Speaker 1: 0:01

Hi everybody, I'm Omid Ashtari.

Speaker 2: 0:04

And I'm Natasha McElhone and I'm Nitin Soni.

Speaker 1: 0:07

Thanks for having us here, Nitin. This is the first time we're recording in a proper studio.

Speaker 3: 0:13

Thanks for hosting us, okay, my absolute pleasure.

Speaker 1: 0:16

We're talking about music today, and we wanted to stay a little bit more on the scientific side of it to begin with.

Speaker 1: 0:23

And I'm sure we're going to take a long journey in various different directions but as preparation for this, looked at a little bit of the neuroscience of music and there are very interesting studies about how music integrates the brain in various different ways. You have the acoustic cortex, you have the prefrontal cortex, you have the motor neurons that are kind of getting ways. You have the acoustic cortex, you have the prefrontal cortex, you have the motor neurons that are kind of getting activated.

Speaker 1: 0:48

You have everything that basically gets activated how much of that um do you take into consideration when you're creating music? Is it more in a an art for you rather than the science, or how do you think about all that?

Speaker 3: 1:01

well, that's a kind of almost in a weird, a bit of a tautologist question, because actually when I am writing music, I'm automatically engaging all those different aspects of my brain anyway. So you have the cilitary phase lock, which is actually locking together all those different or coordinating all those different parts of your brain with the, as you mentioned, the motor cortex, the auditory cortex, parts of your brain, with the, as you mentioned, the motor cortex, the auditory cortex, the limbic system, the nucleus accumbens, the prefrontal cortex, as you mentioned. So all of those come into play when you're writing music or when you're actually even listening to music as well.

Speaker 1: 1:39

Right, in that sense, I guess you're saying because your brain is doing all those things, you're taking it into consideration by definition. Yeah, whether you want to or not, subconsciously, I guess you're saying because your brain is doing all those things, you're taking it into consideration by definition.

Speaker 3: 1:46

Yeah, whether you want to or not, subconsciously, I guess you automatically are, because all of those things are automatically engaged.

Speaker 2: 1:52

Yeah, Is there a crossover here with maths? I know you're quite a maths-y guy. I like maths.

Speaker 3: 2:02

Yeah, there are lots of crossovers with maths and music. You know a lot of people have noticed that with the music of Bach but also with classical music. And you go back to Pythagoras, who actually originally looked at ratios in relation to strings and how all of that works. So yeah, I mean he originally, I think. The legend goes that he walked past a blacksmith and heard all these different tones and pitches coming through and then looked at the relationship between different intervals, musical intervals connected to one piece of string. So you know he discovered that exactly half the length of the string you had the octave and so on, and then he worked out everything from there and then from there you kind of get consonant and dissonant intervals.

Speaker 1: 2:52

To go back to the origin of the question, and I think the answer was obviously made a lot of sense. But the thrust of my question is more. Maybe we know how music affects the brain so reliably, and it feels to me that we don't use music functionally, but only as an entertainment product for many people. So let me qualify that statement. You know, when we want to feel something, we maybe listen to music, or when we're sad, we're going to listen to music, but we don't think about the fact that music can be used in music therapy as much, right?

Speaker 3: 3:28

I don't know about that either, because I mean for example, I mean, you know, you have, as I was saying, with the limbic system, you have the hippocampus and the amygdala and the way in which they're kind of influenced. Your emotions are constantly influenced. You have the nuclear succumbusance, which is actually the reward system. So you're, you're actually, you know, all of these things are constantly it's not just about entertainment you're, you're stimulating lots of different ways and your cognitive heart functions as well. So, yeah, um, there are many different ways in which you're stimulated at the same time. And entertainment is kind of a construct, isn't it really? Because entertainment doesn't really. I mean, all of that is entertaining. You know, all of that is engaged when you're being entertained. So I guess, um, entertainment is, is a coordination of all that, I guess have you maybe I know.

Speaker 2: 4:18

I just wonder if, historically or traditionally, music was used in the way that you describe as a way of bringing people together and feeling good and feeling united, and, whether it be in a church or a religious ceremony or tribal ceremony, that we've always had a sort of frequency and an understanding and auditory response to the world Just being in tune with nature and birdsong and all the sounds that the animals make, and living on that frequency.

Speaker 2: 4:50

Just cut me off if I'm going down a cul-de-sac. What interests me about someone like you who's spent so much of your life living in music, writing music, creating it, making it, playing it and I remember you once said you spent more time playing notes than you have using words that, whether your brain is so primed that you, your awareness, your ability to tune into everything and I noticed also in quite a lot of your songs, more than most people's, you will use soundscapes as part of your music or as a way into a song.

Speaker 3: 5:26

And I don't know if I've ever heard animals, but well, I actually wrote a whole symphony for animals to no with chris packham I, actually as part of an experiment we were looking into whether animals could actually derive pleasure from music and whether it was functional or whether yeah, because I mean, you know, the perception is that they use music for reproduction, communication, survival and so on, or sound rather warning signal.

Speaker 3: 5:53

Yeah, not music, but yeah, but it was interesting, for example, with chimpanzees. They get quite agitated with, uh, dissonant intervals. And there was, you know there was. There were experiments done which showed that animals could be beat and trained. So for example, the auditory cortex with us is actually responsible for pitch, timbre and rhythm with animals. Like there's a seal called Ronan and that seal can actually move in time to Michael Jackson or Michael Jacksonael jackson or you know michael jackson thriller or whatever, and if you change the tempo it'll it'll move accordingly and the same.

