The Hidden Science of Music, with Eric Whitacre

Did you know there’s hidden science in music? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Grammy-award winning composer Eric Whitacre, co-host Chuck Nice, neuroscientist Heather Berlin, PhD, and Eugenia Cheng, mathematician and concert pianist, to investigate.

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.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I serve as the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. And today's topic, the hidden science and math in music. Ooh, the music of the spheres, you gotta love it. And we're gonna feature an interview with composer Eric Whitaker. More on that in just a moment, but let me introduce my co-host Chuck. Chuck Nice.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Hey, hey, hey, Neil, how are you?

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. Always good to have you Chuck.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  Always good to be here.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a man of, you're comedic man about town. And, and we're gonna also bring in, for this, because it's, it's, if there's the science of music affects us emotionally, we can't do that without sort of bringing in our, our emotional case.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Person where we gotta check up on emotions, definitely Heather Berlin. Heather, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:15Heather Berlin?

  Pleasure to be your emotional case, Neil. Pleasure to be here.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are everything neuro for us.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. So for you, it's a compliment to be the emotional case, or even as a professor of psychiatry, maybe the head case.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The head case.

• 1:32Heather Berlin?

  Right. Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah, I get that.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put that on your, on your office door, yes.

• 1:37Heather Berlin?

  I'm just going to, Dr. Heather Berlin, head case.

• 1:40Chuck Nice?

  Right. Head case.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Heather, you're assistant professor at the I can school, not I can't, but the I can school.

• 1:50Heather Berlin?

  Icon. Icon, indeed.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the Icahn School, but the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Icahn, I-C-A-H-N. And he's a wealthy donor, I think. Is that correct?

• 2:02Heather Berlin?

  Carl, Carl Icahn. Thanks to him, we changed the name of our whole medical school.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, I'm not on a first-name basis. Sorry.

• 2:08Heather Berlin?

  No, yeah. Carl and I, you know, we go way back.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You go way back. You and other billionaires go way back.

• 2:15Heather Berlin?

  Right, right.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so today, we're gonna talk about how science and math influences music. And we're featuring my interview with the composer and conductor Eric Whitaker. He's got a huge fan base. He won a Grammy in 2012 for his album Light and Gold, Best Choral Performance. And he's a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music. Who wouldn't wanna be a graduate of that place? He also created a short film called Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of the Universe, in collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Institute down in Baltimore, Maryland. They're the caretakers, if you will, of the Hubble Space Telescope. And one of the Hubble Telescope's most famous images of the universe is called the Hubble Deep Field.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I caught up with Eric Whitaker when he was visiting New York. And I invited him by, and I thought, you know, I gotta get an interview with him for StarTalk. And this is a few years ago, but I wasn't really ready for that. And I grabbed, like, a microphone off the shelf, and I put it on the table between us. But I got the interview. And so with your forgiveness, you will hear our interview. And it's the content that matters, of course, not the audio quality. And we're gonna learn how Eric put off getting formal training in music for a long time. Here it goes.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  I played music by ear, but I didn't read music.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, who does that? Who, who, is it one in a hundred, one in a thousand?

• 3:40Speaker 03

  I don't, you know, I actually think more kids than not do it. And it's kinda squeezed out of them in early age.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, one of those things that where the school system just beats it out of you.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, or even worse, the parents, like what happened with my parents is we had a piano in the home. And they encouraged me to, uh, to play piano, but then they tried to give me lessons. And thank God I resisted the lessons, because for me, it would've just squeezed the life.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Is there deep insight there into how to stimulate creativity?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  I think so. I think that what happens is you try to codify it too early, and those kids just...

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then it's a chore.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  That's right, it's a chore. And, and also, it's, it gets, um, uh, it, it... Yeah, the aspirational quality of it gets totally taken out and it becomes virile. And that's good for a very specific kind of personality for a kid. But most kids, they just turn off. They don't want to do it wrong.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. So the kids rather just explore.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  That's it. So I-

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's my word, explore.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Explore. So I had the kind of personality where I wanted to explore and was stubborn enough that I wouldn't take to the lessons.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Heather, did either of you get forced piano lessons or music lessons when you were a kid?

• 4:47Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, really?

• 4:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say that like of course.

• 4:52Chuck Nice?

  It was just what had to be done. And I hated them.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. How about you, Heather?

• 4:59Heather Berlin?

  I actually, I did violin and I was in the choir and I loved it. So I don't know, maybe I'm just a nerd. I just, I loved the, it was like math to me in a way, the patterns of the music. And so I really just appreciated it and I felt like I was part, I guess I was, again, I was a nerdy kid. So I felt like I was part of history. Like I loved playing classical music and like thinking about times gone by, like, bah, things. So I enjoyed it.

• 5:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, now, I feel bad about hating it. But guess what? I still hated it.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, Heather loved it so much, she didn't become a musician. So let the record show.

• 5:38Heather Berlin?

  You know, you can't do everything. Eventually you gotta choose one thing. So, you know, music fell by the wayside.

• 5:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. But my brother is a musician now. So it worked out, you know?

• 5:47Heather Berlin?

  Does that count for you? Do you get points for that?

• 5:50Chuck Nice?

  Of course. As far as I'm concerned, you know, we're, we're, our DNA is close enough where I could just take, like, if he commits a crime, I will be a suspect. So.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I had forced piano lessons. I mean, not, it wasn't forced where I was kicking and screaming, but I had piano lessons for a couple of years. And I still remember three things. I can play three.

• 6:15Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three short musical pieces from that period. But that's it. But I appreciated what it did for me, giving me a sense of, a bit of sensitivity and awareness of what other people are doing when they play music. That's all. That's what it did for me.

• 6:31Chuck Nice?

