Music & Peacebuilding

Sound Connects Us: Belonging, Synchrony, Language, and Noise

• Nina Kraus • Season 4 • Episode 4

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Part two of the conversation with Dr. Nina Kraus examines how we find our sense of belonging within our sonic worlds. Speaking of how sound connects us, we enter dialogues about modulations of harmony, synchrony, the power of singing, and how musical training may make us more emotionally sensitive to harmonic cues within human voice. Turning to bilingualism, we examine gains of bilingual abilities, including the grouping of auditory objects, attention, and inhibitory control. The podcast concludes with an examination of the violence of noise, wartime sound and trauma, and the cumulative health effects upon communities.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

Nina Kraus:

Sound connects us. Sound connects us really better than anything I can think of. It is a way of feeling that you belong you belong to a group that might be singing your songs or speaking your language. We live in a world now where there is a lot of isolation and loneliness, and depression. And I think that a lot of that comes from a lack of connection.

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

You are listening to season four of the music and peacebuilding podcast, a podcast season focused on multifaceted textures of belonging. Our podcast explores intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. You are listening to part two of a two part series on the sound mind how our brain constructs a meaningful Sonic World. Nina Kraus is a scientist, inventor and amateur musician who studies the biology of auditory learning. Kraus places a premium on communicating the scientific rationale for activities that strengthen the hearing brain and our Sonic World. The cornerstone of her research is the ambition to improve social communication. Her book, of sound mind how our brain constructs a meaningful Sonic World communicates these principles in an accessible narrative. Of sound mind is Kraus' love letter to sound, how sound connects us, its biological impact on making us, us, and how it affects the world we live in. In this episode, we explore the role of sound in connecting us through belonging, synchrony, affect and language. We close with an examination of the violence of noise, and what we might do to enter states of wholeness. So this season, I'm focusing on belonging, and I was captivated by this one quote, I'm going to read back to you where you write, the sound of speech and music has privileged access to the brain's reward, or emotional network, speech and music might not have evolved, if not for the deep emotional feelings of connection with other humans that arise during these communal activities. Indeed, sound contributes to our sense of belonging to the world, to our own personal sense of home." That was the quote when I knew that I wanted to interview you. And as I move through your book, the themes that I think I heard that relate to belonging, and I'd love to talk about maybe each one of these a little bit, I hear themes of belonging in the synchrony of Sonic experiences. I hear themes of belonging in the emotional sensitivities. I hear themes of belonging in the sounds of place, I think you open up that a lot with songbirds in particular. And I hear language as a form of belonging. Would you like to open up one of those, maybe we can start with synchrony and talk about like how you have noticed sound being a driver within this concept of belonging?

Nina Kraus:

Yes, so much. So I think if we had three words, to put these ideas all together, it is that sound connects us. Sound connects us really better than anything I can think of. I mean, just think of you and me right now. You know, first of all, we're everyday improvisers. And so, you know, it's just, it's this back and forth. That happens in a way through sound. That just doesn't happen in other ways. And it really does sound really does connect us. You know, it is it is a way of feeling that you belong, you belong to a group that might be singing your songs or speaking your language. If you start to get a hearing loss, you might become paranoid because you feel like people are talking behind your back and you're not hearing them. But if you can hear them that you, you know, suddenly feel connected. We live in a world now where there's a lot of isolation and loneliness, and depression. And I think that a lot of that comes from a lack of connection. And we are living I think, increasingly in a disconnected world. And sound has the ability to bring us together. And you mentioned synchrony, so we can measure neurons firing together. So the idea of rhythms as you've read in the rhythms chapter, you know, there are rhythms outside the head. So the rhythms you might think of in language and music, and then there are brain rhythms, and you get these rhythms by neurons firing in synchrony. And when you and I are engaged in making music together, our brain rhythms actually synchronize. So you know, we are literally biologically in sync. And as we go back and forth and talk with each other, we synchronize our biological rhythms. So this has deep biological roots. And again, music has a way of connecting us.

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

Sound connects us. Our auditory processing strengths or weaknesses may grow belonging, or isolation. Studying preterm infants, Arnon and colleagues compare the impact of live recorded and no music therapy. Those preterm infants receiving live music therapy, lowered their heart rates and entered restful sleep states after musical interactions. I wonder if these live musical interactions were relational betweenness offering rich responsiveness that attached comfort to early relationships. With musicians Kraus notes that the musical ability to harmonize may be a skill that asks us to modulate and vibrate with each other in relationship. In harmony, quote, you simultaneously hear yourself and what your partner is singing, and use this feedback to adjust your own movements accordingly. This interaction is about modulating the space between voices, a marriage, a sensitivity to the other person and to the space between them. Singing harmony is emblematic of sounds power to connect us sound is alive, created and experienced, in the lived world.

