How Music Makes Us Feel imagine...

MUSIC: "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson

# O Superman... #

ROBOTIC VOICE: Why do I do it?

You can start creating...

..another world of sound.

I'm a DJ.

I'm a DJ. Always have been.

I don't see music in words,

I see music in colours and shapes and feelings.

Music has the capacity to send you into worlds completely unknown,

and how do you explain the unknown?

Wagner's Rheingold is like perfection.

It's this aquatic vision of the beginning of the world,

which is enormously exciting.

It's like there was a void and then there was stuff.

In Hebrew, there's this word "ruah", which means...breath...

-Breath, exactly. Yes, that's right.

-The breath of God.

-Yes.

Which broods over the waters of chaos at the beginning of creation.

So, there's a great tradition...

that singing is somehow more than speaking.

It was the Christian monk Augustine who said

that the person who sings prays twice.

That there is something about music that redoubles the intensity

of our own spiritual experience.

HE SINGS OPERATIC HYMN

HORN AND DRUMS PLAY

Why do we turn to music when words are not enough?

At funerals and weddings, at times of heartbreak and euphoria.

# Change and decay

# In all around I see... #

Gospel music just hits me instantly.

It's like a wall that just opens something up inside of me.

# Abide with me. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Why is it that music seems to hold more emotion

and go deeper than words?

Music played an important role before language was developed.

This is the mystery that has eluded scholars and researchers

for hundreds, and even thousands, of years.

MUSIC: I Vow To Thee, My Country

# Nun der Tag mich mued gemacht... #

Three years ago, Imagine made a film with the neurologist Oliver Sacks,

about his work on music and extraordinary medical conditions.

# Soll mein sehnliches Verlangen... #

For that film,

I had a brain scan to measure my own emotional response to music.

# Freundlich die gestirnte Nacht...#

I chose several pieces,

including one that had haunted me for 25 years.

# Wie ein muedes Kind empfangen. #

One of Strauss's Four Last Songs, about approaching death,

Beim Schlafengehen - going to sleep - sung by Jessye Norman.

# Haende, lasst von allem Tun

# Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken... #

This looks like the machine is broken.

LAUGHTER

You had this immense emotional and whole-brain reaction

to the Jessye Norman, which is just phenomenal.

Your brain is just bathed in blood.

-Your whole brain is just like...

-Yeah.

It's a deep emotion of blood flow.

# Und die Seele

# Unbewacht. #

That set me thinking.

Science has proved that music does have the power

to induce a range of emotions,

but that doesn't tell us how and why.

So, we decided to make this programme.

It's a wonderful thought

of proceeding to the afterlife, is it not?

And then to have it set as he did...

And you certainly didn't have to know those words, what they meant,

to be moved and sort of feel you understood what it was.

What it was, yes. Just because of the way...

I mean, when he starts with those low strings

at the beginning of the song

and then the...the flying that happens with the wonderful violins.

# Nun der Tag mich mued gemacht... #

And then this singer sort of comes in and imitates that. It is...

It is quite extraordinary as a song.

# Soll mein sehnliches Verlangen

# Freundlich die gestirnte Nacht... #

You were four years old

-when you started to sing and listen to music, weren't you?

-Yes.

Hearing my mother and my grandmother and her sisters singing,

all without accompaniment...

Doing the daily things of life in the kitchen,

making food and singing, accompanying oneself in life.

I would find the channel on the radio

where the classical music was coming through

and I would simply sit and listen and I...

I thought it made me feel good.

-# Somebody's calling my name... #

-# Oh, Lord... #

And then you sang, I suppose, in church as well?

Oh, yes. What a wonderful training it was

to have to stand up in front of the church and sing.

# Somebody's calling my name

# Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord

# What shall I do? #

In the South at that time, you sensed there was a need to sing.

My ancestors sang their way through slavery,

they did not sing their way out of slavery.

But in order to endure...

..unimaginable, unimaginable daily events,

to be able to create this incredible body of music

that we call the spiritual

and there are thousands of them.

And I feel incredible strength from knowing

that I come from a people that were strong enough to endure.

Jessye Norman has come to be associated

with a masterpiece of American song writing,

inspired by the spirituals of the slaves.

