The Listening Tube wih Bob Woodley Saving Democracy and the Science of Music

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This is the listening tube.

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Well, hello there. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, I'll have a chat with Dr. Kurt Ellenberger about the complexities of music and why our brains understand it in a way that even I could understand.

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But first, not the headlines.

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Well, the Epstein files are going to be were, will be released. And while that is a headline, what isn't a headline is what comes next. I'm not big on hypotheticals, but an objective observer would have already determined that releasing the files will inevitably lead to more questions than they will answer. Some will get exposed. Others will be partly exonerated. A few will be partly implicated. There will be people who will be held to account, as there already have. There will be people who will slip through the cracks of the international judicial system. Whatever shock waves that may result in the disclosure of evidence will be short-lived in the grand scheme of the 24-hour news cycle. But what nobody's yet pointed out is that there will still be those who are not satisfied. Maybe too many documents are redacted. Some documents may lead to fishing expeditions to follow a path that heretofore hadn't been considered. Yes, I use the word heretofore because it worked there. What if there isn't the treasure trove of evidence some people expect? As I pointed out on the listening tube before, accurate record keeping is what brought down Al Capone and what allowed the Allies to find out who was responsible for the atrocities of the Nazis. Maybe Epstein was too smart to keep a consolidated list. The very list everybody hopes is in the files probably doesn't exist. What the legacy media is working on now is how to keep the Epstein story alive, regardless of what the records reveal. And there's nothing wrong with that. But opening the vault of the Epstein files might just be today's version of all the drama leading up to the opening of Al Capone's safe. Years after he was gone, there wasn't anything in there.

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Similar, but different.

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Nobody saw it coming, as he's holding an office in a highly democratic district and could have stayed there for the foreseeable future. Oh, wait. There was one person who saw it coming. That was the Congressman's chief of staff. Coincidentally, his chief of staff filed petitions to run for the seat on the day before the announcement, which was also the last day for anyone to file such petitions. Until 5 PM.

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And if that wasn't enough.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

The retiring congressman's chief of staff was the only person to file a petition to run for the office before the deadline. Hmm. I wonder who will win. The only person on the ballot will be the chief of staff of the retiring congressman. Of course, the congressman has a logical explanation for the sudden announcement of his departure, and the timing can be justified. But if he had waited another day, the Democrats claim to be saving democracy would not have taken such a stab to the jugular. In the same way that Kamala Harris was anointed to the post of presidential candidate, the congressman essentially appointed his chief of staff to the soon-to-be vacated office. That's not saving nor even acknowledging democracy. That's mocking democracy. There are some who would proclaim that we have to resort to such measures to save us from Trumpism. No. That's not democracy. Efforts to circumvent democracy in the name of protecting it seems to be the modus operandi of the Democratic Party. Luckily, there's one voice cutting through. As Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman carries the water for common sense, Washington Representative Marie Glessencamp Perez seems to be able to differentiate between right and wrong. That's why she called out the Illinois Congressman for his underhanded maneuvering to essentially appoint his successor. A successor, I might add, to a seat in a very Democratic heavy district. So the retiring congressman didn't want just any Democrat to win the seat, but only his Democrat. That, in and of itself, is demonstrative of the widening gap within the Democratic Party. But the representative from Washington called for a vote to condemn Garcia for the timing of his retirement announcement, accusing him of, quote, undermining the process of a free and fair election, unquote, according to CNN, adding, in using special procedural powers, known as privilege, her resolution is likely to get a vote. Representative Perez is also quoted as saying, We're loyal to the soil. We're loyal to our constituents and say, like, election subversion is always wrong. That's not how we run. I like the phrase loyal to the soil. It seems like for the last five years we couldn't find a Democrat in Washington who felt that way. Open borders, lawlessness. I'm glad Marie feels that way, and I appreciate her loyalty to our American way of life in this particular instance. There is and will be a political price to pay for her willingness to call out one of her own, especially in a deep blue state like Washington. What I don't know is why no Republicans brought attention to it first. Representative Perez could have saved herself some grief by waiting, but she didn't. Kudos to her. As for the state of Illinois and the people of Representative Garcia's district, well, you just got hoodwinked and denied the privilege of electing your own representative. By a member of the party that claims they're trying to save democracy. This week in 1950, the storm of the century. A violent snowstorm takes shape on its way to paralyzing the northeastern United States and the Appalachians the next day, bringing winds of up to 100 miles an hour and sub-zero temperatures. Pickens, West Virginia, records 57 inches of snow. The storm would kill 353 people. Climate change, said no one. But an early weakening of the polar vortex over the next couple of weeks could spell colder than average temperatures for some higher or more southern latitudes in the northern hemisphere. I hope it doesn't snow. I don't like snow. It can rain all at once. I don't have to shovel rain.