Speaker 3: 6:31

I mentioned snowball, then, which is cockatoo, who's also beach, which is also beat, beaten, trained. So so you know, animals need to have rhythm in order to coordinate their limbs when they're swimming or doing other things, and that's how our motor cortex works. I mean, we start tapping our feet, we have all of that stimulation, and animals are no different from that.

Speaker 3: 6:56

I think it's our perception of the word music and the idea of what is a construct. It's sound, effectively, and it's the organization of sound to derive pleasure, but also to have all kinds of other stimulus that are, or stimuli that can, to going to excite us in different ways. I mean dopamine being released and so on.

Speaker 1: 7:18

Um, you know, all of that actually happens during, you know, when you're listening to music or playing music so I feel um that you're absolutely right that when you, when you're creating something, you have an intention as to what you want to maybe elucidate in the listener right yeah but what I'm saying is in the consumption of it, people are not very thoughtful. There's an app called endell. Have you heard of this?

Speaker 1: 7:39

um, no, so basically what it does is it has sounds if you want to focus and has sounds for when you want to sleep, right, and so it actually really kind of drills into the neuroscientific evidence that we have for how certain music affects your mood. And, by the way, it's much better than taking medicine to sleep or like melatonin or all this other stuff. And my point is we have all this wisdom around this stuff, but I think in our consumption of it it's still just seen as an entertainment thing for a lot of people anyway, and not as a functional thing.

Speaker 3: 8:10

Well, I think that's changing. I mean, you know, with technology. I mean, for example, I took part in an experiment with Pink Floyd's Great Gig in the Sky, which they did at the Dolby Atmos building in Soho Square, and I went there and they can reverse engineer your brainwaves so they can reproduce, they can actually reproduce Great Gig in the Sky. So that happened to me, where they were able to play back from my brain, from just the brainwaves, an interpretation of Great Gig in the Sky which actually sounded like Great Gig in the Sky.

Speaker 3: 8:46

So it's actually possible to have that degree of precision in terms of how you look at what's going on with your brain in relation to sound and music.

Speaker 1: 9:00

That's really interesting, because that book that I was telling you about, the David Seltzer guy.

Speaker 2: 9:05

there was an article in the New Yorker about this neuroscientist who's a professor at Columbia but is also a jazz musician by night called Soldier, and so he had this kind of dual life as a musician and then a neuroscientist, but then he kept the two worlds quite separate.

Speaker 2: 9:23

And then at a certain point he realised that one could really feed into the other. So he put some nodes on a flamenco guitarist player's brain while he was playing to see what was activated, and followed all of those wavelengths, and then did the reverse. As you say.

Speaker 3: 9:40

He reverse engineered that through a computer programme, but from what I remember they were different all right, slightly different, so the interpretation there was like a I don't know whether that was a lag actually there's evidence that indicates that we um we, it's just as good if we run through music in our brains, if we're in, instead of actually practicing it's, it's just effective, which I do sometimes I'll go through a whole piece of music in my, in my head, um, and if I can't get to a piano, I'll do that, and that's, that's quite effective. And then when I sit back down at piano it feels fresh.

Speaker 2: 10:18

So I'll do that sometimes before a gig or something like that I guess that was my earlier point was so you're able to do that? Yeah, obviously I'm not, and it helps that I can read and write music as well because that's that's useful, because I can also see it on the page.

Speaker 3: 10:32

I have both the visual kind of memory of it as well as the as well as hearing it the same is true for sports, by the way.

Speaker 1: 10:39

You know when you, when you're thinking about your serve, if you practice the serve in your head as in, like simulate how you would make the serve in your head, you're actually gonna train yourself to become better at the serve. So I think the brain has this simulation property that allows us to actually feel as if we're enacting something where we're not as in. We can just practice it in our brain. You were talking a little bit about anticipation here, and what I find interesting is the dopaminergic effect of music in many ways, and I read a paper about the fact that there's dopamine in being able to anticipate something that happens. Let's say, for instance, a house track and you see it's building up and all of a sudden you know there's the crescendo or the drop or something like that, and then there's also dopamine effect that happens when you're surprised. How much of that do you think is part of the the process of creating music? I assume a lot right, would you?

Speaker 3: 11:36

yeah, I mean there's a, there's a big, there's a big thing of of tension and release. You know, within music I mean you talk about flamenco flamenco for me is purely about tension, release and and it's it's how you build up, and also within classical music, you do you have that.

Speaker 3: 11:50

I mean most forms of music work around that kind of concept. But, um, you know, even in space, I mean even with miles davis, the way he would play trumpet, um, in, in the space between the notes, there was, uh, there was a great deal of tension that he managed to. It's almost like charging the notes so that you have an anticipation, like you said. But that works with both the nucleus accumbens but also the prefrontal cortex, because that part of the brain is also about anticipation, anticipating planning out.

Speaker 3: 12:19

Yeah so it's kind of. But the dopamine part is the nucleus accumbens, so it's kind of. So I think both of those are kind of happening at the same time and I think that's really quite. I think that's present in everything you know, when you are writing music or if you're DJing you know, you see that literally on the dance floor and again, that's the motor cortex.

Speaker 3: 12:38

So you kind of all these parts of the brain are kind of constantly being stimulated on the dance floor and you know, because they there's the dopamine, there's the uh, there's the, definitely people just energy as much.