  What I loved about it is learning, is reading music, which is very hard now because I haven't done it in so long. But it is a language and learning that language is fun. Um, the rote, so back when I took lessons, it was rote. That's how you learn and the lessons were highly structured. And I couldn't take sitting there doing those same exercises over and over and over again. That just drove me crazy.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so that means you just, it was a formal training that stuck with you. But Heather, comment on what Eric Whitaker said about

• 7:09Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The contrasting rote learning and formalized learning with creative learning where you just might train yourself. Do we know anything about what role that plays in creativity?

• 7:20Heather Berlin?

  Absolutely. Just what Chuck said, actually, what we see what happens to the brain when people are learning or playing music is that the language area of the brain, Broca's area, is actually activated. And so, as he was saying, it is like a language. It is like learning a language and those same language areas of the brain and it's having to do with language comprehension and language creation are also active when you're either listening to or playing music. The other thing is that one of the, you know, positives of learning a musical instrument as a child is that studies show that children's brains actually develop faster with musical training. So they did an experiment actually with the Los Angeles Philharmonic where, and they had children, a couple of them got lessons with them and some just had soccer lessons

• 8:02Heather Berlin?

  and other after school activities and they followed them for five years and found that we should do a parts of the brain, like the auditory cortex developed much quicker. And the auditory cortex is also involved in things like language and reading. So they actually were doing better, they had an advantage in those other areas. So it kind of, you know, you're learning to read the language of music, but that kind of has a knock on effect to other areas. Um, so it's very positive, but the, the idea of creativity, so another study showed, and they measured areas of brain activation and creative music ability and they found that

• 8:38Heather Berlin?

  People who were trained still had an advantage when it came to actually being spontaneously creative or improvising. And the idea is that-

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it didn't squash, it didn't squash that part?

• 8:48Heather Berlin?

  No.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, interesting, okay.

• 8:50Heather Berlin?

  It didn't. And so I think that's a, that's sort of a subjective sense that it does. And maybe because of the rote and the, you know, maybe if it was taught in a different way, it would be, you know, taken in differently. But the actual fact of learning the basics, in many cases, gives people more tools to use to be more creative.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very good point. Yeah. So, so could it be true? I mean, I have to say, you know, now that you mention it, I don't know very many inarticulate musicians. If, if they're both in the same part of the brain, does one help the other, force the other, nurture the other?

• 9:33Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, I think, and that's the whole argument, I think, for, you know, the arts, you know, they always in school talk about cutting the arts, right? But actually, the arts can enhance your abilities in the other more traditional academic areas. So they find that, you know, students who take and have art, whether it's painting or music or theater, tend to do better in the other disciplines. Because if you think creatively in the arts and outside the box, you can also use that to think creatively in the sciences and come up with novel theories and ideas. So they, they really do, these skill sets can enhance, you know, can, can bleed over into other areas. So when you're enhancing musical ability, you can be enhancing your language ability as well.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Eric was also interested in science when he was young, but he didn't think he had the right stuff for it. And let's check out what he meant by that in this next clip.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  At age, I'd say probably nine or 10, I was given a telescope for Christmas.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Much like, uh, much like you.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  It changed my world.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where did you live?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  I lived in northern Nevada, so in retrospect, the perfect place.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  In the middle of nowhere. We lived in the sticks, a dirt road. So my, my childhood was huge, open night skies.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you could say that, that, did you even know that there was a universe to discover at the time you got that telescope?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so it was, it was a toy at the time?

• 11:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. It was just a thing that somebody thought a nine-year-old would want, right? Um, yeah, and, and it, uh, it blew my mind. And I'd say, I mean, still frankly, if they somehow needed me, I, I wanted to be an astronaut from the earliest age I could remember.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  And I was fascinated by physics. I love math. Um, I don't really have the brain or personality to be a mathematician. Um, and then I, I found my way into music.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so let me get on your case. So you ended up studying music instead of science?

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where did we go wrong? Was it a teacher? What, what was it?

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was ultimately a teacher. So I had in, I'd say, in my junior year, I had a fantastic physics teacher. I loved him, Mr. Patterson, and, uh...

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We always remember the names of our teachers.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't we?

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  The most important ones.

• 11:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  And in fact, when I graduated, you'll love this, um, I'm, I'm not Mormon or religious, but my best friend in high school was Mormon. So when we were seniors, we went to Brigham Young University to observe classes. And, um, the only class we could...

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The seniors in high school?

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. The only class that was open to us at the time was, uh, that we could go and observe, was this graduate-level astrophysics class.

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 12:14Speaker 03

  I will never forget this. This is probably the moment I knew I wasn't gonna be a physicist. So at that point, I'd had calculus, or I was in calculus. I'd done trig, I'd done some advanced algebra. But we sat and listened to five students, sit alone in a room, and, you know, I think they're talking about the velocity of a photon as it passed through a star or something. And there were no numbers on the board. It was all, right, symbolic and representational math. And I remember just thinking, oh, it turns out, there, I, there's no way. I mean, I, I was so fascinated by the concept, but the, the nuts and bolts, I realized I'm not sure.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so most people in that situation are, uh, inspired?

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To do what it is they just saw happened. You were inspired to not do what you just saw.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, so Heather, do you think there was a left brain, right brain war going on in his head?

• 13:11Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, I mean, so just to debunk the myth of the left brain, right brain myth, which is

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, let's keep it. I like it. It's so helpful. Okay, how about this? Okay, so whether or not it's left or right, there are parts of the brain that specialize in analytic thinking and other parts that specialize in, I guess, abstract thinking. Is that a fair characterization?

• 13:34Heather Berlin?

  I think that is fair. Yes, that is fair.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, whether or not it's left or right, so, okay, so go ahead. No, no. Back brain, front brain.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is your head in your ass? Your ass-brain.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The brain's all over its specific parts of your body. No, so go ahead, Heather.

• 13:58Heather Berlin?