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The listening tube will return at the speed of sound. Send email to thelistening tube at outlook.com.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

My guest this week is a doctor of music. Kurt Ellenberger spent some time in the listening tube from his home in Michigan. Our conversation just might change your tune on how you listen. I know you're a very serious musician, and I enjoyed listening to some of your work while I thought of questions I'd like to ask.

unknown 9:24

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

And now I'm not a musician. I played the tuba in high school. Please forgive me if some of my questions may sound elementary to you.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Yeah, well, I that's the that's the audience I'm looking for, really, is non-professionals uh who are interested in how this stuff works. And I try to, in in all of my articles, I try to kind of bring that to uh to an interested uh layman. And so that's exactly who I who I really like to talk to.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

All right, perfect. Now, I was particularly interested in speaking with you because of the way you connect music with mathematics. Now, every song has a time signature which involves counting, but that's not what you're talking about, is it?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

No, it goes a lot deeper than that. Basically, just a little bit about how the sound waves or how sound works, is that when you hear a sound, when you hear a string, you're hearing that pitch, but that pitch is a combination of hundreds, if not thousands, of other pitches. And the extent to which those other pitches are present in that note, that's what that's where that pitch gets its uh its color from. So we call those harmonics or partials. They're there's the primary pitch, and then there's all these other pitches that stack up above it that are part of it. It's just a naturally occurring acoustic phenomenon. And those are stacked in a very interesting mathematical way. So if you take a C, you just play a C, and I'll play it. Then you play another C above it, we call that an octave. But in that harmonic series, that C above the C is part of the lower C. And in fact, it occurs at a mathematical ratio of one to two in terms of their string length. So if the first C is a hundred centimeters, a string is uh 10 centimeters long, the C above it is five centimeters long, the C above that is 2.5 centimeters. So it keeps having as you uh as you go up. So there's something peculiar about that because we call those notes C, but they're completely different pitches. So why do we call them the same note, right? And I think you you can hear it, they sound like a higher version of each other, right? A higher um but that's a really weird human perception of it. We we hear two pitches that are completely different frequencies, but we hear them as being a lower and a higher version of the same pitch. So that's odd. We and we call that an octave because we recognize that there's something there that relates those two pitches, and what relates those two pitches is the math that we actually hear that the string length is being cut in half, so their waveforms are very symmetrical, and we hear that symmetry as being extreme consonants. That's kind of the math behind it. So the Cs are at two in the harmonic series, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and that just keeps on going. So I'm sure you'll recognize uh when we used to buy computer memory that it was 16 megabytes or 32 or 64. So what we've got in music there is the binary series two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, right? Each each a higher factor uh of two. And so that's that's the math behind it. It sits at the core of the computers that you and I are using for this conversation. Um, it sits at the base of music, it's what defines consonants in music. And it also is at the core of when we started our lives. When a when a sperm meets an egg, it's a cell that divides, and there are two. That divides, then there are four. Those divide, then there are eight. It's really a uh uh that binary series is something that's really rooted deeply uh in our lives, and we don't even we're not really even aware of it.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Well, you certainly uh I I don't think anybody who casually listens to music is aware that there's math associated with it. So, how does that affect the way we interpret music?

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Well, so here's the that that so that's the start of it. Now, here's the astonishing thing. When something asymmetrical comes in, so if we're taking uh string lengths of two, four, eight, sixteen, they they map out very symmetrically. If we put a an eleven in there, it doesn't, right? It sort of breaks up the symmetry. So your ear is hearing an eleven, and what your brain does then is say, I don't like eleven. It's a complicated waveform. It's clashing with the two or the four underneath it, right? So your what your ear does is it supplies you with the solution to that, that the closest, usually lower factor of two is what your your brain supplies as the solution to the mathematical problem. So that's why at the end of a tune, when you get to that final chord, it's kind of a sense of relief because you've had complex waveforms, and then all of a sudden, ah, you're wanting to hear the 10 or the eight, and then the composer gives it to it, gives it uh gives it to you, and then you're satisfied by it. You feel like it's it's arrived where it should arrive. So that's really the engine at the heart of music that makes it possible for music to tell a story and have a narrative because you are listening to these complex waveforms, you're expecting you're or you're providing a solution for it. If the piece goes where you want it to, you're satisfied. If it doesn't, now you're on a journey that, oh, okay, we didn't, I was expecting the eight from the nine, but it didn't go there. So I'm so I'm they're stretching out that tension over a long period of time. Uh, and that that's the engine of what of what makes music tick.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

You say that part of the way we interpret music or how we how we understand it is different or contradictory to Darwin's theory of evolution. How so?

