Are you a lyric person or a music person?

9:20Charlie Harding:Basically, you have this pattern happening in the brain. We don't know if it's music or lyrics, but if you find out if a person is a music person or a lyrics person, you can say, oh, they're listening to this song, they're focusing on the lyrics, So this pattern we're seeing in the brain, that's probably lyrics. If they're a music person, you can say, oh, they're listening to this song. They're processing music. They're focusing on music. This pattern that we see is probably music. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So in order to find out whether people are music people or lyrics people, she had to do a study, which is basically the study that you've been looking for, that I've been looking for for two years.

9:58Charlie Harding:She got over a thousand people. She gave them some prompts. and she asked them to rate them on a scale of one to seven. So one meaning I focus mostly on music. Seven, I'm focusing mostly on lyrics. And I thought maybe we could do a few together. You want to do a couple?

10:15Dominique Vuvan:Oh, yes.

10:15Charlie Harding:Okay, so here's one. After listening to a song, I often think about what the words meant.

10:21Dominique Vuvan:I feel like for most of my life, I've been a two. It's not like lyrics are there, but just registering.

10:27Charlie Harding:I'm probably a two as well. I have songs that I remember the lyrics, but it's like songs that I have to force myself to go back and learn the lyrics. Okay. And here's another prompt. I always listen to what is being said in the lyrics.

10:43Dominique Vuvan:Yeah, like, can you do a zero? I can give myself a 1.5.

10:47Charlie Harding:Okay, I give myself a one on that. When listening to music, I most often find myself drawn to the lyrics.

10:55Dominique Vuvan:I would say, once again, probably a two, because sometimes a perfect rhyming pair will happen. and it will really get me. That happens. But it's like, it's almost like it comes into vision momentarily and then fades away.

11:07Charlie Harding:And it also depends on the artist, right? Surely. I don't know, Stephen Merritt or Bob Dylan or like David Berman, like some of these great lyricists. Joni.

11:18Dominique Vuvan:Like anyone who's like more in the sort of folk tradition. Yeah, Joni Mitchell. Where it really is just sort of vocal and accompaniment. Yeah. Right? Then I'm going to be, that's what I got to pay attention to. Right, right. When you only got three chords and the truth, the three chords aren't as interesting as what's happening in the words.

11:32Charlie Harding:Okay, so I think my lyrical bane of my existence comes from another artist that I really, really love. One of my favorites, which is Bon Iver. And the way that he kind of just mumbles sounds and then converts them into words. And I think a lot of artists do that, but then they convert them into meaningful words. And Bon Iver doesn't really convert them into meaningful words. So I will do a dramatic reading for you. Okay. Only love is all maroon. Gluey feathers on a flume. Sky is womb and she's the moon. Sky is womb and she's the moon. Whoa.

12:19Dominique Vuvan:Yeah. That is deeper than I can understand.

12:24Charlie Harding:I love this song so much. But if I was a lyrics person, would I hate it? I don't know. All right. So in the end, after testing all these people, over a thousand people, Dominique found that a lot of them were more strongly lyrics. So closer to seven, a lot of them were more strongly music, closer to one. Some of them were right in the middle, around a four. But on the whole, there was sort of like a hump in the distribution. And that centered around five. So she found that most people are lyrics people. She said it's kind of like a Cosmo quiz, basically. Like how much of a X are you? But this is way more scientific.

13:00Charlie Harding:Like, they didn't just pick random prompts. They took a bunch of prompts. They saw what worked, what didn't, which ones measured everything they wanted to measure, which ones actually led to consistent answers and not kind of random answers all over the place. And those are the ones they chose to run by people. But that's just half the work. So here's how she described it.

13:21Dominique Vuvan:You want to make sure that someone who gets a 7 on the test, you know, if you give them a test on lyrics memory or something, they should do better than someone who scored a one.

13:31Charlie Harding:They still need to test their results to see if it actually is giving real answers, like if it has predictive value.

13:38Dominique Vuvan:Because otherwise you're measuring some thing that you made up and maybe it behaves well statistically, but it's not actually validly corresponding to the thing in the world, the construct that you're actually trying to measure.

13:49Charlie Harding:So they wanted to have them listen to music and see if they got lyrics. But they didn't want to use music that people were familiar with. So they went to the Australian pop charts, which apparently have like all the same genres we do. They got rock, rap, pop, country. Dominique told me that the Australian country songs, for some reason, are still about Texas. So do with that what you will.

