from the previous. leo cocky learn from fahey. each new generation has these new musicians to slow down and learn a note by note. on the technical side, when you write, maybe do not want to give away your secrets, but are you writing in real time, at that tempo, or do you write slowly and learn to play faster? >> i used to do everything intuitively, did not write music, i would not think about what i was doing. i would fiddle around -- i use a lot of alternate tooting. i would emerge a few hours later and say, this is what i have got. it was a cathartic experience for me. over the years, i have become a little more analytical.

today, my approach is a balance, and intuitive process where you allow yourself to empty your mind a little bit and let stuff come in so that you can experience what is going on around you in a way and translate that into musical experience. >> it is interesting you talk about emptying your mind. there was a brain imaging study published where my colleague, charles lim, a narrow scientist, put some composers in an mri machine. if any of you have had an mri to see if there was a broken bone or cancer detection, we have a special version called functional mri, wary can track the flow of blood in your brain. we put people in the scanner and we had people mentally practice their tennis serve, catch a late meth problems, or think or listen about music. you can see which regions of the

brain are active by following the blood. what charles found is by people improvising or composing, you would expect for something that is that complicated, would require so mineral resources, you would expect a primary finding in his would be lots of activation in particular areas of the brain. paradoxically what he found was deactivation in the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that is the editor, tell you that is not good enough, inhibiting you from blurting things out. the great improvisers had turned that part of their brain off. from your intuitions as a composer, science is a step behind art, but we were able to find that. just from a player's standpoint,

as you develop your skills over time, maybe studied in school, self-pop, but you build up certain skills. when it comes time to improvise or sit down and start to work out something musical, sometimes you have to forget all that stuff. push it out of your mind. it is a handy tool to be able to bring back and say, what am i doing here? i am and 3/4 time, 12 measures of this, and then it is going to go to a bridge or a second measure or something. >> to clarify one point you were talking about, using alternate to earnings -- for those who got not know, there is a standard way of turning the guitar. there are people like alex and david crosby, and joni mitchell, who tune differently

to spur creativity or just to play around. there is a great sense of play in that. most of your pieces are in non- standard to make. among those, there are even some standard ones and you do not use those. >> you bring up an interesting point. a lot of times, musicians use these alternate to earnings as a way to escape what we know. sometimes we get trapped. i know that is a c sharp minor court, that is a b flat. where would i go from there? instead of listening to the experience, and the image, the mood, feeling of what you're trying to convey. sometimes, they bump up against each other. when you are doing a good job as a composer, improviser, you are sticking with the image, not

bring about what the court is. >> one of the things that i get from your music is a strong sense of place and imagery. when i listen to your music and close my eyes, i see pictures of different things. a lot of people that i have talked to that have heard your music experienced the same thing. what has been said about japanese ink artists is their entire emotional state is contained in the brush stroke. if you know how to read it, you know a lot about the artist. i wonder if that is something you are consciously putting into the music, putting in imagery, or something the music gives to you, and then you are discovering for yourself at the same time? >> personally, a little bit of both. a lot of times you come up with something and you say, that reminds me of -- something.

it reminded of some place i was, the desert. sometimes it works the other way. you take a walk and your mind has this image. you start to translate that, as a visual image, or tactile experience, into something musical. how that happens is difficult to explain, but it certainly happens. >> it is mysterious, and to tie it back to science, i had a graduate student at uc-berkeley who came to work with me at mcgill. for his doctoral dissertation, he wanted to study the extent to which we can understand what musicians are doing by looking at them, observing their movement. it is worth pointing out that there cannot be any music without movement, no sound

without movement. sound is the molecules in the air vibrating in particular ways. there is no sound in a vacuum because there are no molecules to vibrate. all sound, including music, has to begin with some motion, movement. in the case of movement, -- music, it is the body moving, somebody pressing a key, striking, blowing, plucking. even singing, there is movement of air through the vocal cords. what bradley did is he took performances of musicians, in this case, a clarinetist playing stravinsky, and we had people come into the laboratory and we turn off the sound. as they listened, they had to write what they heard going on emotional and structurally. a different group of people came in and they had the sound on and

the video off. a third group had both. it turned out the group that only saw the performance and were unfamiliar with the ps new a great deal about the emotional structure, when the emotional peaks were, they knew a great deal about the tension in the peace, and i knew a great deal about where the phrases began, just by looking. but when you saw and heard, the amount of information conveyed was more than the sum of its parts. we corroborated this later with elektra physiological measurements, skin response, the amount you sweat while listening or viewing, correlated with the musical content of the peace. -- piece. >> maybe i should pay more attention to my sweating. >> to the extent that your body movements are evocative of time