  So, you know, I think that is a bit of, you know, when he says, you know, I just wasn't a math person, I don't think that's necessarily true. I mean, the problem is when you jump into math or physics and you jump in at a very late stage before you've gotten all the basics, it can look just completely like another language and very, you know, you think you have no control over it. But if you start people young and train them and to understand the basics, this is what this symbol stands for and etc., you can build up, right? So I think people have this sort of irrational fear of like math and science just because if they haven't learned the basics, it feels very far into them. So I guess I'm going against that idea that there's some people that are math people and some science people and some that are, you know, let's say artistic and music.

• 14:43Heather Berlin?

  There is a difference, though, between people who can think more creatively and outside the box. And that could be applied either to the sciences or to the arts. And so creative people can be in any discipline.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as educators, we have to be cautious about what could completely bomb someone out of the water in a one-time encounter with a subject.

• 15:06Heather Berlin?

  If you get turned off at an early age, let's say from math, you think, oh, I just can't do it, or you had a bad teacher, then, you know, it's very difficult to catch up years later, once you haven't picked up, you know, the basics, because it builds upon, it builds on each other. And the same with music, you know, it's years of practice, and if you miss those early years of training and brain development, where your brain is still plastic and easily malleable, you're at a disadvantage later on. And just one other thing, it's the same thing with language. If you're learning a second language and you don't learn it within these critical periods of development, you'll never be able to speak it without an accent. So there are certain critical periods where you learn music, or math, or language, and if you don't learn it in those periods, it becomes more difficult to learn it later in life.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we gotta take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk about how science might inspire the artist on StarTalk.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. I got Chuck Knight, Chuck. Hey, Neil. Tweeting at ChuckNiceComic. Thank you, sir, yes. And I follow you, just so you know. And I follow you, too. Okay, that's great to see you. To the ends of the, to the ends of the universe, Neil. Of the, of the social media universe, which, wherever the hell that is. Even the deep field universe, okay? We're talking about creativity, and science, and music, and art in general, and the neurological components of that, and of course, we have our longtime friend of StarTalk, Heather Berlin. Heather, you, what do you, you tweet at, what's your handle?

• 16:53Heather Berlin?

  Heather underscore Berlin. The underscore is very special. The underscore makes me very unique. Yes, underscore Berlin.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I hate underscores.

• 17:02Heather Berlin?

  I know that, yes. So is that why you don't follow me, Neil?

• 17:10Chuck Nice?

  Soon as you get rid of that underscore, you've got one more follower.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we've been discussing how science and math might be embedded in music, or at least in musical creativity, and we're featuring my interview with Eric Whitaker, when he had just come through New York and a friend of a friend knew him, and he agreed to come by for an interview, but it was like on the spot, and I had to like grab a microphone off my shelf and set it up on a table between us. So forgive the quality of the recording, but the content is all there. And ultimately, that's what really matters. So I asked if he drew musical inspiration from the science that he embraced. So let's check it out.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  So I've written this piece called "Deep Field", and it's based on a deep field image. And for years, I've been looking for the right way to write this piece. For me, when I'm composing a piece of music, it always starts with, "God, wouldn't that make a great movie?" And then I musicalize the movie version of it, I suppose, the dramatic version of it. And what happened for me was that I knew the image. I'd known it since I was, God, when was it released, 94, 95?

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yes. And, but I didn't really know the story behind it. So as I started to think about, "Maybe I should write this piece", I just started researching it. And the human drama to get that image, that's the thing that tipped it over the edge for me.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Right, so the fact that they launched the Hubble.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not just that it's a cool image, you like the story behind it.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Because it speaks to who we are as human beings. It speaks to the sense of adventure and exploration. And specifically, the NASA can-do spirit, where, you know, they send the telescope out there. They open up the lens, and it turns out it's got that aberrated mirror, right?

• 19:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  There's that aberration on the, and then NASA, you know, they just, I can just see these guys sitting around a conference table saying, "Okay, what do we do? All right, well, send somebody up there and fix it."

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  So they send three or four missions up, they do a hardware fix on it, they do a software fix, right, to basically put a contact lens on the thing. And that, to me, is as extraordinary as the image that comes back, because it just says so much about who we are.

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's the access to the universe through our technology.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  And, and building tools. And this is what I love about NASA. I'm sorry, I'm all over the place. But what I love about NASA is I feel like it's just this, this crazy collection of artists. It's so pure what they're doing. All they want to do is, is just build these machines and so we can get up, so we can find out, discover.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, yeah. So let me give some backstory on the Hubble Deep Field.

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  Before you do, Neil, if I may, I just, you know, he made the fixing of the Hubble such a, such a big, big deal. But I just want to show people, anybody listening won't be able to see this, but if you're watching, this is all that really happened.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck is...

• 20:18Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck's cleaned the lens on his camera.

• 20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we went up there and like went...

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just took out a curtain.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Squeak, squeak. So just a couple of things, and this might be too much inside baseball here, but so you know, even if you don't know why, that if you look at the iris in your eye and you watch what it does as you go from a bright, if you move from a bright, well-lit room to a darker room, right? The, the iris constricts when you're in light and it opens up when you're in darkness. And the act of opening up tries to bring in as much light as, as it can. And so physiologically, you are responding to the absence of light.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if you want to measure something that is way dimmer than, than even that you can detect with your eyes, you can do one of two things. You can make your iris even bigger. No, you can't really do that, but the physics of this is if you had an eyeball the size of your head, you can see into much dimmer places. All right, if your eyeball were the size, were a hundred inches across, okay, ninety-four inches across, you could see out to the edge of the universe. That's the size of the Hubble telescope. Sweet. Okay, it's ninety, it's a ninety-four inch iris, if you will. Wow. And it's taking in light, at much more light than the, than the, than the iris of the human eye.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only that, the detectors are much more sensitive to light than our retina is. Okay, hundreds of times more sensitive. So not only is it getting more light, it's detecting it better than your eye would have even done so if it were that big. Not only that. Oh, sweet. Okay. And there's more. There's an effect. But wait. Oh, wait, there's more.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There, there's an effective shutter speed of your eyeball. And Heather, correct me if I'm wrong, from what I've read, it's about a tenth of a second. Like it's, you, you collect that much light before, you know, you send a coherent signal to your brain. Which is why you could show frames at ten frames a second, twenty frames a second, and it looks like a movie. Yeah. Right, because you can't see the individual frames, even though it's, and no one thinks about this. When I, if aliens come to visit, let's say they have like a thousand frames per second uh, time resolution in their seeing. If we showed them a movie, they would find it completely annoying. They'd say, why are you showing us these still images? This is annoying. It'd be a flipbook.

