StarTalk Podcast
Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Original podcast
From the physics of sound to the healing power of song, groove to the universal sway of music with guests Moby and Jonathan Coulton.
8,513 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. My co-host this week is none other than comedian Eugene Mirman. Eugene, welcome back to StarTalk Radio.
It's great to be back.
I love having you because you see things that no one else sees.
Yes, like into the future.
Yeah, it's like, you know, I never thought of it that way.
Yeah, I'm about 45 minutes ahead of my time.
So tonight's episode is titled "Music of the Spheres." The correspondence between music and the universe, it goes way back, way back.
Yeah, to like the 1400s.
Way backer than that.
Well, the Earth's only, what, 2,000 years old, maybe two and a half?
In your cosmology, for sure.
Mine's even less than like fundamental.
So what I decided to do is bring some musicians around who are inspired by scientific technological themes. They're not even hard to find.
No.
Later, we will get to my interview with none other than Moby. What a following he has from the geek set. But in studio, I have Jonathan Colton, musician. Jonathan, welcome to StarTalk Radio.
Thank you very much. It's nice to be here.
You used to be a computer programmer turned guitar-playing folk musician with a geek following. Like, what's up with that?
Yeah, I accidentally found myself in a career writing software. I accidentally got this job and then I accidentally stayed there for about 10 years.
So you're an accident that was not waiting to happen. It was just an accident that kept happening.
Yeah, I was supposed to be a rock star all along.
Oh, that's how that works.
And then, but they would pay me, they would pay me, and so it made sense to keep coming.
This is quite a resume. At one time, you were contributing troubadour for Popular Science Magazine. Who even knew that such a title existed? Was that on your business card?
I was on the masthead for at least a few issues before they found their senses.
They realized, what the hell are we doing?
What does it mean to be a contributing troubadour? Only because, as you know, no one knows what that means.
Well, people know what the word contributing means, and they know what the word troubadour means.
Yes, exactly.
But yeah, what are the duties of a contributing troubadour?
Yes.
It was an evolving position, I would say. I wrote some music for them. I did some podcasting for them.
But who would have thought that Popular Science Magazine would enter that realm? I mean, that's impressive.
They were very forward-thinking people.
And I have in my list, you wrote five songs for the September 2005 issue of Our Bodies, Our Cells, Our Cybernetic Arms.
What, like, what? I remember the original Our Bodies, Our Cells, that was for women, right?
And me.
Yeah, and curious boys.
Yeah.
Curious liberal boys.
It was well illustrated, if I remember correctly.
Yes, it was.
You've got a new album coming out called Artificial Heart.
That's right.
Produced by John Flansburgh of the band They Might Be Giants, another sort of geek set in the club band. This is great. Coming out later in the fall. You wrote songs about geek culture and science fiction and technology, and there's a hit called Code Monkey. And in fact, because I knew you had a song that I first knew you existed, it's called I'm Your Moon. This is a love song that Pluto's moon Sharon sings to Pluto. That was just so be-- I tear up, I get misty-eyed when I just read the words. And I got your permission to use the lyrics of that song in the appendix of my book, The Pluto Files, which documents how scientific questions permeated pop culture, and you're evidence of that. So, you've got
a song about asteroid mining?
Well--
It doesn't sound like finger-popping, you know?
Oh, no, it's very, it's very catchy. That song is, yeah, that's Chiron Beta Prime. That's actually, that's a--
By the way, you know who else has a catchy song who are miners? The Seven Dwarfs. They mine gems.
That's true.
And they had such a cool song going in and out.
I don't know what you mine on an asteroid. Estrontium? I don't know.
Any heavy metal is available there.
Yeah, and then maybe I would make a joke about a band.
But you didn't.
I know, because it felt exhausting.
Perfect opportunity.
But so many people are like, "Oh, just mention Dokken."
Should have said something.
But I don't want to. "Can you mind Dokken on an asteroid?"
Alright, so you had a computer programming background, which meant you were a little geeky to begin with. And this infused your creativity in your songwriting and performing.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, like any songwriter, I write about whatever I can come up with, because it's hard to find ideas. And frequently, what I'm thinking about-
Wait, we got a universe out there. What do you mean it's hard to find ideas?
Well, I know, but an idea that's inappropriate for a song, and that's going to sort of drive you through the painful process of creation, you know? You need something that-
It's got to work the whole way through, is what you're saying.
It's got to work the whole way through. And frequently, the things that I'm thinking about happen to be kind of nerdy things. So math, and science, and robots, and giant squids.
There's enough songs about just regular love between people, and not enough about mining and-
That we don't need you to do that, when everyone else has done that.
Yeah, do we really need another song about a boy who is sad because a girl doesn't love him?
We have enough of that.
Oh, I detect something in him there, you know?
And for instance, what if her name is Laura? What if her name is Laura? Just as a for instance.
