Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] I’m Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhance Life with Music, where we explore all the ways that music can make our lives better. We live in an incredible era for music lovers. With just a few taps, we can instantly access almost any song that was ever recorded. Streaming services deliver crystal clear sound, home audio systems rival concert quality fidelity, and recordings are produced with incredible precision, with cutting edge technology. And in spite of all of that, live concerts continue to sell out. People willingly spend hundreds of dollars on tickets, travel, parking, not to mention the hassle involved just to experience music in person. Why is this? If a recording can faithfully reproduce the sound of a performance, why does hearing that same music live feel so different? That’s the question that researchers Arun Asthagiri and Dr. Psyche Loui set out to answer. Their recent study was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, and the study found that our brains actually do respond differently to live music than they do to recorded music. Today, we’ll explore what happens inside our brains when we experience live music, why those differences matter, and what this research can teach us about the unique power of making and sharing music together. I am joined today by the study’s first author, Arun Asthagiri. His research partner, Dr. Psyche Loui, has been a previous guest on this podcast. Arun is a PhD student working in the MIND Lab. Mind stands for Music Imaging and Neural Dynamics. This lab is at Northeastern University. Arun holds a bachelor’s of music from the New England Conservatory and has training in neuroscience, computer science, and music technology. Welcome to Enhance Life with Music, Arun.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:02:11] Thank you Mindy. And you’ve set up the project and everything so perfectly. So I’m excited to be here.
Mindy Peterson: [00:02:17] Great. I’m excited to have you here. And I’ve wondered this question so many times. You know, what difference does it make if it’s live versus recorded music? And maybe part of that is whenever I go to live classical music concerts, I just feel like I walk out of there feeling like I’ve just had a massage for my brain. Like I just, I just feel like my brain has hit the reset button. There’s this homeostasis, this equilibrium that’s been reached. And I realize there are so many different elements. There’s, there’s a lot of elements involved in a live performance. So for our conversation today, explain to listeners What element or elements specifically this study focused on and how the study was designed?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:03:06] Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it’s correct to say that live music is very complex, like socially and musically. So there I like to think of it as interacting systems between performers and audience members. There are these interactions between performers, between audience members and across. Right. So there are these many layers of interactions. And of course, there’s also the element of the sounds that one hears. Music might just sound different when it’s live versus recording. So the aspect that we sought to test out was actually the, the aspect of context. So in addition to there being these real time visual and auditory signals that we’re experiencing during live music, there’s also simply the awareness that music is being created for us in that moment. So how does that impact our experience and our brain as we listen to music? Right. So to get at this, What we did was we brought people to a concert hall, actually to listen to music, and we scanned their brains using electroencephalography, which is EEG for short. In essence, we are able to pick up changes in electrical potentials along the scalp as people listen to music. So that’s how we’re able to get some of that neural insight.
Mindy Peterson: [00:04:21] Okay.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:04:21] What we did in the study was we asked people to listen to recordings by a violinist and live music by the same violinist with their eyes closed, so they didn’t have any difference in visual input. And what we found was that there were these differences in kind of rhythmic responses to music in the brain that were stronger. When we heard that music live over recorded.
Mindy Peterson: [00:04:44] And they were hearing live music in this setting, as well as recorded music by the same artist, on the same instrument, the same music. Right.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:04:56] Exactly. Yeah. So it was this very controlled design within a kind of naturalistic concert hall setting. We had people.
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:02] As opposed to a lab.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:05:04] As opposed to a lab. Exactly. So we thought that that was a nice and kind of crucial element of the manipulation or of the design. So we want the context of the concert hall to actually be a part of that experience of liveness.
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:18] You mentioned that the participants had their eyes closed. So did they know ahead of time which excerpts were performed live and which were recorded, or were their eyes closed the whole time, and they didn’t know if they were hearing something live or recorded.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:05:33] Right. No, that’s a great point. So that was key to our design. So we had people see the performer or the speaker set up on stage before they listened. And then we asked them to close their eyes. So they were aware that was the contextual awareness aspect of the liveness manipulation. So they saw people, the artist, walk up on stage. And so they knew the next thing that they were going to hear was either live or recorded if they saw speakers before.
