist and expert of musical cognition and its brain mechanisms, will join us this evening to answer these questions and explain how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ, Boston's news radio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Thank you el, It's Bradley Jay and for Dan on
Night Side, I'll tell you a little something about me
you don't know which is relevant to our next topic.
And guest. Right, when I got out of high school
early like at seventeen, I went to the Conquered Hospital
School for Operating Room Technicians and I became an OI
tech of scrub tech and some of the operations I
(00:28):
did included neurosurgery. I've actually participated a number of times
in brain surgery. It's weird to say, it is absolutely true,
and I was only eighteen nineteen maybe nineteen at the time.
And the reason I bring this up is sometimes during neurosurgery,
the patient is awake and they do a thing called mapping,
(00:53):
where the neurosurgeon will apply a mild electrical current to
various areas in the brain so he knows what's going
on where he's working and doesn't really move a part
of the brand that might be important, for example. And
sometimes that mild electrical current will stimulate music. People will
(01:13):
hear music. Sometimes it will be old factory and they'll
smell things, hear things including music in a different area,
and that kind of points to how important music is
to It's probably more important than we think that. There
might even be an evolutionary benefit to being into music.
(01:37):
There may be more to music than just going out
on Friday and drinking beer and seeing a band. It's
maybe way more important than we realize. And so we're
going to talk to a gentleman who has written a
book on the topic, names Robert Robert to Torre From
Perception to Pleasure, The Neuroscience of Music and Why We
(01:59):
Love It. I have also watched Robert's Ted Talk. I'm
very interested in this topic and I have a lot
of questions to answer. Ask excuse me, and get answered.
I don't know how long this will come. It may
not go a whole hour. We'll just go the stuff
I want to know and I want you to know
as well. We'll just see how long it takes. So
thank you for being with us. Robert.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Hello, Bradley.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It's good to hear your voice. I've heard it and
I saw you on that Ted Talk. I appreciate that.
Tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah, well, people often ask me, you know, how do
I get into this study of music from a neuroscience perspective.
And the reason actually goes right back to Boston where
you are is. I was a student at Boston University
back in the nineteen seventies, and I was always sort
(02:50):
of a nerdic kid and wanted to do science. But
you know, when I became an adolescent, like so many teenagers,
I was just, you know, completely blown away by music.
I started listening to music and I couldn't believe what
it did to me, what it did to my body,
what it did to my brain.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
And so you referred to the music you were listening
to at the time as mediocre rock and rock music.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yes, yeah, I was listening to you know, Iron Butterfly
and this kind of thing just not you know, very sophisticated.
And you know, one day, somehow I cut my hands
on a piece of on a record, you know, a
vinyl record of a piece by Bella Bartalk, Hungarian composer
(03:40):
from mid twentieth century. I had never even heard of
this guy. I had no idea what to expect, and
I put it on and I was just mesmriz. I
was just you know, I couldn't believe that such a
thing existed. So when I went to university to be
you I enrolled in PSI, yes, and I also enrolled
(04:02):
in music, and I actually did two degrees simultaneously. And
that was, you know, very formative because I realized that, well,
I learned a lot about music, but I also realized
that scientific approaches to complex things in the world, whether
it be other planets or you know, the music inside
our heads, is really a very powerful way to look
(04:25):
at things. So I decided, okay, I'm a better scientist
and I'm a musician, to be perfectly honest, and therefore
I embarked on really trying to understand, you know, what
is it about music?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Why?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Why does it even exist? You know, it's just a
pattern of sounds. Why do people you know, could go
crazy over it and pay a lot of money to
listen to it? And why has it existed, you know,
in human societies, way back into realistic times.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I know you have some thoughts on it, and I
am constructed some thoughts on it as well. We'll get
to all of that now. I'd like to I always
like to involve the folks listening, our friends out there
listening at six, one, seven, two, five, four thirty, and
I am of the belief that not only does music
psychically make you feel good, but can actually engage the
(05:18):
mind body connection and make you physically feel better as well.