Speaker 2: 12:52

Being in relation to and responding to, though, a reaction like you see, when the crowd's getting excited and you're kind of going to play into that, whereas when you're composing on your own, I guess you don't quite have that feedback loop, do you?

Speaker 3: 13:04

No, and I think that's the thing as well, this sense of community which you were talking about earlier. I think there's something very powerful about that, you know. There's something that connects us to a universal zeitgeist, to the universe around us and to something that I can't define, but I feel connected and I feel like I'm communing with the universe. When I'm improvising, for example, you have to let go to improvise. Well, you can't be in your head, thinking thought gets in the way of what you're doing. If you are improvising, you have to just be totally unselfconscious and just let go of your hands and your feelings, and then everything happens and you're fascinated by it as well, which is the best way to be does that happen to you as much if you're solitary as it does if you're vibing with other musicians?

Speaker 2: 13:59

in a different way can you describe the?

Speaker 3: 14:01

difference. Well, you, one is like reflecting and one is like having conversation. So it's one more memory.

Speaker 2: 14:10

Not necessarily what I meant by reflecting.

Speaker 3: 14:12

It's you're being reflective in the way that you're playing, responding or responding, and it might be about being with your feelings and thoughts in a more personal way than maybe when you're conversing with others. I don't know, I mean, it's hard to. I guess when I'm playing with a band, there's a certain electricity that comes from playing with other musicians, which is really fantastic, and you feel really stimulated by that in lots of ways.

Speaker 1: 14:40

There's serendipity that's created there as well. Sorry, there's serendipity that's created there. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 14:45

Yeah, no, totally, but I think you're constantly discovering as you're playing. I think that's what improvisation is it's constant discovery and response to the discovery, and continuing that on as you go.

Speaker 2: 14:59

What you're making me think about is how much that can be self-generated, that element of surprise that if you are to some degree a conduit for the music and it's sort of coming through you, and of course there'll be times when I'm sure it's really crunchy and you're writing a film score for something you'd be given a remit and you're like, ah, and it's maybe not flowing as easily or it's a recipe, yeah, that you've got. But then when you're in your flow and you are just on a rainy sunday morning messing around and there's no pressure, when I watch musicians play and I'm so excited by watching it, like where does that come from? Where does that sudden ray into you know a completely different set of chords from where they just were two minutes, and you can see on their face that they're also excited. They're like as surprised as the listener is. And I'm kind of amazed that that can happen within your, your brain, just by itself, without any outside stimulation.

Speaker 3: 15:58

Yeah, it's interesting because you know there's a. I think you have to train your intuition in order to receive, in order to receive ideas that come to you from a universal consciousness. That sounds really pretentious, but that's what I think, in that we, you know, in in terms of understanding music and training with music and playing jazz or playing in your classical music or play whatever style you learn, um, you are training your intuition, you're practicing with your intuition and you're honing it so that you can let go. I think, um, I think, if you let go and you haven't got a trained intuition, it can come out as chaos. I think, if you have learned about how chords work and you have trained your ear and you've trained your feelings around music and you have all those different parts of the brain working together in the way that we've spoken about, I think something just happens which is greater than the sum of its parts, and that's when something beautiful occurs, I think, whether that's an improvisation or whether that's a spontaneous composition.

Speaker 1: 17:03

A side note on what you were saying earlier. There's a book called the Inner Game of Tennis.

Speaker 3: 17:09

Have you heard of this? I have heard of it, I don't know where, from. I think it's a great book.

Speaker 1: 17:20

He wrote it about music too afterwards. Um and that is when you're teaching somebody tennis, you will teach them through language. You'll say, hey, you have to lift your arm further up and you have to step, take step back and then put more weight on your front foot, etc yeah but mastery can never go through language.

Speaker 1: 17:33

You actually have to feel the motion. You have to get rid of language, because language is just a mediator of, like, very condensed information, but it has to become an instinct in a way, right, and so you can't go through language if you really want to flow. That is kind of the point. Yeah, you have to feel it.

Speaker 3: 17:49

It's a different level exactly, and I think if you've practiced enough, yeah, and you have enough knowledge in the first place, then you can relax into allowing those things to happen spontaneously, so you're not worrying or thinking about processing through the prefrontal cortex so much. So, you're kind of. You know, you just have a different, more intuitive approach.

Speaker 1: 18:12

Direct access. Yeah, maybe take us a little bit in a different direction. You have a prolific use of different kind of music, genres and parts of the world that you're fusing. Maybe for a moment let's go to the era before distribution of music was so easy. There were different areas of the world where music just developed very differently, and you have a lot of knowledge about this, much more than I do, and that's why I would love to kind of hear your thoughts around how and why this happened, where we have East Asian music that is so different from Middle Eastern music, that is so different from Western music in some shape or form.

Speaker 3: 18:47

Yeah, I mean. Well, I mean there are different cultural influences with, for example, with Indian classical music which, is you know, dates back to potentially to 200 years BC. I guess. What is it now BCE? I can't remember, but it's the Natya Shastra which is actually looking at. It's looking at how all the arts can work together. So it's a kind of ancient Indian treatise.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Right.

Speaker 3: 19:16

But it looks at Indian classical music in relation to dance and theatre, for example. But also, you know, it's almost like a template for how they can work together.

Speaker 1: 19:26

Is this the raga system?

Speaker 3: 19:28

Well, it's more than that, because, for example, there's a word called jugal bundi, which which is where you have conversation between, for example, a catholic dancer, um, and a double player, so they'll have a rhythmic conversation. But in order to do that mathematically and correctly, they have to have the same access to the same vocabulary. I mean, for example, stravinsky, with the right of spring did had the problem that he where he kind of got very angry with the dancers on stage because they couldn't understand the timing system and the changes of time signature that he was using, and he got frustrated with their movement.