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:57] Okay. So they did know if what they were hearing was live or coming from a speaker, which was placed strategically to be coming from the same source location as the the live art is playing, right?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:06:10] Yes, exactly. So we tried to control for a lot of those factors, the distance. We even did some follow up analyses on the sounds themselves, the acoustic qualities of the performance. And we had people listen individually. So there weren’t there wasn’t like 20 people in the audience. We brought each person in separately to the concert hall to listen.
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:28] Okay. And the sound levels were identical volume, whether it was live or coming from the speaker. Is that right?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:06:36] Yes. We also matched the sound levels in terms of volume. So we recorded actually the output of the speaker and the output of the violinist and matched those levels beforehand.
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:46] Wow. There’s so much thought that goes into designing these studies. It’s really fascinating just to hear that aspect of how you isolated all of these different elements to control, for really focusing on what it was that you wanted to study in research?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:07:00] Yes. And I could tell you many stories of the process that don’t go into the research paper like I have these not so fond memories of dragging the speakers from the lab to the concert hall almost every day for a few participants. So there was a lot of work behind it.
Mindy Peterson: [00:07:17] Sure, it sounds, I’m sure way more glamorous than it is in real life, right?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:07:22] Yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:07:24] Okay, so just a little bit more information on the method. So you had the EEG involved. So that’s like a cap that has sensors that are put on, on the scalp, that are measuring electrical signals going on in the brain as people are listening. And then you also had participants rate their experience after the listening exercise. So that’s more of a subjective rate, their levels of engagement, pleasure. What are some other things that you asked them to subjectively rate afterward?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:07:54] Yeah. We also had measures of focus and spontaneity and distraction. So we kind of got these attentional engagement and pleasure dimensions that we were interested in as part of that subjective experience.
Mindy Peterson: [00:08:07] Okay. And tell us what the results were. What did the what did the study find?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:08:13] Yeah. So the main thing we were interested in is this idea of phase locking. And to explain this, that kind of a general level, it’s rhythmic alignment between the brain and music, right? And we compute this alignment at different frequencies. So you can imagine like at the beat rate in music, how aligned is your brain to the sounds that you hear? What about two times the beat rate? What about four times the beat rate? Right? So we did this over a range of frequencies. And something that we’d expect from previous findings is that our brains should align in this rhythmic way to the time scales in music, to the rhythms in music. So that’s like our kind of sanity check finding that we see this rhythmic alignment. But the interesting finding was that for live music over the recordings. There’s a stronger alignment to that music that you heard, and specifically that happens at the beat rate and at four times the beat rate for faster excerpts. So it seems to be linked to the rhythms of the music that we hear.