And so for the audience, I don't like to I'm
sorry to call you an audience for my For you, folks,
is there a song that actually makes your you love
it so much, it makes your body feel better, you
feel more relaxed or fulfilled or something serene, excited, It
(05:42):
affects your actual body. I think maybe we all have that. Now,
let me ask you, Let me ask you some questions, sir.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yes, how much.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Of the pleasure we get from musical is for music
is cultural? And how much hardwired in? How much are
we born with and how much do we learn from
our culture and our serautics.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, so this is an excellent question. So basically, we're
born with the capacity to enjoy music. But just like
with language, right, you're born with the capacity to speak,
But if you grow up in China, you'll end up
speaking Chinese, and if you grow up in Indonesia, you'll
(06:28):
speak Indonesian and so forth. So the culture that you're
in determines the type of music that is going to
make sense to you. Because you're exposed to it, you know,
very early, even I would say perhaps you know, before
you're born, you can hear rhythms, you know, right through
(06:49):
your mother's belly. And then once you're born. You know,
people sing to babies. This is a very common thing.
Many moms and dads, you know, sing to babies. Do
you people you hear that music?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Do you think that people actually start to form their
musical taste even before they're born from what they hear
their parents listening to.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Maybe maybe slightly, there might be some you know, some
early traces that are laid down in the developing brain
of the fetus. Hearing developed somewhere around the seventh month
of gestation, something like that seventh rate, so it's fairly late,
but you know, you've got a month or so when
(07:33):
you can hear mostly the bass sounds because you know,
the amniotic fluid is it's an insulator, so you wouldn't
hear much, but you would hear bass sounds therefore rhythms.
So that's sort of interesting. But the majority is, you know,
something you learn once you're out in the world, and
(07:53):
so that that becomes like the grammar of your musical system.
You don't have to go to school for.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It, right, And I bet it baby, I mean a
baby before it's born maybe doesn't hear the music so much.
But if a mother goes to a concert and the
bass in the drum is really loud, and you know
how you can feel it in your body, I bet
you the belly kind of access up speaker and causes
waves in the amniotic fluid that the baby can actually feel,
(08:24):
even if the baby can't hear it.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no that I think that's been demonstrated. Also,
the mother's voice definitely is perceived. In fact, a newborn
infant will orient more to its mother's voice than to
another woman's voice, like just about from birth onwards, which
means that it has learned something about the quality of
(08:49):
the features of that voice, and some of those features
might be musical features, you know, the prosody of the voice,
the melody of the voice, the timber of the voice.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Have there been any experiments done to establish how much
is cultural and how much is wired in.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Well, like I said, it's it's not about assigning a percentage.
It's like one hundred percent hard wired and one hundred
percent cultural in the sense that if we didn't have
the hard wiring, we would we would not respond to music,
or we'd be incapable of responding to music.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
I guess which which really we respond to? Though? Is
all cultural, right, because exactly the time signatures in Indian music,
meaning from India, are way different and a lot of
times they don't doesn't resonate with Western listeners at all.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Correct, Yeah, correct. There are many many cultures that use
very complex timing structures. African music, Indian music, the music
of the Balkans, you know, in Eastern Europe, they use
very complex time signatures and complex rhythms, and the people
who grow up in those cultures really have no trouble
(09:58):
you know, out of seven eight or eleven eight measure,
whereas most Western musicians would have trouble with that unless
they're really skilled jazz musicians. Some jazz musicians can can
handle that. So this is all culturally learned and therefore
it's one hundred percent culture. And yet if we didn't
(10:20):
have the brain to support that capacity, you know, it
wouldn't happen. Therefore it's also one hundred percent brand.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Right. Oh, we'll continue with our guests Robert Zatori and
talk about the things addressed in his book, Perception of Pleasure,
The Neuroscience of Music and Why We Love It. In
a moment on WBZ, You're on night Side with Dan
Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio. It is Nightside with
Dan Ray. Bradley j for Dan, and we're with Robert
Zattori and his book is Perception to Pleasure, The Neuroscience
(10:49):
of Music and Why We Love It. I am curious, sir,
is there an evolutionary Do you notice an that maybe
evolutionarily our ability to appreciate music or has helped us,
has helped us get to the top of the food chain.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah, so that's a question that's hard to answer. So
because you know, we can't go back in time and
look at what was going on in ancient humans. But
what we can do is look at archaeology and what
we find is that humans were making complicated musical instruments
(11:33):
forty years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
What was the first instrument that was not a drum?
Was it a flute?
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Flutes have been found that are made out of the
bones of birds, for example, with very precisely drilled holes
to be able to play scales. And this is amazing
because the instruments that were found. Some of them, at
least some of them were found in China. Some of
them have been found in what is now Germany. And
(12:01):
during this time that part of Europe was under glaciers.
