The Science of Creativity, with David Byrne

Neil Tyson explores art, science and creativity with the help of musician and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Providing backup are cognitive scientist/pianist Dr. Mónica López-González, composer/programmer Prof. David Cope, and co-host Maeve Higgins, with a guest solo by Bill Nye.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and you are watching StarTalk, where tonight we're featuring my interview with David Byrne, who's the creator and songwriter for Talking Heads. He came by, I nabbed him, put him in my office, and we talked about the creativity involved in science versus art, and whether one day intelligent machines will be as creative as we. So let's do this.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've got with me as a co-host Maeve Higgins. Maeve, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's good to be back.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome. And we have with us a special guest, an academic guest, who's also a talented artist, and we have Monica Lopez Gonzalez. Welcome, Monica.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's on the visiting faculty at Johns Hopkins University in cognitive neuroscience. Very cool. So, we're featuring my interview with David Byrne, a hugely creative person, and he was the key, he was like the front man of the Talking Heads. And they sort of pioneered the video music revolution back in the early 80s. And from my notes on him, Talking Heads stopped in like 1991, but he's been continually busy since then. And he's been a deep thinker about music, about art, about creativity, about philosophy, and our conversations basically went everywhere. I had to keep raining it in.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  It's funny that your conversations went everywhere with him, because when that happens with me and my friends, it's just more like, "Do you like guacamole spicy or medium?" But I know that's not what you mean with David Byrne.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you would count that as a conversation going everywhere?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd be like, "Ooh, let me think. Whoa, whoa, I can't decide. You really challenged me intellectually."

• 2:22Speaker 01

  So I can imagine you two, jeepers.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what I wanted to know, which I ask really all of my guests when they first walk into my office, especially if they're drawn from some very visible swath of pop culture, I just like knowing, what kind of math background did they have? Did they have a science teacher that they liked? Is there some story they could share with us about that experience? And did that experience somehow influence their career path? And so, let's check it out.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  There was a math teacher who taught math using Alice in Wonderland, which was a lot of symbolic logic.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Charles Doxson was himself a mathematician.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Yes, and that was his specialty, symbolic logic. If this says this, then this means this, but then does that mean that?

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not necessarily.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Not necessarily, yes.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's quite creative.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  I loved that.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many people in this universe get to say, "I had this wonderful math teacher." This is rare, this is rare.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Well, it is rare, and it shouldn't be rare.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It shouldn't be rare.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  It shouldn't be rare.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm telling you, it was the first time I ever heard that.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  It's fascinating stuff. The next year, I had, sorry, a terrible math teacher, and my grades went straight down. And it just shows how much a teacher means. Maybe if I was somebody else, I could have just pushed through there and go, "Come on, I'm interested in it." But when I finished high school, I think it was a coin flip, I was either gonna go to science, engineering, all that, or an art school. And it was kind of a coin flip, and I went and looked, and then I thought, "Art school looks more fun, at least in the first part of the ramp." And it looked like the science and engineering is a lot of hard work, and then you get to actually exercise your imagination. To me, there seemed to be no difference

• 4:12Speaker 02

  in the creativity and imagination that goes into either of those areas. I thought, they're equivalent.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me ask you, Monica, would you agree that creativity in the sciences, math and science versus the arts is equivalent? Because that's a big position he's taking here. And you study the stuff.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, no, I don't make a difference between the two.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you agree?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Completely.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  I was so interested in what he was saying about the Alice in Wonderland, like this symbolism in Alice in Wonderland and...

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Lewis Carroll, he's a mathematician. And Alice's Adventures in Wonderland have been studied by mathematicians. And just the phrasings, the bending of time that's within it, it's all in there. And in fact, there is a, the late Martin Gardner wrote a book called The Annotated Alice, where every passage within Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has an explanatory note about how it relates to math and science. And so, oh, you're making a face, like, did that destroy the story for you?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why wouldn't that enhance the story for you?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  I was just thinking about, like, Rap Genius, that website where you can go and see what they're talking about.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, the translation of it.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be it.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Because when I was, like, reading Alice in Wonderland and the Tea Party was, like, for time, but I didn't understand that, like, that's why they were all stuck there.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Because time was gone missing.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you think there should be a website for classic literature that gives translations of it?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So Monica, what's going on in the brain of a creative person when they're being creative?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Well, so what's interesting is that creativity, I mean, is a whole brain process. And...