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:12] Okay. And help me understand these phrases a little bit more because you mentioned phase locking in some of the articles, I saw a further descriptor on that neural acoustic phase locking. So that must be phase locking specifically related to what we’re hearing in the brain.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:09:30] Yes, exactly. So that phase locking concept is a measure between two signals. And one signal is from the sound. So the the recordings of the music that we got from either live performance or recordings. And the other signal is from the brain. So one signal per electrode on that EEG cap and phase locking describes that cyclic sort of alignment. So a high phase locking value means that it is aligned at that time scale and the low means that it’s kind of random relative to each other.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:01] And is phase locking just another way of saying entrainment, or are those two different things?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:10:09] That’s a great question. It’s a actually it’s an ongoing theoretical discussion in neuroscience.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:14] So. Okay.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:10:15] Yeah, it’s it’s kind of hard to first of all, there are many definitions of entrainment that I won’t get into here, but I would say that it’s most defensively, a measure of rhythmic alignment between two signals. And entrainment is one type of those one type of rhythmic alignment. But you might also say that like tracking or event related responses to music are also rhythmic sorts of alignment. So there are multiple causes that might give rise to phase locking.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:44] Okay, so entrainment may be a broader umbrella with phase locking a little bit more specific and narrow underneath that.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:10:52] Exactly. Yeah. Phase locking is a more specific measure that people use to talk about entrainment, but there’s this ongoing discussion about that link.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:02] Okay. So the results did show that there was greater phase locking and pretty statistically significant. And was it like 30% or something like that, 30% higher with live music versus recorded music?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:11:17] Yes. Yeah. So it was statistically significant for especially for the faster excerpts that were also the more rhythmically consistent excerpts. So the slower excerpts people listened to, there was more variability in the tempo over time. So we especially saw that effect for faster excerpts.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:35] And, and that totally makes sense because I just as a musician myself, I think about slower music and it can be a lot of times the expression that comes through the tempo involves rubato, or you’re kind of slowing down even more and then speeding up. And then, you know, it’s very expressive. So it totally makes sense to me that the faster, more consistent rhythms would produce a stronger entrainment result.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:12:04] Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s the takeaway. And also, we were using these pieces of solo violin and the pieces were by Bach, right. Johann Sebastian Bach. So these were kind of baroque style pieces where rubato and tempo variation is emphasized in those slow movements. So obviously future work can be conducted to follow up this study and look at how this varies across genres and across musical styles and preferences. So that’s something that I’d be very interested to see.
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:35] Sure. You mentioned a moment ago that there was greater enjoyment, greater pleasure recorded when there was this higher level of phase locking. Was that something you could see on the EEG, more activity in certain areas of the brain, or was it just the subjective results of the survey by the participants afterwards saying that they enjoyed those excerpts more.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:12:58] Yeah. So we did that in two ways. And it was actually a really strong effect actually for, for just ratings of music. Like how much did you enjoy this excerpt versus that excerpt? People overwhelmingly rated live music as more pleasurable than recordings, but the interesting and kind of novel result here is that the difference in pleasure ratings between live and recorded music was predicted by how much people were phase locking to that music. So that brain effect that we were seeing was actually linked to the pleasure ratings that people reported after listening to the music.
Mindy Peterson: [00:13:35] So it was a pretty clear correlation there.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:13:37] Yes, it was a pretty strong I don’t remember the correlation coefficient off the top of my head, but yes, that was a statistically significant effect.
Mindy Peterson: [00:13:45] Okay, let’s talk even more about Layperson’s terms of some of these things, and also what this means for for those of us who aren’t Scientists, but want to understand the latest research and how that can impact our own enhancement of our lives with music. So brainwaves synchronizing with rhythm, that’s that neural acoustic phase locking. Is there any other way that you want to describe that in like layperson’s terms?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:14:19] Yeah, I mean, at a very general level, and this is the most exciting part of this method for me is that phase locking is actually thought to reflect how we just track the acoustic signal, the sounds that we hear. So it’s actually traditionally introduced in the literature as a very low level sound processing phenomenon, right? So how do we parse a musical signal into meaningful chunks that we eventually derive higher level understanding from? Right. So in a sense, like phase locking is one part of how we encode meaning from music. And it seems that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:55] That.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:14:55] Seems to be stronger for live music. Of course, a lot of that. There are so many other brain functions involved in that process, but that that’s probably the coolest part of this finding to me, is that such a low level sensory process in the brain is impacted by something as high level as the quality of liveness, the awareness of a live performer.
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:17] Yeah, that is really fascinating. The encoded meaning that’s implied by some of these findings. Do you think that the stronger synchronization suggests were paying more attention, that we’re experiencing more emotion or something else completely?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:15:36] Yeah, that’s a great question and something that I think future studies are going to have to parse apart. Attention is one of the big factors that people point to as influencing this phase locking. So I think that just overall engagement with a performer and social oriented engagement in general might be an important part of how we track music when we listen.