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Well, I've been teaching this in my classes for many years, and I started to ask a friend of mine, you know, who's an evolutionary biologist, you know, what why do we have this? Like, what's the evolutionary advantage that we would get from being able to fill in a 10 from an 11? I was really confused about that. Uh he he kind of steered me in the right direction, said, you know, read this, read this, read this. I spent about a year and a half uh looking at the literature on this, and I just didn't find any viable solution or or explanation for it that would give so so if you can hear this, if you if your brain fills in a an uh a 10 from an 11, how does that make more procreation possible? How does that make survival more possible? I I I couldn't find an answer that I thought was uh sufficient, and so it just really left me in a quandary, like what what what is this? Why do we have this? Did you find an answer? Not really. I I think the only uh what I found was that uh with evolutionists, there's always an answer. So I I got I I talked to uh Edward Dutton, I don't know if you know him, he's a he's a British uh podcaster, um, and he's an evolutionary psychologist, and I presented some of the explanations, and it seems like when you when you hit that wall, there's always one more one more explanation that that evolution can give. So his explanation was, well, you know, if if we can hear uh animals and we we we hear a rough sound and then we we want it to stop, that might have given us an advantage. And I I really didn't find that as a find that to be a compelling, uh compelling answer. I uh honestly to me the thing that it points to is that there's a creator, that music was a gift to us. There's I don't see any other reason for it.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

So no no actual benefit to our survival, but certainly uh benefits to us uh as far as making our lives more enjoyable.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Yes. Uh I mean as Nietzsche said, you know, life without music would be a mistake. And I I think I that's when I started thinking, geez, without this amazing art form, what would life be like? Would we would we have movies? Would we have theater? Would we have what kind of art would we have? We would only have literature, I guess. Because without that ability to hear the complex and supply the solution, we don't have musical narrative. We just have sound. And we we I don't think it would grip us that way.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Math is an obsolete absolute, you know, two plus two equals four. But people's taste in music seems to evolve. Now, is that true? Or does our taste in music have deeper roots from which we really don't stray very far?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Wow, that's uh that's a deep question. That's one I've thought about a lot because you you can see, you know, the music you listened to when you were young, like when let's say what were you listening to when when you were 15, for example?

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Oh, probably Pink Floyd.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Okay, do you still listen to Pink Floyd?

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Yeah. So some of those tastes stay with us throughout our whole lives, but I'm sure you've added a lot of other, a lot of other styles of music or a lot of other artists since then, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:17

I have, um, but many of them seem to fall within certain types of genre. You know, rock and roll, jazz, big band, uh classical. And I don't know if those types of musics or music are related in any way or not, or why I seem to be attracted to those.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Well, I'll give you my my opinion um on this, because you have to start sort of wonder what is it about certain composers and certain bands that make that drive you to them or that pull you to them, and others that don't. So even when you think about your friend group, uh you you know, I remember bringing uh I remember hearing the band UK. You know those, you know that group.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

I am familiar with UK.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

And I heard it on a Sunday night. They had in Detroit radio, they had this Sunday night, they played a a new album, start to finish. And they started it at 11 and I I couldn't go to sleep. I was listening to it, I just loved it so much. I brought it, I bought it, then I brought it to my uh my friends, and most of them hated it. And so I that's happened many times, where I I I love this artist and I love this music, and I bring it to close friends, and they say, no, I don't like it. So I've been thinking about why that is. And I I think what it is, is that in music, the composer embeds it with their worldview, their their philosophy, how they how they see life, how they live life, their personality, if you will. And I think when we hear music that we like, it's partly because we're we're kind of vibrating with that composer's worldview and that and that psychology and that philosophy. Uh that's the only explanation I can I can come up with, uh, although it's not a very scientific one, but it is one that the composer Paul Hindemith uh uh talked about, saying that there's there's more embedded there than just the sound. You're you're you're embedding your personality, your psychology, your worldview in in the music. And when we hear someone who who is closer to ours, then we we like it. When it's someone that's further from ours, we we don't really go with it.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

Is the definition of music changing with evolving genres?

