How music can be both a physical and an emotional experience
Download mp3 (12.41 MB)Patrick Whelan is a doctor — an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at UCLA specializing in pediatric rheumatology, to be exact. But, he’s also a great lover of music.
As part of what he calls a pandemic project, he started teaching a course at Harvard University on music and the mind.
Whelan says music can be a profound experience, that’s both physical and emotional. He joined The Show to talk about his own love of music.
Interview highlights
What made you want to teach this course?
WHELAN: Well, I come from a very musical family. My father sang with the Los Angeles Opera Company, and my mother was a performance pianist. So I grew up with a lot of music around me. And over the years, I was a choral conductor myself, and I started a little a cappella group at Harvard University called the Harvard Din and Tonics, which is still going now 45 years later. And I also was a church musician. So I've had a deep interest in music all through the years.
And in 2005, I lectured as part of a meeting for something called the Global Music Healing Institute. And I discovered a set of lectures that Leonard Bernstein had given at Harvard in 1973 called the "Norton Lectures in Poetry." And as I watched these and listened to him and read about them, I came to appreciate that he really had a prescient understanding of why it is that music has so much power in our lives emotionally and also involving our health.
There's a certain kind of physical aspect to this. How does this work in our brains? Why does music — certain notes, certain rhythms, certain timbres — played in a certain way seem to be able to elicit an emotional response in us?
WHELAN: There's a very spirited discussion that goes all the way back to Darwin about why people listen to music, why they like it, what role it plays in our brains. And Darwin thought that it was a precursor to spoken language. So a a protolanguage. And over the years, there's been a lot of skepticism that music actually does anything important for us. There's this idea that somehow it's just sort of a frivolous thing, like drugs. But, to my mind, when you look at certain elements of the musical experience, there are things that are just so overwhelming. Like for instance, musical memory is extraordinary that we have the ability 40, 50, 60 years later to remember melodies and lyrics that we heard as a child. And then there's a related issue, which is that even in people with dementia who have lost the ability to speak, they still have a capacity to recall these kinds of musical motives.
How tied is music to memory?
WHELAN: Memory is not just some blanket thing that we remember every sensory experience we have or every fact we've been exposed to. But rather, the brain is highly selective in what it remembers. It remembers faces, it remembers voices and it remembers things that happened to us in a highly emotional context. So part of what we've been studying in my course is the evolutionary origins of our musicality, and why human memory and music are so closely tied together.
Can you give us an example of something like that — a very strong music memory in your personal experience that when you listen to it, it will always take you back?
WHELAN: Nobody's ever asked me that before. You know, I, I was talking with my son the other day about how I would come home from school on Friday afternoons when I was in high school, and I was part of a very large family. There was so much noise in our household all the time, and I cherished very much having this quiet time Friday afternoons when nobody else was there. And we had one of those old style RCA stereo sets in our front entryway. And I would put a recording of Archer Rubenstein playing the, Greg "Piano Concerto in A minor." And there was just something about that piece which, you know, was thrilling. And even now, you know, I, I think about it and I become very emotional just thinking about it. You know, even without physically hearing the music, the thought of it is is a delight to me.
There also can be like a fight or flight kind of response that that happens with certain tones, certain kinds of music. Like there is another side to this, it seems.
WHELAN: Absolutely. And this, this gets very much to the heart of I think why we have a capacity to hear music and make music. And there are substantial studies that have been done that show that music has a big effect on our autonomic nervous system. So it impacts our pulse, our blood pressure. And there are certain kinds of sounds that do this.
So we know, for instance, the deeper sounds louder, sounds unfamiliar, sounds — those three qualities — are associated with much faster heart rates and more intense heart, you know, the pounding of the heart, increased blood pressure. And we've speculated that this harkens back to a time, you know, in our evolutionary past when people depended entirely — well, people. Let's talk about primitive mammals that lived in a harsh environment. And what kinds of cues did they depend on in the natural environment to save their lives? It was recognizing when they were exposed to the risks of a predator. And as things get closer to us, they're more dangerous to us. So, this idea of the crescendo or the increase in sound, inducing more of a fight or flight, autonomic response is very deeply rooted in our evolutionary past.