# Summertime... #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# And the livin' is easy

# Fish are jumpin'

# And the cotton is high. #

Summertime is a lament, a cry of both hope and despair.

It's a caress and a lullaby.

# Your daddy's rich... #

My very first job, I was working as a teaching assistant

and my job was to bring the children in

and to have them rest and have a nap.

And I didn't quite know how to do this. I mean, I wasn't trained.

And I decided I would simply play classical music.

They would lie down on their little pallets and I played Mozart for them.

It would take five minutes for them to settle down.

The teacher was astounded.

She said, "I've never seen anything like this in my life."

So, why do you think music has such a powerful effect on children?

The thing that works, when singing a child to sleep...

..is the fact that that sound is coming from this area of the body,

and so those vibrations, those overtones,

are coming on to that child, aside from the words

and the song that's being sung. It's the whole...

It's the whole package.

And that's why from very early on,

whether the mother is singing you a lullaby or simply rocking you,

the beat and the rhythm...

Yes, of the heart

and corresponding to the rather faster heartbeat

of a very, very young child...

But, comforting, in that you are experiencing the same thing.

-Someone clap, just in case...

-I'll clap.

-To re-sync.

Ready?

BUZZING

And the bee is OK?

I mean, I'm... Oh, I can hear him.

Now I can hear him.

-A bee.

-It's... It's actually...

HE PLAYS AN "A"

-..buzzing an A.

-No, I can hear that bee.

Just thinking, we said the sound of nature...

Where does...

Where does music come from?

Well, Messiaen, my teacher, used to think that it came from

human beings imitating the sound of nature they heard,

imitating birdsong, imitating the sound of twigs

that you found in nature,

the sound of the wind, probably language grew from there as well.

So, deep, deep, deep, buried in our conception of music

are natural sounds, are the sounds from which language and music came.

Is that why music has this sort of emotional power,

because we recognise it and because it is part of our make-up,

our physical make-up?

I can't begin to explain that.

In the end, our extraordinarily emotional response to music

has something mysterious about it.

But, it's true, it has something absolutely universal

and deeply, deeply powerful.

We're in the worst in music the moment we're born,

and we're probably immersed in some form of music before we're born.

The sound of the mother's heartbeat...

A sense of pulse,

a sense of sound heard through the mother's stomach as well.

There's all sorts of aspects of music

that are absolutely fundamental to our existence from the moment zero.

MUSIC: "Scarborough Fair"

Even Aristotle tried to understand the power of music.

You have the scene of the Sirens in The Odyssey,

where there is the reaction of wonder and being so captivated by the music.

You see, really, the kids sort of moving with the music

and finding pleasure in it.

# Quickly on a pony, pony, pony

# Quickly on a pony. Clip, clip, clop #

# Noo-noo-ma wye eh, noo-noo-ma... #

But then there is also another reaction,

where the children look almost transfixed, in a trancelike state

when they saw the trombone, when they hear the sounds for the first time.

I think it's a facial expression that you see rarely

outside the context of music.

Oh, that was lovely!

The child can hear the mother's heartbeat.

That's, in itself, the rhythm of life.

Do you think that also may have something to do with

-the importance of rhythm?

-That is possible.

The baby gets exposed to this regular beat also through walking,

being walked around, not only through the heartbeat.

So, I think there are multiple sources that, probably,

are highly rhythmic

and that prime the infant to...attend to rhythms.

Oh!

Hello, Luke. Are you coming on the seesaw with me?

Mothers use this special language, sometimes referred to as Motherese,

which is some sort of speech that is between normal speech and music.

Hello.

Oooh!

And some thunder!

So, intuitively, they use music in some ways.

I can hear the rain.

TROMBONE PLAYS

Studying babies is rather like following in fast forward

the development of ape to man.

The baby is highly responsive to music, practically from day one.

But it takes them at least a year or more

to perceive and understand language and speak language.

The mother has headphones, so that she cannot hear the music.

The point here was to see what the baby could do without any prompting.

MUSIC: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" by Mozart

The child is almost looking to see if it's in tune with the parent.

The child turned around to mother to get acknowledgement.

MUSIC: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" by Mozart

If you present the baby with complicated orchestral music,

the infant has to find the beat

through this orchestral texture,

so it's a bit difficult.