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Well, I think they there was kind of an attempt to do that in the you know, in the in the 19 mid-1900s with composers like uh like John Cage, for example, who just challenged the very notion of what music is by doing kind of kind of stunt-filled uh or stunts with music, like writing a piece for for six radios and six people walk into a room with. Each has a radio tuned to a different station, and then it plays for however long it plays, and that's his music. Um, he did all kinds of that kind of stuff, challenging what that notion is. But I I really don't see that as uh as having been successful. It's an interesting thought experiment, but I don't think anyone ever goes home and says, you know, honey, let's make let's cook dinner tonight. I'll make some pasta. Why don't you turn on the John Cage as some background music? It just it that doesn't happen. So uh so it's it's kind of an interesting thought experiment or philosophical query as to what it is, but I think it comes down still to music is organized sound that is using generally using using that harmonic series and the math in order to create key areas and to make sound narratives.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

There's all always seems to be a generational gap between you know, among people who like music and like an old curmudgeon like myself might say, Well, that that's not real music or what now. Was there ever a time when somebody said that can't be music, it doesn't have any violins in it?

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Oh, of course. I mean, you mentioned jazz. Boy, the the the changeover from Dixieland to big band. Uh, you know, when the Dixieland stuff kind of petered out and then it went to big band, and then the Bebop stuff started in the 40s. Wow, the the Dixieland people said these Bebop people are crazy, they're just playing wrong notes. And the Bebop players were kind of they called the Dixieland people the moldy figs. You're just yours your stuff doesn't work anymore. So I think that's been going on forever. Or even if you think in the in the 70s, uh, you know, the disco craze, uh, and then how the rockers just rebelled against that. Disco sucks, and there was that big disco burning fiasco at the baseball game in Chicago. So I think it's I think this is constantly going on that that uh you know the new style's coming in and the old style kind of resists it. What's strange though, I was just talking uh about this in my class yesterday, was I've noticed that students, so the you know, 19 to 22, 23 year olds that are in college, they all listen to classic rock, 60s, 70s, 80s, some of the 90s stuff. So they they're listening to their own music as well, contemporary stuff, but they're really steeped in that era. So maybe like 65 through 95, they just know all of those bands, which is which is strange because you know, most of those bands were were active when uh their grandparents were listening to it as teenagers. So I don't remember when I was uh 18 or 19, I don't remember listening to music from the 1910s or 20s, right? I was listening to the current music. So I think there is something kind of strange going on uh in society where generation after generation, in terms of popular music, are really grafting onto that kind of classic rock 80s and into the 90s era.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

And you really haven't thought of an explanation for that.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Um I think it's because it was good music.

unknown 25:15

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

I think the music, you know, everything that's come after that, you know, is kind of rooted in that. So you're getting versions of that music updated, which is cool, but it's still it's not original in that in the sense that that stuff was. So I I think it's just that high quality music where the bands were competing for record deals and not everyone could just put their music out there easily. So there was a there was a real gatekeeper process getting those bands to the very top, and I think that that's probably part of it too.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

I would have to agree, and even to the degree where certain record labels uh seem to put out better music than other record labels because they uh different objectives, certainly, and wanted to reach a particular audience, uh, for example. Now, music, as I'm sure you know, is uh a very emotional thing for a lot of people. It provokes emotions. Um music can make us laugh and cry and feel good and feel sad and uh and recall memories. Yep. But y you mentioned that uh minor chords spark a different emotion than major chords. Why is that?

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Well, that's a that's another question that I got from students over the years, and I had kind of my explanation for it, but I hadn't researched it. So I spent quite a bit of time researching what acousticians and you know uh physics people over the years had said about it. And I I again there wasn't a real strong, you know, this is what it is, but it seemed clear to me that what's happening with the minor chord is that in the harmonic series, so if if I play if I play a C, then the partials in that are as follows. It goes C, that's the main note that I'm playing. The next ingredient is a C and octave up from that. Then the next ingredient is the G an octave up from that, and then the next ingredient is a C up from there. The fifth partial is the major third. So it's very prominent in the harmonic series because it's so low in the series. So when you play a C, the the E is sounding, the E natural is sounding. So the major third is sounding when you play a C on a bass or or on a piano. So it's there. What you're doing with the minor third is you're putting a half step below that uh pitch in the chord, but the E is the major third is still there. So what happens in a minor chord is there's a half-step dissonance between the minor third and the and the ghosty major third. So the that major third is kind of existing in the ether. No one's playing it, but it's in the makeup of the the pitch that you're playing. So what you have there is a half-step dissonance, and a half-step dissonance is like a 19, like a uh length uh waveform of 19 or a string length of 19 over, let's say, two or eight. So you have a very strong complex dissonance there in a half step. Uh, and I think that's what we're hearing. We're hearing a dissonance that we accept, but it it never gets resolved. So it makes us feel anxious, maybe frustrated, sad, melancholy, because we want that minor third to go up to the major third, but the major third is only there as a doppelganger. It's it's way in the back, sort of being, it's been usurped by the by the minor third, but that dissonance is still there. And what they call that, they said there's a roughness in the minor third. And the roughness comes from the rumble of the minor third against the major third, which is a half step apart. And that has an emotional impact on us. Yes, because it's an unresolved dissonance, and we want to resolve the dissonances, right? It's like think of like a hymn, like a church hymn. At the end, it's the Amen, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:24

