Lots of us are using music to help with social distancing - why does music impact human emotion so much?
Welcome to the Virtual Science Education blog series. People are publishing survival guides for parents at home. Instead, we are choosing to focus on what you can do - and in this case, probably what you already want to do - enjoy some music!!!
Our goal is to let music open a new door in our thinking and help make science more familiar and accessible for everyone so we can explore the world around us and think about science - together.
Burning question - why are we talking about music and science together? Let’s dig in - because Science Is For Everybody.
But what exactly is music? How can so many cool sounds be made by so many different kinds of instruments?
Our friends at OpenSciED created a unit about how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance. But this makes us think - what exactly IS a sound? Is it a thing we could hold in our hand or something we could watch move through the air?
Is there something about each of us that allows us to enjoy certain types of music? Why do some people cringe and some people boogie-on - to the same sound? People claim music is a universal language - but then why are there so many types and tastes in music?
And why do some sounds make us happy and make us dance around the room, while others make us tell our brother to stop playing his clarinet so loud and to shut his door? There seems to be more about sounds that we need to understand before we can figure out what makes something music rather than a bunch of random sounds.
We need to start somewhere - let’s Listen to some Music Videos
We all can agree there are many types of bands out there. A ton of them have a guitar, a bass, drums, and a singer. Why did this become the case?
There are other groups that are all singers, a full orchestra, a full drum-circle, or a mixture of different instruments. Some use computers to mimic the sound of instruments and others still sample pieces of music and rearrange and combine them to create new music.
One of these groups is only made up of two saxophones and a drummer, the other is only made up of singers. Using our sheet below - what do you notice about the sounds they are able to make and how they seem to work together to move past sound and into music? What is similar or different between the two music groups?
Can we do science while dancing to our favorite music in the house with our family?
What kind of music do you have in your favorite playlist or in your CD player in your car? What songs do you sing while in the shower or taking a walk or play in your head as you go about your day?
Take a step back and think about where else we hear music or sounds. What does your list look like?
My list looks something like this - dance music, music from movies, calm music, live music, music in my headphones, songs on the radio, birds singing, songs stuck in my head since they are so catchy, noises (maybe not quite music yet) from people practicing on instruments, calm music, concert.
Is music just about rhythm and patterns
So wait - is music just about repetition of sounds we tend to like to hear?!? It doesn’t seem to just be a feature of the music in the U.S. but exits around the world. Why?!?!
Let’s listen as Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis walks us through the basic principles of the 'mere-exposure effect,' detailing how repetition invites us into music as active participants, rather than passive listeners.
Music and humans and science and now ….. I’m confused
A study just found that people without any musical training create songs using predictable musical beats, suggesting that humans are hardwired to respond to—and produce—certain features of music. Wait, so,
Does that mean I have Taylor Swift abilities locked inside of me? Can I rap like Drake? If I pick up a guitar will I be [insert name of your favorite and current guitarist here].
How can some people create the patterns while other seem to only be able to enjoy them? Is there some sort of formula?!? Does the pattern change across different cultures and groups? Everyone who likes and makes music isn’t from the same town so is there more to music - do we need to think about this with a different lens? How about scale - let’t think about time and space as we sail forward on this musical journey.
Collaboration and Data Supports A Scientific Claim About The Universality of Music
A multi-disciplinary study - not just scientists, but psychologists, anthropologists, data scientists, librarians and musicians - reached back in time and across the globe to help answer the question - is music universal?
““I started to see all these studies that made claims about music being universal. How is it that every paper on music starts out with this big claim but there’s never a citation backing that up … Now we can back that up.”
— Samuel Mehr”
Is this just confirming what we were thinking before - there is just something about music that practically everyone likes. And it doesn’t have to be any particular genre - the music someone likes could be a repeating pattern of rhythmic bird calls or the jingle of a loose bolt on the bus that peaks every time we hit a bump. We could be drawn to the sound of a singer’s voice and the way it drifts in and out or almost sounds like some kind of instrument. Or the up and down rhythm of a cat’s purr or a dog’s bark, or the buzzing sound of an insect as it flies between our ear and the window.
So music has beats, and beats are patterns, but what is up with vibrations?