BASIC DRUM BEAT REPEATS

The pattern of movements that the babies produce

in response to dry beats and music is very similar.

BASIC DRUM BEAT REPEATS

-You see the smile.

-I do, absolutely!

The more the baby was synchronised with musical time...

..the more frequently they smiled.

It is some sort of a mastery smile.

MUSIC: "Carnival Of the Animals" by Saint-Saens

And there's nothing going on,

it's not that the child sees a movie or is entertained by some clown...

-Yes.

-Amazing.

MUSIC: Carnival Of The Animals by Saint-Saens

-That last crescendo...

-Yes, yes.

-The legs just go back like that.

-I love the way that he's using his feet.

-This is very interesting.

-Did you see this change from a leg movement to a torso movement?

-Yes.

This is a nine-month-old baby.

-She starts to...

-Yes.

-..to push her belly out.

-Yes, she is.

-It's quite massive.

These kids intuitively understand dry beats and then,

of course, later on, in adolescence, now,

these beats are also an important part of this new kind of music.

Yes, I mean, if you think of rap and hip-hop...

People that like this kind of music

would be probably very pleased to see this.

DANCE BEAT PLAYS

Mala is perhaps the best-known producer of dubstep,

electronic dance music

distinctive for its constant use of very deep sub-bass.

It has a powerful beat and can create a trance-like state,

almost like meditation.

Mala is a father himself.

My son, we were trying to stretch his feeds out,

and I remember he was crying, crying, crying,

and I remember just taking him to my studio room

and playing him some Augustus Pablo and he was just zip,

you know what I mean?

You could tell, just the vibration was present.

You know, I mean, he was in a zone with it, without a doubt.

I just like a lot of weight in music.

I like it to cross the barrier where it isn't necessarily

something that you hear any more,

but it's actually something that is physically present.

You know, if you were to stand by one of those stacks,

you know what I mean?

When certain tunes are played, you feel it physically.

You've had the system on for a couple of hours by now,

just to let it...ease up, so...

These low frequencies coming out here,

that's the stuff that you'll feel in the chest.

This is the therapeutic bit, so getting the balance right

between your tops and your mids and your bass...

Get it sounding sweet, man. It shouldn't damage anybody's ears.

One thing that I always enjoyed

about going out to music when I was a youngster

would be that feeling of where you forgot all of the things

that were going on in your everyday life.

Really just exist in the now,

and I think music is one of those things

that really can create that space for people.

I love the fact that music is something that can teleport you...

..to the unknown.

Traditionally, of course, that place has been the Church.

THEY CHANT

Anthropologists would be better able to say this, probably, than me,

but as far as I understand it,

music certainly has religious origins,

so it's certainly a way of heightening speech

in order to talk to the Gods.

CYMBALS CRASH AND HORN PLAYS

You don't just talk in an ordinary way to the Gods,

you must talk in a special way.

Gradually, that would become a chant or an incantation,

and then a prayer.

This church regularly opens its doors to the music of other faiths,

like these Tibetan monks,

with their long horns alerting the Gods to their prayers.

Rather than us all saying, "We pray that it will rain tomorrow,"

we now sing about the love that we lost yesterday.

So, there's been a movement

in how music is attached to our emotions

and which emotions are expressed by that music.

WHISTLE BLOWS

TRUMPET PLAYS JOLLY TUNE

Singing at funerals or at weddings, it's a communal experience.

That sense of everyone speaking in one voice.

It's very potent, isn't it?

I think that at funerals, particularly,

and certainly, in my experience as a priest,

people, as soon as the music starts to play,

as soon as the hymn starts to play,

that gives them permission to cry.

The music does reach them on a different level

and they feel they don't have to hold it all together any more.

There's something rather remarkable, it seems to me,

about communal singing.

You're expressing something absolutely individual to yourself,

at the same time as doing it with 300 or 400 other people.

It's rarer now in society than it used to be.

I guess people probably, occasionally,

do gather around a pub piano perhaps,

and on a football terrace, of course, you hear it.

# Walk on

# With hope in your heart... #

There's something really rather beautiful

about hearing Liverpool fans singing You'll Never Walk Alone.

