Interview with Dr. Daniel J. Levitin, award-winning neuroscientist, musician, and best-selling author.
Zan Boag: I’d like to start with one of your books, This Is Your Brain on Music, in which you describe music as ‘organised sound’. When we hear a sound, what is the brain responding to? And how does the brain turn what it receives into something recognisable?
Dr. Daniel J. Levitin: In writing a book about music and the brain, and being somewhat philosophically inclined, I thought I had to define my terms. I define the brain and I define music, but defining music turned out to be difficult. In the undergraduate music program I was in at Stanford, two-thirds of the faculty thought that anything written after 1620 wasn’t real music. They would not call it music, teach it, or engage with it.
So, it got me thinking, what is music? I went down a rabbit hole trying to sort through that. I finally settled on the definition offered by the composer Edgard Varèse, which is that music is organised sound. What I like about that is that it transforms the categorisation into a matter of intent. I think in many things, intent matters. If I’m holding the door open for somebody and it slams on their face and breaks their nose – if my intent was to help them and not to hurt them, it’s not just legally different, but morally different.
At the beginning of an inquiry, I want to cast a wide net. I don’t want to miss something because of some cultural or intellectual bias. It was through that I discovered all kinds of music I didn’t know about. And that’s why I ended up with that definition.
So then the question is, what happens in the brain when we hear a sound? The brain didn’t really evolve according to a plan or a design. It’s a bunch of special purpose circuits. My former lab mates, Tooby and Cosmides, compared the brain to a Swiss army knife. Each thing is there for a particular reason. Some of them look very similar, but they serve different purposes. Show a corkscrew to somebody who’s never seen a cork – what are they supposed to make of that? The brain has specialised processing units that can distinguish categories of sounds and effortlessly identify human-made sounds. There are always fuzzy boundaries, as Dominic Massaro from UC Santa Cruz would have said.
The generalisation is that laughs and cries and whimpers and coughs and sneezes and groans and grunts and speech are recognised as human-made. And if we’re singing, it’s recognised as human-made. We distinguish that from animal sounds, environmental sounds, industrial sounds, with separate processing areas of the brain.
One of the interesting things about the evolution of the auditory system is that it’s connected directly to movement centres in the brain, and that’s what causes the startle response. So, if you hear a sudden loud sound, you’re going to jump. You can’t stop yourself. That’s hardwired in. The idea is that when a sound comes in, your brain’s primary mission is to predict what’s going to happen next in the world and whether that’s going to be dangerous for you or good for you or neutral.
In very short order, a sound comes in and your brain is either encoding it as safe or unsafe. And then, if it’s safe, is it a human sound? Is it music? Is it something that somebody thinks is music, but I don’t? Even if you don’t care for it, if you listen to the music of the Cameroon Pygmies or throat singing, it doesn’t sound like your kind of music, but you still recognise that somebody’s trying to make music.
Your work shows that music activates the brain’s reward system. But this depends on the listener finding the music pleasurable – is that right? And could you explain how that works?
The idea is that the brain’s pleasure centre is activated by music that we find pleasurable. The neurochemical system that involves dopamine and endogenous opioids – the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental region of the limbic system – gets invoked when the music is pleasurable. It’s not that the music goes right there, but that network is called upon, as it were, if you find the music pleasurable, giving you a sense of reward and motivation to hear more of it.
And that makes sense. You don’t get a reward when you’re hungry from eating a food that disgusts you. In comedies, the classic ‘spit take’ is somebody takes a drink or something and tastes different than they thought and they end up spitting it out. Music works the same way. The limbic system wants what it likes. It’s all a continuum: there’s music that you really like, there’s music that you’re indifferent about, there’s music that you can’t stand. And when it’s music you dislike, that triggers the fear response and the fight-or-flight response.
There’s another type of music though that elicits an emotional response that seems counterintuitive: when you listen to sad music, prolactin is released – you mentioned this in one of your talks that this is the soothing tranquillising hormone that’s released between a mother and an infant when she’s nursing. Why can sad music be comforting, even healing, in certain situations?
