This was the best show ever! Wonderful, fascinating, moving, funny, touching...really great work.

oh so reminiscent:
http://www.whitevinyldesign.com/solarbeat/

enjoy! (the notes are based on actual orbital frequencies)

just listened to this on WLRN, superb.

The Mozart Piece is the Allegro from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik a.k.a. Seranade no. 13 for Strings in G Major K. 525

The Beethoven Piece is the Adagio Sostenuto from Piano Sonata No,. 14 in C sharp minor opus 27, a.k.a. The Moonlight Sonata

Just for good measure the Bach was the Prelude from the Suite for Solo Cello #1 in G Major BWV 1007

omg best episode ever, :))) so good

does anyone know what that song was- that was played by mozart at around 11 minutes?

(23:22) Yes, it's lame, but it's muito fixe hearing your native language on Radiolab. Yay!

Atfer being in TOK and listening to this I cannot get this out of head. It is so interesting what our brains can do to us

What is the Beethoven piano piece that begins playing after Bach in the first section of the show?

The Rite of Spring passage in Fantasia is not the hippos and mushrooms but the saga of the dinosaurs and their extinction, just so you guys know. ;)

Followup on Curt from Minnesota's comment: there was no riot at the Rite of Spring premiere. http://scopesmonkeychoir.com/2011/06/the-rite-of-spring-premiere-was-not-a-riot/

Your interpretation of the Sacre riot has been discounted long ago as being primarily because of Nijinsky's choreography. The ballet was performed 5 more times without much reaction, and performances in London soon after produced no such reaction. The point Jonah is trying to make may be valid, but his example is flawed. Once again, the leap to a desired conclusion isn't justified by the data - I now cringe whenever I hear him cited as a source.

Pia Toscano in the LaGuardia High School Chorus?! From American Idol?! She was discovered on RADIOLAB! (59:10)

Pia Toscano in the LaGuardia High School Chorus?! From American Idol?! She was discovered on RADIOLAB! (59:10)

Just a thought while listening to this episode for the 3rd time -- RK saying he finds it sad that the brain will always seek to familiarize the new, thereby robbing the artist of his/her newness. But here's another perspective: The whole deal with artists is how they work -- how much and hard the work is, and, if you are an artist, how repetitive it can be, the working and re-working or re-visiting of whatever it is that obsesses. I think that the reason an artist can eventually present something new is because for the artist it isn't exactly new anymore in the sense that they've been working enough with dissonance to have changed their neurons. So I guess RK was responding to one part of it, the death of the thing, where we are always living a cycle of death/birth/life/death/etc. Which is what creativity is, no?

It surprises me that Steve Reich and several of his compositions are not mentioned during the "...behaves so strangely" segment. First, he accidentally discovered a composing technique known as Phase Shifting while working with a loop. Second, he has used human speech recordings to derive pitches and rhythms for years now. Check out his piece "City Life" in which he orchestrates the instruments to mimic real-life speech recordings and street sounds from New York City.

My apologies, I didn't listen far enough into the episode. I see it was Stravinsky.

Does anyone know the trumpet song at 28:00 minutes?? What a GREAT episode.

"Sometimes behaves so strangely.."

It's stuck in my head now. Oh no. LSS "Last Song Syndrome" haha!

Of course, this is anecdotal and not scientific. However, last night I was trying to help my son (almost 2yrs old) go to sleep by playing our local classical station. He started freaking out, completely inexplicably. After awhile (maybe 15 minutes), I realized the classical station was playing some very avant garde music. I thought of this episode and the riot at Rite of Spring, so I quickly put in a CD of some much less avant garde music, and he calmed down and fell asleep within a few minutes. Because this was my car and not a lab, I can't control for all variables, but your episode very well may have aided me in my parenting (and in my sleeping).

Thanks for being entertaining and possibly very practical :)

Jessica

Dear Radiolab.

This episode instantly reminded me of

http://happiness-project.ca/

For anyone who enjoyed this episode - If you
haven't heard of Charles Spearin's Happiness
Project, I suggest that it is worth a listen, considering professor Diana Deutsch's story.

Dear Radiolab.

This episode instantly reminded me of

http://happiness-project.ca/

For anyone who enjoyed this episode - If you
haven't heard of Charles Spearin's Happiness
Project, I suggest that it is worth a listen, considering professor Diana Deutsch's story.

Adam-
In case you haven't found it, here are the illusions:
http://philomel.com/musical_illusions/

I listened to this radio episode today while I was picking brain slices to stain. Defiantly have some thoughts about this episode.

