Translator: Midori T
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven The human brain loves patterns. We love to find them
in the natural world around us; we love to make them, to create them,
to put them even under our feet. I'm lucky enough to work in sound - another art form and science
that is full of patterns - here at the Sydney
Conservatorium of Music, right next to Sydney harbour. It's a tough job,
but I get to do it and you can't. (Laughter) And of course, sound is full of patterns
from its very most basic essence, not just organised sound, music,
but something as simple as a sine wave. (Sine wave sound) So, the sine wave
is an interesting sound - it looks very beautiful,
it's a perfect parabola, it's a lovey pattern for our brains -
but it's not particularly interesting. A more interesting sound
might be a sampled flute. (Flute sound) Now, the flute sound looks a lot
more random and crazy, doesn't it? But if I freeze it, you can actually see
that it is a regular repeating pattern. It's very beautiful. The reason it's very beautiful is because there is a lot more
going on than just a single note. If I flip over to this spectrograph, you can actually see that big,
thick orange line in the middle. That's the fundamental pitch. If I said to you
to sing that note back to me - and you were a confident enough person
to sing it back to me and in tune - that's the note you would sing,
that big, thick line. But what about all of those
other little lines above? They are overtones.
They're sparkling away above that pitch. You can actually hear them,
but you're perceiving a single note. Now, you might be thinking,
'James, that's nonsense. I can only hear one note,
and you are referring to it as a note, so stop trying to persuade me.' I'm going to do
a reverse-engineering trick a friend of mine, Adam Maggs, taught me. I will go back to that sine wave - so I can generate that - and I'm going
to add a couple of pitches over. You will hear these as a chord. (Sine wave sound with overtones) But now if I play a melody, (Melody starts) you will hear a more flute-like sound. And it's a single tone, not a chord. (Melody ends) And so our brain loves patterns, and patterns in sound
are incredibly complex and sophisticated. Let me do it again if you like that. I don't know, I found this amazing
and, sort of, a little bit magical. So I will do it one more time. This time, I will add lots
of overtones over the top of that, which will give me
more of a string-like sound. So again, the original tone,
and I will add lots of overtones. You will hear a big chord. (Sine wave sound with overtones) (Melody starts) And now you hear that string-like timbre. (Melody ends) Now of course, humans have been aware that there is all of this amazing stuff
going on when we hear pitched sound, for thousand of years, ever since Pythagoras suggested
that the ratios in sound might actually unlock
the mathematical secrets of the universe. So, even if we just look
at the simplest ratio, if I take a single frequency
and I double it, I get the note an octave above. (Sine wave sound) And if I halve it,
I get the note an octave below. (Sine wave sound) And if we look at all of those
magical sparkling overtones in a beautiful sound
like the sound of a sampled flute, (Flute sound) all of those overtones that are
shimmering and giving us that timbre, they are at specific ratios: the octave,
the octave and a fifth, two octaves, two octaves and a major third. It's all going on there. Now, knowing this, today, we can actually play with this
as a compositional device. So what I can do is, if I take something like my violin tone -
that I made before that stringy tone - and I drop it down a couple
of octaves - I will do that. (Sine wave sound dropping) So it's like a nice bassy sound, now. And if I filter out those higher overtones
and bring them back in, I can play that like an expression. (Pulsing sine wave sound) (Rhythm starts) (Sine wave sound and rhythm end) And of course, that is some
of the science of dubstep. Now, I want to suggest to you that music itself is extremely important, not just because an individual sound
is so incredibly interesting, but because in a piece of music,
where we organise lots of sounds together, we are actually thinking
completely abstractly. Unlike other arts, we can't see things, there aren't concrete things
for us to hold onto, it's sound passing through time. So if we're going to find X, then what we need to do
is learn to think abstractly. If we're going to literally
think outside the box, we need to be able to do things like connect ideas that came before
to ideas that come afterwards, to take individual sounds
and put them together. And I honestly do believe
that music is a truly magical thing. So I decided to try
and prove this in my TED Talk by doing something a little bit risky:
some audience participation. It's a TED first, and I decided that you would be the first ever
TED audience to compose a piece of music - naturally it's going to be
dubstep, given my title - and - 'oh no', said some -
and not only that, but I would set myself
a compositional challenge to make that as difficult
for you as possible, and then I'm going
to premiere it on stage, and I'm giving myself
about 4 minutes to do this, so I got to move fairly quickly. I'm just going to switch the monitor
over to my laptop over here, and I have got a computer programme set up to record the music that you
all are going to help me design, and I have created this little slide. Normally, if any of you
have learned a musical instrument, you will know that you've got to do these
really wonderful things called scales and learned exciting things
called key signatures. Normally, when we write a piece of music, we pick a scale or a mode,
and we pick a key signature. So I'm going to break that
to make it as hard for you as possible. I have decided that we'll use
all twelve chromatic notes of the octave - just in case you're wondering
what that sounds like. (Playing twelve notes) Okay? So that's your musical material. (Laughter) But of course,
I'm actually making a point. My point is going to be, by composing
with all that music material, that our brains are going
to find patterns in it, and they will be able
to abstract that out, and you will be able
to create a piece of music. So I better pick some people.