Speaker 1: 20:05

Because the Western world didn't create like a language that connected the two.

Speaker 3: 20:08

Whereas with Indian classical music that existed and has existed for centuries. And so in that respect there is and yes, the rock system as well, which exists both in the South Indian and North Indian systems, but in different ways. So it's kind of there are these systems that have evolved to allow people to communicate with each other. In the West it's quite different because notation has been the way in which it's evolved, musical notation, whereas with Indian classical music it was normal tradition, as it was in lots of different parts of the world. So I think what is unique to Western classical music is how sophisticated the notation became and that allowed very complex pieces of music and sophisticated harmonic pieces, I, I guess, an orchestration to to work yeah, makes sense, I can't remember what your original question.

Speaker 3: 21:03

I wanted you to jam basically yeah and and to go on.

Speaker 2: 21:05

then why? Why is it that max martin is able to be the most popular or populist songwriter? Why do his songs reach the entire world? Why do we hear the same? Well, since Abra, I mean since, the. Beatles, whatever. Why is it that there's this sort of predominance of, even though we've got all the choice, we've got all the access now to every single kind of music across the world, whether it's pygmy music or whether it's?

Speaker 1: 21:35

Drum and bass, or whether it's Chinese traditional music.

Speaker 2: 21:38

We have access to everything, and yet somehow it sort of coalesced into this incredibly similar sounding music that proliferates and gets played everywhere, even in a bus, in the middle of a desert.

Speaker 3: 21:52

It's an interesting question because there are different types of answers to that. One would be that it's colonisation of the mind, right, because you know, really, why do we not all speak Chinese and Japanese and, whatever you know, we all speak English. Why do we drink Coca-Cola and why is that such a popular language?

Speaker 2: 22:10

It's like the fast food, itola. It's like the fast food, it's saturated fat thing, isn't it? If that is, as you say, a kind of colonization, imperial, it's. It's got the most money, so therefore it's going to spread more quickly and basically, or is it that there is something going back to the brain?

Speaker 1: 22:27

yeah, there was a paper that I found um by elvira abratico and it was the title is music and Emotions in the Brain. Familiarity Matters. She was doing brain imaging and showed that there is a higher dopaminergic output when you find songs that you find familiar. It's easier to listen to them rather than something that's completely awkward Like if you play a bunch of, how does something become? Familiar. Exactly, and this is, I think, where we get to.

Speaker 3: 22:56

And that's what I mean by colonization of the mind, because that happens from an early age, correct, and you know it's what you're exposed to and what is the motivation for other people to expose you to a certain type of music and not another type or in the same way?

Speaker 2: 23:07

But I guess that's my question sometimes, if people haven't been exposed to this kind of music and they've actually been listening to the music that their parents play or grandparents play why is it that it seems to capture people so quickly? It can also be peer pressure.

Speaker 3: 23:26

I mean I'm not being so cynical as that all the time. I mean obviously.

Speaker 3: 23:29

No, I'm really interested, though I mean I think, for example, there are parts of the world where I guess it's what you're familiar with as well, what you've grown up with. So I mean in in certain parts of india. If you played the meds here and they'd go, I don't get this at all and I'd rather listen to, I'd rather listen to this particular rock because I know it, I understand what's going on, I understand where the sum is, I understand the sum being the point where, at the end of a particular time cycle, everyone hears the one, and that becomes obvious.

Speaker 1: 24:03

It's resolved.

Speaker 3: 24:04

Yeah, and so the mathematics of it is actually extremely familiar to people in parts of Madras or certain parts of India. My whole point is it's not necessarily the case that that music touches people, regardless of where they are or what their history is.

Speaker 2: 24:26

And then what I'm always blindsided by, even if I travel to somewhere incredibly remote, is across the airwaves on the radio or from a car radio, or wherever it is.

Speaker 1: 24:37

You get these Western poppy songs and, more importantly, it's not radio, it's people having the CD. Yeah, people think it's cool.

Speaker 3: 24:44

People think it's cool, I mean you know you've had MTV on television.

Speaker 2: 24:48

But it's so main. Yeah, Is there something about the accessibility?

Speaker 1: 24:50

though I think the question is. Is there something about the accessibility, though? I think the question is. Is there something about the formula that makes it more accessible?

Speaker 3: 25:09

I would say colonisation happens in so many ways. It happens through television, through what we're exposed to all the time and, like you just rightly pointed out, I mean who has the money? Who's got the money to be able to perpetuate their culture, you know? So I would say I'm not saying that there is no validity in the idea of simple songs that are easy to sing, that bring communities together, for example.

Speaker 2: 25:31

I mean it's easy to sing.

Speaker 3: 25:33

You know, for a lot of people it's easier to sing a Beatles song than to actually hum a rag together, which is far more complex.

Speaker 1: 25:40

Or la, la, la, la, la, la, yeah, so that's just something that everybody likes singing. Well, that's you know.

Speaker 3: 25:47

So I mean, if you think about football matches, you have a minor third. Well, you know, know, it's like that kind of thing that people will do. And a minor third is is kind of thought of universally as a sad interval, um, you know, even in the indian system. So it's kind of like you'll have. That is universal, that's that, or even the major thing is thought of as positive. So there are these things, but then that's about intervals again cultures major isn't well is it?