So you know, people living in these areas were not
exactly having an easy time of it, but they devoted
a lot of time and resources to making these instruments,
which would have been difficult to make. It must have
been therefore very important for them in some way. It
(12:21):
must have had some function that was essential. And I
think it's the same function that it plays today. Right,
we play music for every important event or a funeral.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Right. I have a theory I'll get to. But before
I do get to that, you mentioned that the holes
were precisely drilled. So they must have been drilled precisely
for a reason. And it must be that that humans
like these particular sounds of this note or this ratio
of this note to this note. Yes, somehow creates more
(12:57):
dopamine than and the listener than some other notes that
don't go together as well. Is there some magic combo
of or magic notes or magic combination of notes that
for some reason resonates with the human brain the human
body to create more dopemine than others.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, so I wouldn't say it's magic. I would say
it's physics. So tones that are related by their frequency
ratios are very commonly found across all human cultures. So
the octave, for example, anyone who plays music knows that
a tone that's an octave above another tone is twice
(13:43):
the frequency. If you talk about a perfect fifth, this
is you know, what I learned in my music theory
classes a perfect fifth, it's a ratio of three to
two and so on up the scale. These are very
simple ratios of frequency, and it's just the physics of sound.
They're present in sound in the environment. It's not it
(14:07):
isn't at all magic. It's really just the way that
objects vibrate. Now, having said that, what happens is across
different cultures you can pick different ratios. So different systems
in different parts of the world might use different musical
(14:28):
intervals different scales because they, for whatever reason they've decided, Okay,
I'm going to pick this more complex interrol and somewhere
else are going to pick a simpler interal. But there's
still a commonality across them. And there's also some constraints
on the way our brain works. We can't necessarily perceive
(14:52):
differences in treatuency that are really really really tiny. It's
just our brains are not built for that. Therefore, rock
and roll, well, the steps in a scale right are
a certain size, it could be a little smaller. Like
we were mentioning Indian music before, some of those ragas
have within an octave, they have you know, eighteen or
(15:14):
nineteen tones. We only have twelve in Western music. But
there's no musical system that has you know, eighty five
tones interoctave because the differences would be way too small
we couldn't perceive them. So there are there are a
lot of things that are in common across different musical systems,
and it seems like, you know, a lot of it
(15:34):
has to do with the way our brain is structured.
We are hearing system is structured.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
All right, I'm going to give you my theory on.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, sorry, just to just to mention the same Gohost
for rhythms, Like rhythms are very commonly ratios across all
kinds of different cultures.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Okay, here's my theory on how music may have have
helped us evolutionarily get to the top of the pile
in the animal kingdom. As we've mentioned, music that resonates
with our particular culture creates a dopamine which makes us
(16:17):
feel good. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter to messenger in the brain,
and it plays crucial functions in a number of ways.
And one of those ways is it's a motivation and reward.
And it seems to me that music could have been
used as a reward for completing a task or doing
(16:43):
along with a task that would make us want to
do that task something that might be otherwise unpleasant. It
might motivate us to, I don't know, build a home,
do things we wouldn't otherwise do, which would be evolution beneficial.
Does that makes sense?
Speaker 1 (17:04):
We sure it makes sense. So we've done a whole
lot of research on music and the reward system. In fact,
our laboratory was the one that discovered that dopamine is
released when you hear music that you really like. And
so that's a very powerful thing right there, because dopamine
is released with very important stimuli in the environment. If
(17:26):
you're hungry and you smell food, your brain will release
dopamine saying, oh, there's something really good out there, I
need to get it. And the same for music. Right,
So music already has that ability to engage the reward
system and to make people feel good, and that's a
way also to modulate people's moods. And every musician, if
(17:51):
you talk to them when they play music, if you
ask them, well, what are you doing, they often will say, well,
I'm trying to communicate a certain mood. I'm trying to
make people feel good, or maybe I'm trying to make
people feel sad, or maybe I'm, you know, trying to
make people feel angry if it's a I don't know,
a protest song. But all of these mood states and
emotional states, a lot of them have to do with
(18:13):
the dopamine system and reward So coming back to the
evolutionary scenario, it's really not impossible to think that if
you have a group of people playing music, they're going
to feel better, right, and they're going to feel better
about each other. There's going to be a social cohesion
that happens when they play music together, when they sing together,
(18:33):
when they dance together, when they clap their hands together.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Dopamine seems key to this whole thing, and it courage
to me to ask you the question, can you just
buy dopamine dopamine? Is it something that is produced synthetically,
and can you get a prescription for dopamine?