14:19Charlie Harding:And she asked them questions basically like, who was the main character? Who was sitting in the car next to this person? And they did find that the people that scored higher on the lyrics scale were able to answer these questions better. So the way they answered those prompts did accurately represent how well they paid attention to lyrics and songs. It's real. It's real. Okay. So this whole idea of some people are more music people, some people are more lyrics people. That one researcher who said it didn't exist, who was trying to gaslight you? No, it's real. It's a real thing.

14:51Dominique Vuvan:I feel so validated. One thing that immediately occurs to me is like, we're both musicians. And I was wondering, like, does that have some inherent bias? Is there a musicianship bias?

15:01Charlie Harding:This is the question. This is exactly what I went into this thinking. I am a musician. I've trained on many instruments. I know music theory. That must explain why I pay more attention to music. And this is the thing that like blew me away. Dominique told me that musical training doesn't really impact your score.

15:20Dominique Vuvan:Interestingly, we found really, really little evidence that these things matter at all.

15:26Charlie Harding:So I was really, really surprised. Really? Music training didn't impact the score here?

15:32Dominique Vuvan:So there's small moments where it seemed to maybe matter, but there's no strong evidence that over our whole sample, you get these strong, lawful relationships between people's musical training and like their lyricsiness, which was really surprising to me.

15:48Charlie Harding:But Dominique says this actually kind of makes sense. We're just all exposed to so much music and sound all the time. Like even you and I, we're playing music a couple hours a day at like tops. I mean, I'm not practicing guitar that much anymore, but even people that play guitar for several hours a day, it can't compete with, you know, 15 hours a day that you're just like hearing ambient sound and pitches and birds and music and honks and all this stuff in the world.

16:17Dominique Vuvan:Right. Like musicality is fundamental to our human experience. Exactly. When we're talking, we are speaking with intonation. We're rising. We are falling. Yeah. We hear the timbre of our voice is identifying who we each are. All the various components of music. Rhythm. Yeah. I am speaking in time.

16:33Charlie Harding:Exactly. And pausing. And she also just looked at all kinds of things. She looked at age. She looked at gender and she just couldn't find an easy way to explain the difference. And in the end, I think we get to this point where it's just a big mystery, right? Like what makes someone a music or a lyrics person? At this point, we don't know. Team music. Also, also team music. But she has a lot of questions about all this. This is like the initial research that's showing that this is a real phenomenon. Yeah. Do you have questions about this? now that you know that this is a real thing and we also don't know what explains it.

17:12Dominique Vuvan:I do want to know whether or not it's trainable to move from a one to a seven. It's something that has been happening in my life. I've been writing a lot more songs. I profess about music and teach songwriting. And I'm required to listen at a level of granular detail to lyric in a way that I never had in my life before. And now lyrics are coming to me in this whole new way. It's so exciting because I feel like, oh my gosh, this whole new world of music is opening up to me. I wonder how other people could also move between these skills.

17:45Charlie Harding:That's actually one of her questions. Is it genetic? How much of it is nurture? How long does it take for you to get nurtured into this? How long does it take for you to become a one or a seven? So I want to just play you what you said there.

17:58Dominique Vuvan:And so I think a lot of the time when we think about these individual differences, we talk about them as though they're sort of like calcified forms where it's just like, this is who you are. Right. But that's not exactly how it works either, because we're continuing to develop through adulthood with all of the experiences and the training and the practice that we seek.

18:14Charlie Harding:And the reason this is important of like trying to tease out music and language is that there's really a lot of impacts here. I don't want to just say that scientific research only matters when there's like practical biomedical impacts, but there are practical biomedical impacts. And I will tell you all about them after a quick break.

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21:55All right, Charlie, I told you I was going to tell you all about the potential

22:07Charlie Harding:impacts of this research. So here's what Dominic said.

22:11Dominique Vuvan:We have a lot of interesting treatments for neurological and brain disorders, like for stroke, for example, there's this thing called melodic intonation therapy, which helps patients rebuild their language networks by attaching language to song, right? So you sort of sing sentences on your way to being able to recover your ability to say the sentences again.

22:35Charlie Harding:You know, there's stuff with music and speech for dementia patients, how music can kind of get through to dementia patients a little bit. there's research on education all kinds of things

22:47Dominique Vuvan:I mean music and memory is amazing I was visiting my wife's grandparents and her grandfather was in his 90s was singing songs to me that he had learned in fourth grade that were all these mnemonic devices to remember classical melodies and by putting words to the classical melody he was able to sing them back he's singing things that he learned in fourth grade

23:07Charlie Harding:I do this all the time I mean when I was in school and I had to memorize like the order of the books of the Bible or something. I actually put them into a rhythm.