That's a very similar experience to singing your favourite hymn

at your best friend's wedding,

where the whole thing is very heightened.

# You'll never walk alone. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I do think in singing there's something...there's something more.

There's always something more.

It's always taking you on.

SOUND OF HEART BEATING

# Swift to its close

# Ebbs out life's little day

# Earth's joys grow dim

# Its glories pass away... #

They played me the mock-up of the whole opening ceremony

and my favourite part, even before they'd asked me to do it,

was Abide With Me, because I thought it was such a beautiful moment

where everything stopped.

# Oh, Thou who changest not

# Abide with me. #

It's a hymn, and it... It just seemed so quiet and beautiful.

They're lyrics that apply to everybody

and everybody at their quietest moment can feel a connection.

You know, my favourite part is when it lifts, when it...

Abide with me... Fast falls the na-na-na...

The darkness deepens... Then this part.

SHE HUMS THE LIFT

There's something just about the lift and then how it closes,

completely closes at the end and the phrase finishes and, you know,

you're not left guessing anything, the sentiment is over

and that one simple thing has been said.

# Shine through the gloom

# And point me to the skies

# Heaven's morning breaks

# And Earth's vain shadows flee

# In life, in death, O Lord

# Abide with me. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

-Your father was from Zambia, but you were born in Scotland.

-Yes.

So, this sense of music which comes from all kinds of places,

Scottish folk, African music,

I gather your father used to put that music on in the car

-going through the Scottish lochs?

-Yes.

I could take inspiration from wherever I wanted.

It was the simplicity of the Zambian music.

If it was a happy song, there was maybe four words,

they were repeated, but you knew that this was uplifting.

CHEERFUL ZAMBIAN SONG PLAYS

Even though I had no idea what they were saying, I felt happy.

So, you belong to both places, is that how you felt?

I think it was the opposite.

I didn't really feel as if I belonged in Scotland,

I didn't belong in Zambia, I couldn't speak that language,

I had never been there,

but I was so different to everybody around me,

so I think it was more of...

I could create my own world from these influences,

I could take a little bit of Zambia, a little bit of Scotland,

a bit of this and, you know, I was learning clarinet at school

and I was slowly forming this musical bubble, I guess.

JOOLS HOLLAND: We welcome Emeli Sande.

I felt more connected to singers and other musicians

than I did to people down the road.

Songs when I was a kid that really moved me, they still move me now.

When I was eight years old,

I didn't really understand what the song was talking about,

and you have more understanding as you age.

# Will you recognise me

# In the flashing light?

# I try to keep my heart clean

# But I can't get it right... #

It's like when you watch Disneys later on,

and you realise there's kind of a dark undertone

under a lot of these stories.

# Oh, Heaven. Oh, Heaven

# I wake with good intentions

# But the day, it always last too long

# Then I'm gone, oh, Heaven

# Oh, Heaven

# I wake with good intentions

# But the day, it always last too long... #

So, who were your childhood favourites who are still with you?

Umm...

Nina Simone.

Billie Holiday.

# Love will make you drink and gamble

# Make you stay out all night long

# Love will make you do things

# That you know is wrong. #

Do you think her vulnerability gives her some of her power?

I think that's the key to the best female vocalists.

Even with the strength and the power of her performance,

there's such a vulnerability that resonates.

As soon as somebody loses that and begins to sing...

just because...

Well, it's fashionable or it's something to do

or something to make money from,

then you lose the heart and the soul.

I think that's why we do fall in love with people like Adele.

It's the vulnerability.

We see that in them, but it's within us and we have that connection.

# I heard

# That you're settled down

# That you found a girl

# And you're married now

# I heard that your dreams came true

# Guess she gave you things

# I didn't give to you

# Old friend... #

Sad songs, typically, are in the minor, downward key,

but these vulnerable but strong women often sing in the major key,

as their voices triumph over tragedy.

# Or hide from the light

# I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited... #

Adele's most famous song, perhaps, Someone Like You, is in the major.

This is where she reduces the Albert Hall to tears.

The reason for that, I think,

is because the lyrics tell you that the song is about memory.

It's memory of past happiness in the midst of present woe.

# Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste? #

If you subtract the lyrics,

what you get is a song in the major which sounds happy.

# Never mind, I'll find

# Someone like you

# I wish nothing but the best

# For you too

# Don't forget me, I beg

# I remember you said

# Sometimes it lasts in love

# But sometimes it hurts instead

# Sometimes it lasts in love

# But sometimes it hurts instead. #

Everyone is weeping with the singer on stage as she breaks down.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

HE PLAYS A SAD TUNE ON THE PIANO

One of the greatest tearjerkers in all of music

is this Albinoni adagio in G minor.

It's actually a forgery.

An Italian musicologist called Giazotto confected this piece

from a fragment of Albinoni he discovered.

It has all the ingredients of sadness

and the classic thing is descending lines,

and it starts off with a descending bass line.

And you also see descents in the melody.

The third thing about sadness

is what we call a suspension in the trade.

When you suspend one note against another it creates a dissonance,

and when that resolves down,

Albinoni would have called that a pianto,

which in Italian means a tear.

It sounds like somebody crying.

And because of the tempo, it being slow,

you have more time to listen to it, to attend to that dissonance,

and the tune is just one tear after another.

Answered by:

A yet more pungent tear.

Hometown Glory by Adele begins with a very similar descending scale.

# I've been walking in the same way

# As I did

# Missing out the cracks in the pavement

# And tutting my heel and strutting my feet. #

This scale is repeated obsessively right the way through Adele's song.

HE PLAYS CHORDS

It incorporates, like all the pianto, the sob.

Of course, you don't need a pianto, in a vocal piece

because you have a voice.

# Doo di di di di da da da. #

Towards the end,

Adele's voice breaks into almost sobbing in her jazz-like scat.

# Da da da yeah

-# Doo doo doo.

-#

The trick of repeating the bassline obsessively

is taken from funeral marches.

It is a dirge all but in name.

# Of my world, yeah

-# Of my world.

-#

There's a theory that music is only capable of expressing five basic emotions.

Sadness, anger, fear, tenderness and love,

because these were the most evolutionary adaptive emotions.

If you ask listeners what makes a piece of music art,

and you require them to rate various criteria such as beauty,

originality, complexity, skills etc, you find the two most

important criteria are expression and emotional arousal.

So what have we learned so far?

Music and emotion has become a subject of intense neuroscientific

and psychological research.

We went to hear one of the leaders in the field.

For over 100 years, psychologists have tried to describe

the musical features used to express different emotions in music.

A more intriguing question, perhaps, is this.

How does music arouse emotions in listeners?

Let me briefly summarise seven psychological mechanisms

through which music could arouse emotions.

The first one is caught brainstem reflex.

The brain is hardwired to pick up danger signals.

This is music that makes you jump.

But it's a fairly primitive mechanism, so let's move on.

If you want to suggest fear,

the best thing to do is to have a very low note,

and the first thing you hear is very low strings

playing a mysterious melody.

We associate low notes with size, as if there's something large

and nasty, a large dinosaur out there in the distance,

but coming closer, and the threat is advancing, and it ends with...

HE PLAYS TWO LOW DESCENDING NOTES THEN A HIGHER NOTE

A question demanding an answer.

And then, like a film director, Schubert pans the camera

away from the fearful object to the frightened subject

and he puts in somebody trembling with fright.

And also frozen to the spot, so trembling,

frozen to the spot with fear and heartbeats in the bass.

I think Schubert was extremely conscious of the emotional

properties of his materials,

just as a painter is aware of the properties of the paint they use.

Schubert is setting up this melody as a vulnerable

victim of the dark forces.

The real crisis of the piece is

when this lyrical melody is attacked and destroyed

by the threatening sounds that explodes very loudly with a full orchestra.

MUSIC IS LOUDER AND FULLER

DUBSTEP MUSIC BEGINS

Dubstep has become the genre used to express

the angst of ambient noises in modern life, in the modern city.

There's a moment about halfway through this track called Hunter

by Mala where everything stops and we have a very mysterious silence.

And then it starts again. But even louder.

They take Schubert's heartbeats in the background.

You have a repeated high note,

like somebody screaming or somebody shivering, also frozen to the spot.

Dubstep also creates anxiety

through intercutting the electro acoustic noises in surprising ways.