and place, feelings, they are naturally becoming part of the musical stream, it would seem. >> right. interesting. you and i were speaking the other day, talking about the word he motion, which includes the word motion. -- emotion, which includes the word motion. dance music literally makes people get up and move. a lot of time, music is more contemplative, moves people in different ways. the matter with your physical move it or not, something is moving. maybe you can explain what is going on in the brain, going through that emotional experience, listening or playing music. >> on the emotional side, there are a couple of clues. cognitive neuroscience is in its industry here try to sort of music. -- in fancy here trying to sort

out music. there is a well-known pleasure center in the brain. this is the same center, when you hook an electrode up to it, rats will keep pressing a button to stimulate it. they will give up food and sex to keep pressing stimulation to this area. it is the same error that is activated when compulsive gamblers are winning a bet or when drug addicts get their drug of choice. it modulates the brain's levels of dopamine my colleagues from stanford and i show that when you listen to music to like, found pleasurable, that eric is activated and it is modulating dopamine. a student of mine showed, she was able to get her hand on a radioactive tag for dopamine, so that we could fall in people's brains. dopamine was increased when

people listen to pleasurable music. dopamine is involved, as many of the brands chemicals are, in many things, but it is also the pleasure hormone, the feel-good hormone. i am not saying it feels like winning a bet or taking a drug or having sex, but invoked the same system. another thing, when people listen to music together, oxytocin is released, a chemical associated with bonding and trust. is what mother's release when they are nursing their infants. prolactin is another hormone that women excrete. we also believe that prolactin is also excluded when people listen to music. chemically, that seems to be what is going on. you were also talking about dance and music. music activates the cerebellum, which is responsible for your

ability to move, your limbs, parts of your body, to maintain a steady gait. it is almost automatic, when music comes in at a student -- certain polls, neurons are going to fire in synchronization with that polls. even kids move to music. one of your more recent records, you took some children's folk tunes and you rearranged them. we were talking about kids moving. do you have any of those candy? -- handy? >> yeah. i will play a little bit of an

old appalachian folk song. what i tried to do is -- and the melody is there, song is there, but i tried to bring the rhythm into a more contemporary context. this has more of an r&b, hip-hop feeling to it. ♪

[applause] >> there is an obvious way that lyrics tell a story. certainly, instrumental music does, that is what ballet is about. in a way, they have it easy because there are dangers to tell the story. would you say that is what you're trying to do with your music, trying to tell a story? >> i think so. i do not always consciously have an image. often i do. sometimes it is a catalyst for starting, i will fiddle around with an idea and the image starts to rise in my mind as i work with it.

for example, i played a little bit of a piece from my collection, the water garden, started in 1998, had sketched out a few ideas. it was wintertime, january. we had just moved up to mendocino county, and it was raining for two, three weeks, every day, constantly. it took me about two or three weeks to realize i was sort of an absorbing the sensation of water into everything i was doing. oh, i get it. it should be a collection on the theme of water. then i turn it around and it became a more conscious effort to make the rest of the music i was writing sound like it have some element of water, whether it was fast, slow, stillwater.

the title of that collection is a slow peace. i always like to think that it feels like the surface of water. more importantly than that, if the composer, improviser, is connected with an image or story, no matter what that story is, the and the listener who hears it is going to feel that. a man that did the same thing. i may be thinking water and somebody else may be thinking garbage. or somebody might be thinking about a friend of theirs. but still, they feel that connection. something is going on there that is creating an emotional, or maybe a visual image that people are picking up on. i am not quite sure how that ties in. >> it is an interesting point.

the performance, of course, has a lot to do with it. one can take a piece by chopin and play it on the piano in a rigid fashion, that is the way that it was written, but without the proper articulation, the peace can sound somewhat flat. it is the performance that brings out the new ones. without putting you on the spot, i wonder if you could play two ways, robotic without proper articulation, phrasing, and then play it the way you would normally in a concert, so we can hear the difference became a performer brings in what the composer brings. >> i will try. [laughter] >> this is a piece from the

water garden. i will try to play it. >> we did not work this out ahead of time. ♪ >> ok, now i'm going to try to play with more articulation and movement. ♪ [applause]

>> i hope you could tell the difference. >> i wonder to the extent it is like acting? no actor, like william shatner, is speaking in a monotone. the idea is to breathe life and experience into the line. that is where the art of it is. >> i think so. i teach a lot of workshops, master classes. one thing i am always encouraging students, guitar players to do is to keep the music movement, so that it does not become static. if you have a note you are sustaining for a long time, you want to have something happening. likewise, when you have notes in juxtaposition to one another, there is a dynamic interplay in

between the notes, just as there are between musicians. as a solo player, it is important to accent certain notes and contrast the dynamics with others. it is like the concept of quinellas and in painting, a little dots, big shots. >> you can play a note by picking it, but there are a lot of ways by playing a note, and there are a lot of different ways that you can hold it. i wonder if you could demonstrate ways of starting and holding a new. >> i guess the term is articulation. guitar, for example, i will just take a couple notes. ♪ i am not doing much with it here.