23:15Dominique Vuvan:I mean, I was a drummer, but I put them into like a rhythm

23:18Charlie Harding:and I would just go through it in my head and I still remember it and it's gibberish, but the rhythm is still in my head and helps. Yeah. So at the end here, right, we've got basis for future research on what causes some people to be music or lyrics people. You know, we got to do more research, genetics, nurture, how long it takes, can you switch? We've got some interesting ways we could use this to actually help people dementia patients, stroke patients, just this kind of basic understanding of the thing that makes us us, which is music and language in a lot of ways. Where does it come from and how does it work?

23:51Charlie Harding:Great questions. But there is this question in here that I can't stop thinking about. If you hear a song, any kind of sound really, it can seem like we're all just listening to the same thing, right? If you hear a noise, you and I might assume we're hearing the same thing. But I've done a lot of reporting showing that our brain isn't just, you know, hearing a sound that exists out in the world. It's editing the sound. It's processing it in a unique way. And it's almost having a sort of performance in your brain. And what happens is that we end up processing sounds in actually pretty different ways.

24:31Dominique Vuvan:So this is the like, do you see the same color orange that I see?

24:35Charlie Harding:Or it's do you hear the same color orange I hear? uh right but i so basically this is what we're getting at when we talk about okay we're both listening to billy brag and wilco and we're kind of hearing different things whoa we're not just focusing on different parts we are hearing different things and here's what i mean i talked to the psychologist diana deutch a few years ago she does tons of great research on audio perception and she has this great example of how we hear things differently like the same things. We hear things differently. So this is an audio illusion she made that listeners might have heard on the show before.

25:09Charlie Harding:But this is called the tritone paradox. And I want to just play you this one. Okay. Did you hear that going up or down? Down. So you heard it going down? I hear that going up. You're wrong. So here's the first one. Yeah, down. Up. Down. Up. Down.

25:34Dominique Vuvan:No. I don't know. I thought we were the same. I thought you were my friends.

25:39Charlie Harding:So her idea is that different people, based on where they grow up and based on the sounds that they're exposed to, actually hear the same exact thing in different ways. So we just listened to the simplest thing, a tritone. And you heard it going down, and I heard it going up. You heard the next one going up. I heard it going down. Apparently, we are different. and that there's a whole bunch of other illusions that she uses to kind of illustrate that people can hear the same thing differently. I don't know. There's a certain level at which I'm a bit, I'm kind of in awe about that. I think that's so cool that we can all hear different things and come together.

26:13Charlie Harding:And then I'm also kind of sad. It's almost like we're all at a concert with our AirPods in, you know, and I'm trying to like weigh these things that, you know, we go to a concert and we perceive different things.

26:26Dominique Vuvan:I often go to concerts with my friend Harrison, who is the drummer in my band. We'll often be watching the same thing, and I will be drawn to the sound of the drums because he's standing next to me and I can see him noticing. And that's not an experience that I would be having if I were not standing next to Harrison at that concert. I would not be paying attention to the drums. But knowing that his experience and his perception of that is different has opened up a door and a world of perception to me that he didn't have before, which I think is really cool.

26:53Charlie Harding:She notices him noticing the drums. And that makes her more curious, right? Like that brings something out in her that wouldn't come out if she was just listening to music in the way that she's comfortable to listen to.

27:05Dominique Vuvan:Yeah, I mean, there is maybe like a potential cynical conclusion we could have come away with, which is like, we're all just having our own experience. We're alone together. But in fact, music is inherently social. Right. That they are having a special experience, that connection, knowing that, yeah, we are hearing different things, But when we get to share that thing that we both enjoy, it makes us very human.

27:25Charlie Harding:I mean, we're not ants, right? We're not the Borg, right? We have to have differences between us in order to have meaningful social interaction. If you were exactly the same as me, if we both heard that tritone going down, it would be really boring, right? But if we have differences in perception, if, you know, Nate's wife listens to the lyrics and Nate listens to the music, that gives them something to talk about. That's like a perceptual gap that actually allows them both to step in and kind of learn something about each other or learn something about the music or like Dominique says, perceive the music in a different way.

28:05Dominique Vuvan:I love this. It's beautiful. I mean, it really is about fundamentally being a person. And this happened to me very recently. I went to a concert with one of my good friends, Noland, who loves the artist Jason Isbell. Okay. And I kind of know his work, but I wasn't as familiar. And Jason often plays with a band. It's like really engaging. But this show was a small, intimate theater show, just Jason and his acoustic guitar, which is mesmerizing and beautiful. And so at the time, I was like, this song kind of reminds me of that other song. And next to me, Nolan is having a profound experience. There's like a rhyming pair will happen.