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean you use all parts of your brain?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. So, for example, at least in music studies and looking at musicians that are improvising, it's been shown that they have heightened activation in premotor areas, motor areas of the brain, so that they're obviously getting prepared to coordinate an action.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, does that mean if you're highly trained and rehearsed at it, you don't trigger the motor parts of the brain as heavily? Because it's sort of...

• 6:21Speaker 03

  It's rote.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's rote.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Rote memorization, almost.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if you're gonna up with something on the spot, there's, what you're saying is there's more activity.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Heightened activation, yes.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heightened, right, heightened activation.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Heightened is the right term, it's all about terminology, right?

• 6:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll be fluent with you, I'll be, I'm hanging with you.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  And so another really interesting finding is deactivation of prefrontal cortex. And prefrontal cortex is the seat of executive functioning, so being aware, moral thought, judgment, everything that makes us human.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when you say executive, you mean high level?

• 6:53Speaker 03

  High level thinking, not, we're not talking about business.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that's what I'm saying.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Deal, yeah.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, okay.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Well, although that's kind of high level functioning, too. And so there's what's called deactivation, so perhaps you have to turn off awareness to be in the zone, to be able to improv.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there's an interesting fact that we've seen, or at least a hypothesis, let me put it at that level, where if you have unbridled space to be creative, it might actually interfere with your ability to be creative. And, and David Byrne actually wrote a book, and the title was, was How Music Works. But in there, he explores constraints on creativity and how that can actually stimulate creativity itself. Let's see what he says.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  The pleasure that we get through our senses, we tend to think of it as being connected to our, our body and our tongues and our eyes and stuff, but-

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Physiologically.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yes, but all the work is going on in our brains, I mean, the, the eyes are just little stalks out there, and the processing tells you what, what you're actually seeing and what you're not seeing, what you're interested in and what you're not interested in, and that the pleasure is, uh, in-

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Making those, those things connect that we tend to intellectually think are separate. Well, maybe scientists don't, but kind of the common conventional wisdom is that they're, that the senses are out here and that our minds are in a different, different place. But they're not, they're in the same place.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The closest I came to that, I was in the, at the band shell in Boston and not the, yeah, was it the Boston Commons where I forgot what they go, it's on the Charles River there. And it was Arthur Fiedler on July 4th, playing, conducting, of course, the Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. And they had the howitzer cannons over on the side and there were fireworks. And so there I was, listening to this bombastic music, feeling the cannons go off, watching

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  fireworks. It was a sensory overload, I mean a delightful sensory overload. Rarely do you get to have all those senses stimulated simultaneously and in harmony.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Music is affected by all the contexts that surround it. They were affected by the kind of acoustics of where it's performed. They're affected by the technology that records the music or the technology from the people that make it, the instruments and the, all the other stuff. They're affected by the financial stuff, how you get paid or not paid, or how you make a living as a musician, affected by how you.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, the consumers of music, never think about that.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we just think it just comes.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just comes.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  It just pours out.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Comes out of you.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  It's like water coming out of a tap.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  But it's, there's all these factors that affect it and it's, it's sometimes unconscious. People know that. If this is what can be reasonably done in this space, in this room, and this for this amount of money, they'll start to kind of self-edit and restrict themselves to thinking within those parameters, which is not a bad thing at all.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna say exactly that. In engineering, the last thing an engineer wants is invent this thing for me, and you have unlimited money and unlimited constraints.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's not what, that's not where you extract the creativity of an engineer. You get the creativity by saying, okay, here are the parameters. It's gotta do this under these conditions, under this temperature, and it's gotta fit in this box and run on this much power.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go. Then, oh my gosh, this is a playground for the engineer.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yes, and the same is true, it's certainly true for me.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the constraints are not really constraints. They are...