Speaker 3: 26:13

Well, it depends. Again, the system is very complex, but my because there are, you know, there's rogues which are quite wistful, but they have major third, but my whole point is that you have the.

Speaker 3: 26:24

You're coming back to the concept of consonant and dissonant intervals and coming back to Pythagoras and oscillatory phase lock and the way in which we actually our brains, are coordinating all those different parts of you know, all those different sections which deal with different things. So it's kind of, I guess we're always being stimulated by music that unites us and that's what we hear the most on the radio, because we like to sing along and participate and move along. So probably the stuff that actually appeals to our auditory and motor cortexes is going to be most effective, and that's true of commercial music.

Speaker 1: 27:07

So I think what you're basically saying, if I may summarize, is there is a part of it that is nature, but a lot of it may be nurture due to the dominance of certain cultures.

Speaker 3: 27:17

I mean, if you think back about early civilizations the first instrument that was created was a flute which was probably trying to simulate birdsong. So the culture then would have been they may have had a familiarity with certain birdsongs and maybe that was what was considered accessible at the time. As time's gone on, we look for music that I guess we can sing together or we can dance to together.

Speaker 2: 27:47

But it's a bit like you know, when you first give a baby it's processed chocolate bar or you don't. Someone does a relative or whatever, and it never wants to go back then to normal food. Because the quick fix or the sort of this short cutting the circuit to the sugar and fat combination is does something to the brain that nothing else quite does. And I'm just wondering if there's a musical equivalent to that.

Speaker 2: 28:11

But then it's very difficult to go back to. Then it's very difficult to go back to Bach, or it's very difficult to go back to something that is time-consuming in how you ingest and process it.

Speaker 3: 28:21

I think if you weren't to expose people to Like, for example. I mean, what I try to do is decontextualize certain things. So, for example, when I do this piece on stage called the Conference with Arif, where we're speaking in quite complex rhythms and the crowd get really excited and I've had so many people try and learn it from me and it's a really complex piece of spoken rhythm.

Speaker 1: 28:47

Is it takadimi?

Speaker 3: 28:47

But they get very excited. I mean, takadimi are actually what you're saying.

Speaker 2: 28:52

There are actually syllables that coincide with certain parts of the doubler.

Speaker 3: 28:57

So certain ways of striking the doubler. Each one has got a syllable associated with it. But yeah, I mean so the actual way of speaking, the doubler balls, or the Catholic catholic dance balls as well. They are bhols, they are the way in which you will communicate, and that can be equally exciting as well and you know.

Speaker 2: 29:19

But your point there is and it's no accident, it's called the conversation it's called the conference.

Speaker 3: 29:24

The conference, sorry, why did I?

Speaker 2: 29:26

well, to me it's like a conversation, yeah when I'm watching that I have no idea what's being said. It's just so exciting to watch and to look at and to watch you vibe off one another yeah, but just to kind of. Maybe there's an energy that comes from it there's a lot of energy in it, yeah, and it's kind of model as well, right, it's like it's multi-modal as well.

Speaker 1: 29:47

You know there's a. They're different, as you were saying also before, the indian kind of language that you created for dancers to be able to communicate with musicians, right like this. There's something about the, the conversation, or for example, um, you know, um.

Speaker 3: 30:03

It's basically ways of exploring rhythmically yes um, different time signatures, um, but you have um because there is a system of dihais, dihai being a phrase that's repeated three times, landing on the first beat of a cycle or a bar. So if you're in 10-8 time, or 10-4 time, or 7-8 time or whatever, you have to be able to equally recite or improvise a spoken pattern to land on the first beat of a given cycle. You might aim for one that's five cycles down, and so on. So it becomes extremely mathematical.

Speaker 3: 30:36

The way in which you're conversing is through your feet, or through your hands, or through spoken patterns. So that's a kind of system that exists, that allows people to improvise in a way that's very exciting and it's communicative in a much more visceral and kind of spontaneous way, and it's much more coming from energy and human energy than it is coming from a need to communicate an actual thought.

Speaker 1: 31:04

So just to pick up on Natasha's question, because I think it's an interesting one, do you feel that there is an equivalent of fast food in music, as in do you get used to simple music and then you can't go back to complex music, or do you don't think that so there's levels of expression and there's levels of?

Speaker 3: 31:20

communication. So when you have somebody who's been purely cathartic with their music, they might create something that is quite inaccessible to other people and they might be just a tortured artist sitting in the corner of a room making kind of crazy noises, but they feel they need to get those out and it's pure catharsis and that for me is probably the most pure form of art there is. But then you get the other side of things, which is pure communication, where you have Haber or the Spice Girls or whatever singing and you'll have thousands, millions of people enjoying that. But it's designed to communicate to as many people as possible. It's not cynically, necessarily, but what I'd say is that that was the original intention. It was never about the catharsis of music.

Speaker 1: 32:15

That makes sense, and so it's about the expressive.

Speaker 3: 32:18

It's about the communicative power, not the expressive power.

Speaker 2: 32:20

Why is it that these same songs get played, whether it's for one of my kid's friend's parties or my parent's friend friends? Golden wedding advert the same frigging songs. Yeah, get the people to the dance floor exactly.

Speaker 3: 32:36

And then I realized no, that's associative, that's another thing which is there's this association that you have memories it's not even the music, yeah, it's just yeah, yeah, well, you have. I mean, our memories are and play a big part absolutely feel about music as well.