28:41Dominique Vuvan:He'll just go like, oh. I'm like, oh, I totally missed that one. I was totally zoned out paying attention to the guitar.

28:47Charlie Harding:And what did that do? Did you talk to Nolan about it? What did it feel like to go to a concert and just have an entirely different experience as someone?

28:58Dominique Vuvan:I feel like we don't actually have good social permission to talk about this music-lyric divide. I feel like you were helping us create that. But at the time, I didn't want to deflate his experience at all. So I think right after the show, I was like, that was really moving. And I was like, I remember talking about, I can see that it's really moving for you. I'm not as familiar with the music. What I meant to say was, I'm not as familiar with the words. I definitely came away being, it was not as impactful to me at all. And since then, I have revisited Jason Isbell's music, and it is, wow. Yeah.

29:36Dominique Vuvan:The song that stuck out to me was called Open and Close.

29:38Charlie Harding:Can we just play a clip for a second? The doorman's asleep. I don't think I'll wake him. He's always so sweet. He's here really late every night of the week.

29:53Dominique Vuvan:Letting the right people in. The real friend. This one stood out because it's about someone from Alabama, from the South. And he has made this record in New York City. And you can tell that this is kind of like the first time someone's been like, what is a doorman? Like, there's a whole social institution about doorman and how they provide services to the city. And he sees it as just, like, the nice person, like, letting in all the right friends. And you can really hear the sort of contrast between the— It's like a tension. Yeah, the tension between the sort of, like, organic rootsy quality of his music and the manufactured nature of city life.

30:34Charlie Harding:That's so pretty. And you probably wouldn't have thought about it this way if it hadn't been for the experience of going to that concert, sitting next to Nolan.

30:42Dominique Vuvan:It was all through the transference of his experience.

30:45Charlie Harding:Yeah, this is what I love about what Dominique was saying about going to that concert and seeing, you know, her friend, the drummer in her band, Harrison, just totally losing himself in the drums. And then Dominique is like, oh, there is this whole other world that I'm not paying attention to. Like, in this case, it's not music and lyrics, it's drums. But then it just makes you realize that, like, every single part of a sound, someone is hyper-focused on it, right? Like every little part of a sound has some story to tell without getting too cliche. I believe it. But this difference of music and lyrics and what we focus on, I feel like this is the tip of the iceberg.

31:20Charlie Harding:And the further down you go, you realize, okay, some people pay attention to drums. Some people pay attention to guitar. Some people pay attention to harmony. Some people pay attention to melody. Right. And then at like a really bass level at the bottom of the iceberg, like we can each hear the simplest interval, like a tritone. and we can hear totally different things. And you build up from there and you're like, oh, actually we have completely different takeaways from any song we hear.

31:46Dominique Vuvan:Even as a trained musician, I really have to work hard to try to hear everything at once. Yeah. Right? It's the equivalent of like walking into a restaurant and trying to hear every conversation. Yeah. We don't actually have the mental capacity to do that. And when music is happening, we can only tune our attention to so many things at any given time. I think that's also why I love to hear a song again and again and again. It's that every time I'm hearing it, I actually truly am paying attention to different things. I'm hearing it with new ears. Yeah.

32:17Charlie Harding:I think that feels like a good place to stop. Boom! Thank you for doing this. Wow. Thank you for the question, Charlie. Thank you for sending me down this two years long rabbit hole.

32:28Dominique Vuvan:I'd like to think that you were only doing this for two years. Yes.

32:31Charlie Harding:No, that's all I was doing. I mean, I keep calling in sick and they're like wondering where I am. And I'm just like, I'm talking to music researchers and no one's giving me the answer.

32:39Dominique Vuvan:I'm stunned. I really feel validated. But also, I feel like I fit more in the world now.

32:55Charlie Harding:This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Solitaroff. Our video editors are Shelby Smith and Alex Coles. Our animator is Kareem Correa. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Devon Howard and Joe Nebres. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from me. Meredith Hodden outruns the show. And Bird Pinkerton looked around and saw a large white chamber with black curtains. Her Beek Beeper was going nuts. She saw a group of birds standing in the center waiting to greet Flapton. This is Jeff Beek, he said. That's Jimmy Cage.

33:37Charlie Harding:and these are the Yardbirds.

33:45Charlie Harding:Special thanks to Dave Baker and thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you want to see the video version of this episode, you can find us on Netflix. And if you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at unexplainableatvox.com. Tell us what kind of mysteries you want us to look into on the video show. And if you want to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to vox.com slash members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we'll see you right back here next time.

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