Where are Neil's friends? Weren't they in the front row? No, no one is admitting
to be Neil's friend, oh yeah? Okay, can I have a couple of numbers? (Audience) Two. Two and - sorry? (Audience) Five. Two and five, brilliant.
Okay, so two and five. Is anyone else in the front row
who wants to shout out a number? (Audience) Seven. Thank you very much. That was
a very confident seven, wasn't it? Alright, so two, five, and seven. (Playing) It's nice, it's sort of suspended.
Alright, so I'm going to play those notes. (Playing) Fantastic. Alright, so I have got my first chord.
We will come back to that later. Alright, second chord. Shall we see whether the top balcony
can yell some numbers down? (Audience) Ten. Twelve. Ten, twelve. And? (Audience shout numbers) I heard six first, sorry. Okay, ten, twelve -
somebody did shout eleven, and that would have been
really, really nasty, wouldn't it? (Laughter) That would have been like:
(Playing) (Laughter) Alright, so twelve, ten ... and six, wasn't it? Yeah. (Playing) Ooh. That's sort of diminished
and Wagnerian, well done ... (Laughter) top aisle. Right, we'll see how that one fits, later. Okay, middle. (Audience) Nine! One! (Laughter) Okay. I love that you knew
I was coming. That's brilliant. Nine. Okay, I got nine and one and ... ? (Audience shout numbers) Nine, one, and definitely
two people shouted three from two different parts of the balcony,
like they'd practiced that. Nine, one, and three. Okay, so - (Playing) Ooh, that's really horrible as well. (Laughter) Well done. It's like, 'Hang on, this guy's come
all the way from Australia. Let's prove him wrong!' (Laughter) (Playing) Brilliant. Okay, I know there is a load of you
planning on shouting out again now, but look, I can just look
at the three left, so four - Yes, thanks! (Laughter) (Playing) So helpful! In case
my eyes weren't working. Oh, look at that! There is a major
chord left. That's really funny. (Laughter) (Playing) In all my test runs, that never happened. Okay, well done, TEDxOxford! That's fantastic composing of four chords. (Applause) So, now let's have a listen. Now, remember I gave you
impossible musical material, so it's going to sound
weird and odd and wrong, but as you listen to each repetition,
your brain is going to go, 'Ha! There's a pattern' -
because it's repeating. (Laughter) And you're going to like
it more, I promise you. (Repeating chords) Yeah? Not bad. Now, what I'm going to do is just going to do a little bit
production work on that. I'm not going to change
your pitches, I promise. And my producer's fee
won't take much off your royalty. (Laughter) So I'm just going to go
and make a bass line because, you know, you can't make
dubstep without a bass line. So what I'm doing here is
I have made a copy of your chords, and I'm deleting off some of the upper
notes just to leave the lower notes, and I'm going to drop those down
a couple of octaves. So that sounds like this.