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:59] Yeah. Do you think that social or that greater encoded meaning has implications for music educators? What I’m thinking about is I know that there have been studies shown that putting something to music can allow something to stay in our memory more, and it can be more memorable to learn something by learning a song. Like, for example, there’s a song with the table of elements where you can kind of learn it that way, and just learning it according to a melody helps it stick in your brain a little bit more. Anything else that you can think of implications that this might have for music educators?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:16:43] Yeah. I think that this aspect of rhythmic encoding or rhythmic tracking of sensory signals is really part of how our brains are designed in a way, like we are rhythmic creatures as humans. And I think that’s a really interesting thing to think about when we think about social interaction as well in live music. I actually just saw a keynote talk by Miriam Lenz, who studies social interactions in children, and what she finds is that the moments when people are opening their eyes the most in social interactions tend to align with beats in music. So there seems to be this rhythmic aspect of social cues that we give each other as well. So I think the overall takeaway is that when you’re communicating an idea to somebody or trying to learn an idea, rhythm matters in how it’s presented and also context matters in how it’s presented. So whether this is coming through a computer or through a live teacher or through a live musician might influence the strength that we’re responding to, to that input with. So I think these are things that are typically talked about less. Like usually we’re talking about the content of what we’re trying to teach, but I think the context around that content also matters.
Speaker 3: [00:18:02] Sure.
Mindy Peterson: [00:18:02] Well, a couple of things I was thinking about when you just said that when you were talking about the rhythm of speech, I’m sure there are so many corollaries between live performance of music and live performance of speech, as opposed to being with someone on a screen during Covid. Of course, we all adapted pretty quickly and everything went from live, in-person events to on screen events. And there’s some silver lining in that, that that makes certain presentations so much more accessible because you don’t geographically have to be in the same space anymore. But I can see how I think all of us who have lived through that experience of shifting from in-person to virtual can relate to the fact that there’s an attention that’s lost and an encoding. There’s an impact that’s lost when we’re not in person. Live with people. So it makes sense that there would be similarities with with speech and presentations than what you’re finding in this study with music. The other thing I was thinking about when you were talking about the rhythm of speech. I know that’s been something that’s been talked about, like even Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech and how much his speech had rhythm to it and how power, how much more powerful that makes a speech, whether it’s his or someone else’s, rather than speaking in more monotone or without rhythm.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:19:29] Yeah. I mean, I think it gets at the idea that there’s so many qualities to music and to speech that go beyond what is notated in a way. Like oftentimes we reduce meaning to the text that is behind a speech, or the notes that are on a page that are behind music for some types of music, but really both are forms of human communication, and communication goes beyond symbols. So I think rhythm is one aspect of that prosody and kind of just these latent emotional meanings that are that exist in music and speech. And I think increasingly talking about practical application, like for live performers and live musicians, that’s where I see honestly the greatest impact for this work. It’s like this, the thing that you’re doing is very meaningful. And I think especially in today’s society, with the advent of technology that can generate now human sounding music, right? I think there’s going to be an increasing demand for live performers to provide that breath of fresh air in an otherwise kind of polluted, easily digestible musical environment. Yeah. So the things that go beyond the surface level of, of music or speech, I think live performers can offer that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:47] Yeah. Anything else that you want listeners to really be thinking about the implications of this study, whether it’s the musicians themselves or music educators, maybe parents as they may be considering taking their children to a live concert or even hospitals, senior care facilities, therapists, you know, what are what are some of the unique cognitive or emotional considerations that you want listeners to be thinking about based on the findings of this study?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:21:19] Yeah, the message that I would have for whether you’re a more clinical practitioner or a music educator or a musician or a parent of a potential musician, would be that we’re moving towards a society that increasingly makes consuming music or just general media quite easy, right? That was the setup that you actually gave for listeners, right? We’re in a world where recordings are extremely popular. We have technologies that are making this even easier. And there’s something like difficult and in some ways more weighty about a live performance, right? If you just take it as what it is, it’s it’s something that has an additional factor of a human being in the loop with what is being created for you. And I think we should, as people embrace that sort of additional. In some ways it’s a difficulty, but in many ways it’s like an opportunity of just engaging with people, right? So don’t give in to the, the easiest way of consuming music is the best. It’s really about what the source of that music, and usually the most meaningful source is when it’s created by a live performer. Unbiased opinion.