Speaker 1: 32:52

Yeah, let me take us into a different direction a little bit. I saw an interview with you that you gave, I think, to what was it? I don't remember, um, what the channel was, but uh, you were talking about the early days of the first couple albums that you did with your kenwood the stereo and like a simple mixer yeah and you know, now, yeah, and now we're here in this studio, high tech and the world has changed a lot since then, and your newer albums are very different in terms of the technology that you're using.

Speaker 1: 33:21

Talk to us a little bit about how you feel as a music maker that's been spanning decades of making music, how technology has changed your process and how you feel about it.

Speaker 3: 33:30

Well, it's changed in so many different ways. But it's also how you apply it and what you're using it for, or what the purpose is of the music you're creating. So you know, for example, if you're writing music for video games, you have to take into account all the success and failure parts of the player, so it's an interactive way in which you're writing.

Speaker 3: 33:50

That's such a good point, so you have to think about that, and all the different stems of the music have got to respond. So you have to, and it's not necessarily just a sudden change. It might be a gradual change.

Speaker 1: 34:03

I'm a gamer, I know there you go.

Speaker 3: 34:05

So I did Heavenly Sword and Enslaved, oh wow cool I love it.

Speaker 3: 34:08

So I did Heavenly Sword and Enslaved and those two games. You know we spent a lot of time coming up with systems for how that can work. But then you know if you're working as a composer now because I'm classically trained. I use StaffPad now, which actually allows me to write directly onto the conductor score electronically on my iPad and that can immediately be turned into notation. So as I'm writing crotchets, quavers and so on, all of that is becoming notation, which is then also writing preparing the parts for each of the sections of the orchestra. So I'll write in the dynamics and you'll hear that played back. So literally you can be sitting on a tube or whatever, or quite often I'm travelling and I'll write on a plane. I've written orchestral pieces on a plane.

Speaker 1: 34:58

And you can pick what kind of instrument is playing this part and then you hear that played back, yeah, and then they can play that back An 80-piece orchestra can play that back exactly because it's ready, whereas it depends what the purpose is.

Speaker 3: 35:08

If I'm mocking something, I mean, for example, I work on films quite often. I'm working on several at the moment where sometimes they'll just want me to create the orchestral score with no orchestra, and so I'll be using simulated instruments which are very sophisticated. Now I mean almost impossible to tell the difference because a lot of them are sampled directly in air studios. For example, spitfire Audio, they'll record 150 piece orchestra and so I have that at my fingertips and I can play that in different ways, with all the different articulations and dynamics, so I can control all of that and be able to express that musically. So I can control all of that and be able to express that musically, and so you can have an orchestra at your fingertips at any time. So all of that is incredibly useful because it allows you to express yourself and explore your creativity without having to be hindered by kind of you know the constraints, so it's infinite really the possibilities of you.

Speaker 1: 36:08

You can just whatever infinite, really, the possibilities of you.

Speaker 3: 36:09

Yeah, you can just, yeah, whatever's going on in your mind, yes, you can release, and that's what I think has only happened really over the last few years I mean, and because of processing power and all the rest of it, it's really allowing us to be able to work much, much quicker and with much more precision about what we want to create, and you, you know, in whatever way we choose. So if I want to then say all this music that I'd written just on a computer ages ago for an idea, I can you know right now, harry, just before you came, was actually putting that, some of my music into my iPad so that I can write to. I can write some string parts to it, which I did, you know I've been doing recently, so it's, it's incredible what you can do now.

Speaker 2: 36:54

I know you've had the privilege of playing for some decades where it's. Each decade is very, very different in terms of what you've got access to and the tools that you have at your disposal. So you had to learn right at the beginning with, just you know, maybe a wood instrument or a string instrument and you got used to that feeling of that string and that wood and things that perhaps a new generation may not even touch the instrument.

Speaker 2: 37:18

I don't know how important you think because you're talking about speed how important you think endeavor and a bit of sweat and toil is to creating something beautiful. If it is at your fingertips and you can realise it quite instantly, does that detract in any way? Or actually no, it doesn't. It just frees you.

Speaker 3: 37:39

That's a really good question. I mean I think for me, I like to hear evidence of process, and that can be pain and that can be feelings. I like to hear a sense of authenticity, that something came from a genuine feeling. I think as long as that's there, I don't really care about much else, and imperfection though. Imperfection To me.

Speaker 2: 38:08

that's what often makes things very beautiful and, interestingly, sometimes, when you do things spontaneously and quickly, you have know imperfection. No imperfection.

Speaker 3: 38:09

To me, that's what often makes things very beautiful and interestingly, sometimes, when you do things spontaneously and quickly, you have more imperfection so I mean, you know it's, it's not necessarily as I said to you once before. I really like this line in zen, in the art of motorcycle maintenance, when he says the buddha's not to be found in just the petals of a flower, but also the console of a computer, this idea that something can be spiritual regardless of whether it comes from whatever source it comes from.

Speaker 3: 38:37

It depends. I think it's about your intention and how you're working and what feeling you're accessing and how authentic that feeling is.

Speaker 1: 38:46

I love that I wanted to go in the same direction. Actually that constraints create creativity sometimes. But you know, I like the way you're approaching it and saying no, actually it's the ultimate empowerment and this ultimate empowerment, as long as the intention is right, can just be, as beautiful as the constraint production I think so.

Speaker 1: 39:05

Yeah, yeah. Let me ask you about AI. Are you using any of that in any of the things that you do right now, For instance? You know, I guess a lot of people do auto-tune. It's a form of AI in a way. I guess right, and I'm not saying that is something very appealing, but it is a form of AI. Before we get to generative AI, Do you use anything along those lines?