While we are looking at patterns in terms of music - is this a lens we can use to make sense of other phenomena that we didn’t really notice a pattern in before? Like - normal daily sounds?!? When you were in your school - what did the lunch room sound like? The gym - when everyone is bouncing basketballs during warm-up? Recess? Silent reading time or the library? What did those difference sound or feel like? Could you feel the vibrations?!?!
Source: Royal Observatory of Belgium
Suddenly, there are fewer sounds in the world. This is something we can investigate.
The graph on the left, Seismic Noise from Nature, shows a range of measurements of noise prior to and during the recent coronavirus pandemic.
What type of relationship between activity and sound can you identify by analyzing the graph?? What causes some of the changes in the pattern - and not just what the graph text tells us - what causes the changes in the red line? What makes it go up - or down?
If you were a random point at any one place on the line what would the city sound like? What would if feel like?
Is this picture really what it could look like when it wasn’t busy - like say, in the middle of the night? According to the graph, there is never a condition where there is zero displacement of the ground - so what is happening here?
Are all sounds a result of some sort of force? Like a drumstick hitting a cymbal, a train going over tracks, or basketball players running around the gym with the sound of the ball bouncing and their sneakers squeaking against the smooth floor?
What do vibrations even look like and how can we describe them?
Looking at that graph and exploring our thinking around what that red line means in terms of sound and vibrations is very helpful in our pursuit of making sense of music and rhythm and patterns. However, what do these vibrations look like? What can people do to observe vibrations in everyday events so we can use that experience to help figure out what is happening when we shift scales and go bigger and more complex.
SOUND ON for this one!!
What is happening with this frog?!? What do you notice this frog doing? What do notice in the water? As the sounds change - how do the patterns in the water change? What could be causing this?
How can you work with this idea at home to work on figuring out why you see a pattern in water or how you can do something to cause one Where can you observe water and plan a small investigation to test some of these ideas or provide evidence to support some of these explanatory claims? Remember, evidence can be a visual description of what you see. You don’t have to have fancy tools to measure, as long as the observations you use to support your reasoning relate to your claim.
Does the same thing happen when we clap? Or stomp on the ground? What about a guitar string? How can so many different things make vibrations? In how many objects can we observe a similar pattern?
If you have an instrument (pots and pans or metal water bottles or hollow tubes or twigs and milk bottles) anywhere nearby - grab it and play it - observe what happens when you play it. Do you feel anything in the hand you are holding the instrument with?
Can Vibration Help Us Make Sense of Complex Science Using Rhythm and Patterns?
Ok, so I’m excited here. We are injecting some full out creativity into science and connecting rhythms from music with patterns we observe in science - even from frogs in water! What if we can tap a beat - or even stomp on the floor - what does that look actually look like if we are looking for patterns? We’ve seen that you can see vibrations so we know that vibrations can be detected and observed in a patterns - what else causes vibrations and can measure them somehow?
Earthquakes are scary and complex - talk about some major vibrations. Take a moment to watch this visualization from an earthquake in Idaho. What is going on with those and blue dots? Is there a pattern here we can use to start figuring out what is going on with the earth after an earthquake? Or, perhaps, looking for a pattern will help us decide what we can explain and help identify gaps in our understanding.
We most likely end up with more questions - how are there dots that far away from Idaho? What type of tools do we use to measure these earthquakes and how does that translate to these dots? What is seismic and how is it connected to noise?
And, what else can these instruments measure? Why are we even measuring these vibrations?
BUILDING CONNECTIONS TO CROSSCUTTING CONCEPTS USING MUSIC AS A CREATIVE VEHICLE
We started with music, thought about repetition and rhyme, connected vibrations to patterns of seismic noise and tried to use this lens to figure out something that is complex - our changing earth.
We’re going to share both the PDF version and a Google Slides version so you can make changes as needed. Please share your experiences with students and give us feedback via email to ngssphenomena@gmail.com or via Twitter @ngssphenomena.
Sources used in article / Further Reading
Rhythm Might Be Hard Wired In Humans Science Mag
Music everywhere Harvard Gazette
Earth Is Vibrating Substantially Less Because There's So Little Activity Right Now Science Alert
Post written by Chris Zieminski and TJ McKenna for ngssphenomena.com
Comment below, or email ngssphenomena@gmail.com.