We’re just hand-waving here because we don’t really know. I don’t know how you would actually study it other than to ask people what’s going on. And when you ask them, many will say, “When I’m feeling sad, I’m feeling like the world doesn’t understand me. And if I put on happy music, that’s just a bunch of people having a good time and they don’t relate to my mood. If I put on sad music, I’m not alone in my sadness. And so I find comfort in that.” And from that comfort can come pleasure – like when you’re sick and somebody comes by who loves you and puts their hand on your forehead. You still feel sick, but the recognition of your condition is comforting.
We’re constantly surrounded by sound, much of which we don’t choose. What determines whether we attend to it or ignore it?
We attend to what grabs our attention. Certainly somebody yelling “fire” or a siren or an animal distress call, that’s going to get your attention. If you’re all riled up, something that sounds particularly soothing like a babbling brook or a Bach lute suite, that will grab your attention. I think we have a system of filters, and these have been easier to study in language than in music.
But the idea of an attentional filter goes back to Donald Broadbent and Anne Treisman and others. The concept first got scientific scrutiny in the 1950s.
The idea began with what Colin Cherry called the “cocktail party phenomenon”. How is it you can be in a crowded room with a bunch of conversations going on and you can pay attention to the person that’s in front of you, tune out all that cacophony – and yet if somebody says your name from the other side of the room, you hear it? That’s the attentional filter at work. At some subliminal level, your brain is keeping track of the input and it’s deciding what will percolate up to the front of consciousness.
And I think it’s the same with music. We don’t understand the rules for what music grabs you as we do with language, but it either grabs you or it doesn’t. Familiarity helps, and particularly if it’s something you like. So if you’re a big fan of Adele or of Frank Sinatra or whoever it is, and you hear their voice and recognise it as theirs distinctively, and it’s a song you haven’t heard before, the familiarity of their voice, not the familiarity of the notes and the chords, that still gets it through.
Now, how does the brain turn what it receives into something we recognise? It turns it into something we recognise by an initial categorisation. Is it safe or is it unsafe? Is it human made? Is it not human made? And I think the deeper question is how do we recognise that something is music? And we don’t always. My parents didn’t think the Beatles were music at all, they were adamant about it. For a while I didn’t think that hip-hop was music, but I’ve come around.
So then the next thing that happens at a deeper level is do you recognise any of the patterns in it? Jazz players are always quoting other songs in their solos. Are there tropes that you recognise, like the 12-bar blues, the 16-bar blues. Even at a subliminal level, you may not be able to say, “Oh, well, that’s a 12-bar blues,” but you recognise it as something in common, “family resemblance” as Wittgenstein would say, with other things that you liked. That family resemblance puts it in a preference space and cognitive space of: What is this? What is it like? I remember when Amy Mann released her first solo record, I thought, here’s somebody, I’ve never heard anything that sounds like this, but it sounds like she’s listened to a lot of the same music I listened to growing up. And I love that.
I wonder if familiarity is, in a way, a tribal phenomenon. So, if we recognise the sound, it’s familiar to us and we identify with it in some way. We’re going to have a more positive response to it. You were saying earlier that your parents didn’t regard the Beatles as music. This was a new sound to them, and they didn’t identify with the Beatles tribe. I wonder if that’s the same with jazz or hip-hop or classical music, if it’s not something that forms part of your identity, perhaps you reject it in a way.
It’s a fair point. I think the tribal certainly has a big part of it among teenagers. Teenagers are forming their identity – you can bet that a 13-year-old is going to be very careful about what they wear and how they cut their hair and it’s going to be very intentional, and they’ll go through a few fumbles and get teased along the way. But clothing, makeup, hair, and the music you listen to all play a role. We’ve surveyed tens of thousands of people who said, “in my high school, this was the music our group listened to, my friends, and we would never listen to that music over there”.
So there is a tribal aspect, but it’s also a very personal aspect. I don’t feel at my age that I’m part of a musical tribe anymore. I have my preferences, but I wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that I liked something and think that maybe you would think I was uncool. I wouldn’t try to say I like something in order to impress you.
I listened to something in which you were talking about early humans. And you were saying that the systems involved in music are older than those for language. But you said that oxytocin played a role in ancient history in caveman days. That we would sing around the fire to ward off predators or an angry neighbouring tribe, and became bonded to one another. I wonder how closely related that idea of tribalism with music is today to the ancient part of us?
