Dangerous Beeps: An Interview With Michael Schutz - Part 1

“Ultimately the sound is almost irrelevant to the musical experience, with the important caveat that what matters about the sound is the psychological process it triggers in the mind of the listener. So it obviously plays an important role there, but what really matters is how it's being perceived and how it's being heard. So if there's something like a gesture that can change the perception, then you have changed the music, because music is something that really exists only in the mind of the listener.” --  Dr. Michael Schutz   This episode's guest is the Associate Professor of Music Cognition/Percussion at McMaster University.  Drawing on his interdisciplinary training in music, psychology, and computer science, he directs the MAPLE Lab, which researches Music, Acoustics, Perception, and Learning, while also conducting the McMaster Percussion Ensemble and serving on faculty at the Honors Music Institute in Pennsylvania.  Designated a "University Scholar" in recognition of his innovative merging of music performance and perception, he's received the Ontario Early Researcher Award and the 2019 Alumni Award from the Penn State School of Music, as well as numerous grants to support his research. Before McMaster, he spent five years as Director of Percussion Studies at Longwood University, taught percussion at Virginia Commonwealth University, and performed frequently with symphonies. His TEDx Talk “Death by Beep” is now available on the TED website and the below YouTube link. His name is Dr. Michael Schutz and you'll want to hear his suggestions about how to fix a very real problem that’s happening right now in hospitals all over the world. As always, if you have any questions for my guest, you’re welcome to reach out through the links in the show notes.  If you have questions for me, just visit www.audiobrandingpodcast.com where you’ll find all sorts of ways to get in touch. Plus, subscribing to the newsletter (on the www.audiobrandingpodcast.com webpage) will let you know when the new podcasts are available.   Listening to the Echoes The show starts with Dr. Schutz recounting a memorable early experience with sound, how he first discovered the mystery of echoes as a child by dropping his lunchbox and listening to the sound bounce off a neighbor’s house, and then the day that he received his first drumset, a Rototom that sparked his passion for music. “I just remember,” he recalls, “at the moment thinking that there’s something really fascinating about these percussive musical sounds.”   Questions of Psychology We continue with his introduction to psychology, and how his early skepticism about the importance of body language while playing the marimba gave way to the understanding that music and psychology have a lot in common, and that in some ways music stands at the forefront of psychology. “I realized,” he tells us, “that a lot of the things that we spend a lot of time exploring as musicians are, essentially, you can think about them as questions of psychology.”   Magic Between the Ears Dr. Schutz goes on to talk about the McGurk Effect, a dramatic example of how what we're seeing can quite literally change the way we perceive sound, and the surprisingly complex and active role that the listener plays in a musical performance. "Music is something that really exists only inside the mind of the listener," he explains. "Outside our minds, it's a bunch of sound waves, a bunch of air molecules bumping together. The magic happens between the ears."   A...