• 11:13Speaker 02

  No, they're liberating.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Liberating.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  They allow you to kind of, okay, the clearer I know what, what is the box that I need to work within, the happier I am, then I can, eliminates that, the infinite number of choices and whatever, I would just be lost in there.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've reduced the variables.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And mathematically speaking, if you have too many variables, you can't constrain the system.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, you've gotta tighten out, you've, you've gotta clamp down on some of the variables. Leave a few that you can then manipulate.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then get the thing to work.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Art and science have that in common.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the two of you are both creative people in your own ways. Do you agree, I mean, we, we kind of agreed, I agreed with David, that constraints are actually a good thing, not a bad thing, and in a way, they're liberating. Would you, would you agree with that?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. Like, um, definitely how much money you have to do something, or like, how much time you have to do something, totally helps. Like, if you're just like, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna write a book about whatever, you'll just be there.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when we come back on StarTalk, uh, we will pick up my interview with David Byrne, and we'll talk about experimentation. Of course, we do that in science, but apparently it's also a fundamental part of art when we return.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. StarTalk. We're sitting underneath the Hayden Sphere, containing the Hayden Planetarium, of which I serve as director. So we're featuring my interview with David Byrne, and we've got you, Maeve Higgins, and Monica Lopez Gonzalez. And the band Talking Heads, I think it dissolved in 1991. And that's many years ago. So what's he been up to? Well, recently, he did something he had never done before. And here it is.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  This year, I'm doing a project where I'm bringing together 10 high school and slightly older color guard teams. There's the kids with the flags and the sabers and rifles and all these things that they do, with 10 kind of live musicians, kind of groups of live musicians, who have written music especially for these teams. And see what happens. There was a little bit of tightrope walking there in trying to figure out, okay, how much can I play around and experiment and still find a way for it to kind of pay for itself?

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  And not just be like an indulgence. But I've kind of navigated that throughout my life. Part of the interest is in finding these kind of pockets of creativity that are going on. I mean, the musicians, the musicians I know. I admire them. I love a lot of what they're doing. This other stuff is something that I don't know that I kind of stumbled on. And I go, look, there's all this kind of creativity. It's outside of my world. New York has never heard of it. It's going on out in all these other little towns. And they're passionate. They're dedicated to what they're doing. And they're creating this crazy stuff. Somebody needs to bring that up and show some love and appreciation for what people are doing

• 14:34Speaker 02

  outside of kind of the official cultural channels.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that anything different philosophically or spiritually from George Harrison learning about the sitar? At a time when no one really knew what the sitar was in the West. Is that the same thing as Paul Simon going to South Africa? Bringing some of those sounds and they're going on and serving their niches, but maybe there's a place to give them a new birth or a different kind of flavor.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  There's a similarity, yes.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because everybody's got music.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And yeah, and some people are, they're, what they're doing is sometimes so beautiful and sophisticated and you can learn so much from it. This other stuff, though, is more homegrown. It's more like, oh, there's something in my own backyard that I didn't know was there.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd never heard of this concept before. Homegrown creativity may be drawn from the firmament in your locale versus something more mainstream. So Monica, can you address that? Sources of creativity is what this comes down to.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah, and I liked how he said pockets, finding pockets of creativity within that. Because I think what he's saying is that if you, if you stay in your one medium or discipline, it makes you remain stagnant in it. And when you go and look at other mediums or other disciplines, you end up having a larger vocabulary of information. So you actually make bigger the constraints you can now deal with.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  And so you can play with them at this point. And so when you create something different that maybe somebody already knows about, it's still different because now you add your personal experience to it as much as you bring in whatever.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've incremented it along some direction.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would not have happened otherwise.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the novelty of it, yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And that sounds incredible that he is like, I, I don't know what the color guard is, but he said it's children with savers and.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  And then he said like, "New York doesn't know about it, but I think I've seen kids with sabers here." Just on the train. So yeah, that sounds incredible. And that he would add music to that and then all of our heads would explode. It sounds great.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but also speaks to the value and need for experimentation, which is something we do in the, in the science lab, of course. It's deeply associated with that activity. So, so Monica, tell me-

• 17:06Speaker 03

  But so is art.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, tell me about it.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Art is experimentation.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about it.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  I mean, both art and science are about, you have a question, right? You have variables that you start manipulating and testing, and then you have a product, an outcome. I just described the scientific method as much as the artistic method. And so I think, I mean, they're identical, really. It's just the tools that you use, that's what's different.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, here's an interesting difference, May. Uh, when you experiment, you can bomb.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, I've never personally bombed, but I've definitely seen guys in particular who can't do it. And yeah, it's brutal. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's like you went wrong, or like you did it bad, but it's just not the result you were hoping for. In our case, that's a laugh. And the opposite of a laugh is like silence, or like something being thrown at you. And that's a tough one.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I, but can't we also note here that in science, I can perform an experiment, and if it works, it works, and it's not subject to anyone's interpretation, or anybody's emotional state. Whereas you as artists, you are, if you're a performing artist, as both of you are, you have to feed a mind state. And maybe it feeds this mind state and not another one. Maybe it feeds Tuesday night and not Friday night. So that's kind of different compared to my experiment in the lab.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  The reaction part of it. And well, and I-

