A stream of Sting in the morning

Whenever I have to get up very early to drive to meetings, I play Sting’s My One and Only Love over and over again on my car stereo and sing with Sting. By the time I arrive in my meetings, I am coherent and feel good about life in general. Music, especially Sting’s, makes for a glorious morning. But why?

How could sound which is by definition, vibrations, arranged in a certain tempo, played by different musical instruments make their way to our ears and suddenly shake our whole being as if we ourselves were cathedrals, concert halls, or dance clubs resonating with the music of our lives? How does sound become music? When do we make that shift in perception? And for master musicians like Sting — what do they hear and imagine when they are creating music?

Daniel Levitin was a rock star. He later became a cognitive neuroscientist who got his dream subject, Sting, to agree to an experiment that will perhaps reveal why music from a master musician like Sting makes for a glorious day for those who like his music and for Sting himself when he makes music. See it unfold on July 26, 9 p.m., on the National Geographic Channel called My Music Brain.

I wrote about Levitin’s fascinating book called “Your Brain on Music” sometime last year where he probed the evolutionary roots of music as well as his theories as to what happens to our brains when it soaks itself in music. Levitin found that with music, our brain becomes more “alive” than any other state in the sense that the connections throughout its parts are widespread — emotions, bodily movements, visual perception, etc. But he has always wanted the chance to peer into a master musician’s brain and he got it when Sting said “yes.”

When Levitin asked Sting to imagine the music of Miles Davis (one of Sting’s favorites) while Sting was inside the MRI, his toes started “groovin,” proving that there are strong connections between music and bodily movement. Sting’s caudate nucleus which links bodily movements with emotions also lit up, giving us a neurological image of how music causes your body to groove. Levitin took this opportunity to explain why Sting’s music, like that of others, is capable of entrainment — of synchronizing your body to music. This is a very powerful ability because this infuses music with a call to action whether to aggression or to courage. This could be well seen as a good clue as to how music enabled humans to form social bonds.

Levitin thinks music is the powerful soundtrack that made humans connect with each other. It is deeper than even language, that the memory of a beat stays even when Alzheimer’s has made us forget the lyrics of a song. Music is so ancient in our nature that we have found evidence of it, dated 35,000 years ago in the same cave, Hohle Fels, where they found the sculpted figurine of a woman. It was a flute made of bone with five holes. And since feelings do not fossilize, we can only wonder whose spirit it soothed and the kind of pleasure it brought him or her.

What also surprised Levitin is that when Sting thought of music, his visual cortex lit up. Sting validated this by saying that when he imagines music like Bach’s which he loves, he sees music moving in chambers, towers, buttresses and domes. And like master musicians, Sting shuffles information from one side of his brain to another and the bridge that connects both sides, the corpus callosum lit up as proof of this. In amateur musicians, isolated parts of the right and left light up with music. 

While all over his brain, Sting cradles his music with much emotion, he also said that he sees music as a “puzzle” to figure out though he claims he also knows it could never be figured out entirely. This makes music an intellectual enterprise as much as it is an emotional one. Another singer, Feist, was featured in the program and this is what she said about music: “It is like the flicker in the corner of your eye — it disappears when you look at it.” And I think that is what is also what makes music so beautiful — its elusiveness when you try to dissect it in pieces. It takes a rock artist/neuroscientist like Levitin to make us trust that it does not diminish the way we view music if we look at what happens to us when we make or listen to music.

The show also looked at jazz and how its improvising nature resonates with the brain’s natural tendency to look for something new — not for the totally unfamiliar but something that surprises. What floored me was when they showed another musician in an MRI machine playing jazz on a keyboard on his lap. His medial prefrontal cortex danced which apparently is the same place in your brain that is alive when you do your own autobiography. Whola! Music is another way to define yourself without having to worry about censorship.

So if we follow the points of light, the sparks that are created by beautiful music in our heads, do we now have a formula for musical creativity? No. Mike McCready is co-founder of Platinum Blue Music Intelligence Inc. and he appeared on the program. He looked at three million songs in the past 50 years and isolated elements like melody, harmony, chord progression, pitch, etc. He discovered that all the hit songs fell in any one of 60 mathematical clusters in which humans find pleasure. Fitting any of the clusters means having an 80-85 percent chance of a hit song. In fact, one of Sting’s hit songs fell in one of them. But there is no formula for perfect creativity since they cannot create hits from the clusters but can only look at what songs are already out there. We go back to what Sting and Feist said, that it seems built-in in music itself to be a mystery.

The thing about music is I cannot prescribe a stream of Sting to anyone’s morning and be assured that they will get the same effect it has on me. You have to find the perfect song for your own morning. That is both the discovery and mystery that is music.

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