Kurt Ellenberger on Music, Math, Evolution & Why Our Brains Crave Patterns

[00:00:00] Today's episode takes us into a space where music meets something much bigger—math, evolution, and the way we understand the world itself. I'm joined by a composer, author, and former pianist whose work spans everything from jazz theory to deeply thought-provoking essays on music, culture, and human nature. His writing has appeared in the Huffington Post's Arts section, and today he serves as a contributing writer and editor for All About Jazz,

[00:00:27] as well as managing editor for the Journal of Applied Jazz Research. He's been described as a pianist who blends the lyricism of Bill Evans with the energy of Keith Jarrett, and the same balance of emotion and intellect carries into his work exploring the connections between music, math, and evolution. This is one of those conversations that doesn't just stay in music, it expands into how we think, create, and even exist. This is a Plot Twist you don't want to miss. Thanks, welcome to the show.

[00:00:57] Well, thanks for having me. It's great to have you. Before we get going, can you introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, sure. My name is Kurt Ellenberger, and I'm a recently retired professor of music at Grand Valley State University, where I taught for 27 years, most of that in the Honors College. I'm also a pianist, composer, and an author, and I've been recently doing podcasts, so kind of fun. You're like the jack of all trades. I love it.

[00:01:25] So you've had, like you said, a diverse career, pianist, composer, writer. What originally pulled you into music in the first place? I just kind of got hooked on it when I was a kid. I was kind of forced to take music lessons as a child. I started when I was about six, and I didn't like it because all of my other friends were playing outside, and I had to sit there and practice for 45 minutes every day at 4 o'clock. But by the time I got to be 12 or 13, I just kind of got hooked on it.

[00:01:53] I saw a couple of different broadcasts. One was, they were both on PBS in Detroit, and one was Duke Ellington. So they had the Duke Ellington Orchestra on, and I was just transfixed. And then a couple of weeks later, they played Gustav Holst's The Planets, and it was the same thing. I was just glued to the screen. It's like, wow, what kind of music is this? Like, why does it sound like it does? And from then on, I was just kind of hooked.

[00:02:20] I started practicing two or three, sometimes four hours a day, much to the chagrin of my family, and just knew that that was going to be my career. Very cool. And you are very good at it. You've been compared to artists like Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. How do you feel about that comparison, and where do you think your own voice sits in with that spectrum? Oh, gosh. You know, I always get kind of just nervous hearing those kind of comparisons, because those people are my heroes, and I don't think I even approach what they did.

[00:02:49] But I certainly love what they did, and I drew from it. And I think from that came kind of my own sound, which has elements of their work in it and others, of course, but also just reflects my background as someone who is really into classical music, really into jazz, and kind of living in the porous kind of netherworld between those two, I think, is what I would say. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

[00:03:17] So for people who aren't musicians, how would you explain the relationship between music and math? Because I find this very fascinating and something I don't quite understand. Math is not my strong suit anyway, and I love music, but I'm not good at it. Well, sure. This is kind of a really interesting topic that every class that I taught, I would start with this little demonstration of how our brains perceive music.

[00:03:43] And at the end of it, students are always just absolutely dumbfounded by it. So what's happening there is your brain is actually doing a mathematical calculation based on the relationships between the waveforms that I played. So what your brain likes to hear is very simple patterns, simple symmetry, simple relationships between the waveforms.

[00:04:06] So if I play a C, then I play another C, your brain says, oh, that's like the same note, only higher. But in reality, they're completely different pitches. So the relationship between those two is a, is that the string length needed to play the lower C is exactly twice the string length of the higher C. And if you go up, the next one is a quarter of that. And the next one is an eighth and a sixteenth and 32.

[00:04:36] So people my age recognize that, that, that number system. So one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64. Cause that's what we used to be able to buy computer memory with in the, you know, in the early two thousands, right? You, you could buy something with, oh, this one has 512 megabytes of memory or a thousand and 24, because that series is called the binary series. It's multiples of two, right?

[00:05:04] So two times two is four times two is eight times two is 16 times, and so on. That's the, that's the numerical system at the heart of our computers. It's freaky, but it's also at the heart of what makes music work. Because if we didn't, if our ear didn't hear the symmetry between the two and the four and the eight, it, then we would not recognize those notes as being consonant and it wouldn't feel good. So what your brain is doing when it's hearing complex string relationships is that it's,

[00:05:33] it's hearing like a 13 against a seven or a three against a 10. And that, that's not symmetrical. What it supplies is the nearest, a factor of two solution to the complex waveform. So when it hears a seven, so one against the seven, what it will supply is the eight above it, because now you're in the binary series. So your ear says, we don't like that. That seven is kind of, that's dissonant.