We certainly see the vestiges of this at political rallies, at sporting events. There’s almost always music, and it’s very particular pieces of music. An NFL or college football team is not going to play their rivals’ fight song in their pep band. It has been shown that when we listen to music as a group, provided it’s music we like, it does release oxytocin, this hormone that’s involved in social salience and bonding, and people feel more bonded together after listening in a group.
My friend Victor Wooten says that the amazing difference between a concert and a sporting event is that at the sporting event half the people there want half of the people they’re watching to fail. And moreover, at sporting events or political rallies, you might notice if somebody’s dressed shabbily or if they’re dressed fancy and you might start thinking, “how much money do they have?” and “what’s their political view?”. Nobody cares about that at a concert. Nobody cares what colour you are or who you voted for.
You said something about how brains synchronise, that regions of the brain are literally on the same wavelength when people listen to the same music. And they don’t even need to be in the same room together. But when they are in the same room, say in a concert, not only are their brain waves synchronised, but people experience an exchange of oxytocin, a hormone that binds us together. Perhaps this goes a long way to explaining why concerts are so popular.
I think so. They’re popular for the social function. But also because at a concert, because it’s live, you never know exactly what’s going to happen. There’s a certain amount of excitement there. Are they going to make it? Is it going to fall apart? Are they going to do something different? Bob Dylan famously changes words to some of his songs over the years. So a real Dylan fan wants to hear how he’s approaching a lyric now as opposed to before.
I always thought the excitement of seeing the Rolling Stones was that the rhythm section to me as a metaphor feels like a freight train that’s about to jump the rails. It’s wobbly, the tracks are not smooth and straight at any point. There’s going to be this great disaster and it’ll hop the rail. And they never quite do it, but it always feels like they’re on the verge of doing it.
And it suggests that in treaty negotiations or high stakes things like that, that it might be a good idea to have the opposing sides listen to some music before they sit down at the bargaining table.
It’s not a bad idea. I suppose you have to make sure that it’s the right type of music though, that they’ll both respond positively to.
Exactly, right. Didn’t Beethoven compose music for the Treaty of Versailles?
You’ve done a lot of work on the health benefits of music. You’ve studied how rhythm can help restore movement in Parkinson’s patients. You wanted to measure the effect of music on them. So you put them in a brain scanner and the only thing you told them was to stay still or it won’t work. And you found that parts of the brain that were related to snapping their fingers or tapping their feet were activated even though they weren’t moving at all. Is this part of the reason why it has a positive effect on, say, people with Parkinson’s?
Yes. There are entire populations of millions of neurons that synchronise with the tempo, with the beat, whether you’re a musician or not, and whether you’re aware of it or not. And in Parkinson’s, particularly in instances where they’ve lost the ability to walk, they freeze or they can’t get started, what’s happened is degradation of the basal ganglia and regions of the brain that help govern these movements. Degradations there mean that their capacity to help you move is reduced. And so the music that’s the tempo of your walking speed activates healthy neurons in other parts of the brain and the brain realises, because it’s a flexible Swiss Army knife, that it’s got this external clock now internalised in the brain and it figures out how to martial movements to synchronise with it. It does that for free – movement and sound are quite tightly linked in the brain.
So Parkinson’s patients who otherwise couldn’t walk, you put on music with the right tempo and in five or six seconds, the brain synchronises and they start walking. And through training that way for a couple of weeks, they can get to the point where they don’t even need the music anymore. They’ve built up new neural capacity and alternative neural connections that use other parts of the brain. The idea is that the brain is so massively redundant that part of it can go offline and if you’re lucky the brain will figure out how to bypass it. There’s bypassing the brain and then there’s actively doing something to have a particular effect – people can use music to regulate their mood or concentration.
Is this something we do intuitively, or can we actively listen to certain types of music to regulate our mood and to help us, whether we’re feeling bad or whether we’re just in our everyday life to get more out of life?
We do self-regulate already. Most of us know that if you’re having trouble getting through your exercise workout, music might help and there’s a certain kind of music that has helped you in the past, or music to calm you after an argument or to help wake you up in the morning, music to motivate you to do various things, music to inspire you. Most of us have had the experience in our lives that music has changed our emotions. Some of us just are a little more intentional about how we use it. I have a list of songs that if I’m in a bad mood, I know that they’ll turn me around.