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll be a flipbook, exactly, exactly. So, so, so not only is the iris bigger, not only is the detector Better, but it's not limited by a tenth of a second exposure. You could take a long exposure and continue to accumulate as provided you stayed locked and tracked on your star. You can take a continuous exposure. Now, you don't want to do it too long because then if something goes wrong with that image, then you lose the whole thing. So what we did was take many, many, many, many exposures and then added them together. So that's so that way you get the deepest, deepest as in the dimmest things in the universe will show up in that image.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if you don't even see them when you point the telescope. Hmm. That's what's so amazing about it. In fact, that region of the sky that was picked was picked for how empty it was. They said, let's pick the emptiest part of the sky we can and then aim the telescope there. Our most potent, powerful telescope in the world. That was a big gamble. It was a gamble now, okay? Who would agree to this? Why would anyone say, yeah, I want to look in the emptiest part of the sky? No one would. No one did. So how did the picture get approved? We build, we, my people, my, my people. Right. My astrophysician people.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We build into our system the modes of serendipity. Modes of where you override what might be prevailing sentiment. So for every telescope in the world, there's something called director's discretionary time. And the direct, normally we compete for time on the telescope and it's got to be peer reviewed and everything. But there's a percentage of the time that the director says, I choose to do this with it and no one can tell me no. Oh, it's the way I make my children compete for my affection.

• 25:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heather, you gotta, you know, work on him. We're getting a list of things that Chuck needs help on.

• 25:13Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Heather Berlin?

  But can I just say what this is so fascinating, what it really sheds light on, so to speak, is just how limited our sensory capacity is, how we're limited by the physical structures that we have, like our eyes and our ears and even our brain.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your human physiology, right?

• 25:31Heather Berlin?

  And so what we did is we used our ingenuity to build a better eye, let's say, a better functioning eye. Now imagine if we could build a better brain, you know, how much could we understand about the universe? I mean, unfortunately, the brain is much more complex than understanding how the, you know, the physiology of the eye and how that works. But ultimately, that's the ideal, right? Because look what we did when we just simply built a better eye.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would love that. A better, well, that's just AI, building on itself. Yeah, that's what you're saying there. Well, see, then... Well, when that day comes, Chuck, they just, AI makes us their pets. That's what I was about to say. Who wants that? I want a better brain. I don't want to build a better brain. What good does that do? No, I want the brain.

• 26:19Heather Berlin?

  No, we can just plug you into the big brain and you could just become sort of a part of it. We can all just plug in.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because the big brain would say, I don't want Chuck. Exactly. Why do I, why do I want dumbass Chuck as a part of my brain? That brain don't need Chuck.

• 26:34Heather Berlin?

  Big brains don't need Chuck.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Wait, so I'm almost done with this.

• 26:41Heather Berlin?

  Okay, sorry, yeah.

• 26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So go ahead.

• 26:41Heather Berlin?

  I digress.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What happens is the director. So the director. Okay. Name's Bob Williams. He, he said, I want to do this. And there was some criticism, and he was going to use a lot of telescope time and unpeer reviewed. He said, I just want to see what's out there. And so he did it. And it became the most famous picture taken by the Hubble telescope. In this tiny patch of the sky.

• 27:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Countless thousands of galaxies. Right there going out to the edge of the universe. And you might say, well, maybe you just looked on it, on a patch of the sky that's that filled with galaxies.

• 27:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't think so because the universe is really.

• 27:20Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was about to ask you. Has there been any extrapolation done to see whether or not we just hit a galaxy dense portion of the sky?

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, that would be like really unlucky, lucky if that were the case. So we say, all right, just, just to, let's look like over in the opposite direction in another place. And we did that and so there's several deep fields and they all are statistically equivalent in how rich the universe is. And so the story of fixing the telescope, the story of getting the time to even obtain the Hubble Deep Field mattered to Eric Whittaker. And so let me ask you, Heather, he, he likes stories. Why? Uh, we know stories are important, so I'm not going to ask you, are stories important? I'm going to ask you why?

• 28:05Heather Berlin?

  Uh, there's a, there's a number of reasons. I mean, one is that it's, it's ancient. It allows us to predict things, right? Stories are a narrative and it's a sequence of events and it allows you to predict the next event. And it's a way to transfer information, right? And memory is tied to emotion and often these stories are illicit emotions, right? So, but I mean, you're going way back to cavemen, you know, like we, what, we went over to that, that pond over there, but there was like no fish in it, so don't go over there, you know? Like, that's a very simple story with the, but, but over time they've evolved and they also teach morality in many cases as well. So there are moral lessons, there are ways to predict, um, sequence of events.

• 28:49Heather Berlin?

  Uh, but I think the.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a way of, of, of connecting what would otherwise be disparate information into a narrative that then makes sense in your head.

• 28:58Heather Berlin?

  Yes, and then, and then often they, they have some, you know, moral to them or they're conveying information, but they elicit. Some sort of emotion that again helps us track the information and we remember things better.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So does music help with storytelling?