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I get a different result on Friday than I did Tuesday, I messed up in some really bad way.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Well, because science is about reproducibility.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd have to tell me that Fridays has an effect on my experiment. And, and we invented the name, the days of the week, right? The, the days of the week have no astronomical relevance at all.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, well, so I think then the one difference between art and science is that science is about reproducibility.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  But art is all about creating something new every time. If you reproduce it, it's not art in the sense of novelty. I would dare to say.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that. Well, when StarTalk comes back, we will pick up my interview with David Byrne, and we will explore the relationship between music and architecture on StarTalk.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We've been featuring my interview with David Byrne, and in this next segment, I want to get straight to it because it's a highly innovative idea regarding music and architecture. Let's just see where he takes us on this topic.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  When there's certain sized rooms that sound a certain way, the natural kind of artistic evolution is that the music that gets performed in them should sound the best in that room. The easiest one maybe to imagine is, say, a Gothic cathedral. The music that's generally heard in there is very kind of long notes, not a lot of complicated harmonies or chord changes, nothing very quick and rhythmic.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It seems to me that would get lost in the resonance, in the echoes of the chamber.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And the music that works best in that is the music that was written to be played in those spaces. It allows for those long echoes, and that long echoes actually enhance the music and make it sound more spiritual and awe-inspiring and yeah, of the cosmos, whatever. But you can then imagine, say, as people sometimes mistakenly do and say, "Let's have this, we're gonna have this percussion ensemble play in the cathedral because what a beautiful venue." And you realize what a sonic and cultural disaster that would be too. It just becomes this cacophony of noise. And you just go,

• 21:03Speaker 02

  "God bless, but this is the wrong kind of music for this room."

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he developed this concept in his book, what was it, How Music Works. In there, he elaborates on how the evolution of music has co-moved with the evolution of the spaces in which it has been performed. And he gave the opposite example, I mean, the inverse example, where you have a small club. And do you bring in, you know, monks to sing, to sing Gregorian chants in a small club? No, the, it's, the, the music is different. And if the music doesn't sound good in that space, it, it's not invited back to play in that space. So there's, there's filtering that puts music in their proper venues. And I, I was intrigued by this, by, by, first by the acoustics of it, the fact that he thought

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  about it. And I was just wondering, Maeve, you have a certain joke. Is it funny in every size venue? Are you venue influenced?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Totally. Like, but what, yeah, totally. Comedy works best in...

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not partially, but totally. Yeah, okay. I wanted one day hear the word "partially" come out of your mouth. Okay.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Totally. Um, like, comedy works best in small venues. I feel like the more intimate, I don't know if it's to do it like sonically or not, or if it's to do with actually, it's a conversation, so you want to be close to them, and you want to let the, them breathe, and you say something, and them, you know. But I feel like, um, I would say that because...

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a more approximation of a one-on-one thing?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Right. Like a conversation. But then, when comics get really successful, they book arenas. And then people often say it's a disappointing experience, because arenas are supposed to be like, for what, like sport, rock, music, sports, you know, so you lose something.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there's another issue regarding how we receive our music. And there was a day when it was only live, because there were no recordings, now there are recordings, well, what is the, or then there was radio, and then there were recordings. And how do you, in terms of what's portable and you take around with you, we, we take around the recordings? And sound quality is an interesting, it, it's not always the same. And does it influence your appreciation? These are interesting questions that, that I asked, and I wanted to know what David Byrne thought about it. Let's check it out.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  When I was junior high, whatever, 12, 13 years old, something like that, and I first started listening to music on the radio. It was on a little transistor radio, about that size, that you would kind of sneak into bed and quietly listen to it under your pillow. The speaker was that big?