What is it that you think causes it to turn around? Is it some link to it having worked in the past or is it some link to a memory of some sort that helps you or is it the sound of the music itself?
All of the above. There’s no one thing. But these are songs that work because they have worked for me in the past. But they don’t always work – I can’t hear my favourite song five times in a row and have it still be effective.
One of the things that stood out for me was you spoke about, and this is with having children myself, it’s something that has been important for me, for them to learn to play an instrument. I didn’t have a specific reason for it other than I thought it was important, but you mentioned that learning to play an instrument or learning to sing can help strengthen the connection between the left side of the brain and the right side, and that this allows you to integrate or logical kinds of thought with the more exploratory, artistic kinds of thought, and that it actually enables better problem-solving abilities. Can you explain a little bit about how this works?
Music activates both sides of the brain and not just one. In fact, it activates pretty much every area of the brain we know about. Not all at once and not all with the same music, but different kinds of music in different situations will eventually activate all these different regions. The whole left-right brain story has been over-exaggerated in the literature, but there are differences between the hemispheres. Because music listening is bilateral, you’re strengthening the connections and the ability to exchange information across the two halves. And especially learning to play an instrument is bilateral.
Even if it’s a one-handed instrument like the trumpet, the idea is, do I play what I thought I would or not? You’re keeping sense of time if you’re playing with other people, you’re listening to them. These are whole brain functions.
It’s part of the reason why taking a break from a problem you’re trying to solve by listening to music can help. I think much of it comes down to the default-mode network, which is that the nonlinear, non-logical part of the brain, the mind-wandering mode of the brain as an attentional system, when you’re not directing your own thoughts but you’re letting them run with you, the feeling we have when we’re just falling asleep or just waking up. That’s why we have the word ‘daydream’. And some of us will have it in the middle of reading a book. You are three pages in and you realise, I don’t remember any of this. My head was somewhere else. And so getting into the default mode a few times a day is very healthful and good for problem solving. And one of the most reliable ways to get there is to put on music that you like and not do anything else. Don’t scroll Facebook or anything, but just let the music go in.
And what about specifically playing music, learning to play an instrument?
That seems to be even more healthful. And across many studies we’ve now seen that musicians tend to have longer life spans, healthier lives as a rule. Not all of them obviously, there are other factors, but as a category, as a job, as a hobby, musicians fare very well. And I think part of it is the eye hand coordination aspects of it for all but singing. But even then you’ve got motor control that you’re engaging with. And our bodies are ambulatory. They were made to move. And this is a pleasurable way of moving your body to play an instrument. You’re engaging with pitch and harmony and timbre and rhythm and duration and meter, accent structure, lyrics maybe.
All these are enriching for the brain and the musician who knows how to read music or who has a good ear can engage with some of the greatest works ever created by humankind. What I love about playing the piano, I can put my fingers precisely where Chopin put his. I may not sound like Chopin, but for a minute, I can feel like Chopin. He must have felt something like this when he played this etude or this prelude or whatever. So, I find that inspiring. I think a lot of musicians like that sense of communicating with great figures.
It’s possible that we’re going to lose that to a certain extent with the rise of AI-generated music. Do you think that is a danger for us?
I think of AI music, the best of AI music as it stands now. I think of it like those plastic flowers in a hotel lobby. And when you enter, you go, what a beautiful bouquet. Wait, wait. You get closer. Those aren’t real. Eww.
I wonder if there’s perhaps a danger of us losing something if we do cease to create the music ourselves. You were saying before that you could be in touch with Chopin because you could put your fingers exactly where he had put them. So, for a second, you could engage with him in a certain way. Do we lose something by not having that link anymore – by listening to music that hasn’t been created by another human, we don’t have that connection with another human?
I think so. Look at the scandal that happened about Milli Vanilli when it turned out they didn’t sing their own songs. Authenticity is a whole sub-discipline within philosophy, I know, because I’ve read up on it. Dan Dennett and others have talked about this. If I made a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, so much so that nobody could tell the difference, does the replica have the same value? Well, no. We care about its history. We care about its pedigree. We care that Da Vinci painted it. That’s why we’re interested to know whether Shakespeare really wrote all his works or somebody else did.