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Well, if you have Parkinson's, yes, your doctor will give
you a prescription for something called el dopo, which is
the precursor to dopamine.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
See, I didn't know if he's something you could synthesize.
Thank you for that. And you mentioned Parkinson's. Yeah, I
saw another dead dots on the same This is super
interesting on the same topic. Is there's a man with
Parkinson's and it showed a video and he walked in
a halting way, very unsteady to keep stopping, but when
music was played, he was able to dance completely smoothly.
(19:25):
I bet you have an explanation for that.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Yep, yep. So that goes back to dopamine. So Parkinson's
is a disorder where the dopamine neurons have largely died off.
There's still some left, but there's a huge reduction in
the transmission of dopamine in the brain. So that's why
they give you the drug. The right is to try
to help that. But because music releases dopamine naturally, when
(19:54):
a patient with Parkinson's, here's music, their dopamine system, what's
left of it is act and that allows the symptoms
to go away. And there's another link here, which is
between music and movement. So in a lot of our research,
we found that the motor parts of the brain areas
that are responsible for movement, and the auditory parts of
(20:17):
the brain areas responsible for sound, are strongly linked to
each other. They're connected to each other in a special way,
so that when you hear music, especially if it's rhythmic music,
your movements will be facilitated. This is why we dance.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Whenever people hear, you know, rhythmic music, people start dancing
just spontaneously. It doesn't happen to a visual like no
one dances to a silent movie or even to like speech. Right,
if you listen to a podcast, no one gets up
and starts dancing. But when people listen to music, their
(20:55):
motor system is suddenly jazzed up. So you know, this
has a lot of consequences.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Just for the record, everyone, I'm not known as a
great dancer. However, back in the day, I won a
contest contest doing the bump. Do you remember the bump.
I want a free drink doing the bump. I have
one final question for you, and that is is there
some let's say we define good music as that which
(21:25):
creates the most dopamine? Is there is there some music
that's simply better than other music when it comes to
dopamine creation? For example, does classical music create more dopamine
in general than say rock music or something else.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Now, well, it's not really about the style or the
genre of music. I would say it's more about the
structure of the music, how complex it is, which can
be it can be complex in any in any style,
and also about how well it's played, how well the
musician has communicated that complexity in the music. So, you know,
(22:11):
something that's played in a very boring way, it's just
not going to release as much soup. I mean as
a musician who knows how to how to turn a phrase,
how to you know prolong a certain cadence, a singer
who modulates her voice as she's singing to express some emotion,
(22:34):
all those features are going to be what is going
to make the music more more valuable in terms of
how your brain responds. If you hear music which is
very repetitive and very simple. That might be okay for
you know, kids to listen to because the kid's brain
does not yet developed, but it's really boring. No one wants,
(22:55):
no adult wants to hear that kind of music. And
even some pop music, you know, even people who like
pomp music, they get tired of it after a little while.
That's why you have the top forty list keeps rotating, right,
because the music is well, but some of it is.
But you know, if you go into music that's more complicated,
(23:15):
it could be consticle, it could be walk and roll,
it could be jazz, it could be you know, gospel,
it could be anything.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Right you need to get You may need to get
a different type of music to keep getting a dope,
i mean fixed. Robert Zetti, thank you so much for
being with us on w b Z. The book is
From Perception to Pleasure, The Neuroscience of Music and why
we love it. Thank you so much, sir.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Thank you Bradley. It was a pleasure, of.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Course, Bye bye. I'm gonna before we go to the break,
a little bit of an observation, and that is there
has to be more to it than the sound. Let's
take the Taylor Swift. There has to be the the
maybe the identity with the identifying with that luminary and
Bowie too. Bowie spoke to people who were outcasts, and
(24:06):
being associated and known to be associated with that must
add must make you feel good and included and probably
adds to the dope Iamine shot you get. You know,
that was so much fun talking about Halloween. And I
had to, you know, say goodbye to Wayne and a
couple and a couple other callers. I have time to,
(24:26):
uh to do that some more because it was so fun.
So Halloween's upon us. Actually, strangely, Christmas has already upon us.
Have you seen Christmas decorations yet?
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
My god. So we're gonna go back to the Halloween favorite.
Think of a great great Halloween movie. Your experiences a
kid and Halloween. Maybe you did some pranks or had
some done to you and Halloween candy? What did you
like and not like? Have you ever seen a ghost Halloween?