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was tinny?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  It was tinny. The sound on a contemporary smartphones is probably better than what was on those things. But at the same time, it's still kind of very limited. And I realized, the music that I was hearing out of this crappy little thing changed my life and changed, and made me realize, well, you hear this really crappy thing, but there's enough information there for you to know, there's a world out there. There's people doing things that are...

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a portal.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  It's a portal, and you go, there's people doing things I didn't know about. And it's speaking directly to me. That little thing with the crappy sound does all that. So I thought, okay. Fidelity and the kind of beautiful sound that can be produced is not... It's wonderful, but it's... you can't demand it. The crappy sound can have a huge effect as well.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Monica, what's he mean by fidelity?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Well, good sound quality, I mean, the information is all the raw information that you have. You're hearing every bit of it, every piece of it.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So fidelity is the reproduced music versus the music that was played? Because you might lose something going from one to the other. Okay, so he's arguing against this...

• 24:52Speaker 03

  That you don't need it, right?

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, not to be influenced by it. I have to agree with that. Would you agree?

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Again, I think it depends on context. I mean, because he said, you know, this little crappy thing, but because I was in my room listening, I mean, it has emotional content. And I think it's a cross between...

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was under his pillow, in his bed.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he's having a fun time. And I think that's affecting his experience with that. And also, there's the question of just art in general. If it's meant to have an expressive quality, you'll get it no matter how you're hearing it.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when StarTalk returns, we will go into our Cosmic Queries mode. And we will field questions from our fanbase, asking about the physics of sound, when we return.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk and I've got Mae Wiggins. I've got Monica Lopez Gonzalez. And as you know, we've been featuring my interview with David Byrne. But right now, we're gonna take a break from that and we're gonna go to Cosmic Queries.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Cosmic Queries?

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmic Queries. So Mae, you have collected questions from the StarTalk fanbase. I've not seen the questions before. The point here is not to stump me. I mean, if I don't have the answer, I'll just say, "I don't have the answer."

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's more fun if I hear it now for the first time.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is what you're about to do.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the physics of sound. Okay, let's go for it.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  This is from Derek Azuik Chia from Anchorage. "How would voices, and sounds in general, change from world to world? For instance, do sounds change in pitch and frequency on Mars or Titan? And if so, in what ways?"

• 26:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a great question. So, the frequency with which your vocal cords vibrate depends on the density of the air in which they're embedded. And so, if you breathe helium, which is very low-density air, the frequency of your vocal cords rises and you sound like Mickey Mouse.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  And so what about Mars?

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are other places where if the air is denser, then you'll sound like this. You can get a person with a high-pitched voice and they'll sound like the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Like someone had really deep voices, deep gravelly voices. So you have that kind of... So yes, yes. And we don't think much about that because normally, we're breathing the air we provide ourselves. You're not gonna say, "Yeah, let's just breathe Martian air." No, because you're not gonna be worried about what your voice sounds like while you're gasping for oxygen.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Is this sexy to you?

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's just not practical to test. So yes, you will sound completely different on different planets. It's a great question.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great question.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  All right, another question. Michael Bruce from Mountain View in California. "Is it a myth that opera singers can shatter glass by singing high enough?"

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've not seen it done, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. Because there's certain frequencies that are called resonant frequencies in other objects. And have you ever done this? Go up to a ch- maybe not, I didn't. You go up to a tree that's way thicker than anything you would you would think of toppling. Okay? And then you just start pushing it, right? If there is a rhythm with which you can push a tree that pumps the tree in exactly the motion that you had originally set it to do. It's the same thing as pumping when you're on a swing. It's how you can just put yourself into motion without touching anything. You sort of sway your legs right at the right moment. That will add to that motion.

• 28:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you tuck your legs back right at the right moment. So you can do this to a tree and you will hit a resonant frequency of the tree. And if you do this enough, you can actually snap a tree in half. And so-

• 28:46Speaker 01

  You say you try it best.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh yeah, I do it all the time, it's fun. No, no, no, I don't do it to the point where I kill the tree.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but you get it.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's fun to just watch this pumping. It's literally, it's physics, in physics we call it pumping. You're pumping a system. It with the, in a resonant frequency of the system itself. The system wants to sway at that rate. Now if you pump it in exactly that way, you, all that energy stays there. And then the tree starts blowing it, waving in the breeze. And, and it's a sense of power o- over nature. And I did this mu- I still do it today.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  So somebody's vocal corp, somebody's voice-

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so, so you get a, so you get an object that has a resonant frequency-

• 29:25Speaker 01

  The glass?