Just for instance.
But we do need a song about how a robot can't get a car to love it.
Yeah, that's an unwritten song.
That's the thing, we do.
So you're not the only one who's been inspired by the techno culture. Of course, Moby, what a man this guy is. In fact, he visited me at the Hayden Planetarium, and I couldn't resist snaring him for a StarTalk interview. Let's see what he says about how he got inspired to do exactly what he does best.
So Mrs. Travers' class, third grade, I'm eight years old, and she asked everyone in the class what they want to be when they grow up. And my answer was "a scientist." I didn't know what kind of scientist, but I'd watch Star Trek, and I would see Mr. Spock on the bridge of the Enterprise, and he had cool-looking stuff, like oscilloscopes and buttons.
With lights and-
Yeah, and I was like, "I don't care what I do, I want to have a job that involves oscilloscopes and buttons." And I assume that means being a scientist. So ironically, I ended up being a musician, and now I work with oscilloscopes and buttons. So I've accidentally become a scientist. I go into my little laboratory, and I have computers, and I have buttons, and I have all sorts of things to play around with.
So your influence was not the teacher, your influence was pop culture.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Base 1999 and Star Trek and Nova and Cosmos. I ate it up.
This just says that you like it, but how does it plug in to your creativity?
Well, basically, it's the difference between what we observe in the material world and what we know the truth of existence to be or not to be.
What you're saying is that science is a tool to take us out of our five senses into the rest of what the universe has to tell us.
I naively see the world as having weight. I see the material world as being material and having certain material properties. And under a little bit of scrutiny, those all fall away. I like the material world. I like bread and I like puppies and I like things.
Sunsets and right?
Yeah, I like the world that we live in. And science has shown us that none of that is real.
It's a facade.
It's a facade and the truth of existence is so far beyond our understanding. The dilemma is then, okay, what do you do? Do you then sit in a closet and just rock back and forth and sob uncontrollably? Or do you say, you know what? Music and puppies and bread and sunsets might not be real, but I like them. So enjoy them, make music, have fun with your friends, understanding that we are all comprised of matter that's 15 billion years old.
But still, it sounds to me that's more of a state of mind than a, I think that when I put this note on a page.
Well, I guess science leads me to not take myself too seriously.
It's a perspective for you.
It's a perspective and it's a muse because I sort of feel like, okay, I'm this, as is everybody, this odd temporal manifestation of quirks and strange elements in the universe.
As has been said, life is the universe's way to get to know itself.
Yeah, like life is sort of the universe standing outside of itself, looking at itself. And if that's my role, I'm happy to occupy it. And it inspires me to not necessarily have a clue as to what I'm doing, but enjoy the process and to be open to the idea that the significance of our actions might be beyond our understanding.
Yeah, music is an invisible control over humanity. An invisible hand.
So Jonathan, what musical instruments do you play?
My main instrument is the guitar, but I play other guitar-like instruments. Because it's easy and I don't have to learn anything new.
Guitar-like instrument is code for anything with strings on it?
Basically, anything you strum with strings, ukulele, banjo. Although I will say banjo is quite different.
Yeah, but how much do you do just out of complete electronic music?
I mix in a lot of electronic stuff, because I find that one of my favorite things to do is to like force a little randomness into the music.
Randomness is good, it's in the universe, it should be in all of our operations.
And so I love tools where you can just like turn the thing on and tweak some knobs and then it starts making strange noises.
Like a theremin or a chaos pad?
Exactly, that kind of stuff is really fun to play with.
The theremin, this is, tell us what the theremin is.
Theremin is a musical instrument that you play using the air and your mind.
No, it's the musical instrument that aliens play when they land.
Yes, that's the other part of it. I have a theremin, I use it in my act sometimes. Very poorly, but it's fun.
Do you really use the theremin?
I do.
What do you use it for? To make spooky sounds?
Yeah, well I tell one-liners as a joke.
Sort of like a, who was the guy who played the violin and made the...
Yeah, but bad on purpose.
Right, sure.
So let me ask you, there's been some research that if you learn a musical instrument early, it benefits you later in life, is this all true?
Obviously, look at me.
I'm an Adonis, do you think that this is just from what I eat? No, it's because I...
Wait, then you woke up, okay, then what happened?
It helped Bon Jovi. He is proof.
I think, you know, I've always been drawn to playing instruments and singing and it was just sort of...
There are suspicions that people get better at math, they're trying to make that math-music link. I'm skeptical myself, because I was good at math and I sucked at musical instruments.
Well, I think people claim that music helps math, not math helps music. Just to be clear.
Just to clarify, thank you for...
No one thinks you can compute so fast that you'll be able to sing.
Okay, that's very good to know. And how about for language? The symbols of math are not verbal.