Speaker 3: 39:32

Yeah. I've used autootune for years. It depends on the singer and depends on what it's for. But I think you know recently I even used in order to prep a piece of music because I hate my singing voice. So to prep a piece of music a song that I'd written for Eva to sing I used some kind of an AI character that we found that was able to interpret the syllables each of the syllables of my lyrics and the notes and sing them.

Speaker 3: 40:01

It sounded really weird. It sounded like they had a speech impediment as they were singing. But it was good enough that Eva could hear what the intention was and then she could sing it properly. But it's useful that way. But then you know AI. I mean, it depends what you call AI.

Speaker 1: 40:20

So let's take this example, because I think it's a great example. The 25th generation of what you just described, where you type in text and it's turned into a voice is going to be pretty much have the same fidelity as human voices yeah, I know yeah and and do you think then we can still apply the statement that you made right just before, saying that you know buddha can can also be found in in this right.

Speaker 3: 40:46

I think it's interesting because, for me, I do want to be able to see humans performing and doing things. Um, and it's like applied maths, isn't it really?

Speaker 3: 41:01

you know maths is is a kind of theoretical way of accessing an understanding of the universe. Ai can enhance our ability to enjoy human beings. You know, I think, I think it's, it's it's kind of, you know, I mean like if you think about either being able to do that. I enjoyed her performance. I wouldn't have got that performance out of her if not for the fact that I input data from AI into Eva so that she could come up with that incredible output.

Speaker 2: 41:32

Well, I think this question is really interesting for you, specifically as an artist, is because, as far as I can tell, you've never been replaced no, you can never be replaced that you have never been resistant to technology or you've embraced it.

Speaker 2: 41:51

You've been really excited by it and you've been able to hold those two things, so the impulse to create and to be spontaneous and to be intuitive. But you're not. This is how we're going to do it, and I've always done it like this. I'm going to stick to this. You're really fearless in that way, so I'm really interested how these two things are going to crossbreed in you in the next few years. What's? That's probably the wrong word, if I can just like add to that you know what you're saying.

Speaker 1: 42:19

Eva picked it up because because you were inputting it through an AI and she then could replicate it. The thing we have to remember is that all this generative AI does it's trained on human data. It's trained on human ability.

Speaker 2: 42:34

It's trained on human-created For now.

Speaker 1: 42:56

But for now, without the baggage that we have of our history and our constraints and how we look at the world. As meatbags, right. But there's certain things that we appreciate, that are human, and those will be trained. The AIs will be trained on the human data set and so, in a way, eva can multiply herself by giving her voice up. And there's an artist called damn. I forgot, she's the ex-girlfriend of elon musk oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3: 43:24

Yeah, I know, she said feel free to use my voice. And exactly what's in it?

Speaker 1: 43:29

grimes and grimes, exactly grimes, made her voice open source and said look, this is. You can use my voice if you use my voice in a song that you create I'll take royalties to a certain extent, and if I use your songs and then kind of publish them myself, I'm going to give you royalties.

Speaker 3: 43:47

But this is where you get into really gray areas legally, because the whole thing of intellectual property Exactly, and because AI can generate in no time whatsoever every single permutation and combination of notes for a large number of notes, and so therefore they can copyright all of that in an instant and say that's already been written so there is no new music and since we put a lot of emphasis on melody, in terms of what is a composition, it's really tricky.

Speaker 1: 44:25

This was the Marvin Gaye cheering case as well, right I? Mean we already see this to an extent right.

Speaker 3: 44:31

Well, that's an interesting one because that chord progression with Pharrell that's existed. I mean it's basically a 1-6, mean it's basically 16251, which is a chord progression. That's the bark used all the time and loads of people have used.

Speaker 2: 44:46

I'm just going to play for a second something you said earlier on about tapping into something universally, even if you're working on your own, and as I guys. I think you mentioned. So just to extrapolate from that, if there is an energetic and I'm gonna go woo woo for a second.

Speaker 2: 45:04

That is sort of a sound that belongs to the planet, the universe, whatever it is that you're tapping into, and you have greater access to say than me or someone who's non-musical. What do you think? Are we in a sort of strange system at the moment where we even have such a thing as intellectual property rights or ownership over music that you have created? Is ai going to bring us back to a place where, in fact, this is something that just was it always meant to be shared and should always be shared, and no one should actually own a bit? Like you know, borders to countries, or what am I just?

Speaker 3: 45:39

gonna get rid of all of this intellectual property communism just going back to that, yeah, um, yeah, I mean maybe. I mean like certainly there's been a democratization of um, you know spotify's done that, you know there's like in terms of access. I mean you know, if you go back to what happened with napster and so on, that you could say there was a democratization of ownership of music and and you know, but at the same means of production.

Speaker 3: 46:07

Anybody with a laptop now has a studio yeah, like you couldn't do that in the past. Yeah, absolutely. But the thing is that I kind of think that it's a tricky one, because musicians have been, have been squeezed and squeezed in so many different ways and, um, you know, governments no longer there isn't much government help. I mean, you know, during covid government, this government was encouraging musicians to retrain as something else and you know, and get another profession. There is no love of the arts in this country at the moment. Um, you know, in from the government, certainly, and I think it's appalling what's going on and we are in danger of losing one of the most incredible things about our culture, you know, which is musical expression More about being human.