Somebody's asked me to put together a Halloween playlist. I
(24:58):
don't know what to do. I need your help. So
Halloween on w b Z
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ, Boston's news radio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Thank you el, It's Bradley Jay and for Dan on
Night Side, I'll tell you a little something about me
you don't know which is relevant to our next topic.
And guest. Right, when I got out of high school
early like at seventeen, I went to the Conquered Hospital
School for Operating Room Technicians and I became an OI
tech of scrub tech and some of the operations I
(00:28):
did included neurosurgery. I've actually participated a number of times
in brain surgery. It's weird to say, it is absolutely true,
and I was only eighteen nineteen maybe nineteen at the time.
And the reason I bring this up is sometimes during neurosurgery,
the patient is awake and they do a thing called mapping,
(00:53):
where the neurosurgeon will apply a mild electrical current to
various areas in the brain so he knows what's going
on where he's working and doesn't really move a part
of the brand that might be important, for example. And
sometimes that mild electrical current will stimulate music. People will
(01:13):
hear music. Sometimes it will be old factory and they'll
smell things, hear things including music in a different area,
and that kind of points to how important music is
to It's probably more important than we think that. There
might even be an evolutionary benefit to being into music.
(01:37):
There may be more to music than just going out
on Friday and drinking beer and seeing a band. It's
maybe way more important than we realize. And so we're
going to talk to a gentleman who has written a
book on the topic, names Robert Robert to Torre From
Perception to Pleasure, The Neuroscience of Music and Why We
(01:59):
Love It. I have also watched Robert's Ted Talk. I'm
very interested in this topic and I have a lot
of questions to answer. Ask excuse me, and get answered.
I don't know how long this will come. It may
not go a whole hour. We'll just go the stuff
I want to know and I want you to know
as well. We'll just see how long it takes. So
thank you for being with us. Robert.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Hello, Bradley.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It's good to hear your voice. I've heard it and
I saw you on that Ted Talk. I appreciate that.
Tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah, well, people often ask me, you know, how do
I get into this study of music from a neuroscience perspective.
And the reason actually goes right back to Boston where
you are is. I was a student at Boston University
back in the nineteen seventies, and I was always sort
(02:50):
of a nerdic kid and wanted to do science. But
you know, when I became an adolescent, like so many teenagers,
I was just, you know, completely blown away by music.
I started listening to music and I couldn't believe what
it did to me, what it did to my body,
what it did to my brain.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
And so you referred to the music you were listening
to at the time as mediocre rock and rock music.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yes, yeah, I was listening to you know, Iron Butterfly
and this kind of thing just not you know, very sophisticated.
And you know, one day, somehow I cut my hands
on a piece of on a record, you know, a
vinyl record of a piece by Bella Bartalk, Hungarian composer
(03:40):
from mid twentieth century. I had never even heard of
this guy. I had no idea what to expect, and
I put it on and I was just mesmriz. I
was just you know, I couldn't believe that such a
thing existed. So when I went to university to be
you I enrolled in PSI, yes, and I also enrolled
(04:02):
in music, and I actually did two degrees simultaneously. And
that was, you know, very formative because I realized that, well,
I learned a lot about music, but I also realized
that scientific approaches to complex things in the world, whether
it be other planets or you know, the music inside
our heads, is really a very powerful way to look
(04:25):
at things. So I decided, okay, I'm a better scientist
and I'm a musician, to be perfectly honest, and therefore
I embarked on really trying to understand, you know, what
is it about music?
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Why?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Why does it even exist? You know, it's just a
pattern of sounds. Why do people you know, could go
crazy over it and pay a lot of money to
listen to it? And why has it existed, you know,
in human societies, way back into realistic times.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I know you have some thoughts on it, and I
am constructed some thoughts on it as well. We'll get
to all of that now. I'd like to I always
like to involve the folks listening, our friends out there
listening at six, one, seven, two, five, four thirty, and
I am of the belief that not only does music
psychically make you feel good, but can actually engage the
(05:18):
mind body connection and make you physically feel better as well.