Nina Kraus:

We all like to sing songs. We all like to sing together. And I think so here I'm really talking to the music teachers. Because I think that especially conservatory trained musicians, you know, you're taught to aspire to perfection. And so much of First of all, making music is being musical. And we are all musical. You don't have to be a professional music, you know, I have a one year old grandson and I can take his little feet. And I can sing a little song and tap his little feet together. And anybody can do that. But it's kind of remarkable how, you know, I mean, just little things in my own life. So I'm fortunately I'm married to a musician. And one of the things he started doing is at the place he teaches is on Sundays at three, we have kind of a Hootenanny and you know, people who we know kind of come together and bring their instruments and maybe somebody has a song and we just sing and play our instruments. It feels great. You know, we've been going to retirement homes, and, you know, groups of us and just sort of singing songs. And you know, people who you kind of look out at a group of people who, before you started singing, and making music, we're kind of looking down and we're not especially engaged and then you start singing, you know, a song they know and they're singing along and it feels good. Just so you know, we all would love to sing

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

fascinated by Kraus' writings about synchrony and the hearing brain. I looked up a 2020 study by Hou and colleagues on inter-brain coherence between an audience and violinist. Audience members watched recordings of 12 pieces, while wearing headgear to record cortex activity. Researchers found that the performer and audience members synchronize their brain activity as a piece progressed. And in particular, the synchrony of the left brain auditory center was significantly correlated with the degree to which audience members enjoyed a performance. The left brain auditory center may use memory to generate, quote, expectations of how the next sound will unfold. Researchers also found synchronization in the right inferior frontal and post central cortices. These regions assist in recognizing temporal patterns, and are important hubs of the mirror neuron system. As a peacebuilder, and music educator, I see synchrony as the possibility of entering the betweenness of restorative community. Musical synchrony and shared affect are building blocks of belonging. Let's talk about bilingualism because I'm fascinated by bilingualism and that there's also some crossovers to music that we can get to here in a second. So there's something magical that happens with bilingualism and there are some of what we might consider some losses in the bilingual brain. But yet, you're arguing that there are some gains that far outweigh the losses as a person develops a bilingual sense. So can you talk about bilingualism a little bit?

Nina Kraus:

Yeah, and I can tie it back easily to belonging. I think I tell the story of Trevor Noah, who he wrote a book called Born a Crime. And so he was born in South Africa and was born in a culture where he learned a number of different languages from English and Afrikaans and Zulu. And, and he reads his audio book, which is really great. But but he talks about how when he was, you know, in school, it was just a school kid. And, you know, kids are so partisan in terms of their little groups and cliques. And, and he, you know, found himself with one group of people and they kind of looked at him and wondering, you know, why are you with us because like, the the color of your skin might make us think that you belong with that other group. And then he just started speaking, whatever language they were speaking, and suddenly you belong. And I also say in the book, that if I could have a superpower, it would be to be able to speak every every language I wanted to speak. Because that would enable me to belong in a very special way. To anybody who I wanted to have a connection with, belong, belonging with your language.

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

Kraus writes, quote, speaking more than one language influences how sound makes us feel, think and move. While a bilingual brain may slow down processing due to a diverse palette of linguistic possibilities, that diversity may also quote, provide richer ground for thinking, conjuring memories and other associations. Bilingualism also strengthens response to the fundamental frequency of pitch, a critical skill in grouping auditory objects. And as examined in a study by Carlson and Meltzoff. bilingual children experience gains in attention and inhibitory control that seemed to transcend challenges of poverty. The shared cultural stories of our worldviews are encoded in the vocabulary, grammar, and usage of language. When we hold a diversity of linguistic stories on our tongue, and in our ears, we enter possibilities of different ways of being and comprehending.

Nina Kraus:

For example, if there are two people talking in a crowded place, one of the cues that we use is pitch because I say, oh, that's Kevin's voice. Oh, I know, I know that. That's the voice of this little kid that's talking over there, pitch helps us group what we might call auditory objects. Right? And identify Oh, that's the that's the sound of my coach. And so, if you are bilingual, or trilingual, or however many languages you have, you need to be. All these languages are, they are alive in your brain at the same moment, even though you're only speaking one language you have them all. And you have also become especially good, and we can see this in the biological response in the bilingual, the strength of processing of the fundamental frequency is really strong. which I would argue really helps people make sense of complex soundscapes as does, you know, the musician's brain also helps you make sense of complex soundscapes because you can pick out the tuba. But you're doing it in a different way. The brain is using different resources in its vast and intricate and beautiful sound mind. To, to make sense of sound,

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

I think there was there was one study that you pointed to about a musician, being more sensitive to the emotion of a baby's cry, than the non musician and I would also that, that probably also maps to the complexity of a sound, right?