• 29:13Heather Berlin?

  Absolutely, because music is, I mean, one of the reasons why it's so potent is that it really directly activates these emotion centers in the brain, things like the nucleus accumbens and the reward centers. And so when you tie music into stories, it's just another way to kind of help us not only remember but appreciate. You even get things like oxytocin, which is a kind of a neurochemical that has to do with bonding and love. And so when you elicit those emotions, I mean, that's what every commercial is trying to do, you know? They're trying to help elicit an emotion and a catchy jingle and help you remember it so you don't, in that case, you buy the product.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember jingles that I don't want to remember.

• 29:56Heather Berlin?

  That's the other thing. There are certain patterns that stick in your head that you don't necessarily want sticking in your head, like baby shark, do, do, do, do, do, baby shark. I just had to do that so that everybody can enjoy that now for a moment, but. Yeah, that's for the earworm. Right. But, you know, so certain things we don't want to remember, but music is such a powerful way. And if you notice in the best kind of musicals, right when there's an emotional crescendo in the storyline, that's when the music comes in and it just accents that. And so it's so emotional, you can't even use words, you need to break out into song and dance, right? And so it's another, yeah.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So can storytelling help inspiration?

• 30:32Heather Berlin?

  Yes, yeah, I think it helps with, so we all want to solve problems and we like mystery and uncertainty to a point, but when we feel that there's a possibility of solving something, that excites us. And I think that's what inspiration comes from and motivation, and that's part of the human condition.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're going to take another break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the hidden math in music on StarTalk.

• 31:12Chuck Nice?

  Hey, it's time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Julia Zeikowitz and Corey Ricci. Guys, thank you so much. Without you, there's no way we could make it across the cosmos and do this show. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're talking about the hidden math in music in a larger program about what role science literacy, music literacy, art literacy plays in our creativity. And I'm inviting back our guest, Heather Berlin. Heather?

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. How's it going? Hey. And of course, we're featuring my interview with Eric Whitaker, who had just wafted by my office a few years ago. And I was unprepared for that. I had to grab a microphone off my shelf. And so the audio quality isn't good, but the content is most excellent. But what I want to do in this segment is introduce yet another guest, Eugenia Kang. Eugenia, welcome to StarTalk.

• 32:30Speaker 05

  Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you're a mathematician and a concert pianist.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the whole, so we're done here. You did it. What more? That's what we're trying to wonder if that could happen. And you did it. You got a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge. That poses the question, is there such a thing as impure mathematics? But that's you.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  That's a whole different topic.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole different topic. Okay. You're also a scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And this is that famous museum there that has all the paintings that we saw in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Yes, we did.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay. And you're also the author of X plus Y. A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender. Ooh, you're getting all into all kinds of stuff. All right. So, tell me something, you teach a course called The Mathematical Secrets of Music. So, we want to know all the secrets. Just tell me right now.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  Right, how long have we got? Well, I try to demystify math and music at the same time. Because many of the students, they're all art students, and many of them were really put off by math education in the past. And so I try to gently show that math can help us be creative. And also to demystify classical music, because classical music's another thing that puts a lot of people off, unfortunately.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, because there's snooty people.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a whole culture. That you might be put off by the culture, even if you're not put off by the music.

• 34:09Speaker 05

  And unfortunately, both math and classical music sometimes have a culture of keeping people out, rather than bringing people in. And I prefer to bring people in. And there are ways in, in lots of ways. So here's an example that just uses, it's not, so sometimes people say to me, well, music has counting, and math has counting. And I think that's the most boring part of math, and the most boring part of music together.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can count a four eight, you know.

• 34:34Speaker 05

  But here's an example. So if we, if we go, like, here's a piece by Ravel.

• 34:45Speaker 05

  And so this is going, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two. And this is the same rhythm that's in West Side Story. I want to be in America, okay, but in America, everything free in America, for a small fee in America. And this is going, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two. And what that is, is it's saying that two times three equals three times two, which is otherwise known as the commutativity of multiplication in math. And it's that commutativity that is giving us this little catchy rhythm.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  And so that's just one example. And the thing is that you don't have to know that's the math that's going on to just enjoy the music. And I always say that's kind of true about a lot of the math around us in the world. You don't have to know it's there to get on with your life. And loads of people say, "Well, I get by perfectly fine without math." And sometimes I say, "Yes, you do, but I get by better."

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying if I just know what 2 times 3 is, I can play the piano like you do? Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 05

  Absolutely, that's all it takes.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just said that. I think you, Chuck, she just...

• 35:48Speaker 05

  I just said that.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Heather, she just told me that.

• 35:51Speaker 05

  It's just that if you understand the structures inside things, I think you can get more understanding out of it.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you say, is this a trend? That there's more math being put into music?

• 36:03Speaker 05

  It has happened for a long time. So Bach did tons of it. So he used a lot of symmetry in his music, which I think is really amazing. Because you don't have to know it's there. Like this, this theme from a Bach view.

• 36:19Speaker 05

  He then just completely turns it upside down, which turns into this.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Which still sounds, sounds really nice. And there's another example where Rapp Manonov... So Rapp Manonov is a couple of hundred years later. And there's the theme of Paganini, where he writes a set of variations. And the theme goes like this.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  But then writes, so this is... And then he turns it upside down. He just, that's a reflection. He goes... And it becomes this beautiful...

• 37:09Speaker 05

  And you don't have to know that that's how he made that theme. You can just go, "Wow, that's a beautiful piece of music." And then when you know that he wrote the theme, I'm kind of like, "Wow, that's, that's kind of cool." And what I do with my students is I, I let them write pieces of music for themselves using those mathematical principles. And there's a, then there's a contemporary composer. John Taverner, who used the same principles. All the possible symmetries of a rectangle. So you can rotate, you can reflect vertically, you can reflect horizontally. And he wrote this piece called The Lamb, where the theme is this. Little lamb who made thee. And then it's harmonized by flipping that upside down. So I can't sing two lines at the same time, yet. But if I play the other one on the piano, it goes like this.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  And it's kind of eerie and then goes.