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:38] No, I totally agree. And one thought that came to me just now, as you were saying, that was it’s almost like that pre-recorded music that requires no effort or no investment on our part to partake of it. Like you can’t even watch a reel on TikTok without hearing music going, and you had no investment at all in accruing that, that musical experience. And it’s almost like the ultra processed foods of music listening. Yeah, yeah. As opposed to the real nutrition rich, nurturing food that you’re going to get in some of those organic macronutrients of protein and fiber and nature’s carbs and things like that. And like you said, live music is a very complex experience. So it’s kind of like getting those complex carbs as opposed to the ultra processed carbs.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:23:35] Sure. But I would add to that and say that it’s a two way street, right? The the richness of live music is not just in the music itself, as our study is showing. It’s in the perceptual awareness that the listener is bringing to the table. So this is why I like to always think about music listening as an active process. You like. Oftentimes, even in the the literature, you hear the word passive music listening, like we’re sitting there, we’re receiving music. But when we listen to music, our brain and our mind is actively constructing expectations about what we hear. It’s also situating the music we hear in a broader context of, oh, is this being created for me by a performer or through a recording? Like there are all these additional factors that us as listeners bring to the table as we listen. So I think this is an important aspect of how we frame what music is doing broadly. And it’s obvious, but I just want to say it that the meaning behind music is different for everybody, and that is because everybody’s bringing a different set of expectations to the listening experience. So I think that’s also an aspect of live music that is unique. Like you have usually a set of audience members that are, I think actually in the best performances are going to be polarized. So you have a very captivating performance that that makes some people feel like, whoa, they went off the rails there. And others would be like, wow, that was the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. Um, and I think that’s because the mental models and the generative models that the brain is bringing to listening are so different across people. And I think that variation is actually of interest, not something to be washed away.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:20] That’s insightful that you bring that up. And I think that’s one reason I find music research so intriguing is there is so much about music that is subjective, and you can ask five different people for their input and feedback and opinion, and you can get five different takeaways and five different responses. And then you have the scientific research that you’re doing and it is very objective. And so you have the both. And when you’re looking at music, one thing that is really cool about this study is it does provide scientific basis for the fact that our brains do respond measurably different to live music than recorded music, even when the music itself is identical, it’s performed by the exact same performer. The volume is the same, you know, all of those other control elements are accounted for. So that’s really fascinating. And you were talking about tuning our brains. I know Doctor Louis had said in one of the articles that I read that live performance tunes, brainwaves to music. So in other words, just like a musician tunes their instrument to a pitch or an orchestra, our brains are doing some tuning as well when we’re listening to music, which is just really, really intriguing and fascinating.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:26:36] Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a great way of putting it, and actually a better way of saying that. The context thing that I was talking about earlier, that it’s essentially a tuning thing, like the what, what is doing the tuning? It’s the perceptual awareness that we’re in a live performance. And that in a sense, provides a context for the music that we’re about to hear. And it seems that that context strengthens our response to that music in this one measure.
Mindy Peterson: [00:27:03] Sure. Well, and I’ll point out to you and your study, you’re very clear about some of the considerations. All of the participants had formal music training. They all probably had an affinity for classical music, which was the music excerpts used in this study. But one thing I want to point out, too, is you were controlling for the social aspect of being in a concert, which I think is huge. And it was not intentionally it was not a part of this study. So I think all these results would just be exponentially. So if you were to take into account the social aspect of being in a concert with a full audience, rather than just isolated alone, like these participants were, they were alone in the concert hall when they were evaluated.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:27:49] Right? Yeah, in a way that we’re really just narrowing the effects that we could possibly see for live performance. And that’s what we’re what we set out to do, right? Of course, I think that actually the biggest limitation of the study is that our sample was this Western trained set of people, because we conducted at a conservatory setting. And I’d imagine that actually there is some interaction between the liveness, the context of music, the live context, and how much you like the music you’re listening to.