♪ i am giving, in that static pattern, which i am making up, i am giving some of the notes more volume, sustaining some of the notes longer come bending some of the notes, approaching them differently. that, i think, is a critical part. it is a way of orchestrating music for the guitar, for example. one of the reason the guitar is such a popular instrument, you can directly control -- your fingers are on what is vibrating. you can feel it and feel when you are making changes. >> and of course, you have i brought up -- vibrato. >> yes, you do. [laughter] let me go bragrab another

guitar. i will play this as an example. ♪ basically, these are all the same pitch. three a notes i am playing, one is open string, one in isfretted. one gets a droney sound. the other has the sound of hitting a drum, and then one gets the vibrato sound. sounds like one -- like more than one note. >> you are creating a rhythmic pattern. not only different dynamic

patterns, some notes played louder than others, but they also have different texture. just like any percussionist. the indian drum is a great example. there is such new ones in the way it is played, it creates such a sense of depth in the rhythm. >> to you think there is a gene for music? >> well, you are the scientists. [laughter] i do not know. my grandfather was a side -- violinist with the san francisco symphony. my father was quite a good pianist. my brother was musical, my sister was not. i have a musical cousin. i do not really know. >> let me put it this way and i will try to stumble through a scientific explanation. let me remind the audience at this point that we are going to take questions in five minutes.

there are microphones set up in the aisles. please be ready with your questions. if you had not become a musician professionally, do you think you would still be playing? >> yes, i think i would still be playing, but everybody should play a little bit, sing -- not everyone feels confident about their medical abilities, -- musical abilities, but it is such an import way to connect. it is, after all, a vibration. whether you are doing it to relax, get excited, to jump up and down, i think it is an import way to connect yourself to something that is a little bit bigger in life. life is a constant stream of

vibrations, whether you are in traffic or sitting quietly next to a pond. >> do you feel like you had a particular talent and was in it, or do you feel for it was an interest that was in aid and you had to work hard to achieve your ability? >> i think of myself as being not a typical musician in some ways. i have a lot of friends who are much more schooled and i am, they read, can play just about anything you put in front of them, but i think what i have been able to do is internalize some experiences and spit them out on the guitar in ways, hopefully, which tells a story. if i was not doing this, maybe i would be writing short stories. i tried painting.

i was lousy. but i like the idea. >> just to hammer on this point carter, do you think you got to where you got because of some brain structure that you have the others do not, or did you get there by hard work? >> i certainly worked hard but i think it was more inclination. i think it was some inherent sensitivity, proclivity toward trying to create sound as a way of expressing who i am. >> there is this 10,000 hour- rule to become a world expert at anything, whether it is a chess player, at fleet, anything. 10,000 hours of practice. do you agree with that, is that possible? >> it sounds plausible.

i have been doing this for a long time but i think there was a critical point when i was younger that i felt i reached a certain point at which i felt like i had enough mastery over my instrument that i could accomplish what i was trying to do. >> on the science side, nobody is really sure, of course, whether there is a gene for music. two of the complicating factors are, a town that grows up in a household full of music will have a different set of learning experiences and in a house where music is not supported. become difficult to separate nature from berkshire because of these in our mental factors. the other thing that is interesting is music manifests itself in some way different

ways. not all composers can blame their instruments very well. and not all instrumentalists compose, and there are for rangers that do not play or compose. you would not say that they are not musical. then you have all of these people who are musical experts, disk jockeys, film supervisors, and they have what we would call musical sensitivity, but it manifests itself in so many different ways, the hunt for a gene is complicated by that. if you are looking for a gene that might give you blond hair, that manifests itself in different ways, but more less is blond hair. musicality is 10 or 12 different things. and to become a great musician requires different personalities. you have to be willing to sit in a room off for hours on end practicing, that kind of willpower, and you have to have a belief in yourself, certainly,

for the first few years of musical training, it does not sound very good. you have to believe it has to amount to something. all of these things come together which complicates the search for a jeanne. >> i certainly lost a lot of hours in my life. >> how many hours a day would you -- would you say you play? >> it depends. it could be none, five minutes, four, five hours. when i am preparing for something, i still get pretty lost. i could sit there for two hours without looking up too much, thinking about where i am. >> before i go to question, i wonder if you could indulge us and play the intro to my favorite song of yours "crossway." >> i will try. it has been awhile.