• 38:17Chuck Nice?

  It sounds, it sounds like there's some dissonance in the very middle of that. Is that me or is that the way that's written?

• 38:24Speaker 05

  No, that's right. It goes dissonant and then it, and then it converges.

• 38:27Chuck Nice?

  And then it comes back together.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  Right. And it's just a mathematical formula.

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's supposed to, he's supposed to tell Chuck it is in his head, the dissonance.

• 38:36Chuck Nice?

  Stop it! Get out!

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugenia, is it fair to say that, of course, by, when you mentioned rectangles and the multiple symmetries of it? Are you, because you can put a mirror in the middle and it's the same and horizontally it's the same. That you're not only getting sort of arithmetic infusion in the creativity there, but also geometric infusion. So could it be so that if a musician does learn math? They, they come with more tools in their utility belt to possibly invent new forms of, of music?

• 39:11Speaker 05

  I think that's true. And I think, but I think that's true of everything in life. I think that, that anyone who understands, if you understand more math, then you just have more tools to understand and create anything in, in basically any aspect of life.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I asked Eric Whitaker, how does he introduce math into his own music? And he, he gave an interesting answer. Check it out. Here it is.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  For instance, I play endless number games, math games, in the pieces themselves. From the most basic, I wrote a piece called equus, which simply means horse in Latin. But because it had five letters, E-Q-U-U-S, then the entire piece is based on the number five, which means that they leap up a fifth, they leap down a fifth. There are five bar phrases, there's two plus three over four in terms of time signatures. There's just this endless game where things are, and that's on the micro level and then on the macro level. So big sections add up and equal five, or it's...

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'll grant you that, but is it pleasant to listen to?

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Okay, so...

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go there, I don't have a problem you go there, but at the end of the day, am I listening to this music?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is the best question ever. So I think for a lot, a lot of the 20th century, music was written where it was only about that process, and it is not pleasant to listen to. You can break it down, you can go, how elegant is this math? And you know, I also use the Fibonacci sequence often and all the time.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People love them some Fibonacci numbers.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it sort of makes the perfect dramatic structure. You know, where the climax is, where that middle is, is just a little bit further than center. And so for a piece of music, oftentimes the climax comes right at the Fibonacci number, at the golden mean, and then finds its way back down. And artists have been doing this for centuries without having any idea what they're doing. Bach does it all the time.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they were led there because it worked?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Intuitively.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugenia, tell us about the Fibonacci sequence.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Well, like you say, people love them some Fibonacci.

• 41:11Speaker 05

  They really do. And so it's a sequence of numbers that begins with one and one, and then you produce the next number by adding together the previous two numbers. So you add one and one, and that makes two. And then you take the previous two numbers, which are now one and two, and you add those, and you get three. And then you take the previous two numbers, which are now three and two, and you add those together, and you get five. And then you add the previous two. So each time, you stick another number on the end, and then you shift up, add the last two, and that makes the next number.

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frankly, this sounded like, this sounds like the activity of a bored mathematician.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  Kind of, yeah. And but but it goes on forever. It's an infinite. There's no end to it. And this sequence comes up in some places, but I think the reason it captures people's imagination is because there is this longstanding, well, honestly, it's a myth that that it's very fundamental and that that the golden mean is some magical number. So the golden, the golden ratio or golden mean is if you take, if you take consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, their ratio gradually stabilizes. And it never completely stabilizes, but it gets closer and closer to this particular number, which is the golden ratio. And another, another, the, the, the golden ratio has a geometric interpretation

• 42:25Speaker 05

  as well. So it kind of makes some number stuff match up with some geometric stuff. And I think that often to non-mathematicians, that seems like magic. And that's wonderful. And I love the fact that math seems like magic, except that math isn't magic. It's logic. And that's slightly different. And I like the fact that logic seems mysterious, but it's not really mysterious because it's logic. It's only sort of mysterious if you don't understand it in a way.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you don't understand it, it's mysterious, period. Right, right.

• 42:54Speaker 05

  And the golden mean is, is not really a very, it's not a terribly extremely special number. There are loads of numbers that come up by, if you like, magic, that's not really magic. It's really logic. There are loads of, there are loads of numbers like that. And, and so there's this idea that the golden mean is inherent in beauty and that it's the perfect ratio and that artists have been using it forever without even realizing they're what they were. And the thing is, there isn't really any evidence for that. Um, you can, you can find pieces that seem to have something happen at the golden ratio. But then the trouble is that's, that's awfully like confirmation bias.

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you look for it and you find it.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  And you can take any piece, find the golden ratio, and then declare that you decided that something really dramatic happened there.

• 43:41Chuck Nice?

  It, it, this is great when you talk about it from a mathematical standpoint, but I'm trying to, um,

• 43:49Chuck Nice?

  Kind of audioize it as music. Is there an example you can give us for those of us who are uninitiated? That we might be able to know exactly what you and Neil are so gleefully talking about?

• 44:04Speaker 05

  So, the idea often is that some dramatic climax happens. The golden ratio proportioned through the piece. And the golden ratio is approximately 0.618 something. And so what they're saying is that a bit more than halfway through, something dramatic happens. And the thing is, I think it's a bit, I think it's a bit fishy, honestly, because, because it's, it's also very close to two thirds. And all it's really saying is that approximately two thirds of the way through a piece, something interesting happens. And if a piece is interesting, then something interesting will always happen to approximately two thirds of the way through a piece, you know? And you can find examples.

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  And something interesting probably happened a quarter of the way through as well.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  Well, exactly, also halfway through.

• 44:47Chuck Nice?