Speaker 3: 46:52

Yeah, and I think that people are going to become more and more reticent to seek careers in music or look at you know, it's easy to say, because that's one side of the equation yes, you're sharing, but then, at the same time, what's the motivation? For a musician to share what they've spent their whole lives training to do with everyone else. So, yes, it's great that people can share that music, but I mean, yeah, it's unfair on the person who created it, surely?

Speaker 2: 47:24

But I suppose for many professions in the arts whether it's writers, whether it's actors and trying to chase down oh, who's duplicated my voice? Or who's duplicated my image or who's duplicated my music? Just becomes an exhaustive process where there's so much content.

Speaker 3: 47:39

Well, that's why there was the act of strike, exactly and this.

Speaker 2: 47:42

This is me being very polyamorous and star trek around um positive around ai. But I wonder if there is going to be a very strange kind of epiphanous moment where we realize actually it's an enormously unifying force that can bring together things and and yeah, there won't be these barriers, these borders, these, because it doesn't have any.

Speaker 3: 48:04

It is the point well, yes, because I I mean, if I were to speak honestly I don't believe in capitalism as the way in which everything should be organized coordinated organized. I mean so because you know of the system that we're in, because the kind of economy we're in, and so on. The motivation for just about everything becomes about profit maximisation or personal gain and so on, and also if you're succeeding.

Speaker 2: 48:32

I'm not what's that Zero-sum games.

Speaker 3: 48:35

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 48:35

If you're succeeding, it means I'm not.

Speaker 3: 48:37

It means you've got something for me. That fear-based, that sense of competition yeah, I think the that's the problem, and I've always said this, and I think I've said this to you before. You know rather than you know if, if we were to abandon being competitive or training to be competitive from an early age and much more cooperative and much more about collaborative, supporting and collaborative, and you know um, then I think we would have a very different society, um and I think can I just say for a second I get your point.

Speaker 1: 49:07

I get your point. It's not about money, let's just make it about attributing my contribution to yeah, but then valuing contribution doesn't have to be monetary. Yeah but so we need to have. What I'm trying to kind of say is we need to have some sort of accounting of the inputs of the creators into whatever the ai is spitting out in the end right, because we'll ever, as things, progress.

Speaker 2: 49:30

That's just not going to be possible, and this is very defeatist, I feel like.

Speaker 1: 49:34

I think we have the ability to design stuff as as now but you're holding on to.

Speaker 2: 49:39

To me, that's holding on to an old construct this is a fair point.

Speaker 1: 49:45

I love this discussion. I think that, in a way, what you want is you want to be able, as a human, to still matter in some shape or form yeah, but you can do that.

Speaker 2: 49:55

You don't have to be validated by money or by no not by no, no but all by the, by the, by the system or any aspect of the system we currently have, or by being an individual Because that has failed, because really what you're talking about is being an individual If actually you're contributing to something that is much greater than you, yeah, but you don't know your contribution.

Speaker 1: 50:14

That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2: 50:15

I'm suggesting. Perhaps you don't even need to know. Why does it matter?

Speaker 3: 50:18

I mean, you know if you donate to a charity, sometimes you do it anonymously you don't have to have feedback on your From the person you've helped and you're valuing yourself when you do that, that requires the highest level of adult development. No, I think it's the default position that we find ourselves in when we're born and I think, gradually, society knocks that out of us. I think we naturally want to collaborate, want to support each other, want to validate each other, want to validate ourselves.

Speaker 2: 50:52

It's the citizens of it, it's the human kind of it. No, no.

Speaker 1: 50:55

I love this debate and I agree with you. I think we have an opportunity to still design these systems in a way that contributions can be actually attributed.

Speaker 3: 51:05

Well, you get blockchain, you get all of that, you get encryption blah, blah blah, but I don't think that that's actually really going to be tenable for that much longer, because AI is going to make all of that redundant.

Speaker 1: 51:17

I agree with you. I think, ultimately, we will be in a point where we all have to figure out what we want to do with our lives and what meaning means.

Speaker 2: 51:23

What I'm really excited by is that what you suggested was perhaps negative, that sort of obsolescence that we shift to a different system. That's what's exciting is, it requires a pivot and a change of attitude, and I think we will go back to something that is actually more innate and we've just been sidetracked by this idea.

Speaker 3: 51:41

I agree with that. That's what I think as well. I think AI is going to be a catalyst for change. We all agree on that. I think it's an epiphany moment.

Speaker 1: 51:50

It's inevitable, that it's going to be a catalyst for change. I do think we disagree, but that's great.

Speaker 3: 51:55

Sophie says we can't say inevitable, but I guess the point is that the ways in which we've been doing things till now will be redundant because AI will supersede all of it if we continue with this way of doing things, because AI will just make us all redundant.

Speaker 1: 52:19

So we have to actually re-evaluate everything. Can I say I think people will still want to see you live right. Well, that's why.

Speaker 3: 52:23

I'm saying live performance is a human thing, but then you know, I mean, look at what they've done with ABBA. But they still want to see virtual ABBA. That's incredibly popular. It's still them. Yeah, Well, it's a simulation still.

Speaker 1: 52:39

Anyway, I thought this was a really great discussion and we ended on a quite quite a um interesting philosophical point, but it was great to go on this musical journey with you and I appreciate it yeah, thank you very much, thank you so much and you're not getting away with not playing any music.

Speaker 2: 52:56

So it's happening, good to know I will play something.

Speaker 3: 53:03

I will play something, thank you.