And so for the audience, I don't like to I'm
sorry to call you an audience for my For you, folks,
is there a song that actually makes your you love
it so much, it makes your body feel better, you
feel more relaxed or fulfilled or something serene, excited, It
(05:42):
affects your actual body. I think maybe we all have that. Now,
let me ask you, Let me ask you some questions, sir.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yes, how much.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Of the pleasure we get from musical is for music
is cultural? And how much hardwired in? How much are
we born with and how much do we learn from
our culture and our serautics.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, so this is an excellent question. So basically, we're
born with the capacity to enjoy music. But just like
with language, right, you're born with the capacity to speak,
But if you grow up in China, you'll end up
speaking Chinese, and if you grow up in Indonesia, you'll
(06:28):
speak Indonesian and so forth. So the culture that you're
in determines the type of music that is going to
make sense to you. Because you're exposed to it, you know,
very early, even I would say perhaps you know, before
you're born, you can hear rhythms, you know, right through
(06:49):
your mother's belly. And then once you're born. You know,
people sing to babies. This is a very common thing.
Many moms and dads, you know, sing to babies. Do
you people you hear that music?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Do you think that people actually start to form their
musical taste even before they're born from what they hear
their parents listening to.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Maybe maybe slightly, there might be some you know, some
early traces that are laid down in the developing brain
of the fetus. Hearing developed somewhere around the seventh month
of gestation, something like that seventh rate, so it's fairly late,
but you know, you've got a month or so when
(07:33):
you can hear mostly the bass sounds because you know,
the amniotic fluid is it's an insulator, so you wouldn't
hear much, but you would hear bass sounds therefore rhythms.
So that's sort of interesting. But the majority is, you know,
something you learn once you're out in the world, and
(07:53):
so that that becomes like the grammar of your musical system.
You don't have to go to school for.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It, right, And I bet it baby, I mean a
baby before it's born maybe doesn't hear the music so much.
But if a mother goes to a concert and the
bass in the drum is really loud, and you know
how you can feel it in your body, I bet
you the belly kind of access up speaker and causes
waves in the amniotic fluid that the baby can actually feel,
(08:24):
even if the baby can't hear it.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no that I think that's been demonstrated. Also,
the mother's voice definitely is perceived. In fact, a newborn
infant will orient more to its mother's voice than to
another woman's voice, like just about from birth onwards, which
means that it has learned something about the quality of
(08:49):
the features of that voice, and some of those features
might be musical features, you know, the prosody of the voice,
the melody of the voice, the timber of the voice.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Have there been any experiments done to establish how much
is cultural and how much is wired in.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Well, like I said, it's it's not about assigning a percentage.
It's like one hundred percent hard wired and one hundred
percent cultural in the sense that if we didn't have
the hard wiring, we would we would not respond to music,
or we'd be incapable of responding to music.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
I guess which which really we respond to? Though? Is
all cultural, right, because exactly the time signatures in Indian music,
meaning from India, are way different and a lot of
times they don't doesn't resonate with Western listeners at all.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Correct, Yeah, correct. There are many many cultures that use
very complex timing structures. African music, Indian music, the music
of the Balkans, you know, in Eastern Europe, they use
very complex time signatures and complex rhythms, and the people
who grow up in those cultures really have no trouble
(09:58):
you know, out of seven eight or eleven eight measure,
whereas most Western musicians would have trouble with that unless
they're really skilled jazz musicians. Some jazz musicians can can
handle that. So this is all culturally learned and therefore
it's one hundred percent culture. And yet if we didn't
(10:20):
have the brain to support that capacity, you know, it
wouldn't happen. Therefore it's also one hundred percent brand.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Right. Oh, we'll continue with our guests Robert Zatori and
talk about the things addressed in his book, Perception of Pleasure,
The Neuroscience of Music and Why We Love It. In
a moment on WBZ, You're on night Side with Dan
Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio. It is Nightside with
Dan Ray. Bradley j for Dan, and we're with Robert
Zattori and his book is Perception to Pleasure, The Neuroscience
(10:49):
of Music and Why We Love It. I am curious, sir,
is there an evolutionary Do you notice an that maybe
evolutionarily our ability to appreciate music or has helped us,
has helped us get to the top of the food chain.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yeah, so that's a question that's hard to answer. So
because you know, we can't go back in time and
look at what was going on in ancient humans. But
what we can do is look at archaeology and what
we find is that humans were making complicated musical instruments
(11:33):
forty years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
What was the first instrument that was not a drum?
Was it a flute?
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Flutes have been found that are made out of the
bones of birds, for example, with very precisely drilled holes
to be able to play scales. And this is amazing
because the instruments that were found. Some of them, at
least some of them were found in China. Some of
them have been found in what is now Germany. And
(12:01):
during this time that part of Europe was under glaciers.