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That can be, yes, that a, that a human voice can reach at a high enough volume. And then it'll start vibrating, okay? If it's at the resonant frequency. And if you can vibrate it with enough energy at that frequency, the glass is not going to be able to stay with you. And you'll just crack it. So that, so that, so, yes.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  It's possible.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  We need to demo it, I kind of want to do it.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we've been discussing creativity, how it manifests in art and in science. And I had an hypothesis that creativity in science is fundamentally different from creativity in art. Now, you'd probably disagree, as did David Byrne. But why don't you hear me propose it to him? You'll hear his reply, and I desperately am interested in how you react. Let's check it out. Einstein discovers relativity.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's a brilliant genius and all the like. But none of us would ever say that without him, relativity would never be discovered. Somebody would discover it later, or some combination of people. It would come out of... It would rise up. Whereas if Beethoven never composed his Ninth Symphony, nobody is. Ever. So the work of art is singular in space and in time, whereas the work of the scientist, it may be a little ahead of its time, but its time will always come.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Gee, I would argue that nobody's gonna write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but somebody's gonna write something that partakes of a lot of the same elements. It may not be as good, but the qual... Whatever, the zeitgeist or whatever, there's...

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inspired.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  They're inspired by what is available at that moment, the instruments, the concert halls, what kind of orchestra you can put together, what's available, who's commissioning, how much the commissioner will put up with as far as innovation. All those factors, I think, will allow something to emerge that is maybe not as good, certainly not the same, but in the same universe as opposed to... It's not gonna... What I'm saying is, it's not gonna sound like Bach. It's gonna sound more closer to Beethoven. This is just me saying. And that at any moment... I would think, and I could be completely wrong,

• 31:51Speaker 02

  that when there's a Beethoven, there are lesser Beethovens. Orbiting. Orbiting around, sometimes much lesser, and that we will never, ever care about. Some have chaotic orbits. Yeah, yeah, whatever. And that the zeitgeist says that, yeah. I'm really suspicious of the kind of singularity idea that there's, whatever, the great man theory of history, or whatever that might be, or the arts, where I do feel like there are certain people where lots of the factors come into focus, and that person just... The benefit of buoyant forces. Yes, they kind of buoy to the top and get shoot up like a fountain.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's thinking there's a universe in which Beethoven creates, and others are in that universe, so we don't have to think about whether someone will create that exact symphony. And I was just saying, people praise that symphony, and people praise relativity. Without that symphony, there is no symphony for people to praise. But without relativity of Einstein, somebody would have come up with it later. That's all I was trying to say there. So, Monica.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  I think what science is looking for are sort of absolutes, ideas, concepts that are independent of us.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, independent of our own creativity.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  While the Beethoven example, or the Bach, whoever it is, is...

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exists only within us.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's totally personal, but it's also dependent on society and culture, your environment, context again. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a Bach, and there can only be a Bach, but that doesn't mean that other individuals who are around at his time would be influenced by similar factors. But because each person is unique, with different experiences, they will use all of that in different ways.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when StarTalk returns, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence as a source of creativity, possibly supplanting the greatest creativity we've ever expressed as humans, when we return.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Startalk, one of a live audience in the Dorothy and Louis Coleman Hall of the Universe at the American Museum of Natural History. This is my day job, right here.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  This is your, yeah, you come down here, get your coffee.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I chill with the cosmos, this is what I do. We've been featuring my interview with David Byrne, highly creative guy, founder and songwriter for Talking Heads. And up till now, we've been talking about creativity and how that can be a manifestation of your culture and how different things within your culture can produce one kind of creativity versus another. And at one point, given our state of technology, at some point, you gotta ask the question, is creativity purely a human thing? Or will machines ever take that place? Can you have an artificially intelligent computer that not only feels, but expresses itself?

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a question that I think needs answering. Now, there are people out there who are working on this.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  You could just Google those.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Professor David Kope from UC Santa Cruz, okay? He's written a computer program that can compose original music. And I'm thinking, should you be scared of this if you write music?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like your indignance with which you answered my question. Well, we've got Professor David Kope on video right now, live from UC Santa Cruz. Can you bring him on for me? Welcome to Startalk. Honored to be here. So, Professor, you've written a computer program that creates music, that has a creative...

