Transcriber: Linndy V
Reviewer: Kelwalin Dhanasarnsombut By all accounts, I was a very weird kid. (Laughter) I was painfully shy,
and if anyone talked to me, I would just stare at my shoes,
which I got to know pretty well. (Laughter) I was also daydreaming all the time, and being accused
of being in my own world. At my first year in school,
I was flagged for "special attention," after an exercise
where we had a list of words, and we had to organize them
into two categories; "people" and "food," Seems pretty simple, but I was kept back because
I put the word "sandwich" into "people." "Sandwich" to me, was a magical woman
who lived on the beach. Sand-witch, I mean... (Laughter) It was fairly obvious, I thought. (Laughter) I also had an unsual childhood. You see, my dad was a nuclear physicist. He spent a lot of time
examining subatomic particles. And these are the building blocks
of everything, the very fabric of the universe. And it was challenging
trying to communicate this to my 8-year-old friends at the time. Because of his research,
I traveled the world a lot, and I kept moving school and country which made me disconnected from people. As hard as I tried, I just
couldn't understand why it was important what a local sports team did with a ball. (Laughter) But where I did feel connected
is when we lived in Geneva. My dad worked at CERN. That was a wonderful childhood
formative experience for me. When I visited him at work, I got to play with these
amazing things called "computers." Me and computers, we knew each other. But what was the most inspiring thing
was witnessing these teams of scientists discover subatomic particles. They would get protons and neutrons, accelerate them, in an underground accelerator
at almost the speed of light, smash them together, and they would explode
into the new hitherto unseen particles. And this was so wonderful. I was struck not only
by the intelligence of these scientists working together, collaborating
to further the limit of human knowledge, but actually this aesthetic beauty
of those images like the one you see now. It was as if the they were creating
science and art at the same time. And another way that I felt connected
with others was through music. My dad played us everything
from Bartók to the Muppets, but when my uncle gave me
a cassette tape, which I don't know if you know,
it's a kind of retro MP3. (Laughter) It was the Beatles,
and on one side it had "Sgt. Pepper's,", and the other side,
it had "Magical Mystery Tour." And when I heard it, my tiny brain
exploded, like a million particles. There was a particular song,
"Blue Jay Way," which, not only the lyrics,
but the melody and the harmony, seemed to exactly reflect my feeling
of disconnection with people. And I couldn't understand how
these musicians knew how to organize sound so that I felt this way. Now to me, as a naive boy, science and music
were actually the same thing. They were both about wonder
took extraordinary skills and dedication. And they were both about discovery,
about the universe, and about ourselves, our inner worlds. However, the educational system
of the time told me, in no uncertain terms,
that they were, in fact, separate. They were taught at different times,
different parts of the school. And one was serious, and one was play. It didn't make any sense to me,
and ultimately, I had to choose. And I chose the sciences.
I went and got a degree in Economics. But by the end of my third year, my dad lost a short and brutal battle
to cancer, aged 51. And I realized life was short,
so I switched, and I turned to my passion of music, and went to study
at Berkley College of Music where I endeavored to understand
the mechanics of music. And I learned that in fact,
these two worlds were more connected than people were saying. When we talk about scales and chords
and intervals and the cycle of fifths, what we were doing is making
geometric shapes, mathematical models out of that music. Which felt extraordinarily correct. This, for example, is my analysis
of a John Coltrane solo. Each of these bubbles are a phrase
that he played, that he improvised, and they've been placed
in a three-dimensional space, of all the possible choices
he could have made. And this is the improvisation he took. What I like about about this
is it reminds me of the bubbles chamber images
I saw all those years before. So, we can reveal patterns from music,
but I was fascinated to discover that we can actually
place patterns within it. The composer Bach was fortunate enough
to have a last name which spells out a four-note melody
in the German notation system: "B-A-C-H." He used it most famously
in "The Art of Fugue," which turned out to be his last piece. This piece is dictated from his deathbed,
in his blindness to his son, and you can see how it is incomplete
as the melodies trickle away. One of the last melodies he wrote
within that is his own name, "B-A-C-H," esentially signing off. So, we can put names into music.