So you know, people living in these areas were not
exactly having an easy time of it, but they devoted
a lot of time and resources to making these instruments,
which would have been difficult to make. It must have
been therefore very important for them in some way. It
(12:21):
must have had some function that was essential. And I
think it's the same function that it plays today. Right,
we play music for every important event or a funeral.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Right. I have a theory I'll get to. But before
I do get to that, you mentioned that the holes
were precisely drilled. So they must have been drilled precisely
for a reason. And it must be that that humans
like these particular sounds of this note or this ratio
of this note to this note. Yes, somehow creates more
(12:57):
dopamine than and the listener than some other notes that
don't go together as well. Is there some magic combo
of or magic notes or magic combination of notes that
for some reason resonates with the human brain the human
body to create more dopemine than others.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Yeah, so I wouldn't say it's magic. I would say
it's physics. So tones that are related by their frequency
ratios are very commonly found across all human cultures. So
the octave, for example, anyone who plays music knows that
a tone that's an octave above another tone is twice
(13:43):
the frequency. If you talk about a perfect fifth, this
is you know, what I learned in my music theory
classes a perfect fifth, it's a ratio of three to
two and so on up the scale. These are very
simple ratios of frequency, and it's just the physics of sound.
They're present in sound in the environment. It's not it
(14:07):
isn't at all magic. It's really just the way that
objects vibrate. Now, having said that, what happens is across
different cultures you can pick different ratios. So different systems
in different parts of the world might use different musical
(14:28):
intervals different scales because they, for whatever reason they've decided, Okay,
I'm going to pick this more complex interrol and somewhere
else are going to pick a simpler interal. But there's
still a commonality across them. And there's also some constraints
on the way our brain works. We can't necessarily perceive
(14:52):
differences in treatuency that are really really really tiny. It's
just our brains are not built for that. Therefore, rock
and roll, well, the steps in a scale right are
a certain size, it could be a little smaller. Like
we were mentioning Indian music before, some of those ragas
have within an octave, they have you know, eighteen or
(15:14):
nineteen tones. We only have twelve in Western music. But
there's no musical system that has you know, eighty five
tones interoctave because the differences would be way too small
we couldn't perceive them. So there are there are a
lot of things that are in common across different musical systems,
and it seems like, you know, a lot of it
(15:34):
has to do with the way our brain is structured.
We are hearing system is structured.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
All right, I'm going to give you my theory on.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, sorry, just to just to mention the same Gohost
for rhythms, Like rhythms are very commonly ratios across all
kinds of different cultures.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Okay, here's my theory on how music may have have
helped us evolutionarily get to the top of the pile
in the animal kingdom. As we've mentioned, music that resonates
with our particular culture creates a dopamine which makes us
(16:17):
feel good. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter to messenger in the brain,
and it plays crucial functions in a number of ways.
And one of those ways is it's a motivation and reward.
And it seems to me that music could have been
used as a reward for completing a task or doing
(16:43):
along with a task that would make us want to
do that task something that might be otherwise unpleasant. It
might motivate us to, I don't know, build a home,
do things we wouldn't otherwise do, which would be evolution beneficial.
Does that makes sense?
Speaker 1 (17:04):
We sure it makes sense. So we've done a whole
lot of research on music and the reward system. In fact,
our laboratory was the one that discovered that dopamine is
released when you hear music that you really like. And
so that's a very powerful thing right there, because dopamine
is released with very important stimuli in the environment. If
(17:26):
you're hungry and you smell food, your brain will release
dopamine saying, oh, there's something really good out there, I
need to get it. And the same for music. Right,
So music already has that ability to engage the reward
system and to make people feel good, and that's a
way also to modulate people's moods. And every musician, if
(17:51):
you talk to them when they play music, if you
ask them, well, what are you doing, they often will say, well,
I'm trying to communicate a certain mood. I'm trying to
make people feel good, or maybe I'm trying to make
people feel sad, or maybe I'm, you know, trying to
make people feel angry if it's a I don't know,
a protest song. But all of these mood states and
emotional states, a lot of them have to do with
(18:13):
the dopamine system and reward So coming back to the
evolutionary scenario, it's really not impossible to think that if
you have a group of people playing music, they're going
to feel better, right, and they're going to feel better
about each other. There's going to be a social cohesion
that happens when they play music together, when they sing together,
(18:33):
when they dance together, when they clap their hands together.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Dopamine seems key to this whole thing, and it courage
to me to ask you the question, can you just
buy dopamine dopamine? Is it something that is produced synthetically,
and can you get a prescription for dopamine?