They're acoustic, right?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I find that songwriting for me is, you know, the reason that I was a software designer and I transitioned so readily to songwriting is that I think of them in terms of the same process in a lot of ways. You're building this thing, you kind of know what you want it to look like, you don't know where to start, so you start with this little piece and maybe it works, maybe not, and you find another piece and you try to link them together, and then you go back and sort of debug and make them more efficient, you know? And all of a sudden, there's a dancing turtle on the screen. Yeah.
Let's go back to my interview with Moby, because he actually put some thought about synthesizers and what role they play in mediocrity. Let's check that out.
Bob Moog and the people at Princeton Labs, they invented-
Moog as in the Moog synthesizer?
Yeah. They invented non-musical musical instruments, the early synthesizers, because they wanted to create a whole new musical idiom that was not in any way based on Western music.
Oh, so a whole other vocabulary of musical communication.
And so they thought they were inventing the future of sound. But then people started using synthesizers in a more conventional 12-tone way, and rock bands started using synthesizers. And then in the late 70s, a lot of urban musicians discovered drum machines and synthesizers, and you could make really big sounding recordings in your bedroom. And now, everything's done on computers. So like, in the old days, to make an electronic recording, you needed a whole bunch of synthesizers and drum machines and all this knowledge of how to make everything work together.
So the IT revolution has revolutionized electronic music.
Yep, and now anybody with a laptop and some purchased or cracked software can make good sounding electronic music in about 20 minutes.
Is that good or bad? Because the counterpart to that is anybody can publish anything now-
-with desktop publishing. And so the filtering for what is good and bad is no longer in place.
The problems for me seem to be the gray goo problem. Sorry, I never heard of the gray goo problem. Oh, gray goo is the idea of self-replicating machines. And eventually, if self-replicating machines get really good at self-replicating, the entire world is covered in these self-replicating machines. That's like a gray goo. Gotcha. So I knew about self-replicating machines. I don't think a machine is goo. And so, as that applies to music and culture, if everybody's creating music and photography and movies, suddenly, there's just so much OK stuff out there. And with technology, like, you know, with iMovie and GarageBand, like, it's possible to make good-looking or good-sounding creations. And people get very comfortable with good. And rarely are people pushed to make it great.
And the criteria for judging the success of something oftentimes becomes, is it OK? Rather, is it amazing? Is it transcendent? But at the same time, people have used technology to make remarkable stuff. And so I assume that new technology will be used to make lots of remarkable stuff as well, even if at present, there's a lot of mediocrity. The human spirit does seem to rebel against the complacency of OK. So I hope that we push ourselves a little bit harder to use this technology for all its potential.
When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more of my interview with Moby.
Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. Again, I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist. This week's episode, "The Music of the Spheres", featuring an exclusive interview that I had with Moby. The musician, I think he sold twenty million albums.
I think the same thing.
That's Eugene Mirman here. I couldn't do the show without Eugene.
No. I'm surprised radio even exists without me.
And also in studio, I've got another musician who has a strong following in the geek set, Jonathan Coulton.
I've sold twenty million records divided by some number with many zeros on it.
You need the math to get, divided by pi, by pi squared.
Someone who's a fan of yours just heard themselves called the geek and is like, wait, am I?
Busted.
Surprise.
So just to get, just to put some of this up front, music is what we call, as humans with our auditory senses, the vibration of air molecules against our eardrums.
And if it vibrates one particular way, it's somebody's voice. Another particular way with, with repeated rhythmic elements, we call it music. So it's really just the physics of air. And it's remarkable that, you know, as...
Could you say that's what we humans call it?
What is it? Because like horses call it something else?
Probably.
They have a totally different term for it?
I don't even, who knows if horses even perceive of music the same way?
They perceive, they can probably hear like Cat Stevens and stuff.
They don't like it, though.
It's too soothing for them.
Too soothing. Actually, every time we study animals, we find out that they're smarter than any previous generation ever gave them credit for being.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah. So I just, you know.
How, like, how smart? Like, they could like?
Embarrassing smart.
Scrabble smart? Or they could like, watch people play Scrabble?
Embarrassing smart. And so this vibration thing, you know, string theorists who are trying to merge the science of the large, Einstein's general theory of relativity, with the science of the small, quantum mechanics, they have a way to do that that represents all particles as strings vibrating.
In one way or another, and depending on that vibration, you get one kind of particle or another. So it's a, it's a, it's a single idea that spawns an entire universe, which is a sort of a philosophical bias that many physicists have, that whatever complexities are out there, at its core, it's really simple. But what's curious is that the simplicity comes from the vibration of strings. So Jonathan, did you know that?
I, I did, and I have to say, I think it's a, it's a convenient metaphor, a very pleasing metaphor. I'm not sure it helps.
So that means, that means string theory is not your muse of creativity?