Nina Kraus:

The harmonics? Yeah. Whether your baby means it when he's crying in the night, and you know, your judgement of okay, I need to get up and be with my baby because he really needs me. Or, you know what, we'll both be way better off if he just cries for a while and we'll go back to sleep and be happier in the morning. But you're making this judgment on the emotion of his call, his crying based on the harmonics, and if you make music, you are you know, we just know that the musician brain automatically is better at processing the nuances of the timbre of the baby's cry.

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

Encoded and frequency harmonics, rhythm and amplitude. Our voices contain subtle cues of our affect, and emotions. These subtle cues help us hear the emotional texts beyond our words. How do we become responsive to the sound and meanings beyond words, if musical training develops sonic sensitivity, could enhance our perception of emotional meaning? Using the rich and complex auditory stimulus of a baby's cry, Strait, Skoe, Kraus and Ashley, explored how musical training might impact responsiveness to sound affect. When compared with non musicians, adults who started musical training prior to age seven, had improved stimulus representations of pitch and timbre. Adults with 10 or more years of musical experience had an enhanced synchronous response with a stimulus. In reviewing literature, authors reflected, quote, our results thus provide initial biological evidence for enhanced perception of emotion in musicians, indicating involvement of subcortical mechanisms in the auditory processing of communicated states of emotion. Rather than being hardwired, responses to the emotional content of vocal sounds is quote, malleable with extensive auditory training. If we are to develop our capacities of empathy and care, investments in developing our heightened senses to frequency, harmonics, and amplitude, might unlock doors to emotional understandings and responsive belonging. And bilingualism and musicianship, if I'm right, have an impact on the ability to hear sound in noise.

Nina Kraus:

Yeah, so with with the bilingual bilinguals new because if you think that a bilingual has all of these capabilities for languages in their brain, and but but they need to kind of inhibit the language, they're not speaking to be speaking, the language that they're currently speaking. And so it turns out that bilinguals are especially good at what is called in the business inhibitory control. Actually drummers are really good at this too. It just kind of inhibiting the sounds that or events that are not relevant, you know, just kind of being able to better pay attention to what is important and better inhibit what is not important. So bilinguals are especially good at doing those things. And it has just been repeatedly shown in a number of different ways and we can show this biologically and also very clearly link people's abilities in attention and inhibitory control with sound and the strength of their fundamental frequency.

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

My last question, because this is a peacebuilding podcast, we often talk about our theory of violence or violence. And, and I would say that if I was to speak to violence, and here we can talk about noise and the noisy world that we live in, let me go back to my question here. So if we don't, we don't even just have to talk about the noise of war, we can talk about just the noise of our daily lives. And and there was one part in your book where... fascinated me in which there was a study that compared a classroom that was near train tracks and a classroom was away from train tracks and the direct impact it had upon learning. So could you open up for us that even some of what we think of as benign noises, have an incredible effect on our being in the world.

Nina Kraus:

And our thinking? The brain is vast, and it consists of what we know, our cognition. So everybody knows that loud sounds, super loud sounds can damage your hearing, your ear. But hardly anybody knows that moderate level sounds can really disrupt our brain. So you know, we've all had the experience of, you know, the air conditioner will cycle off, or there's a truck outside, and then suddenly, he turns off his ignition. And you hadn't even noticed you hadn't been paying attention to those things. But when the sound turned off, we take a deep breath, and we relax. You don't realize that sound is our alarm sense. So people tell me, Oh, I'm so anxious. Oh, I'm stressed.. Well, if there is meaningless sound that is going on all around you, or you know you are, and another thing that people complain about, is not being able to focus. Well, sound is your alarm sense. If you are distracted every time your neighbor locks or unlocks his car door. That's biologically programmed. And we don't realize how damaging that is to our ability to learn, as they've demonstrated in this classroom. The ability to learn the ability to think the ability to have psychological, peace and quiet and not to feel. Its as though, we're in a in a constant low level of alarm. Because evolutionarily, we've had to learn to pay attention to that sound, that sound is what's going to alert us to.. is this a sound I need to get away from? is this a sound associated with mating? Is this the sound, is this food that I'm going to get? We're programed, to, to pay attention to sound, sound is our alarm sense. So I think that we can all... you know step one is being aware that this is a problem. I mean, even something like a hairdryer. You know, if people, if people were aware of the deleterious effect of this noise on our lives, and on jarring up our brain, you can create a hairdryer that doesn't make a lot of noise. You know, there are things that we can do. So first of all, you need to be aware of what it is and then secondly, make the best choices. I mean, you can't change the whole noisy world, but you can change the the environment you live in to some extent.