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Well, if you have Parkinson's, yes, your doctor will give
you a prescription for something called el dopo, which is
the precursor to dopamine.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
See, I didn't know if he's something you could synthesize.
Thank you for that. And you mentioned Parkinson's. Yeah, I
saw another dead dots on the same This is super
interesting on the same topic. Is there's a man with
Parkinson's and it showed a video and he walked in
a halting way, very unsteady to keep stopping, but when
music was played, he was able to dance completely smoothly.
(19:25):
I bet you have an explanation for that.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Yep, yep. So that goes back to dopamine. So Parkinson's
is a disorder where the dopamine neurons have largely died off.
There's still some left, but there's a huge reduction in
the transmission of dopamine in the brain. So that's why
they give you the drug. The right is to try
to help that. But because music releases dopamine naturally, when
(19:54):
a patient with Parkinson's, here's music, their dopamine system, what's
left of it is act and that allows the symptoms
to go away. And there's another link here, which is
between music and movement. So in a lot of our research,
we found that the motor parts of the brain areas
that are responsible for movement, and the auditory parts of
(20:17):
the brain areas responsible for sound, are strongly linked to
each other. They're connected to each other in a special way,
so that when you hear music, especially if it's rhythmic music,
your movements will be facilitated. This is why we dance.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Whenever people hear, you know, rhythmic music, people start dancing
just spontaneously. It doesn't happen to a visual like no
one dances to a silent movie or even to like speech. Right,
if you listen to a podcast, no one gets up
and starts dancing. But when people listen to music, their
(20:55):
motor system is suddenly jazzed up. So you know, this
has a lot of consequences.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Just for the record, everyone, I'm not known as a
great dancer. However, back in the day, I won a
contest contest doing the bump. Do you remember the bump.
I want a free drink doing the bump. I have
one final question for you, and that is is there
some let's say we define good music as that which
(21:25):
creates the most dopamine? Is there is there some music
that's simply better than other music when it comes to
dopamine creation? For example, does classical music create more dopamine
in general than say rock music or something else.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Now, well, it's not really about the style or the
genre of music. I would say it's more about the
structure of the music, how complex it is, which can
be it can be complex in any in any style,
and also about how well it's played, how well the
musician has communicated that complexity in the music. So, you know,
(22:11):
something that's played in a very boring way, it's just
not going to release as much soup. I mean as
a musician who knows how to how to turn a phrase,
how to you know prolong a certain cadence, a singer
who modulates her voice as she's singing to express some emotion,
(22:34):
all those features are going to be what is going
to make the music more more valuable in terms of
how your brain responds. If you hear music which is
very repetitive and very simple. That might be okay for
you know, kids to listen to because the kid's brain
does not yet developed, but it's really boring. No one wants,
(22:55):
no adult wants to hear that kind of music. And
even some pop music, you know, even people who like
pomp music, they get tired of it after a little while.
That's why you have the top forty list keeps rotating, right,
because the music is well, but some of it is.
But you know, if you go into music that's more complicated,
(23:15):
it could be consticle, it could be walk and roll,
it could be jazz, it could be you know, gospel,
it could be anything.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Right you need to get You may need to get
a different type of music to keep getting a dope,
i mean fixed. Robert Zetti, thank you so much for
being with us on w b Z. The book is
From Perception to Pleasure, The Neuroscience of Music and why
we love it. Thank you so much, sir.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Thank you Bradley. It was a pleasure, of.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Course, Bye bye. I'm gonna before we go to the break,
a little bit of an observation, and that is there
has to be more to it than the sound. Let's
take the Taylor Swift. There has to be the the
maybe the identity with the identifying with that luminary and
Bowie too. Bowie spoke to people who were outcasts, and
(24:06):
being associated and known to be associated with that must
add must make you feel good and included and probably
adds to the dope Iamine shot you get. You know,
that was so much fun talking about Halloween. And I
had to, you know, say goodbye to Wayne and a
couple and a couple other callers. I have time to,
(24:26):
uh to do that some more because it was so fun.
So Halloween's upon us. Actually, strangely, Christmas has already upon us.
Have you seen Christmas decorations yet?
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
My god. So we're gonna go back to the Halloween favorite.
Think of a great great Halloween movie. Your experiences a
kid and Halloween. Maybe you did some pranks or had
some done to you and Halloween candy? What did you
like and not like? Have you ever seen a ghost Halloween?
Somebody's asked me to put together a Halloween playlist. I
(24:58):
don't know what to do. I need your help. So
Halloween on w b Z
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