So, how about other things? And in fact, this is an ancient idea. Pythagoras talked about
the music of the spheres, a harmony created by the planets' orbits. And in the early 17th century,
Kepler even suggested scales for these, based on the eccentricity of these orbits. There is a poet-philosopher called Rilke
from the early 20th century, who wrote an essay in which he observed that the human skull had this seam that keeps the parts together,
called the coronal suture. And he noted that it had
some similarities to a sound wave, or what he said,
"the groove of a phonograph." And he posed a hypothetical question: What would happen if we tricked
a needle into playing that pattern? What sounds would come out,
and what feelings would be evoked? Now in 1919, this was a purely
hypothetical question. But in 2004, using my old friend
the computer, that's exactly what I did. (Music) What you're hearing are sounds
converted from a Victorian woman's skull, who would have lived
at the same time as Rillke. What I love about this is that never
in a million years, would I have composed this with a stack of blank paper
and a lot of coffee. It's as if it was music
that was in the universe that I could pluck Very shortly after I finished this piece,
a tiny event would happen to me that would have a huge impact on my life. In the DNA of one of my white blood cells, two parts of chromosome, nine and 22, happened to break off
and do a little dancing, switch places. And that created a new gene,
which had one instruction: replicate. And what that meant for me is I acquired a rare, very fast-growing,
and very dangerous form of leukemia. On Friday, I was teaching
at the Royal Academy of Music, on Monday, I was in an ambulance,
being rushed to hospital where I would live for several months, receiving a strict regime
of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. I was put in isolation
because my immunity was shot. So my poor wife, family, and friends could only visit me
wearing gowns and masks. So, stuck in that isolation ward, alone,
first of all, I invented a memory system, so I learned all the reigns
of the British monarchy. And then I did a hundred artists. But then I noticed that everyday,
I was given my blood cell results as my disease progressed, and I started noticing
ins each of the population of blood cells, some really interesting,
actually musical patterns. So what I decided to do
is just do what I did before. I let the blood cells compose a piece
which I called "Bloodlines." So each day, I wrote
a second of this music . One second at a time,
just to pass the time. I say I wrote it, but actually,
my blood cells wrote it. I just received the royalties
on their behalf. (Laughter) So I'm going to play you
a little portion of it now. (Music) Today, and another day. That "Whoosh" at the beginning
was my leukemia crisis, and now it's descending because
of the chemotherapy I've been receiving. Now thanks to the frontier
of medical knowledge, and thanks to a bone marrow transplant from my sister, which turned my blood type
from O+ to O-, from male to female, and incidentally makes me
resistant to malaria, (Laughter) which is quite nice,
it has its benefits, I recovered. And also, some fast-thinking doctor, on the day I was diagnosed, required me to produce a sample in case I survived,
a sample of a personal nature. This was kept on ice for eight years. And now my wife and I have
a beautiful three-year-old daughter, called Chloe, which is a Greek word
for "little shoot of life". When I look at her, I realize that her existence is even more
improbable than mine. I went on to do a PhD in composition,
and connected with people because I collaborated
with space scientists, getting the harmony
of distant planets, distant galaxies. I've worked with sleep scientists,
turning sleep patterns into music, mine are particularly funky
with a three-year-old in the house, I can tell you. (Laughter) I've worked with mathematicians,
I've worked with climate scientists. The melody goes up, by the way,
in case you're wondering. (Laughter) I've even worked with sociologists
and psychologists, because, in fact, there is a pattern
to even human behavior, even when we're acting intuitively,
we have our ways, we have our patterns. I'm trying to think of an example. Like when you guys walked in today,
you had to pick your seat, and that was based on various things:
whether you have a good view, you didn't want to be too far away
from someone you knew to be rude, or too close to a stranger to be weird. (Laughter) You might have shifted your position
because you might have redecided, and we could even write a piece
just of you guys coming in, and the music of your independent
thoughts, your own worlds. I say, "Could have,"
but that's what we did. (Laughter) When you walked in,
we, from the top, filmed you coming in. And then I went to a little room
and worked quite hard. I told you I was weird. So, if you imagine this
as a strings on a harp, from low to high, from left to right. So as each person sits down,
or shifts in their seat, you'll hear a bell-like tone. The height, by the way, is the volume. There's another element
which is as you're seated, you'll produce a string sound,
a nice, warm string sound, and it gets warmer. Seems appropriate. And one more thing, mobile phones,
anyone browsing on a mobile phones producing a light,
adds this extra resonance. (Laughter) So, let's have a listen. He's the first guy. (Music) Top right, he keeps moving,
he keeps playing different notes. (Laughter) Feel the warmth?
Feel the warmth of your seats. That's high siren,
that's the mobile phones. Shifts ahead a little bit
as it's filled up. Look at all those phones,
you naughty people. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm not sure why you're clapping me,
it was your piece. (Laughter) I just transcribed. So through this musical approach, I've rediscovered something
that I instinctively knew as a nine-year-old
gazing into bubble chambers, and listening to The Beatles. Music is more profound than love songs
and mere entertainment. And there is music
in everything around us. Everything we do is music, from the galaxies,
down to subatomic particles, and somewhere in the middle,
our little lives, loves, and pains. These are not disconnected,
but interwoven melodies in an infinite and beautiful
cosmic symphony. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much.
Thank you.