Oh, it's right.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

So that ah is an 11 and it resolves to a 10. That's satisfying. If we just leave it sitting on the on the 11, we're we're like, hey, this tune isn't done yet. Come on. And then when it goes down to the 10, then you say, okay, now we have symmetry again. So it's the same with the minor third, except it doesn't resolve. So it it's sitting there, it's a dissonance, and it just it never gets fixed. We never get to the, in this case, 19 down to 18 or 19 down to 8 or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

And this all has to do with the math and how our brains interpret the sounds.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Yes. So the your brain recognizes the symmetry when those string lengths are are in a simple ratio. So think of it this way: if if I asked you to take a 8.5 by 11 uh piece of paper and fold it in half, could you do it? Sure. Could you fold it in quarters?

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Eights?

SPEAKER_01 30:32

It'll get more difficult as it gets smaller.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Yeah. How about if I asked you to fold it in 11?

SPEAKER_01 30:40

No, probably not.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Right. So it you know, that's a visual uh analogy of how the how we can easily deal with twos and multiples of two, but as soon as we get into the complex relationships, we're done. That's when we bring pen and paper in, and you know, then you have to measure the page to see where to fold it to get 11 out of it, right? It's the same way in music. We we want those twos, fours, eights, sixteens. Those are symmetrical. As soon as you throw something that's asymmetrical in there, we we go, uh, uh, that's asymmetrical. So that's why you're when you when someone cuts you off on the on the freeway, your car horn goes. It doesn't go, please don't cut me off. It doesn't do that. It what you're doing when you hit the car horn is you're sending a bunch of complex asymmetrical waveforms to that driver, and that is annoying because there's no solution to it. So that that's why that that's why that works.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

I like it. Do tempo and dynamics contribute to how we calculate music?

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Absolutely. So um tempo is kind of mimetic. So you look at most pop music, right? It's right around 120 beats per minute, maybe 126, something like that, which is about double the human heart rate or close or around there. So when your body hears those beats at that at that speed, your body acts and mimics those. So those rhythmic gestures are then mimicked by the body and you get more pumped up. That's why you put that kind of music on when you're running or lifting weights or or you know, exercising, whatever. Or when you want to dance. Or when you want to dance, exactly. But when you walk into a funeral and there's very slow, sad music, the rhythm there is telling you slow down, move, move slowly. This is not a place to be exuberant. So you start to mimic the gestures, the rhythmic gestures in the slower music, which are more appropriate for an occasion like that. So absolutely it it's uh it's linked and it's really the human body and mind will start to mimic those gestures. And if those gestures are lively and vigorous, then you become lively and vigorous while you're listening to it. If they're subdued and melancholy, then you will you will start to mimic that as well. And so that's why the different events have different types of music, because we start to act like the music.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

So music can not only make us react in an emotional way, but also a physical way.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Are we mostly aware of it or not?

SPEAKER_00 33:35

I don't think we're aware of it. We're we're aware that something's happening. Like people will say, well, what kind of music do you listen to when you're at the gym? Oh, well, I listen to EDM, really fast pounding EDM. Well, why do you do that? Well, uh it just it just pumps me up. Oh, okay. They don't then think, well, why does it pump me up? They that I think that's where it stops for most people is they know that it has a utility, but they're not really looking into why it has that utility. So I always joke, you know, if you ask people what they use music for, they'll say, Well, it pumps me up, makes me feel good. I also use it uh when I'm if when I'm sad. I like to listen to, you know, certain music will pick me up, other music will kind of calm me down. So I always think it's we're lucky that music wasn't invented today because it would the government would regulate it, because it functions just like a drug, right? You it you it goes in your ears and your mental your mental state changes, just like if you you know you slam a shot in a beer, you're gonna feel it. Music does the same thing, it elevates and it can depress as well. So it it works very much like a like a psychoactive drug. So I'm like I said, I'm glad it's here today, otherwise we wouldn't have it.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