If somebody was trying to depict fear onto screen,

they'd go for certain set ingredients,

the classic example being Psycho.

Heartbeats and shivering, tremolo effects on the strings.

Like the shower scene.

Professor Juslin talks about the heartbeat music mimics,

and how we unconsciously associate music with the mood we're in.

You meet your friends, and when you do that, you become happy.

A particular piece may be playing in the background.

Eventually, the music itself will create this happy feeling,

so you don't have to be aware of this connection for it to work.

This is used in advertising, of course.

Ale, unlike lager, is a slightly older,

a slightly more relaxed sort of affair.

# Gonna sing you an old country song. #

What we wanted to do was to create a social scenario that you

wanted to be a part of.

# From the strings of this old rusty guitar. #

Some of the visuals and some of the casting

aren't what you would expect in an ale commercial.

We wanted to make it slightly more urban, younger.

But with more emotion than a lager ad.

# Will I see you again

# Please just come on back home. #

The track they chose, though it sounds familiar,

was by a relatively unknown young singer, Jake Bugg,

whose career got a boost from being in this ad.

It's got this folky, country and western feel to it, obviously.

Some of the stuff we played around with, for me, changed it quite dramatically.

I'm sure you could change it. Let's have a look.

# I'm not trying to pull you

# Even though I would like to

# I think you are really fit

# You're fit but my gosh don't you know it. #

-It completely changes.

-Right. Now, you'd have cut it differently.

You'd have made it more upbeat and more irreverent, and there was

a conversation around that and other tracks a lot like that.

We were like, we should do something more progressive.

But that's a lager ad.

In an ad for a new printer, they've turned to folk again,

but without the warm cosiness.

Still using nostalgia to sell, but with a modern twist.

The old computers

and printers are actually making the sound that we hear.

MECHANICAL TUNE

This iconic Dylan track, The Times They Are A-Changin',

is the music central, as far as you're concerned, or is it extra?

I'd challenge anybody to think of their favourite ads of all time.

They've all got a really impressive piece of music.

Using such a powerful track, that's at the forefront,

as you can hear on that advert, we didn't use a voice-over

anywhere on it the music was the pure device used.

You haven't got language barriers.

It could go anywhere in the world and the majority of people would understand that piece of work.

It's instantly global.

Laurie Anderson is also experimenting with the music

made by machines, though she's not selling anything but her music.

You know, I was just working on one thing that I have over here.

I had to rebuild it today because it got confiscated in customs.

Did you make these yourself?

Well, what this is is a pillow speaker

and what you normally would do is put it in your pillow

and you learn German in your sleep.

-That's a good idea.

-I just wake up feeling super paranoid.

So, being somebody who likes to experiment and somebody who wants to

sing like a violin, that's what this instrument is,

let me get the rest of it, which is now an updated iPhone.

One second.

This was a long time ago, done with a cassette deck.

Now, of course, your whole life is in your iPhone.

Shall I show you how this works?

It's going to be really quiet, though, so we could do it downstairs.

-With the amplifier. Let's do that.

-OK. I'll follow you.

I played violin from five in our family orchestra.

A lot of these are designed so these harmonics, you know...

This is...

That's an A, and the computer hears an A

but when the violin plays an A...

It's got vibrato, and the computer's going,

what do you mean, A? A flat? B? What?

The software that I'm writing takes that into account,

that it's not an exact science.

Let's see. This needs to be a little bit louder than it is.

SHE IMITATES VIOLIN PLAYING

-As a vocalist, one of my goals is to sing like a violin.

-Why?

Because I find violins very feminine,

and I aspire to be very feminine.

I'm not particularly feminine, but I aspire to be,

and because they're closest to the female voice.

This capacity for voices and instruments

to sound like emotions is something the professor explores.

This unconsciously reacts to the music as if they were in the

presence of someone expressing emotions in the voice, like

joy or sadness, even when there is no voice, just instrumental music.

This is called contagion.

If there is a voice, the connection is quite obvious, perhaps.

MOURNFUL MUSIC PLAYS

If you have a tenor singing at the extremity of his range,

so he's really high, his voice is almost cracking,

then that's expressive of something normally very painful.