[00:06:03] Uh, it, which means that it's not symmetrical. And the ear says the place that it would get symmetrical, the closest, easiest place to go is to go to eight. And now you're, now you have one to eight, which is now part of the binary series. And it's symmetrical and your brain is happy. Wow. Just kind of freaky, right? Yeah. So consider this, it's at the heart of the computer system that we're using to communicate right now. The binary series is the foundation of that.

[00:06:31] It's also, as we saw in that demonstration, it's also at the heart of what makes music work. It's what gives music its plot, right? Because if, if you have the complex, uh, waveforms and you aren't expecting something to happen, then music can't have a plot, right? If you're not expecting X, Y, or Z, then, then why would you listen to the next note? So let me, let me give a demo of that. I'll play the same little cadence. So I'm going to play the note.

[00:06:58] So I, I gave you what you expected, but I changed something around it and thereby gave it a different narrative. So you felt like, Oh, where did we go? We're, we're, we're, where I expected. And so in a sense, that's how music gets its plot. And what I just did was a plot twist, right? So that works at every level. So one more example that I think is really fascinating. Another place the binary series is at play is in conception. So when a sperm meets an egg, it's one unit.

[00:07:28] Then what happens? It divides into two, two cells. And then those two cells divide into four, those four into eight, those eight into 16. So here we have three things at the foundation of life, at the foundation of computers and the, the kind of engine that makes music work are all the same number system. That is so, that is so fascinating. I, I, I can tell you're a professor. Okay. Yeah.

[00:07:57] I, I'm also a professor, but not this kind of stuff. I, this would, I wish I was this smart, but I love this. How did you first get into this? Well, I was always curious why music made me feel the way it did. I mean, it was, I had such a, and I still do have such an emotional response to it and that it just grabs me to the point where there are certain music I can't listen to very often because it's just so gut wrenching. Like for example, Gustav Mahler, the classical composer.

[00:08:26] I have to just kind of be prepared for the emotional experience of listening to Mahler. It's not something I can put on in the background. And I, as a teenager, I started wondering, what is this? Why, why am I reacting this way? And why do other people react this way to music as well? So I thought, well, maybe physics has the answer. So I did, I didn't quite do a full minor in acoustics in my undergrad degree, but I did most of the courses.

[00:08:50] And there I started to see these mathematical relationships that others of course had written about it. You know, it's centuries past people notice this stuff, but that gave me the answer. It said, here's why you're doing that because your brain is calculating complexity and it wants simplicity. It doesn't like the complexity. It wants to return to, to something that's simple, just like a novel does, right?

[00:09:15] Usually start with something easy, then it gets more complex and there's, there's chaos, there's dissonance, there's confrontation. And then that comes to a head. And then you come back and hopefully in the most, most cases, a novel or movie ends in things being peaceful, unless there's a sequel coming. So, so we just have that as part of our psychological makeup. And in music, it has to do with the mathematics.

[00:09:41] Your brain is automatically calculating the relationship between these different sound waves. And when they're complex, when they're odd numbers, when they're asymmetrical, your brain senses that as being, ugh, stop that. You're, you're annoying me. When it's simple, your brain says, oh yeah, I get that. I like, I like that. I don't like, like that. That's horror movie stuff, right? Now that, that is very intriguing.

[00:10:06] And you, you make a great point that a lot of us don't even really think about is, you know, we relate to music. We really do. And it's on an unconscious level. I know when I'm writing my books, I have a different sound for whatever kind of scene I'm trying to write. You know, if I'm trying to go into like an emotional one, you know, I have very, you know, sad songs or, you know, if I'm doing like a happy thing, it's a more upbeat thing. So that, that's very intriguing to me. Yeah.

[00:10:33] It's, and that's really what the best music does, especially film music, right? It's, it's painting in the mathematical realm using sound, what the emotions are on the screen. And when those things come together, then you have this explosion of impact that you couldn't have one without the other. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about your writing because you incorporate writing and music together. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah.

[00:11:03] So I, I started writing a lot. I was doing kind of research stuff as a professor, but I started writing for kind of a general audience, probably about 15, 16 years ago. I was in a, well, I was, I have a medical condition with my hands and I had to stop playing. So I thought, what am I going to do? So I started, I started a blog and I didn't even know what a blog was. So I wrote this article about jazz and jazz culture.