Well, no, you know, I think it's a, I think it's a fascinating thing, but the, I mean, shouldn't, I, I have a question for you. Shouldn't the term "strings" and "vibrate" be in quotes?
Why?
Yeah, because it's not, the world, you're not saying the world is a viola.
I'm saying that they're actual vibrations that you can measure with a wavelength and a frequency.
I guess that's true. Are they actual strings?
They're strings in the dimensionality that they are. They're not like cat gut.
They're, they're 11, 11 dimensional strings.
Yeah, depending on the model, but yes.
Well, I say 11. You say, you say 10?
I say 10.
Let's go the whole thing off.
10 and a half, we'll take that.
No, I think it's a very, it's a very beautiful metaphor. It's a very nice way to think of, think of things happening, and certainly that idea of simplicity spawning complexity is everywhere.
Okay, so it has your vote, but does it have your inspiration?
It does. You know, I, I think about that stuff quite a bit. It's a very moving, it's a very moving concept for me to, to find that, you know?
Now, Moby has thought deeply about this, and for my, by my read, I think he's thought a little too deeply. About, about sound and the brain and the mind and music. Let's see what he tells us about the intangible nature of music.
Music is so ubiquitous, you know, it's such a normal part of our lives, but it can do so much. They play it at funerals, they play it at weddings. People play music to have sex, they play music to cry. People play music when you're trying to get armies to march into war. And what's amazing about music to me, it doesn't exist. All it is is air moving a little bit differently. But somehow, moving air a little bit differently can make someone weep, can make someone jump up and down, can make someone move across the country and cut their hair.
So what you mean there, of course, is that there's not a thing that you look at and you say, "That's music."
It's a construct of our brain responding to moving air.
Yeah, that's all it is. I mean, most art forms, you can put your hand on them. You can touch a sculpture. Music, by definition, doesn't exist, and it never can exist. Like, the moment that air hits your eardrum, it's done. It's gone. For that microsecond, it affects you emotionally, and the music is gone. Because we think music exists, because you're like, "Oh, what about CDs and vinyls?" Like, those are just delivery vehicles, convenient ways of recording and storing electronic impulses that will move air a little differently.
So you say that music doesn't exist physically,
Mm-hmm.
yet has the greatest power over our emotions than anything anyone has ever devised? That's scary.
That's why I'm-
A scary beautiful.
That's why I'm a musician. I've dedicated my life to this. I don't want to figure it out. I just love that it has this power.
You love that it is.
Yeah, I love that it is, and I just want to devote my life to making music and being around music.
That's Moby, and my exclusive interview with him at the Hayden Planetarium. You're back at StarTalk Radio. So, that's, I think, Eugene, he was very deep and philosophical there, I thought, in a very scary way.
Uh-huh.
That you found unnerving?
It was a little creepy, actually. You know, his name is Moby, but Eugene, you said you knew why.
Well, I knew why, because it, well, yeah, because he's distantly related to Herman Melville.
Yeah, Herman Melville.
Contrary to my theory that he is hunted by a sea captain, who does not like his music and prefers more acoustic.
So that's the, that's the, that's the, the missing cousins version of it.
So Herman Melville, for those who don't remember, is the author of Moby Dick.
That was the connection you did not make in your comment.
He was also the third angel in Charlie's Angels. He was the brunette, to clarify.
For those who didn't know, Moby's actual name is Richard Melville Hall. And he had a childhood nickname called Moby, thus becoming his nom de plume.
Nom de note.
I gotta get me one of those.
As it were.
No, I think Jonathan Colton is a very sexy sensual.
Well, sure, now it is. When, when I started, it was nothing.
It was nothing. Yeah. Maybe you should just be called The Cult.
So music, music goes way back. I mean, there, there are people who were sure that music was derived from the gods. That music, musical tones, musical harmony could be something that, that is perfect. And the gods are perfect, so this is clearly the work that, that you would need to engage in to satisfy the gods. Jonathan, when you're composing, what gods are you appeasing?
Hermes. What a dull god to choose.
I am, I am appeasing the gods of the internet. That's, that's, that's my job.
Uh, yeah, no, I don't, I don't think too much about appeasing the gods. I, I just try to, I just try to make myself happy when I write music.
But is it formulaic? I mean, you, you have a geekish mind, so are you thinking out of the analytical box? Or are you saying, you know, I remember the Fibonacci series and I'm gonna, I'm gonna assign notes to those and get, get a new song?
No, you know, sometimes, sometimes it's.
No one does that. That's not a thing.
They do, though. I mean, there's plenty of music that's based on, on, you know, mathematical.
Quadratic equation.
Sure.
Things like the golden ratio. People are trying to get these, these deep. You know, Aristotelian, Pythagorean truths.
You know what, though, there's no, there's no heart to it. There's no heart to it when it just comes from that. I mean, I, I, I wrote a song about-
So he just dissed an entire branch of music here.