Rolex watches are an interesting example because of its intrinsic value. The value of the parts and the pieces is a tiny fraction of the value that a Rolex sells for. You can’t spend $20,000 on watch parts – it’s impossible – but a Rolex could be $20,000. It’s just that we’ve assigned a value to it, having to do with the company’s history and the people who wear it and it’s a fashion statement. So all of this gets into the issue of fashion when you start talking about authenticity because there’s a true authenticity of a work. Did Shakespeare write it? Did Chopin write it? Did Leonardo paint it?
Or there’s the social authenticity. If somebody gave me a fake Rolex, I don’t think I would wear it. It just seems silly.
I can see that you’ve had influences from a wide range of disciplines, but particularly because you’re a neuroscientist and a musician. You’re not someone who’s just a passive musician who sits around and plays a little bit at home. You’ve actually been actively involved in producing music and performing music. So do you find that these two ways of engaging with music, do you think they pull you in different directions or they complement one another?
I get asked that question a lot, or a version of it. I just don’t know any other way to be. I like doing both. I’m pleased that I never had to choose. I’m sure they influence each other in ways that I’m not, I don’t have access to, that I’m not privy to. The most profound experience I had as a musician was something that is a psychological, cognitive-psychological, cognitive-scientific connection. When I was producing records full-time in the 80s and part of the 90s, I was able to acquire demo versions of Beatles songs. Now you can buy them. But back then, ten people had them. I can listen to a Beatles demo or a Steely Dan demo or a Madonna demo, and in many cases, the demo sounded horrible. Just horrible.
And I found that so inspiring, because I sound horrible when I play. But somehow, to me, they managed to get a record out of that. So I thought, if they’re geniuses, I’m not comparing myself to them. I don’t know that Madonna’s a genius, but the first two are geniuses. The producers are geniuses. I don’t know that I have that genius. But if it’s just a matter of hard work, that’s something I can do. I value hard work. And so, I just spent the last two days working on a new song. And I got it from sounding horrible to sounding just bad. But I know that with time, it’ll sound alright. And maybe even pretty great.
You’ve studied the brain and music for many years. In studying the topic, what do you think it reveals about humans?
We are a musical species. Music and humans, it appears, co-evolved. And we may not be able to articulate all the reasons why. Or the how – the purpose, if you want to call it that. But we are musical. And not all animals are musical. Even birds who we say sound musical don’t recognise their own song if you transpose it into another key. That’s one of the fundamental qualities of human music. One of the arguments among the ethologists is that birds aren’t really musical – that what sounds like music to us, that we’re interpreting as music, is their way of talking. We’re hearing the prosody of their speech. So I think that’s one thing that we’re deeply musical as a species, hardwired into it. Babies, even before they can talk and are babbling, they’ll babble musical ideas, little melodies and rhythms. The baby goes, “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!” – that’s kind of a melody and a rhythm.
The other thing is that for those of us who are musicians, it reveals that for whatever reason, music is healthy for the brain and is neuroprotective. Because studying to become a musician, a master musician, like first chair of the LA Philharmonic musician, or a member of Miles Davis’s band, that sort of thing, it requires more study than becoming a brain surgeon or an astronaut, tens of thousands of hours. And as a consequence, we build up a lot of cognitive reserve, neural reserve, and a lot of pathways that can help stave off the effects of ageing.
Dr. Daniel J. Levitin is an award-winning neuroscientist, musician, and best-selling author. His research encompasses music, the brain, health, productivity, and creativity. Dr. Levitin has published more than 300 articles, in journals including Science, Nature, PNAS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of four New York Times bestselling books: This Is Your Brain On Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, and Successful Aging, as well as the international bestsellers A Field Guide to Lies and I Heard There Was A Secret Chord. As a musician, he has performed with Mel Tormé, David Byrne, Rosanne Cash, Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Victor Wooten and Tom Scott. Dr. Levitin has produced and consulted on albums by artists including Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and on the films Good Will Hunting and Pulp Fiction, and has been awarded 17 gold and platinum records. He is currently the Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva University, San Francisco, California, and James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Neuroscience and Music at McGill University.
