FOUR TYPES OF PEOPLE WHO ALREADY KNEW WHAT U OF T RESEARCHERS ARE JUST DISCOVERING
“When you walk through the halls of this university, you can literally hear the buzz of innovation,” proclaimed Denise Donlon, the evening’s MC, to a capacity crowd at MacMillan Theatre. The event, billed as Sounds Of Science, was a showcase of recent interdisciplinary research between the faculties of music and medicine at the University of Toronto. The sprawling science fair and mainstage showcase was tasked with yoking together a dizzying array of academic work related to the intersection of music and science.
While some of the projects seemed to only tenuously address music (the role that our hearing plays in stopping us from falling down) or science (a modded version of Street Fighter for SNES that played music with the player’s input), it is unquestionable that U of T is producing valuable research about sound and the brain, especially with regard to neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Like most forms of scholarship, however, progress is slow and incremental, and there’s pressure on researchers to present their work as visionary and groundbreaking to a popular audience. It’s a tricky balance to strike, and Sounds Of Science was weighed down by breadth and constrained by lack of depth, leaning a little too heavily on “wow factor” visualizations that inadvertently distracted from the significance of the research.
In a series of brief presentations, ironically marred by projector problems that made most of the PowerPoint slides illegible, researchers attempted to demonstrate the significance of their work in plain terms. The results felt mixed. Despite the inherent value of the work being carried out, attendees were likely to feel only modest levels of shock and awe if they happened to be any of the following:
PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO DANCE
Professor Lee Bartel talked about using low frequencies produced by subwoofers to treat various disorders, citing case studies of fibromyalgia and Alzheimer’s where patients have reported feeling better after subjecting themselves to regular “doses” of a 40hz tone.
Additionally, Drs. David Alter and Jeff Wolpert presented a study that showed patients’ exercise habits improved when they worked out to a playlist that had been augmented with an unchanging, insistent rhythm underneath.
Taken together, the results seem to point toward a conclusion, although perhaps it’s too early to tell: it turns out that a driving, steady beat and booming bass might make you feel good!
PEOPLE WHO USED TO WATCH THE OPERATION SHOW ON TLC
Professors Aaron Low and Darryl Edwards are working together to map and assess the vocal cords of opera singers. To illustrate the subject matter more clearly, Dr. Edwards put an endoscopic camera into a singer’s throat and had her run through some brief exercises. If you can remember when The Learning Channel used to show films of surgical procedures back in the 90s, you are no doubt familiar with the view from an endoscopic camera. The insides of our bodies look weird as hell, and our vocal cords are no exception.
The demonstration’s brief length didn’t allow the professors to talk much about how their work will be used toward training, conditioning and treatment of future opera singers, but the infrastructure for such programs is, of course, still a few generations away. For now, however, we know for sure that vocal cords look very, very strange.
PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN SPORTS
“We’re now where sports medicine was at 20 years ago,” Dr. John Chong told the audience, as the screen displayed the musculoskeletal structure of a violinist playing in real-time. The comment was meant to convey the rapid advance in studying the anatomy of elite performance musicians, but it felt backhanded in its acknowledgement of a massive gap between the two fields.
Chong’s interest in providing performance musicians with the same level of treatment as their athletic counterparts dovetails with Professor Michael Thaut’s, whose work on synchronizing motor control and amplified sound was used by the German rowing team to win a gold medal at the London Summer Olympics.
While both professors presented work that has an obvious practical application, it was uncomfortable to acknowledge the writing on the wall: the value we place on music in our culture, when set next to sports and commerce, feels indelibly low. When Win Butler quits music in favour of pro basketball, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
PEOPLE WHO USE THE iTUNES VISUALIZER
As a denouement, the event showcased a bass and trumpet duet that displayed a visualization of the trumpet’s sonority on the projection screen as the attendees dutifully filed out of the auditorium. It wasn’t a demonstration of research or an output of meaningful data. It looked pretty neat, though!
The interdisciplinary research being carried out by U of T’s faculties of music and science is formidable and should not be taken lightly, which is what made Sounds Of Science seem like a bit of mixed bag. The over-reliance on visualized data, and its apparent ability to impress the layperson, seemed to undercut the significance of the scholarly work, such as Professor Thaut’s life-long work of successfully treating neurological disorders with musical strategies.
As an academic presentation, Sound Of Science gets a solid C grade, but with our acknowledgement that this scholarship is far more substantial than the constraints of the forum allowed for. We’re still a way off from being able to train musicians like they’re Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, and we still don’t know what happens to our brains when we listen to Bach’s Toccata And Fugue In D Minor. But we can very likely say with almost certainty that music is maybe probably definitely good for you. Good news, right?
music@nowtoronto.com | @streetsbag