If people come to a funeral, quite often they want to sing,

and they take the breath in, but they just can't

because their voice is the place where their emotion is expressed.

If the grief is very deep, then there's a wordlessness about it,

and an inability to express what it is and how it feels,

so wordless music,

you know, a cry or a scream or a sob,

a groan, a lament...

Put into musical form,

that then enables you through that singer to have expressed

the extremity of your own emotion.

With Bjork's music, she's not scared to make an ugly sound,

a kind of scary sound, and she's not scared to whisper

to the point of the voice almost cracking.

She uses every part of the animal, in a sense.

One of the things I find very stressful about working with

operatic singers is all they want

is to make the most beautiful sound,

and they want to make it facing you and they want to make it downstage.

It's always a tug-of-war in music to express emotion in a new way,

not to lapse into the familiar, which can then become a cliche.

It's a particular danger in film music,

often written on demand to evoke emotion.

I like to experiment and try things, you know?

I think that's the only way to come up with something interesting.

You've got to take a chance.

Just absolutely no dialogue, no sound effects, nothing,

it's sonically completely empty.

It's a great challenge for the music because you're on your own.

I tried to create Liam Neeson's interior mood.

I found this odd and unique whiskey box in a store,

and that literally was my first inspiration.

It has a bit of a loneliness to it.

The longing quality, if you play the same thing on a different

instrument, it gives you a different feeling.

Matt wrote the music for Ridley Scott's recent epic prequel to Alien.

On Prometheus, I used common objects like my coffee maker.

What did you use the coffee maker for?

There's a very primal heartbeat in Prometheus.

HEARTBEAT

My coffee grinder is one of those beats within the pattern.

I tried to harmonise a lot of the flute parts.

We did it with blowing through the flute and singing at the same time.

Impressive.

Some of it was, it was definitely unpleasant, scary sounding,

but very unusual.

And I love that, because you can't tell

if it's a voice or a flute instrument or what it was.

When you write for film, you have a starting point for music,

which makes it sometimes easier than just to start with nothing.

You have a different kind of freedom when you write for the concert hall.

Today is the dress rehearsal for George Benjamin's new opera,

Written On Skin.

Quiet, please. Thank you.

I need quiet. Thank you.

It's the first time we've played it with the singers,

with all the theatre.

We have the world premiere in three days.

The opera deals with violence, adultery, suicide.

It's a dark subject, and it's a dark world,

but I hope we have managed to summon some beauty as well.

Something which is dark confronts some frightening

and troubling things, but the desire is there to complete,

and that completion, which may be releasing some emotion in us,

that can be a joyous thing as well.

When I'm composing,

if I can't find some form of emotion in what I'm writing,

then I can't write.

But I never decide the emotion beforehand

and then try to fill it with music.

I work on nuts and bolts and emotion grows out of that,

and usually surprises me.

What you're really saying is that easy emotional responses

are not necessarily what great music is trying to do?

In a very large amount of the music that I love,

the emotion is inside the notes and the relationship to each other.

It's not something imposed from the outside.

The emotion comes from within the music itself.

Music is very wide, you see.

Because it's so abstract, it can go almost anywhere.

It can go to any realm of human experience,

because it can then go to places you're not expecting it to.

Thank you. See you tomorrow. Thank you so much.

MUSIC: "Ninth Symphony" by Beethoven

Beethoven's Ninth begins with a mysterious open fifth.

A lot of pieces in recent times have grown from a single very plain

sound and gradually evolved,

just like a movie where you start at night time and you gradually

begin to see what the landscape is, and you begin to see things,

and the music evolves from darkness and silence into saying,

that's become very boring now,

so one needs to escape those cliches just in the way that classical

composers did in the past, they escaped the cliches of their days.

So the challenge is to come up with something fresh that grabs

the ear, and that's not necessarily easy.

# Call me irresponsible

# Call me unreliable. #

Of course, some people want music to be comfortable and familiar.

You can't beat the oldies but goodies.

I'm with Daniel Graham from Brand Audio.

They choose the tunes we hear

when we're waiting on the end of a phone and at the shopping mall.

-You call it captive music.

-Indeed.

We have a captive audience here, and obviously,

the music side is finding the right music for those people.