I I think you just brought up a great idea for a fictional novel, actually. If music were invented today and if it was government regulated, wow, uh certainly it would be a different world we live in.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, regimes and and governments have are aware of this, right? The the Russians didn't like jazz. The the Nazis didn't like jazz either. They tried to suppress that because they sensed in that music was something that it was the sound of freedom.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Is there a mathematical connection to music that can explain why my wife wants to go see Three Days Grace in concert for the third time?

SPEAKER_00 35:35

Hmm. Uh I I'm afraid that's a question I can't answer. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:39

Just thought I'd throw it out there. Now, I have a Roland 730 synthesizer keyboard here in my studio. I don't I don't know how to play it. I know how to play with it.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:52

And I've used it to create many, not all, but many of the sounds that you hear on my program, the listening tube. What is it about being able to create sounds other than our own voices that we find so appealing?

SPEAKER_00 36:12

Wow. Um I think it's it's just another way of expressing ourselves without without using words. And I think that goes really deep. I think that actually reaches a deeper part of who you are than when you're when you're using words. So I think that's really what it is, that the ability to express ourselves without using words and trying to find that expression in sound. I think that I think that's what it what it boils down to. And that that's in that's infinitely fun to do, too.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Oh, absolutely. I could I could mess around for hours.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

Now, one of your articles mentions the concept of seeing sound. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 37:00

What I meant by that is if if you take the the string lengths of uh sounding sounding a C, you see uh a sine wave that's doing this. And what you're when you do a C and octave up from that, you see that there's another sine wave in there that's cutting it in half perfectly. So you're you're hearing the symmetry, but when we see what the string lengths are doing, you're seeing why that symmetry is there. So it was kind of a play on words. We're not really seeing sound, but what we are seeing and hearing and sensing is the symmetry of that uh the binary series, the two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. It it forms a beautiful pattern when we look at those vibrating string links uh uh simultaneously.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Okay, the reason I wanted to ask you that was now almost six years ago, I lost the hearing in my right ear just completely overnight. Before I lost that hearing, I could see sound, not in the sense of I could see where the two sides of stereo met, and I can't do that anymore. Not having stereo hearing, my brain had to adjust how I interpreted sound for a short time after it happened. I had a hard time recognizing songs that I had heard a thousand times before.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

Oh wow, that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Is there a benefit to being able to hear in stereo when it comes to how our brains interpret music?

SPEAKER_00 38:34

Absolutely. I mean, that that's why uh if you look at um if you look at at any any mixes of any tunes, right, uh every instrument is panned left or right a little bit or a lot. It's nothing is just straight center. Why? Because the stereo makes it three-dimensional, it allows us to place the sound, like I said, in three dimensions rather than just a flat sound coming at us. So from an evolutionary perspective, you could say, well, that's really helpful because if I'm hearing the steps of a lion and it's coming from this direction, my my left ear is gonna pinpoint that. My brain can pinpoint exactly where that is. And so that's why they do it in recording, is it gives texture to the uh to the sound when things are panned a little bit left and a little bit right. If it was all the same, it just wouldn't have that texture. So that that's what you're missing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

I know I can't tell where from where sound comes from anymore. So I have to be very careful when I cross the street. I was just wondering if there's anything I haven't asked you about that you would like to share.

SPEAKER_00 39:40

No, this is this has been really great. We really covered a lot of a lot of ground here. You know, it would it would help with the visuals a little bit. So I would I would say if if people are interested to follow up and to read my article, then you can actually hear some of this that is harder to do in this format.

SPEAKER_01 39:56

Thank you so much for being here today. I really do appreciate it. I am enjoying our conversation. I hope you have as well.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Oh, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Dr. Ellenberger's website is Kurtellenberger.com. That's Kurt with a K, and Ellenberger has all E's and no U's. Kurt has a lot more to offer when it comes to learning about the science and philosophy of music and listening to music. Thank you again to Dr. Kurt Ellenberger for spending some time with me in the listening tube. The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly, Copyright 2025. Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the United States. Shout out to some of the new locations tuning in Phoenix, Arizona, Springfield, Massachusetts, and Peter Lee Durham in the United Kingdom. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. Visit the listening tube dot com to follow the program. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Thou Ad Infinitum.