Many orchestras are led by medics
Maths, music and patterns
'I couldn't believe humans could make anything that beautiful’
While most of my interviewees grew up with classical music around them, Edgar Choueiri, professor of applied physics and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and did not hear his first classical concert until he was 11 years old. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he recalls. ‘They played Telemann, then Bach. My jaw dropped. I was seduced by the quality of the sound of the violins and couldn’t believe humans could make anything that beautiful.’
Julian Close, formerly an applied physicist (transducers and sensors) at the National Physical Laboratory but now an international opera bass, also experiences a visceral reaction: ‘It gives a thrilling sensation as you listen. It can make your hair stand on end, the sheer drama of it.’ And Deborah Prentice, professor of social psychology and vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, finds music equally and instinctively immersive: ‘Playing the piano is completely absorbing. I am in the moment. Music is in time. It is right now. That is incredibly compelling.’
'Music is like going through the wardrobe into Narbia'
But more than providing a creative outlet for scientists occupied with rational thought, music is actually complementary to scientific work, suggests Tom Heightman, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and chief R&D officer of Adrestia Therapeutics. ‘There is something spiritual and emotional about music that can’t be captured in words,’ he says.
‘It is a wonderful counterbalance on a personal level.’ Dr Martin Landray, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, feels similarly: ‘Growing up, I always felt like a scientist (disciplined, methodical, deterministic), and music gave me a way of bringing out emotions and feeling the joy of rhythm and dance. I prefer Romantic music; clever, mathematical music doesn’t give me what I need from music.’ Heightman likens entering the ‘amazing and fascinating’ world of music with going ‘through the wardrobe’, just as the children do when they discover the land of Narnia in CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
Structure and relaxation... music as the DNA double helix
Thorne points out the subtle connections and parallels between the scientific and musical worlds that entice him specifically as a scientist. ‘I find that music takes me into a completely new world,’ he says. ‘It gives me relaxation and delight in a different part of my intellect. There are structural messages that you have to hunt for in music, as in science, and that appeals to me.’
‘Some music is very structured,’ agrees Heightman. ‘When I think of the ascending motifs in Bach’s First Cello Suite, it is reminiscent of the very ordered atomic structure of the double helix of DNA and the sequence of bases that tell the story of our genetics. There’s a direct parallel there. It’s like a benevolent cycle of inspiration between the two. Both hold a mysterious allure of exploration, of experimentation and continuous learning. There are always new discoveries to make and build into the way we think.’
How music can boost problem solving skills
Music’s special ability to balance and complement scientific thought can also boost scientists’ thinking and problem-solving skills. ‘This is very much the case,’ says Heightman. ‘Very often on a project, we spend days with our heads in books or poring over data on the screen but we won’t achieve the necessary insight.
'It’s when we step away and allow the sub-conscious mind to wander that the connections get made – in an unstructured way. Then the “eureka” moment suddenly pops out. I think that is the most profound impact that recreational music has on my work. Having the recreational counterbalance allows the freedom of thought.’
Prentice agrees. ‘I’m a social psychologist, so I’m interested in human and group behaviour. Music for me can be like an experimental model. Producing music involves behaviour, so it is a model of how mind, body and action fit together. And then it is also a model of groups and how they function.
'I’ll very often think, “What am I trying to create with this group? Is this group like a symphony orchestra, where they are going to get together and produce a collective sound? Or is it more like a string quartet where they are going to play at the same time but you will hear each individual voice?”’
What scientists can learn from musicians
Landray, who leads large-scale clinical trials to find new medical treatments, finds analogies to his experiments in the workings of an orchestra: ‘It is the conductor’s job to pull the very best from each individual and/or their sections to create the overall performance.’
‘Drug discovery requires teams of scientists with a wide range of different expertise,’ adds Heightman. ‘Creatvity is most powerful at interfaces, when we make the boundaries between disciplines fluid – just like musicians playing different instruments challenge each other to push their boundaries of tone and expression.’
‘Scientists can learn from the way musicians practise too,’ suggests Landray. ‘Practice demands a level of discipline and can be lonely, hard work. Tricky bars need to be worked at over and over. The same is true for science. You sometimes come across a little nugget of the project that is hard. You think there is a way through it, but have to be able to solve it before you can expand out to the whole picture.’
How music can change lives
Quantifying whether music can make a real impact on scientific research is difficult. But detecting whether music can alter the course of a scientist’s working life is much more tangible. ‘My love of music changed my scientific career,’ shares Choueiri. ‘I was trained as a plasma physicist and my funded work was in this area. I now work on plasma propulsion for spacecraft for half my time, partly funded by NASA. The other half is spent researching spatial audio, driven by my love of music!
‘It all started because I asked myself why it was that when I played back my recordings at home it didn’t sound like a real orchestra. Of course, I wasn’t the first person to worry about this. After banging my head against the three most promising exploratory techniques in use at that time I chose to focus on one of them.
'It had a fundamental flaw that altered the tonal colour of the music – what we call “tonal distortion”. As an engineer and a scientist, I started to look into it and as a lover of music my dream was to perfect it so that I could reproduce the piece that started me on my quest: Bach’s Mass in B minor.’
That quest, explains Choueiri, was a hugely successful one: ‘Eventually I had a mathematical breakthrough. That has taken my scientific work in a completely different direction. The university decided to patent my invention: Bacch 3D Sound, in honour of JS Bach – also an acronym (Band Assemble Crosstalk Cancellation Hierarchy). It has been a great commercial success and is used in high-end stereo systems.’
The perils of overthinking
Julian Close’s life also took a dramatic turn through music. After singing as an amateur five evenings a week while still working at the National Physical Laboratory, he decided to leave and enrol instead at music college. He is now an international opera singer, appearing frequently at the New York Met.
‘One summer, as an amateur, I sang a small role in La traviata and after it I felt bereft,’ he recalls. ‘I had been a level-headed scientist where everything is very conformed and regimented but now some emotions were unleashed.
'It is well documented that certain pitches literally resonate with the heart, body and mind and to generate them oneself is quite incredible. “Primal” is the word. At music college, physics was a bit of an impediment to my music making. I’d be focusing on the science of it all and drifted into micromanaging.’
The perils of overthinking resonate with Prentice’s experience of learning the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata too. ‘My teacher said, “Don’t force your hands together; just play, then fix it if it is off. There are things in life that you try to programme to be right and there are the things that you let go.
'That’s hugely important to me in my role at Cambridge. You can’t make Cambridge do anything. It’s already behaving. It is in action. It is doing. That idea of synchronising behaviour is something that I have thought about and used many times. Music is a set of ideas, concepts and activities – it is so many things; it’s my vocabulary.'
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