David Byrne Interviews Daniel Levitin -- or is it the other way around?

This month's issue of Seed magazine features an interview, or really more of a discussion between music researcher Daniel Levitin and David Byrne. Even better, you can read the whole article online!

Byrne has been one of my musical heroes for decades now, and Levitin is a phenomenal researcher who really knows how to write. I'm about two-thirds of the way through his book This Is Your Brain on Music now, and I'm very much enjoying the read.

So how does the interview go? It reads a little awkwardly -- you get the sense that Byrne and Levitin just sat down for a somewhat choreographed chat, and then Seed published the transcript. But there are also some nice moments, such as this one:

DL: But for most of us, the studies from my laboratories and others have shown that language, environment noise and music all have separate cortical representations--they register and show up in distinct parts of the brain.

And then there are things like what I would call paralinguistic noises. Things that aren't language but that are associated with the expression of the human voice: laughter, crying, sneezing, coughing, hiccups, groaning. These things seem to have their own representation but are closer to the language sections. But we do make a distinction neurologically between speech, music, and environmental sounds.

DB: Right.

DL: When we sing lyrics, both mechanisms, both sets of structures, are being activated. And if you look at, for example, the acousmatic composers from Belgium, France, and Québec who create entire musical pieces out of jackhammers and waterfalls, there is this sense of ambiguity where your brain is recognizing the sounds as environmental sounds, but the music part of the brain is getting activated too.

In Pink Floyd's "Money," maybe the first popular recording that did this, cash-register noises make music. And the brain, I think, responds to that with both mechanisms, which means more of your brain is actually reacting.

DB: Right. Generally, we don't see them as music, but if they fall into a pattern--

DL: --or once a composer places them in a pattern, then you get it.

DB: Somebody orchestrates a bunch of car horns, and it's music.

DL: I've got a recording from a guy named Woody Phillips, who is a carpenter. He noticed that if he put particularly dense wood through his power saw, it would slow it down a predictable amount. So, normally, the power saw would be like zzzz, but if he pushed through a two-by-four of pine, it goes bzzz and a two-by-four of maple goes bzut. So he lined up pieces of wood, and he performed a piece of music--Beethoven's Fifth.

DB: Oh--ha!

Phillips' performances, the article notes, can be found on YouTube. Here's a neat example:

It's a constant source of amazement for Levitin that the human perceptual system readily recognizes the tune, even though the set of acoustical vibrations a buzz saw produces is entirely different from that produced by an oboe or a clarinet. I'd have to agree--the way we can find the same musical pattern in a variety of different sounds is truly remarkable.