  And right, and you know, and the climax is probably, yeah.

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, so regardless, the Fibonacci sequence is a pattern, alright? And, and if there's a repeat, if it's two thirds or the golden ratio, that's still kind of a recurring thing. Heather, why are we so quick to notice patterns? Sort of neurologically, do we innately like patterns?

• 45:12Heather Berlin?

  Yes.

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if so, why?

• 45:14Heather Berlin?

  So, again, it has, you know, goes back, there are evolutionary reasons for it. So if you could predict what's going to come next, you're at an advantage, right? You save time, you save resources. Um, so those who were able to do so had a higher chance of surviving. And so the brain evolved in a way to like discovering patterns. Even in ambiguous information, we try to come up with patterns. And that's why often people, you know, see faces in clouds.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They see patterns, yeah, yeah.

• 45:41Heather Berlin?

  Right, right. But that's just because our brain is so adept at finding these patterns. And we get dopamine when we do. And also when there's some uncertainty and then we can resolve that uncertainty. So we figure out either the pattern or the solution. We actually get rewarded for that. We like patterns, but we like a little bit of uncertainty. And I think that's what comes up with like, you know, oh, there's like this climax and a thing. And how is it going to resolve? And that sort of draws us in, right? There's a little bit of mystery. But, but, and then when it does resolve, we feel this like satisfied and gratified. If it doesn't, you know, some of that very disparate kind of like. Jazz music, maybe that doesn't have so much of a pattern or that doesn't resolve. Some people don't enjoy it as much. I mean, maybe they enjoy it more on an intellectual level,

• 46:26Heather Berlin?

  but not so much on that basic, basal emotional level.

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Heather, you mentioned something I hadn't fully appreciated, that the fact that we so quickly recognize patterns is because we're actually intellectually lazy, right? So if you can, if you know a pattern and something has happened before or it's repeating, then you don't have to have a whole fresh new thought to know what the next thing is gonna be. Because the pattern gives it to you.

• 46:51Heather Berlin?

  By the way, we can get into trouble. So it's a heuristic, you know, it's a shortcut to save time. But this is also the same mechanism that's related to unconscious biases, right?

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 47:01Heather Berlin?

  Because when you notice certain things are happening over time, you start to make these quick assumptions, which aren't always correct in the individual case.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugenia, does music have to have patterns in it to be enjoyable?

• 47:15Speaker 05

  Everyone's different, you know? We all enjoy different things. And I think that I like trying to explain why I enjoy particular pieces of music. Because to me, that is a more interesting discussion than just yelling backwards and forwards with people saying, "No, you idiot, this piece is better." "No, this piece is better." And there's enough arguments like that.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You idiot.

• 47:38Speaker 05

  And so I personally enjoy music that has really interesting structural patterns. But just like Heather was saying, not exact repetitions, because then that wouldn't be any uncertainty and excitement of the possibility of resolution. And so, for example, there's this piece of Chopin where

• 48:04Speaker 05

  and that theme comes back over and over again. But it's slightly different each time. So the next time, he does something nuts with it and goes

• 48:18Speaker 05

  Which is basically the same theme, except that he's stuffed eleven notes in. And because eleven...

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The crow barred it in.

• 48:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And so eleven, eleven is, well, it's various things. It's a prime number. It has no common factors with six. The left hand is going one, two, three, four, five, six. And so you have eleven and six happening at the same time. And you kind of can't tell whether it's gonna land. I mean, when I'm playing it, I never know if I'm gonna land them both at the same time either. But, and then each time, something else. So the next time it goes...

• 48:52Speaker 05

  And so it's the same thing, but with a slight twist on it. And it's, it's the same with really huge pieces of music, where there's often what's called a recapitulation, which is where the beginning section recapitulates. It comes back, but different. And then there's a little twist in it, then it goes off into a different key or something. And I love seeing those big structural patterns. There are, there are other types of pieces where the same thing just happens over and over again, without changing.

• 49:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but I... We call that rap, we call that rap music. Wait, wait, Eugenia, dare I even say this? That you like this, that kind of music, because you're bringing an intellectual component to the underlying melodies to it. But, but if you don't go all intellectual on it, then you get a very, or if the music doesn't have that extra dimensionality to it, then it just becomes a simple melody. And isn't that what a lullaby is, to lull children asleep? I mean, so, so you, aren't you agreeing that pleasant music has to have patterns? But interesting music needs to be, to have the, the dynamicism that you described?

• 50:05Speaker 05

  Well, different people like different kinds of music, you know? And so some people really rebel against patterns. And actually, that's how the development of classical music happened across the last several hundred years. That there was a lot more rigid structure that was demanded, just like in society, it was a lot, it was a lot more rigid. Unfortunately, society is still quite rigid, but... But I think we've become a bit more flexible and people gradually broke rules in music and said things like, well, in the olden days, you had to write everything in four or three, like one, two, three, four, because we're all in the military. And then composers started going, no, I want to write things in five, like Eric Whitaker was saying, or I want to write things in thirteen or something. And then, and then we gradually break rules and that's how math develops as well.

• 50:49Speaker 05

  People say, well, there's this rule saying you can't take the square root of a negative number and then mathematicians go, wait, but I want to take the square root of a negative number. And so they invent imaginary numbers and, and complex numbers. And we keep sort of wanting a framework with patterns, but then also rebelling against it at the same time.

• 51:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's really deep. And of course, art, the best art is breaking some rule and taking you to a new place. But whether you're using math or not to compose a piece of music, it still takes some investment of creative thinking. And I asked Eric Whitaker.

• 51:27Chuck Nice?

  I don't want to hear any more Eric Whitaker. Let's keep talking to you.

• 51:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the last clip. It's the last clip and it's ninety seconds. So you can, you can, you can. So I asked Eric Whitaker, how does he approach creating a new piece of music? And here it is.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  I did my master's degree at the Juilliard School and, and I studied.