Many of the underlying points are very interesting and may be very valid, but I have some issues with some of their assumptions.

Music is extremely cultural, as is our ideas of note names. The Western method of tuning (equal tempered) is pretty specific to western music (as is the idea of a major third sounding better than a minor second). To think that these preferences are inherent somewhere in the brain is pretty presumptive and we have to be careful when talking that way. There does seem to be something inherent about the perfect fifth and it is often found in nature, but there ends the tentative universality of music. The music of Bali (and others) actually DEPENDS on their notes being “out of tune” and they feel that music truly lacking in depth without it. We must be so careful when we deem one system as correct and another as incorrect. In many cultures, rhythm is the main unit of music and language (rather than pitches and chords as in western classical). To a classical musician, the music sounds plain and simple because there is not harmonic depth, but it is terribly complex rhythmically, and in fact a symphony to someone of that background in immensely plain and simplistic. Along these lines, I would guess English is timbre based? Not tonal like mandarin (as we can vary pitch and maintain meaning), and not rhythmic, because we can say things fast and slow yet maintain meaning). But slight changes in consonants and diphthongs can really mess things up. We notice ESL students have trouble with t/d, th/t, l/r. I dunno…out on a limb with that one.

So when they talk about certain neurons firing for ugly minor 2nd chords, I am suspicious. Perhaps it is true that these neurons fire at sounds that are culturally deemed odd/novel? This I would believe. Or perhaps they always fire for minor 2nds, regardless of whether we think that is bad or not.

Also the matter of perfect pitch making Chinese students better musicians (you know…cause that stereotype must be true….???), I was unconvinced that the difference wasn’t just due to difference in practice time or the quality of instruction received, or the encouragement of parents. Chinese student also out-perform Americans on math tests. Does that mean that their brains are innately better in math? Probably not, but it does speak to their education system and hard work.

What I think would be a more interesting experiment would be to reverse the direction of the dependent variable—to see if English speakers with perfect pitch are better at learning mandarin than those without perfect pitch.
Just some thoughts on a very interesting and well-done episode.

Where can you find the audio experiments to listen to these days.....? I wanna know what the Chromatic illusion is all about.

i'm pretty sure the rite of spring was used in the evolution/dinosaur part of fantasia...right?

At art school was the first time I heard Rite of Spring. It didn't seem so shocking to me at the time. The stories of the riots intrigued me beyond belief. I enjoyed the theory of why they did.

As usual a fascinating show. Thank you.

Fascinating show, as usual. By the way, the language at heard at 22:38 (eifo hapil?) is not Yiddish, but Hebrew.

amazing, beautiful, GORGEOUS ressource, i can spend hours here, thank you!

This program has answered a question I have puzzled over since 1967. In 1967, friends introduced me to Bartok. I didn't like it. It disturbed me. It made me feel uncomfortable with myself. Months later, I heard the same piece and found it pleasant and intelligent. Later I bought several Bartok records. I loved them. Aside: Stravinsky is one of my favorite composers.

I was greatly puzzled by my reaction to Bartok. At first, I wondered if I was accepting Bartok to fit in with these highly intelligent, abstract thinking people. That was so unlike me. Thank you for the clarification.

Charlotte

I am the youngest of 4 sisters. My parents were amateur musicians (professionally a doctor and a nurse) and they encouraged all of us to take music lessons. When I was very small, my sisters all took turns caring for me, and when it was Kim's turn she would lay me across her lap while she practiced piano for hours. By the time I was 2, the family discovered I had perfect pitch.

I have always believed the development of this skill had more to do with my exposure to music than to some genetic accident. Thank you for presenting a program that helps me make some sense of it.

I am now a music therapist and teacher and work with many students with special needs. I'm going to add this podcast to my computer lab and have students listen to, explore, and write essays on it. How fascinating!

Ok, the first part of this episode was like a deja-vu for me. The other day this phenomenon actually happened to me in real time. I was in an argument with my mom, and all the sudden I realized what I was saying was coming out like a song/chant. It was really really weird for me. And as soon as I realized it, I was really startled. I wonder if we do this all the time, but just aren't aware of it.

What came first? Music or language? Easy. Music! First there was sound, OM, then there was light, then, there was matter.

Social Psychology has adopted the term dissonance to explain the physiological response experienced when an individual's behavoir does not match their attitude.

That idea definitely makes sense to me, though it may take me a little while to get used to.