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

Chronic noise exposure, like near an airport, quote, can lead to an overall decrease in perceived quality of life. increased stress levels, along with an increase in the stress hormone cortisol, problems with memory and learning, difficulty performing challenging tasks, and even stiffening of blood vessels and other cardiovascular diseases. Early studies by Bronzaft and McCarthy looked at the impact of an elevated train that ran next to an inner city school. In this study, trains passed by this school every four minutes and 89 decibels between At 9am and 3pm. Comparing a classroom next to the train tracks, with one away from the tracks. Researchers found that students on the noisy side lagged behind peers by three to 11 months and reading when noise abatement measures reduced trains by six to eight decibels, quote, the reading level difference vanished. Kraus points out that even the most seemingly benign noises may have an accumulative effect on the neural static we carry within our bodies. I layer hear a profound text by Daughtry because of its relevance for peacebuilders on traumas of sound and noise, Daughtry's book, listening to war, sound music, trauma and survival in wartime Iraq, examines the violence and meaning of sound in wartime contexts. In layers of sonic zones organized by proximity Daughtry documents the increasing oppressiveness of wartime sound from electrical generators to roadside bombs. War may be an accumulation of hyper arousal. As humans vigilantly gather information and judge the importance of sounds of bullets, bombs, loudspeakers and increasingly disturbing silence. As warriors return to peacetime environs, the damage of wartime arousal has the greatest post dramatic effect within the medium of sound. A returning soldier named to Baker reflects that when he hears triggering sounds and peacetime soundscapes quote, you figure out what it is real quick, but you get the tingling, my heart starts racing fast. It might just be for three seconds, but it feels like 10 minutes, it can take you away, and you're not there anymore. The stories of post traumatic stress, quote, all point the capacity of Bellephonic sound to live on as a ghostly resonance, haunting those who have been exposed to the toxic nexus of sound and violence. How do the imprints of noise and sound live on in our health and wellness? And that it's one more factor I think, as in a recent New York Times article that is linked to a social determinant of health, you know, different populations have different exposures to, to sound depending on where you're living? Absolutely, yeah.

Nina Kraus:

Yeah, and in fact, some of the research that we've done on on children living in poverty is that we, you know, we know that even although there is sound, and excessive levels of noise in these low income areas, because they're next to the airports and there's a lot of environmental sound. Also, within our brain, we have what we can think of as you know our neurons are always on. And if the neural responses are not synchronous, they create kind of a static, and we have found that just internally, kids living in poverty, part of the signal the neural signature of poverty, is, is excessive neural noise. So you know, think about being between radio stations, on your your tuner. And so that gets in the way of learning. And another group of people who we have seen to have exceedingly quiet brains are athletes. So, you know, we're doing this work with our elite athletes at Northwestern University. And these Division One athletes have the quietest brains that you can imagine. And you know, they are really primed then, and in a really good biological condition to make sense of the sounds and of any information that is happening around them. Yeah.

Kevin Shorner-Johnson:

I leave you with the final paragraph of Nina Kraus' this book. What I have shared with you in this book, are my scientific gut feelings based on years of thinking about the biology of hearing. Science cannot furnish every answer, but we have abundant evidence to trust that sound is a force shaping our minds. We can give voice to the power of sound by considering initiatives for making music, foreign language learning, and athletics, sounds has a place in medicine for people and coral reefs, we can work to honor silence, the sounds of home the soft sounds we love, and avoid excessive noise and the places we spend our time. We can consider sound in the creation of new spaces. We can try to make music with our families and friends. We can appreciate the beauty of sound with awe. may we embrace the vibrational between this of our Sonic lives listening to respond to unlock to belong to conjoin the marrow of our being in vibration. and may we quiet our noise finding betweenness in our languages our listening our quiet steps home. Dr. Nina Kraus' his book The sound mind is published by MIT Press. Her research lab named brainvolts can be found at brainvolts.northwestern.edu Dr. Kraus invites you to consider donating to the work of her lab at brainvolts. She notes how much work her lab has yet to do, and the desire to advance this important work. My deepest gratitude to Dr. Kraus for her ongoing research work in support of the depths of our sound lives. Special thanks to Pixabay and Sandra Lehman for the use of free sound effects in this podcast. This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson. At Elizabethtown college we host a master of music education with an emphasis in peacebuilding. thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care. Join us at music peacebuilding.com