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What the hell does your program do? That's what I should be asking.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Well, I've written more than one program. But the first program that brought a lot of notoriety was written in about 1980. And it's a program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence. And it fundamentally is a program that takes a database of music by typically a classical composer, because they're dead and because they can't sue me for imitating their style. It takes a large body of that music and analyzes that music and fundamentally tries to create a new composition in the style of that music, but essentially not replicating any of the pieces that are in the database.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I'm told you actually have a clip you can share with us?

• 36:40Speaker 04

  Yes, I do. It is, it's a part of one of the movements of a work, not written by Vivaldi, but hopefully in Vivaldi's style, called The Zodiac.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's crazy. That's like, I could listen to that. I hope so.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could listen to that all day.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  You too?

• 37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and if, and since I'm not like a music historian, if you just told me that was Vivaldi, I'm, I'm there. I'll say, yeah, the Lost Concerto found in his attic. Okay, so Monica, we have Monica here who is a musician and a cognitive neuroscientist and also a playwright. So how, how did that sound to you?

• 37:42Speaker 03

  I mean, that was Vivaldi. That's, you've got the syntax down.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She gave you some up there.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  I was bold.

• 37:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The syntax, so syntax is the...

• 37:49Speaker 03

  The syntax, so the grammar, the musical grammar. I mean, he captured it perfectly.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  The program.

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is this the future? Do, are we just get rid of your musicians now? Or, no, you, wait, wait, wait. You needed the musician to model your program after. You needed Vivaldi to imitate Vivaldi.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, I, but...

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was Picasso imitating someone else? Was Vivaldi imitating someone else? Was Van Gogh imitating someone else? So, this is derivative creativity, not the purest kind of creativity we might seek and value in the human species. Is that a fair criticism?

• 38:30Speaker 04

  There is no purist creativity. Creativity is all borrowed.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  We all influence each other, so...

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're citing the cross-influence of everyone. So whether or not someone even admits it, you're saying it's derived from somewhere?

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're just doing the same thing everybody else is doing, except it's your computer?

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, here's what I wonder. Are you as creative as your computer program is?

• 38:58Speaker 04

  More so. In fact, that's... I mean, I went through a lot of AI techniques back in the early 80s, and they all failed. So finally, I asked myself, "How would I do this myself?" And then I modeled a program on what I would do to do what the program does. So the program is fundamentally doing exactly what I would do had I been asked to create a 12-movement work by not Vivaldi, but sounding like Vivaldi, and naming him Taurus and Etymo.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in fact, you programmed into the computer a piece of yourself?

• 39:36Speaker 04

  In a way, yes.

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So this is the early stages of just uploading your mind, body, and soul into a computer? Well, Professor Kope, thanks for joining us all too briefly on StarTalk, and maybe we can find another way to tap your musical compositions.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, coming up, Bill Nye explains the science of creativity on StarTalk.

• 40:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back in Star Town. The American Museum of Natural History, right here in the heart of New York City. We're gonna catch up with my good friend Bill Nye. He sends us dispatches from around the city and... I don't know where he is. I never know until I see the clip where he is. But he sends these in, and he knows the topic, and so this topic is the science of creativity. So let's see what he sent us.

• 40:43Bill Nye?

  Creativity is important to us humans. I mean, just think about it. That's where music comes from. I mean, how do you do it? You come up with a new melody and new lyrics for that new melody? That's complicated, and it comes out of nowhere. That's creativity. And I think creativity is very important to human survival. I mean, imagine being out there on the savannah, getting confronted with a hungry lion. You gotta come up with an escape route. You gotta be creative, right now. Of course, we all know people who have no creativity whatsoever. And those people end up in management. But for the rest of us, creativity is where all this came from. I mean, I'm sure it started out in ancient times with vocalizations.

• 41:28Bill Nye?

  Somebody in the tribe would go "mm, eh", and then someone else in the tribe would go "eh, eh", and that led somewhere. That led to a melody, and then eventually, vocalizations that were standardized and everybody could understand them. And the tribes celebrated that and elevated those people to the point where, if people like your melodies and vocalizations enough, they print it on a vinyl record and put it up for sale. Even those of us who think we have no musical ability at all, we love to sing. Because creativity just brings that out in us. When you're being creative, you wanna tell the world, "I'm creative. I'm singing. I'm creative. I'm singing.