[00:11:32] And within a month it was being cited in, I think it was the Minneapolis post or journal, whatever that newspaper is, and a couple others. And I thought, wow, maybe I'm onto something here. So I kept writing. I entered the Carnegie, Carnegie Hall arts blogger contest and made it pretty much all the way to near the top on that one. And then Huffington Post contacted me and said, we'd like to publish all your blogs. And so that just kind of took off.

[00:11:57] And I started writing these music related articles, but that were for a general audience. So kind of like what we're talking about today, I'm hopefully presenting, you know, a pretty deep disciplinary topic, but making it accessible to someone who's not a professional musician. And that's kind of what I've done. So for example, I have an article about why Christmas music, so much of it is so jazzy because students asked me about that. Like, why is Christmas music so jazzy?

[00:12:26] So I would give them an explanation. And then I, over the years, I thought I should write an article about this because it's kind of interesting, the connection there. So I have articles like that. I have, I've done a few interviews and things like that, but I, I've, I've done quite a bit in acoustics, sort of explaining, like we talked about today, why, why we have that expectation in music.

[00:12:46] And, you know, similar articles like that, that, that are relying on deep disciplinary content, but that I'm trying to present in a way that makes sense to just a general, general audience, but someone who's interested enough to kind of go, you know, take the walk with me. So has writing changed the way you understand music or just kind of polished it a bit more and show, you know, exemplified your love for it?

[00:13:11] Well, as a, as a teacher, you know, the, the writing thing is sort of getting my thoughts on a topic in their most condensed and clear form. So that, I'm sure you have the same experience when you're writing that I think when you're writing and you're doing it at your very best, you're learning about what you think and you're learning about the topic at the same time.

[00:13:33] So often when I'm, when I'm writing, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm putting down what I'm thinking, but then I come across other evidence and I have to incorporate that in. And I realize my writing is actually a part of my learning process as well, which I find really a lot of fun, even though it's frustrating as hell sometimes because you're stuck on a sentence and you know what it is you're trying to convey.

[00:13:56] And you write something down and it doesn't convey it. Then you scratch it and they do it again. You do it again. Then you get to the next sentence and you're at the same issue. And then it's five o'clock and you know, my wife's calling me for dinner. So, you know, it's, it's a, it's a really cool process because I think you learn about yourself, but you learn about the topic at the same time. So yes, the writing has definitely changed the way I look at music and understand music because I've learned more about it while delving into those questions.

[00:14:26] And I'd have to say, you know, my students have been a big part of that because they ask questions that as professional musicians, we just don't even consider sometimes. So you get someone who's outside of it looking in on what you're presenting to them and they say, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense to me. And then you, then I go back and say, you know what? They're right. I've just accepted a narrative from the discipline that is convenient, but perhaps not as evidence-based and as truthful as it should be.

[00:14:55] So if someone listens to this episode and walks away with just one new way of thinking about music, what do you hope it is? Well, I, I would like to, I would like to, uh, I'd like listeners to go away thinking, wow, there's a, there's a mechanism inside of us that is linked to this numerical series, which is just based on the power of two.

[00:15:17] But it's not only in our computers, it's also at the basis of why we have music because without, without that predictive quality that I demonstrated, music could not exist. I don't think. So my, my question, my challenge was to, to evolutionary theory. Why do we have this? And I couldn't find an answer. So to me, I guess I would, I would hope listeners would go away with kind of a mystery about it.

[00:15:44] If they take music for granted, you know, you, you pop on, you know, Spotify or whatever in the car, you put the headphones on when you walk out of a building and you're listening to music.

[00:15:53] Like, okay, that's cool. But realize how miraculous it is that we have this, this auditory system that not only can hear things so carefully, but is also doing this deep level mathematical computation that makes the very idea of music possible in the first place.

[00:16:14] So mystery wonder, I guess is what I'd like people to go, to go away with knowing that when they're listening to music, this is the engine that powers it and you're doing it automatically. It's built into the, into the software that, that we, that we carry in between our ears. Wow. This is, this has to be one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had. I really, I'm not kidding. This is very interesting to me. Where can the audience find more from you about this and your work, your broader work?

[00:16:44] Sure. I have a website where you can find most of my music is there. A lot of my scores are there. CDs are there, but also all of my articles are there as well. So I write for, I'm a contributing editor for all about jazz where I have 30 or 40 articles up there if people are interested, but all of the links are at my website, which is my name.com. So Kurt Ellenberger, all ease.com. Perfect. And I'll make sure all the links are in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:17:14] This is really, really fascinating. Thanks so much for having me. It's been fun. Thank you.