Yeah, sorry, sorry guys.
That's all songs about like, the Pythagorean theorem.
You're all wrong.
You know, Blackbird was written to the Pythagorean theorem.
I have a song called The Mandelbrot Set, which is about a fractal called The Mandelbrot Set. And I was, I was, when I wrote that song, I was-
Wait, I gotta tell people what fractals are. Because fractals, when you, one of the things you, that happens to you when you think outside of the box is you get to invent a new way of thinking about the world. So the first person who said, "Oh, I can add two plus two and three plus four, and you get four and seven." Now you subtract, okay, seven minus four is three. Okay, what's three minus seven? Silence, okay? You need to invent a new branch of the number line to answer that question. So negative numbers got invented. Then they started dividing numbers, and they got numbers in between the numerals. So then they invented fractions. And so then they took square roots, and they said, "Hey, what's square root of minus nine?" I don't know. And the answer is-
It's a food, and then they came up with food.
That was an imaginary number. So, so here we are, when we're trying to understand dimensionality, fractals is a way to represent nature and matter in dimensions that are not integer numbers.
And it's a fascinating branch of mathematics.
It is, and so when I was writing this song, I, you know, I was thinking, "Oh, wouldn't it be funny to write a song about this fractal? Uh, this, you know, this sort of highbrow mathematical concept?" And, and, uh, that's the joke, is haha, it's a song, it's a moving song about this mathematical concept. But as I was writing it, I actually found myself quite moved by thinking about the nature of the Mandelbrot Set. So that, I still get tears in my eyes at the end of that song sometimes.
That's somewhere between beautiful and very weak.
Well, I know, it's strange.
Like emotion.
This is, it's crazy. What I wonder is, is music native to the human condition, do you think? Is it something that everyone has to have? And if you don't have, you're somehow less human?
You mean that you don't enjoy?
No, no, I mean, let's say you're on a desert island. Do you make music? Or do you see people playing music and say, "What's wrong with you?" until you learn how to like it?
No, I think you do make music. It's sort of, I don't know.
I think everyone walks around singing the things they're doing at the time. Like, "I'm getting a sandwich." Like, I'm sure that you'd be on an island-
Yeah, we all do that, Eugene, yes.
I'm sure I've seen it in movies. It's universal.
Okay, birds sing, you know, other animal creatures sing.
Bees do it.
Even educated fleas do it.
There you go.
I had to finish that, I'm sorry.
Thank you very much.
I thought you were gonna leave me hanging.
I know, I'm with you. I am-
No, well, that's true. Birds make music, obviously not for the same reason that we do. Or maybe-
You mean to lure girls into their room?
It worked for Barry White. So what I wonder is, does the music change your neurochemistry in a way that completely changes your mood? We will get back to that after this break. You're listening to StarTalk Radio.
Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. For a special StarTalk Radio on the music of the spheres, where we have my exclusive interview with Moby, Moby the musician. And on this program, we also have, live in studio, Jonathan Coulton.
Colton.
Colton, thank you. I first-
Hey, I thought it was Coulton too, and I've known him for years.
Coultron is a giant robot that assembles itself.
With a beard that looks semitic.
I first bumped into his work when I stumbled on a song that he composed and sang, called "I'm Your Moon", which is a love song between Sharon, Pluto's moon, and Pluto itself. Assuring Pluto that even though Pluto was demoted, that Sharon will be its one and only. Which I thought was so beautiful, even though we now know of three other moons of Pluto, so.
Yeah, I know, that's awkward.
I know.
Really awkward.
Awkward.
So.
Pluto is a slut planet. Not that that's bad, and I understand.
Actually, technically Pluto is a dwarf slut planet.
Dwarf, yeah, dwarf, yeah, Mr. Dwarf Slut Planet to you. So, so I want to talk about the effect of music on human emotion and human feelings. It is clear that music is not just something that goes on in the background, although some musicians would accuse other musicians of composing just that kind of music. But music at its best clearly resonates with some deep emotion that's within us. And so I'm wondering, Jonathan, do you compose so that you can influence people's emotions? Was it to like get dates originally?
Oh, well, yes. Sure, I mean, I swear, I used to play the drums, and then I realized that it was very hard to impress girls at parties, because nobody had a drum set.
That, this is, this is clever.
But if you could, if you could pull out the guitar and do a little James Taylor, suddenly, suddenly, you got something.
I like the idea that you were just missing a drum set at a party. And then people would be like, who's that awesome guy playing the drums in the living room? I definitely want to go out with him.
I actually did bring my drumsticks to a party once. But just so I could show everybody how I twirled them.
Twirled them?
Nobody was impressed.
Okay.
So then you picked up the guitar?
Then I picked up the guitar, and that changed everything, and yeah.