Mindy Peterson: [00:28:20] So sure.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:28:21] I imagine that classical music is not going to do it for everybody, especially if you don’t like classical music, which is totally fine. So I think as people broaden the scope of this work, there has to be this treatment, this careful treatment of what are the preferences of the people that you’re bringing into the lab, and what is the live music that is being created for them?
Mindy Peterson: [00:28:43] Yeah, totally. Well, in talking about the subjective nature of music in all of the research and all of the interviews that I’ve done with music therapists and scientists and physicians and authors and educators. That is definitely a constant, is that there’s no one size fits all when it comes to music, because individual preferences have such a huge impact on the effect of said music. So yeah, I definitely agree with you there. Well, before I let you go, I know we’re getting close to the end of our time here. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s next for the Mind Lab? Uh, are there what are the next questions that you hope to answer? I know you’ve alluded to a couple things that you’d like to study more, but is there something kind of on the books that you’re planning on studying next?
Arun Asthagiri: [00:29:28] Yeah. I mean, you’ve mentioned this idea of subjectivity in music listening as a key thing, and I’d like to get a kind of more rigorous understanding of where that subjectivity comes from. And one example of this is musical chills. So moments in music that give us goosebumps, and this happens to be different for different people. But you might imagine that there are certain maybe biological or physiological principles that underlie people’s responses across these experiences. Even though the instance of music that causes these responses is different across people. So that’s one thing that we’re looking at is how brain body communication is playing a role in our emotional and subjective experience to music. And we think that that’s going to provide, um, another way of looking at the, the origins of this subjectivity as we listen. So that’s actually my dissertation focus. The lab is. Yeah. And more generally in the lab, we’re interested in kind of music as a form of brain stimulation. So health aspects of music. So I think I’ll mention it in a bit in the coda, but we are running some studies on how music might impact our cognitive well-being and specifically aspects of working memory and sustained attention. And looking specifically at this rhythmic aspect of music as something that might be stimulating the brain in music.
Mindy Peterson: [00:30:56] Yeah. Well, let’s go ahead and go to the coda. As you know, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending, a coda. By sharing a musical tool you wish more people knew about. Whether it’s a book or a blog, an app, a therapeutic tool, or anything that enables you to enhance your life with music. So tell us more about the tool or tools that you want to share with us in closing.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:31:20] Yeah, sure. So I have two mini tools here. I don’t know if I can completely call them tools, but one is this shameless pitch for that other work that the Mind Lab is doing with music as a form of brain stimulation. So we’re collaborating with Oscillo Biosciences, which is a company that’s designed this light stimulation device that accompanies music, and it’s used for people with older adults with mild cognitive impairment to stimulate the brain in what’s called the gamma frequency range, and that’s linked to improvements in working memory and other sorts of cognitive functions. So we’re trying to leverage music as a as a tool for brain health in this way. So I think that’s a cool use.
Mindy Peterson: [00:32:05] Fascinating.
Arun Asthagiri: [00:32:06] The second is a more personal pleasure that I think a lot, lots of your listeners might enjoy. And it’s a YouTube channel by Daniel Anastasio, and he is a classical pianist. But the thing that I really liked about this channel is that he performs excerpts of music and talks about them in a very genuine way, just about what is the source of his love for this music, what he thinks are the components of music that give rise to its emotional weight. And I think it’s just such a, um, he kind of exudes a performer’s love for music in this really refreshing way and a very approachable way for a general audience. So I really recommend Daniel Anastasio’s YouTube channel.
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