Sound generates emotions.

Emotions generate behaviour, and that's what we're looking to do.

To have the kind of behaviour that makes people go out and spend money.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Audio has that ability to reach you at a subconscious level,

where it creates a feeling or an emotion, but at the same time,

not distracting you from what you're here to do.

-Who are your most popular performers?

-Adele's very popular.

She's a very unique artist in the sense that she's able to

really transcend many, many generations of people,

and I think it's that balance of having a sort of contemporary edge

to what is a very sort of classical style.

Is there any room for classical music?

Classical music has got interesting properties within retail space.

Where it's been played on mainline train stations,

it actually deters and reduces crime by 30%.

-Is that right?

-Absolutely.

Certain stores, like fast food chains,

use classical music at the end of the evening because

it actually reduces crime and deters youths loitering within the mall.

It's very powerful.

Your average loutish youth don't want to sit

listening to classical music.

Some young people who do like classical music are rehearsing

Nico Muhly new piece, Gait.

Like George Benjamin, Nick Mooney is hugely admiring

of the 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen, whose work

Turangalila is being performed at the Proms in tandem with Gait.

The deal with this piece is I was terrified of writing something

that had to go with Turangalila, which is one of my favourite pieces

in the world, so I made a list of everything that piece does not do

and tried to do it all in this.

I was obsessed with these little repeating patterns that would line up in strange ways.

It's not that you haven't experienced the emotions,

it's that every emotion is the biggest deal ever,

every small little twinge of something turns into this sort

of ocean, which is how I always thought about the music of the 19th century.

I find myself very alienated from romantic music.

Like Tchaikovsky for me, I don't feel that.

I do not feel this passion, I do not feel this despair.

For me, music has been the most moving

when it's not clear what I'm meant to feel,

it'll just be a tiny little cadence and a tiny little turn of phrase,

and you think, I don't know what that was,

I don't know what I was meant to feel,

but I felt something really strongly.

Stravinsky said music doesn't express feelings,

but just expresses itself.

Oh, that's very interesting. Doesn't express feelings.

Well, I'm sure that I would in a way agree with that,

because what music does is to help you to find your own feelings.

Whether they are remembering something that was wonderful

or maybe sad, or whether you're simply in the moment.

I was taken very reluctantly to see this cartoon about classical music,

and from the first moment I was transfixed like I've never

been transfixed by anything else in my life.

I can still remember the works in Fantasia.

MUSIC: "Toccata And Fugue In D Minor" by Bach

The imagery mixed with this wonderful music, for a child,

at least this child, it struck an incredibly profound note,

and it changed my life.

Finally, we have episodic memory.

Here, emotions are aroused because the music evokes

a memory from a specific event of the past.

You may recall childhood memories.

Music memories from early adulthood have a special emotional

significance, perhaps because music has an important function

in regard to identity.

As a kid, I was very quiet, very shy,

I found it very difficult to speak to peers and people older than me,

but when it came to music, suddenly I was so loud and I just wanted to perform a song,

and there was something inside me that, when I had written something,

I just wanted to show it to somebody immediately, and it gave me a voice.

That's what I can see, when I've sat in on sessions, somebody had

a voice, and that's what I could really understand and connect with.

Music has got this wonderful ability to enliven.

Most of the people here have dementia.

A lot of the time, the people here would be

sitting in their comfy chair, just staring at the ground.

Music can bring joy. Everybody knows that.

And joy in this environment is something really worth working for.

We use music to reach into the person and bring out who they are.

And who they have been, and bring it into the now.

# Rum bum baa baa baa

# Baa baa bum ba ba ba. #

HE CONTINUES SINGING

Music brings energy into them,

because that's what music has inside of it.

# Singing ai ai ippy

# Ai ai ippy

# Ai ai ippy ippy ai. #

HE HUMS SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

# Somewhere over the rainbow... #

We learn to be human beings through music.

It's the first thing that we start using as language.

So it's one of the last things that goes.

Music is deep, deep, deep down inside.

SHE JOINS IN

Do you want to sit with me, Daphne?

There's a chair here.

# Nothing can harm you Nothing can harm my baby

# With your daddy and mamma

# Standing

# By. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

Summertime!