Okay, but wait a minute, wait, James Taylor sang about love. And, and, and you're singing about geek stuff.
Oh, yeah, but I'm always singing about love.
But Hillary said that, Eugene said, "Oh, yeah."
I like the way you said that.
No, but you know, the thing is that I'm always singing about love, even if I'm singing about geek stuff. And I find that the.
It is true, the love song, it was a love song between Sharon and Pluto.
Well, yeah, and, and you know, as I was saying before, the.
Two inanimate spherical objects.
Yes. But it's this beautiful concept, because they're, they're rotating around each other, you know?
It's a very, uh.
Romantic.
It's a very romantic idea.
In fact, maybe you, maybe you knew this, but it was not. apparent in your song
Uh huh.
that Pluto and Sharon are tidally locked.
You know that, which means.
They're always facing each other like lovers.
They always show the same face to each other. One does not rotate and reveal its hindsight to the other.
You shouldn't do that in a, in a marriage either.
It's called a double tidal lock. Earth and our moon is only a single tidal lock. We have tidally locked the moon so that it only shows one face to us. So that on the moon, when the astronauts were there, Earth is always in the sky. You know that, you know that image that showed Earth rise over the moon?
Mm hmm.
The Earth doesn't rise. It only rose because they were orbiting the moon and it rose up above the horizon. It's a complete fiction.
Are you saying the moon landing is fake?
I'm not authorized to comment on that. Okay, so I'm heartened to recognize, Jonathan, that you're, you do think about love when you compose your music.
Always.
That this is good.
No, it uses emotion into these subjects. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, it's always very emotional. Even plain old music without words, I find very emotional. Bluegrass, like just instrumental bluegrass can make me cry, I find.
Bluegrass.
I guess I'm weak.
No, you're not weak. I do like the idea. You're like, sometimes shoes make me cry. It's like, well, it sounds like you just cry a lot, Jonathan.
So Jonathan, are, are there, is there music that you can compose that can be so good? That it's like a substitute for sex? Or a substitute for something that you really want and need emotionally? But you just put on the music and then it satisfies you?
Oh, absolutely.
Cause there's research into that now.
Jethro Tull's thick as a brick can keep people from having sex for months.
Oh, that would be the opposite phenomenon.
Well, yeah, I mean, that is the thing you do when you get depressed and you, you put on music that, that sort of makes you sad. You, you wanna sort of have that resonance.
So that and the chocolate, you know, whatever.
Tub of ice cream, crying to your tub of ice cream and you fall asleep.
You just dream up planets doing it.
You cheat.
How dare you cheat in it? How dare you cheat in it?
He didn't say what the it was. I'm an astrophysicist and I know what planets do when they do it. They orbit.
Yes, and that's literally what I meant.
Oh, sorry.
But I think there's evidence, music triggers neurochemical reactions in the brain, as does other chemistry that could be induced. But it's all about influencing our brains. I mean, it's a fascinating subject, and I spoke with Moby about this. He's done some thinking about neurology and music. Let's see what came out of that conversation.
I work with this organization in the Bronx called the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, and started by Oliver Sacks. So he learned that there's conventional music therapy, which is if you play music to someone who's in a hospital, it makes them happy. And sometimes it actually cuts down the length of their stay and facilitates the healing process. But what he learned is that if you play music for someone who's had a stroke or has had some sort of brain trauma, someone who's lost the ability to speak can still sing. Because if you damage the speech center of the brain, singing doesn't necessarily have to do with the speech center. So you can get an 80-year-old patient who's had a stroke, can't speak, play them their favorite song from their 10, and they can vocalize it.
And through that, the way the brain rewires itself through neurogenesis and just magic, you can actually...
Brain magic.
I mean, essentially what it is...
Mysterious things we haven't figured out yet.
And part of it is the idea of neurogenesis and neural plasticity. Like, I think up until recently, neuroscientists thought, by the time you're 10 years old, you have all the brain cells you're ever gonna have, and through liquor, crystal meth, stress, whatever, you're just constantly sloughing off brain cells.
Getting dumber.
And now they realize, like, neurogenesis, the brain can keep growing new brain cells until the day you die. But a lot of it's behavioral. And so I think the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function looks at that and tries to figure out how to, like, rewire the brain and sort of facilitate brain cell growth.
You mentioned that people, for some kinds of brain damage, can lose speech but can still sing. I've always been intrigued that people who stutter... Can sing without a stutter.
Well, I think that what Dr. Sacks learned is the whole brain responds to music. So there's no music center. And so that way, if someone stutters or can't speak, they can still use the mechanisms of vocalizing to make musical sounds because it's the whole brain involved and not just the speech center.
So what's the future of this? Is there gonna be some book with symptoms and which one of your songs a person should listen to? I got my rheumatism, you know, dial up song number five on Moby's recent album.