It's still your material. (Music starts) (Music ends) (Laughter) Happy with that? Okay, good. (Applause) (Laughter) Clapping yourselves, it's your work. (Laughter) I have just moved your chords
into a more synthy sound because I want to make it
a little bit more Rock 'n' Roll, and I'm going to add a few drums - it's like a cooking show moment -
that I prepared earlier. Okay, this is the premiere of your work. (Music starts) (Music ends) Well done, you! (Cheers) (Applause) It's your song. I mean, royalty per track divided
by 1,800 people less my producer's fee; you're not going to get rich but ... (Laughter) created a whole hall
of composers, which is great. I'm just going to back to my slide show. So, all of that
from a sine wave, there it is. It's quite hard to bring it back
to a serious point now, isn't it? (Laughter) So why is this important? Why did I decide
to come and talk about this? Well, fireworks go off in our mind
when we listen to music, when we interact with music,
when we compose, when we improvise, when we perform. We know, absolutely,
the research has been in for decades, that's incredibly good
for our imaginations, for the growth of our brains, and also for children
to develop their own cultural identities. So as you can imagine,
music is absolutely front and centre in all worldwide modern
education curriculums. Absolutely front
and centre - no, it isn't. (Laughter) In fact, increasingly,
music and the arts are marginalised, and they are marginalised
because governments, who direct curriculums despite the fact that they're not experts
in teaching and learning, increasingly pushes towards
doing well in standardised testing, first on local levels with individual state by state
or country by country standardised testing and then international
levels such as PISA. This is considered very important. And of course, the things that those tests
check for are important. Employers tell us, when we do
the research, that yes, they want people who can read and write
and present themselves and do grammar, and there's even a little bit of science
in those tests nowadays. Apparently, that might be
good for the future. Of course, it is. It's ridiculous. But they also want people
who can think creatively; they want people who can show initiative;
they want resourcefulness. And we know, from the research
I just mentioned, that that comes
from arts driven education, and music is the art that can provide
a real key to abstract thought. Now, teachers, of course,
do get some teacher training. But increasingly, in government-run
schools in lots of countries - I'm not just talking about the UK,
and I'm not just talking about Australia - there are fewer and fewer
specialist music teachers. In my country, in government schools, sometimes as low as 20%, in some states,
actually have a specialist music teacher. And the hours that we spend teaching
classroom teachers for primary school are going down and down,
averaging on 10 to 20 hours out of a whole degree
of classroom primary education. So it's becoming a smaller and smaller
part of that preparation to be teachers, and, of course, it follows
these national government trends. There are a few countries
that are exceptions to this; for instance, Finland, they had to give
over 100 hours of training to their primary teachers, in music,
before they go and become teachers, and in South Korea, it's over 200. Funnily enough, those are two countries that actually do quite well
in the PISA rankings without actually just having
to teach drilling and skilling. So there is some evidence out there that that governments are busy
shooting themselves in the feet. In high school education - again,
I'm talking broadly over the whole world - we have a different kind of problem,
we have created a cycle. I have wonderful amazing students, two of my recent graduates
are here today as Andy mentioned, and - one of them is on the screen there - and - I think about 5 to 7%
of our high school kids, despite the fact that a 100%
of them say they love music, only about 5 to 7% get through
to the end of high school. So what we end up with at the end of that
is a particular kind of success rate. And that success rate is based
on Western art music, and it's based
on learning theoretical music in the way that you would get
if you taught at a music conservatorium, as I do. And that's fantastic.
It's really brilliant. But what it means is that when a smaller
percentage of them become music teachers, they're going to probably teach
in their own kind of traditions, their own model for success
in music education. So we create a cycle of always training
kids towards Western art music. And of course, that's a problem
because it's suggesting that new musical genres, such as dubstep,
which you're now all experts in, are not really legitimate
representations of musical culture, and we're actually devaluing
our children's musical cultures. So I've just spent nine months
filming a free online course, which I'm going to launch any day now, which looks at all these issues
more broadly, not just in music education, but in arts education
and 21st-century education, more broadly. And the thing that came out - I went into schools; I went
into universities; I looked at research; I met people who are actually
electronic music producers themselves; I went to studios - and what came out, of course,
is all the obvious stuff that lots of people have been
harping on for 100 years, so I'm still not quite sure
why no one listens. Education really must not be this treadmill towards
high-stakes standardised testing. And people love learning
experientially hands-on. The constructivist music movement
has been around for over 100 years. But what we did see
in all of these schools where music and the arts
were central to the curriculum and the research that we saw was that kids have got fantastic
skills of self-expression, and they really could do
amazing things - amazing things. Because they could think abstractly,
they had found X. So, my 18 minutes is nearly up. I have, hopefully, created
a whole room of Beethovens. I have, hopefully, enlightened you
a little bit on the science of dubstep. But more importantly,
my closing message is that for people like me in education,
like you, maybe, around education or just generally around learning
communities like schools and colleges, that we really focus on the idea that we must not apologetically advocate
for the arts in education. I think the arts, and music especially, can lead all education
into the 21st century. (Applause)
One minute in: “The sine wave is a perfect parabola.” As an engineer: I’m sorry, I can’t take this guy seriously.
lol that song was terrible
[deleted]
The science, Imo, is really in the modular gear and software programming for instruments. Other than that dubstep isn't much scientifically different than other music
Thought that was fascinating, thanks for posting.
You know someone is out of touch when anything bass related is "dubstep"
Trying to be a "cool teacher".
James Humberstone's bio, courtesy of the TEDxOxford website:
MRW