• 42:12Bill Nye?

  I'm creative. I'm a sex machine. I'm creative. I'm singing. I'm sexy."

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, there's a big issue, probably in other places in the world, but we feel it a lot here in the States. The funding for arts education is always under stress. And the school boards are wondering, do we cut the art? Do we keep the science? And there's tension. We know this. And I brought that up with David Byrne. And he had strong views on that as well. Let's check it out.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  In order to really succeed in whatever math and the sciences and engineering like that, you have to be able to think outside of the box. And you have to be creative problem solving. And the way those disciplines are taught is not totally creative. The creative thinking-

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not at all.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Not at all. It's more like, this is this, this is this, this is this. The creative thinking is in the arts. A certain amount of arts education doesn't mean that your ambition is to grow up to be a painter. But you can use that kind of thinking and apply it to anything else. Business, engineering, science.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And be better at it.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  And you're better at that. You succeed more and you bring more to the world because you have these abilities that came from outside of your discipline. So bringing different worlds together has definite tangible benefits. And to kind of cut one or separate them is to injure them and cripple them. A lot of our creative thinking, imaginative thinking, our relations with one another, the things that kind of make us different from machines are not all our kind of rational thinking. That's pretty easy to copy. It's the other stuff.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  To me, imagination or creativity is a kind of inventing and imagining something that hasn't existed before. And in a sense, there's a relationship-

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Between that and confabulation and fabulation and making up, making up stuff which is very close to lying. So, there's a relationship between creativity and deception. If you're following me.

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, go, keep going, I'm there.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  If you're following me. It's a little bit of a stretch, but I'm thinking, to be able to make those kind of creative leaps, you also have to be able to deceive. There's a bad, there's a dark side to it. There's the side where you can deceive other people. You can tell them stories that aren't quite true. And that's part of what makes us human. You can make up stories that aren't true, you can make up stories that could be true, and that, imagine things that haven't happened yet that are wonderful. And somehow, we navigate between those two things if we have a moral compass or whatever. But a machine does not have a moral compass. I tend to believe that a lot of our decision-making is not rational either. We rationalize, we post-rationalize.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  We rationalize after we've already kind of made the decision. And kind of an excuse, "I did that because..."

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. A well-known effect in psychology, that, yeah, you have to study that.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  But the thing is, how do you navigate between the two? If you have too much of one and too much of the other, you're kind of...

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're just off, you can lose, you're off the deep end.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're off the deep end.

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And at the end of the day, you still have to sell it.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're gonna pay your rent. So, you can't take all, a finger has to stay in reality.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, yeah. There are, there are crazy artists, and there is, it's a popular meme, it's a popular story that, but you have to, you have to have some sense to be able to survive, too, yeah.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I basically agreed with everything he said in these interviews. I mean, I just, he's a deep thinker, he's creative, he's educated, and so his thoughts are, they're put together in ways that really resonated with me. When I think of culture, what do I think of? I think of, you visit other countries, and then they show you what it is that makes them them, and not you. And in almost every case you do this, you are looking at their art. You are looking at their architecture. You are looking at aspects of their civilization that has been empowered by science and engineering. And so...

• 46:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For anyone to say, "Let us cut art for anything else." Suppose they did that back in Renaissance Europe. What would Europe be without the support and interest in a thriving culture of art? As we readily spend money to visit these cities and go to their museums, to turn around and say, "Now I'm gonna cut the art budget here." That makes no sense to me. And it may be that science and art, which we know sort of go together, the arts and sciences are colleges of institutions. It may be that art and science, thought of in that way,

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  are the only true things that we create that last beyond ourselves. Everything else comes and goes. The leaders, the politics, the economies. So am I biased? I don't know. But what I do know is, if there is a country without art, that's not a country I want to live in. If there's a country without science, you're living in a cave. We measure the success of a civilization by how much, by how well they treat their creative people. And I'm just fortunate, as host of StarTalk,

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to have two creative people here for this show. So, thank you, Maeve. Thank you, Monica. Thank you, David Byrne, for showing up in my office for that interview. You've been watching StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.