Well, the question is, is there some music, like a Brandenburg concerto, that affects everybody equally? But a lot of it has to do, it's very subjective. I mean, people respond to the music that's familiar to them. So if you have someone from Indonesia and you play them a beautiful piece of pastoral classical music, it won't affect them at all. But play them gamelan music that they grew up with and it triggers a whole flood of crazy stuff in their brain that can actually be very therapeutic.
So culture matters.
Yeah, I think so very much. It's a lot of it's Pavlovian.
If culture matters, that means while music may be a universal language, musical form is not.
That's a question for someone way smarter than me. I would imagine that the two inform each other. There might be some elements to music that everyone responds to, like volume. If you play something really loud, people respond to it. Or really quiet, people respond to it. Or like, long notes do sort of convey a more sort of like, I don't know, subdued emotional state and quick, short notes are more exciting.
Okay, so the basic mechanics of music may trigger similar responses, I guess, but the creative composition surely wouldn't.
Yeah, I mean, I hear "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee Gees and it triggers an emotional reaction in me that is almost exclusively the product of sitting in a parking lot with my mom when I was five years old, growing up, hearing it, waiting for our clothes to be cleaned in the dry cleaners. You know, so it has very little to do with the actual, like, fundamental elements of the song and to me, it's all associative.
That's from my exclusive interview with Moby in my office at the Hayden Planetarium. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. You can find us on the web at startalkradio.net.
They probably have if they're listening.
And you can like us. Is there a dislike option in Facebook? You can like us in Facebook, StarTalk Radio.
You can like us and write something mean. I think that's...
That's how that goes.
You know, the people talking, like, playing familiar music, it would...
Now I'm really obsessed with the idea of aliens kidnapping you but playing you the eagles to relax you while it happens.
Well, it's true that music, in fact, has a very special place in our brains. In old age, for example, you can like forget your spouse's name, but you can recite and sing whole tracks of music that you've known your entire life.
That's why I'm gonna marry a song. I just haven't picked it yet.
No, but what's interesting about it is if music has this way to remain in your head and in your memory when other things are lost, you can imagine studying what part of the brain is lit by one kind of music or another, or one song artist or another, or one musical genre or another, and somehow use that to stimulate or to probe or to at least gain access or gain an understanding of how we gain and lose memory. I mean, so music has a very fertile future, I think, as we go forward. And not only that, music can stimulate the formation of chemicals in the brain that we already know influence your happiness. Like dopamine, depending, I think it depends on what kind of music.
It could be something like suck it all out instead of put it back in. Prolactin, you've heard these chemicals before. Oxytocin, that's the trust hormone. These are things that can be triggered.
But is there a song that makes you trust someone more? Is there a noise I could make that would make people always believe me?
Here's what you do. If you can find a song that stimulates the production of oxytocin, and the song is about trusting people, then you get a double dose.
Oh, my God.
You get people to do anything.
I'm gonna figure out what chemicals are created by what kind of music and then make an album of controlling people.
We've gotta take a quick break, but more StarTalk when we return.
Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is a special edition of StarTalk, where we're talking about the music of the spheres and the science behind the music. In particular, what goes on in the heads of those who have a geek following. Moby is among them. We have another clip of my exclusive interview with Moby from my office in New York City, but in studio live, we have Jonathan Coulton. Jonathan.
Hello.
Did I say your name right, finally?
Nope.
I'm not convinced he did.
Give it me again.
There's just no R in it. It's not like...
Coulton.
It rhymes with Bolton. Imagine that you're having an interview with Michael Bolton.
With Michael Bolton.
If you have the guts to imagine such a situation.
Extraordinary. You know, music, I just, I want to get deeper into the science that you carry with you, the geekiverse that is within you, that manifests itself in you as an artist. And I just wondered, are people who like compose for science fiction movies and who think about that, do they have the same innards that you do, or are you a different species?
No, I'm a very special boy. I've known that for a long time. I don't know, I am particularly moved by nerdy things. And math and science, I find sort of beautiful windows into how the world works. I think it's the greatest thing in the world, when you can understand the mechanism behind something. That's what gets me fired up.
We call that science.
Well, I know. And, you know, I have always loved it. It has always really amped me up.
Okay, so it's not just something you visit, it's something that is part of you.
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
And I always wondered if, on the next mission to Mars, whenever that is, whatever decade that comes, I asked Moby if he wanted to be sort of the composer for the soundtrack for that trip.
Do you have that authority?
I will never admit...
Because that trip is going to be a dance party, so we know that. But what kind...
Yeah, yeah. What kind of jamming are you going to do?
Kind of dance party.
On route to Mars. Let's find out what Moby had to say about journeys into space and what role music might ever play in that.
When I hear your music, I'm thinking, he might be able to compose the epic musical track for my nine-month journey to Mars. Now, if NASA said, "We're looking for that person," are you gonna run to the front of that line?
