Cadence Podcast: What Music Tells us About the Mind

This season, we’re going to focus on music as medicine—telling the stories of people whose lives have been immeasurably improved with music. In this episode, we talk about William’s Syndrome, a genetic condition that causes heart problems, intellectual disabilities and a profound love of music. We hear from 31-year-old Benjamin Monkaba, who has the condition, his mother Terry, and Jennifer Latson, author of The Boy Who Loved Too Much, a book about William's Syndrome.

As we finish up season one, we look back to one of the most famous and strange musical illusions: speech turning into song through repetition. We explore some new research on the relationship between singing and speaking and what happens in the brain when the illusion works. And we look forward to season two, in which we'll focus in on what music can tell us about medicine.

It takes years to train your ears - but not necessarily a music degree. Auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus tells us how musicians listen and therefore hear differently with training. Orchestral conductor Eric Dudley explains that the secret to getting an orchestra to sync up is teaching them to listen and ukulele player and comedic musician Molly Lewis demonstrates how she taught herself to become a musician by listening better.

In this episode we continue our exploration of how musicians tell time and how anyone embodies pulse. We talk to Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist who studies time at UCLA and we hear from previous guests: music cognition researcher Jessica Grahn, percussionist Jack van Geem, and film director Jonathan Lynn.

How do our brains tell where the pulse is in music? Can we improve our sense of rhythm or is it something we're just born with? In this episode, we learn how professional percussionist Jack Van Geem became a precision timing machine, and how he teaches his student, Katrina Shore, to develop her skills. We also talk to music cognition researcher Jessica Grahn to find out what's happening in our brains when we feel the beat.

You often hear people say that music is good for your brain because it's the only activity that uses all of it. That's not true. And the truth is actually much more interesting. In this episode, we talk to auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus, who explains how musical training changes what we hear, or, more specifically, how we listen.

Is there music that is considered universally great? Why do some composers from 18th century European countries still sell out concert halls hundreds of years later, while most of their contemporaries have been forgotten? Is their music really that much better? Or have we convinced ourselves that it’s better because we know that we're supposed to like it?

We take a step back from neuroscience and psychology to listen to what artists have to say about what music is for.