• 51:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here in New York?

• 51:47Speaker 03

  That's right. And studied with a man named John Corleone. And John is brilliant and he's a brilliant teacher and he taught me this technique where you, you take a large piece of paper and you draw, before you write a note of music, you write, you draw the emotional architecture of the piece. How do you want the piece to play out emotionally from start to finish? And you can use whatever you need, you know, colors, pens, cut things out. And I use descriptive words. I'll write, you know, like that bit in Debussy that I want to steal, or, or that film score by Thomas Newman, or this is the big, grand, luscious, dense, and just whatever it takes to kind of get the, the lumpy shape of it. And then from there, always there's this little, what I call a golden brick. Some truth reveals itself in those doodles.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  The idea is that you're just freeing yourself from the tyranny of detail, just writing, writing, writing. And then somewhere, there's a little golden brick. And that's the motive that becomes the DNA for the entire piece. And so that's how I always start.

• 52:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that golden brick somehow bring it all together? Or does it emerge and take you yet to a different place?

• 52:50Speaker 03

  That's very perceptive. So in some pieces, in the best pieces, it's like Beethoven's Fifth. The entire symphony, all four movements are based bum bum bum bum on those four notes. So it gives it a cohesion and a coherence that, again, I think just reflect the laws of the natural universe.

• 53:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In chemistry terms, it would be a substrate.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  A substrate? Yeah. OK, I have to learn about this.

• 53:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Substrate is good.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  There's already a piece to be written.

• 53:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the thing in which everything else happens. So it's a substrate.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Oh, it is?

• 53:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  OK, that's it. Yes, exactly.

• 53:22Chuck Nice?

  OK. I didn't hear a word he said after he said he was taught by Jean Corleone. All I heard was, "You come to me on the day of my daughter's wedding."

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, close cousin of Jean Corleone. Yes, yes. So Heather, I probably know the answer to this, but if you're going to create something new, is it better to start with the big picture or the little picture? Assemble it from ground up or start from the large and?

• 53:52Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, I mean, it's always good to have a... Yeah, it's always good to have a framework so you don't get sort of stuck in the details or the minutia. You know, it's all about contextualizing and then editing yourself, right? And so often, if you get stuck in a pattern, for say, you can break free by thinking about the larger concept or having a larger kind of scaffolding or structure. But, you know, the thing that I just want to hark back to in terms of, you know, these patterns that we're talking about is how important novelty is, again, in the brain to keep our attention. So when you're talking about, you know...

• 54:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what Eugenia was talking about.

• 54:27Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, there's these themes, but then each one, they're slightly varying. It's almost like pressing the refresh button. So your attention comes back because it's like the same but different. Now, our brain doesn't want it to be too abstract, too, you know, so there's this repetitive sort of pattern, but slightly different every time to keep our interest, to keep us engaged. And all that, again, is happening at a very unconscious level. And while, yes, there are subjective individual differences in terms of like what kind of music we like or don't like. I do think there are sort of commonalities across humans, one of them being liking novelty or attending more to novelties. And I think with creativity, part of it is is being able to break the rules. First, you have to learn the rules. You learn the structure, you learn the patterns.

• 55:09Heather Berlin?

  And only by then, then you can learn how to break them in ways that are interesting. Because it's not just about smashing everything apart, but it's it's almost like breaking them in a sort of controlled way, you know, um, little by little to get to these interesting creative places.

• 55:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's an old saying with uh IBM, if it if it um, how's it they said, if it works, then break it. So that you can reassemble and have it work even better. Uh, it's like the opposite of what you might think in that. Uh, Eugenia, how do you solve a math problem that you've never seen before?

• 55:40Speaker 05

  Well, it's actually very similar. So first, I'd like to say that the research I do isn't really involved with solving problems. It's really involved with with building new structures that illuminate things that other people are thinking about. And I it I was very struck by Eric's description of how he starts writing a piece of music because it felt very similar to me to how I start doing math research, which is definitely not to get bogged down in the details. The details are crucial when you're doing math because the logical detail is how you write a proof. But when you start, you need a big soaring structure of where you want to go and where you might be able to go in your wildest dream. And you don't know if it's going to work and you don't know how you're going to put it together.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  And it really reminds me of the story of how Sir Christopher Wren built St Paul's Cathedral in London, where he had this dream of building this huge dome. And he just didn't know how he was going to do it. And he just started anyway. And and eventually it came to him how he was going to make a structure that was going to be big enough to dominate the London skyline, but not so big that it would it would overwhelm the inside. But he didn't know how he was going to do it when he started. And that's how I think math proofs start for me. I have a dream of how I want this overarching structure to be. And I sketch it out just to sketch out the broad. And then, just like Eric said, there's often a golden brick or some some one idea where you think, oh, maybe that's the one idea that's going to hold everything together.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  And then you go back and start filling in the details. And then usually ninety nine percent of the time, it completely fails and it.

• 57:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, but that one percent that it works.

• 57:17Speaker 05

  You're right. And then it's so exciting. That really, in that moment, it makes it all worth it.

• 57:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Eugenia, we gotta, we gotta bring this to a close, but I'm delighted to have you on, and we'd love to get you back again for another show.

• 57:30Speaker 05

  Oh, I'd love to come back.

• 57:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, we will totally, we will build a show around you. We have no hesitation to do so. But Heather, always good to have you.

• 57:40Heather Berlin?

  Great being here. Thanks for having me.

• 57:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 57:42Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 57:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent.

• 57:44Chuck Nice?

  And now you, now you have to have Eugenia play us out, as they say.

• 57:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Play us out.

• 57:49Chuck Nice?

  I have, can't, can't leave the show without doing that.

• 57:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Eugenia, if you plays out, as I say, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bidding you to keep looking up.