Full transcript of the episode (it gives away every surprise)
Listen
The missing note
A melody nobody has ever heard: it was just composed for you. It stops before the last note. Listen to the four possible endings, then pick the right one.
The reader listens to a brand-new melody that breaks off before its last note, then compares four possible endings. Almost everyone picks the same one: the “home” note of the scale, which gives a feeling of rest.
You knew the answer.
Nobody ever taught you the rules of this music. You absorbed them by listening, for thousands of hours, ever since you were in your mother’s womb.
The Chills
Your brain predicts music note by note. The chills come when it is right… or wrong.
Your brain spends its life predicting what comes next: the next word, the next step, the next note.
In music, this guessing game becomes a pleasure. Each note confirms your expectation… or foils it.
Listen
A single note apart
The same melody, played twice. Listen to both versions. Which one is sad?
A melody is played twice: in major, then in minor. Only the third note of the scale changes, lowered by a half step. Most Western listeners find the minor version sad.
A single note changed: the third, lowered by a half step. And the mood flips. But is that written in our genes, or learned?
In 2009, researchers played Western music to the Mafa, in the Mandara Mountains of Cameroon, who had never heard any. They recognized joy, sadness and fear far better than chance.
But the precise link between minor and sadness seems to be learned: in 2022, among the Uruwa of Papua New Guinea, who have heard little of our music, it was almost nonexistent.
Listen
Two chords
Listen to them. Then say which one you find more pleasant. There’s no trick… at least, not for you.
The reader compares a consonant chord (C, E, G) and a dissonant chord (C, C sharp, F sharp), then says which one they prefer.
For the Tsimane’, both are just as good.
In 2016, MIT researchers played chords to this people of the Bolivian Amazon, who are almost cut off from Western music. Consonant or dissonant, they found them equally pleasant. Pythagoras believed he had discovered a law of the universe; it was, in part, a habit.
And the chills? That moment when your skin prickles and something runs up the back of your neck?
Question for the reader
Have you ever had goosebumps while listening to music?
- Often
- Sometimes
- Never
If you answer “Often”:
Here is what happens in your brain at that moment.
If you answer “Never”:
You are not alone: 3 to 5% of people get almost no pleasure from listening to music. This “musical anhedonia” was only described in 2014; yet these people react normally to other pleasures, such as money.
In 2011, in Montreal, Valorie Salimpoor watched music lovers’ brains during their favorite passages. At the moment of the chills, the brain releases dopamine: the molecule of desire, the one involved in food, sex… or certain drugs.
Even more surprising: a first release comes a few seconds before the passage. When the brain senses it coming.
Listen
Making them wait
A musical phrase climbs toward its conclusion. Choose how it ends: as expected, or by surprise. And make the wait last as long as you dare.
A series of chords stops on a chord of tension. The reader chooses to resolve it the expected way (back to the starting chord) or with a “deceptive cadence,” which slides toward an unexpected minor chord.
Tension, expectation, resolution: that is the machinery of almost all Western music. The composer makes you wait, then rewards you, or catches you off guard. When the surprise lands at the right moment, the chills come.
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
In nursing homes, caregivers notice something strange. People with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, who no longer recognize their children, can still sing the songs of their youth by heart.
The parts of the brain that hold musical memory are among the last to be affected. A song can give a person back to themselves, for the length of a few verses.
Question for the reader
Which song from when you were fifteen still moves you?
Saved in your dossier. Music heard between the ages of ten and thirty leaves a deeper imprint than any other: researchers call it the “reminiscence bump.”
Question for the reader
1993: according to an article in the journal Nature, listening to Mozart makes you smarter. An American governor even proposes giving a classical music CD to every newborn. True?
- True
- False (correct answer)
If you answer “True”:
Sadly, no.
If you answer “False”:
Well spotted.
The Mozart effect doesn’t exist.
The measured gain was small, brief (a quarter of an hour) and limited to one spatial task. It comes from arousal and a good mood, not from Mozart: in children, the pop group Blur does just as well.
Expectation, tension, resolution: the popular music of the 20th century would push these rules to the bone. So far that four chords are enough to write hundreds of hits.
Sources
- David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, 2006.
- Thomas Fritz et al., “Universal recognition of three basic emotions in music,” Current Biology, 2009.
- Eline Smit et al., “Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music,” PLoS ONE, 2022.
- Josh McDermott et al., “Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception,” Nature, 2016.
- Valorie Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,” Nature Neuroscience, 2011.
- Ernest Mas-Herrero et al., “Dissociation between musical and monetary reward responses in specific musical anhedonia,” Current Biology, 2014.
- Jörn-Henrik Jacobsen et al., “Why musical memory can be preserved in advanced Alzheimer’s disease,” Brain, 2015.
- Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky, “Music and spatial task performance,” Nature, 1993; Glenn Schellenberg and Susan Hallam, “Music listening and cognitive abilities in 10- and 11-year-olds: the Blur effect,” 2005.