Oh, yeah. I'm a space nerd. So, basically, if NASA came to me and asked me to do anything,
if they asked me to like-
To mop the latrines?
Yeah, mop the latrine, make coffee somewhere, I'd be happy to do that. But if they wanted me to write music for spaceflight, of course, I would like nothing more than to do that. But it does raise a bigger, nerdier question that very few people, apart from me, might be interested in, which is, as we go into space, do we have to carry our physical bodies around? And that's, I think, a debate within NASA as well. Like, a Mars mission, do humans have to go to Mars, or can we send representatives to Mars? I just think there's a bigger question of what it means to be human, which I know sounds vague, but basically, we're defined by our cognition. All of our things, our skin, our eyes, our nose, our senses are what informs our cognition. And through technology,
we have the capacity to build other things that will also inform our cognition. So that's the question. It's like, do we need to send our biological bodies into space to inform our cognition, or can our cognition be informed technologically?
There's several movies like this, like Total Recall. It's can you just affect what the brain is thinking and doing in such a way that you have lived that experience with all the reality of having been there?
And our sensory experiences are really limited. They're amazing, but our visual spectrum is pretty limited compared to what's out there.
We're practically blind.
Yeah. And even our sense of hearing is also quite limited, so like-
That's why we bring dogs to hear things, right? And smell, right.
So that's the other question, is like, can we go into space in a modified or augmented form that will actually like improve the experience that you're talking about?
That's a fascinating point. We have methods and tools that extend our senses and give us senses we never dreamt of. Use those as the means of exploration and bring that back to you and then you would then experience it as you never even could have being there alive.
And for me, it raises the even bigger, bigger, bigger question. People are saying like, well, how can you download a human being? And like, oh, you can't because the brain is performing a trillion functions and there's no way you could possibly download them. The question then becomes, how many of those functions are keeping the body alive? And how many of those functions are biological functions? If you remove all the biological functions, what is the cognition that's left? What's the sense of self is left? And that probably is fairly small and could probably easily be downloaded and replicated and sent into space a lot easier than a big biological body.
Moby scares me. I don't want him head of NASA.
When he first said, it sounded like he wanted to send like the Tea Party into space to tell us what was in Mars. It was like a, like, well, send, okay.
So you know what I wonder? We have our traditional five senses and we put in a lot of effort to stimulate them in all ways that we can invent. Leaves me, leaving me to wonder if aliens didn't happen to have a sense of hearing, music would mean nothing to them. But they might have other senses, like a sense of magnetic field about which we can't sense at all. So they could have magnetic field devices that really they get their rocks off.
Right.
That would be just an interesting.
Well, they, they could also have a sense of hearing and just different brains and and find music to be terrible. I mean, I think it's probably an accident that music works on us the way it does. It doesn't seem like it comes from an evolutionary.
Well, there's some thinking about that because it turns out if music can bond a group, then it makes for stronger coherent tribalism.
Oh.
As they all band together behind one song or one beat.
Wouldn't exist without Creedence Clearwater Revival. We would have disbanded in 73.
So songs can create tribal communities that was surely important.
Way back when. And if songs didn't mean anything to you, you wouldn't feel the bond with your brethren.
That's like, the reason we're masters to dogs is because they don't have a good enough music to rise up as a unit.
That's right. You know, so the best music that's ever been composed, I'm maybe biased here, is the soundtracks of science fiction films.
Yes, you are biased. I'll tell you that right now.
The greatest music that has ever been composed.
No, okay, sorry.
It's a bit of a dramatic statement.
Sorry, sorry, okay. There's been some okay music composed.
I agree with you.
Totally.
No, but not that it was composed for it, but the movie 2001. You gotta go.
Oh, that's a powerful audiovisual experience.
Alzus, brak, zarathustra.
Well, that's, of course, based on the, on the, on the, what is it? The, the stack of harmonic vibrations that makes, makes up notes, right? That piece of music is actually based on...
Yeah, if, yeah.
The harmonic series. It is. It's based on the harmonic series.
We haven't even addressed Chopin Howard thinking that music is the most powerful art form.
I thought this was a smart show.
Anyway, we're really running short on time. This hour went by like lightning. Jonathan, you tweet at Jonathan Colton.
I do, yeah.
And Eugene, you tweet at Eugene Mirman.
Yes, and sometimes at Jonathan Colton when he turns around.
What?
You tweet at him. I also tweet, follow my cosmic brain droppings at Neil Tyson. I need a StarTalk tweet of the week. How about, "Where once religious iconography stimulated creativity, in the world we now live, science often serves as the artist muse." That's all the time we have. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, and I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by the National Science Foundation. Thanks, Jonathan, for being on the show. Eugene, hope to have you back again. As always, keep looking out.
Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
