Hi there everybody, and welcome to the week where we start to talk about how music can foster intimacy in order to strengthen relationships. This is a really exiting topic for those of you who are interested in seeing how music might actually be able to impact on your everyday life, with those who you love and care about. Whether that be in the kinds of intimate relationships that exist between parents and babies, as we'll talk about often, or whether in the case of adult relationships, intimate relationships. It's thinking about how musicality can actually shape the ways we communicate, with one another, in a more meaningful way, and thinking just about the words that we exchange. Indeed, that is the basis of the theoretical contributions of our guest here today. And I'm really happy to have Dr. Steven Malloch, communicating with us, this time online for our interview. Steven is in Sydney, which is around about a thousand kilometres north of where I am in Melbourne at the bottom of Australia, and where they tend to have much better weather, along with the Sydney Opera House. But Steven and I are communicating today via the computer in this interview. And hopefully you'll still be able to see the ways that we interact musically with one another throughout the interview. So maybe we'll start off, Steven, actually by asking about you yourself. And you might be able to share with us a little bit about how you came into this work, to explore this phenomenon that you've now labeled communicative musicality. >> Okay, well, I'll tell the story chronologically. So I picked up the violin, I started playing the violin at school. Enjoyed it, I was very good at it and continued on then started a bachelor of music degree again majoring in violin. What happened during that, I'm saying this because it does influence my work, is I found I suffered extremely badly from stage fright and I would get incredibly anxious before going on stage at the Sydney Conservatorium where I studied. Now I wasn't the only one doing that, but for me it was almost debilitating. And so when I was going through that at Sydney Conservatorium there wasn’t particularly any much help for people suffering from stage fright like that. It was more, best to just get on with it. And so I moved out of performance and into musicology. And the study of musicology sort of studies the theory of music and the history of music and really built my understanding of spans of time. So how spans of time constructed, how a piece of music takes us on a journey. So I spent many years studying musical structures, harmonic structures, formal structures. And that idea of how people, how composers structure time and carry an audience with them really fed into my later studies on mother-infant communication. So, went over to London, did a Master's of Musicology. Went up to Edinburgh, did a PhD in Musicology. And the PhD was on music timbre, so it was on a combined both the study of music theory and also psychoacoustics. So I had a physics supervisor and a music supervisor. And so that's possibly my interest in how people experience sensations. So it had to be the study of psycho-acoustics, not just acoustics, because it had to move beyond a study of music because say as decibels and waveforms is to the sorts of models that people have created in terms of how we experience sound. And so the PhD was looking at okay we can analyse formal structures in music, in terms of note sequences, in terms of harmonic sequences, in terms of time sequences. Whatever the composer's using. Can we also analyse the way the composer puts together instrumentation? So can we analyse in some sort of formal fashion the overall sound colour that a composer creates? And so I came at that through analysing CD recordings of certain pieces of music. So as I was saying, so I had this interest in formal structured arcs of time, how composers organise that, then how we experience sensations through psycho-accoustics. And then I reached the end of my doctorate. And okay, what do I do now? [LAUGH] Do I have to actually join the workforce or something like that? >> [LAUGH] >> And so what happened, I then met up with Colwyn Trevarthen for the first time. I had no idea who Colwyn was. I was introduced to him by my music supervisor Peter Nelson, and he and I put in a post-doctoral research grant application. And to my great delight we got it. We were successful. And I still wasn't quite sure who Colwyn Trevarthen was, because I hadn't had any background in psychology particularly. And so we got funding. I knew he was someone who had really fascinating ideas about interactions between human beings, particularly babies and their mothers. Also, knew he could write extremely densely, and I know for the research grant he and I sort of went backwards and forwards. I'd try and simplify what he wrote. He'd make it complicated again. >> [LAUGH] >> But it was sort of a good introduction to his thinking, having to sort of wrestle with him. And indeed, that's sort of the way we continue to write together. We sort of wrestle a bit in the way that we co-author. And so I was starting to get to know who he was and then I turned up in his lab and started working in his lab. And I realised all these people from all over the world were coming to visit him. And it started to dawn on me that I was actually working with someone really important. [LAUGH] Which is very exciting. And so that's again my journey into studying mother-baby communication. I should also say alongside of this, I was also studying to be a yoga teacher, and I was also starting to lead meditation groups. So there was another part of my life which was about the importance of stillness. The importance of going inwards. The importance of understanding oneself to a felt sense, not just cognitively but understanding oneself in a body sense. And so, and I mention that because that's also a major influence in my academic work, and certainly in later years when I then studied to become a psychotherapist, that how do people experience themselves in a relationship with others? And thus my attraction to Colwyn's work into subjectivity and how it's always an infant and a parent. It's never just the infant. It's always in relationship. And so the idea of psychology is always about how people in a relationship with themselves and their environment. It's never just a single person and so perhaps about two and a half years doing a post doc with Colwyn. Came across the tape of Laura that's now, she, that spectrographic analysis has become almost infamous, I think. It seems to turn up in our work constantly. >> Could you tell us about what that is, spectrographic analysis? >> Certainly, so just a little bit of background, I was sitting in a room at the very top of the psychology department at Edinburgh University, listening to this lady Laura, chatting with her mother, and I found I started to tap my foot to it, because I was listening to it. And I was struck by this. That there seemed to be a rhythm that was going on between Laura and her mother as they chatted together. And I started talking to Colwyn about this, and he was like, well, yes, yes, he was really excited about this. And it fitted in with his idea about the importance of timing in human interaction. And so if I thought, where there's timing, there's probably also musical shapes occurring. Well they might be musical shapes, as the mother and baby communicate with some musical shapes in terms of the vocalisations that are occurring. And so there's a way to get into that spectrographic analysis is a representation of the sound as it moves through time. So in a spectrograph you get and a fundamental frequency going along and then you also get the other tones above that. So you get both the onsets and offsets of a sound. You get the duration of the sound. And to a degree you get a sense of the the timbre of the sound because the timbre is created out of the other tones. So a spectrograph is an extremely good visual representation of sounds as they go on and off and as they change in pitch. >> So they look like lines going across the page and up and down to give an indication of higher and lower. >> Yes. >> Across time. >> Yeah, exactly, and also there can be some representation of loudness as well. So it's such an ability to get a picture of a interaction through sound, which enables you then to analyse it. Because otherwise, it's very hard to actually measure these, well, it's impossible to measure them as they go through in realtime, because it all happens too fast. And so the spectrographic analysis was in the tradition of Danston, Colwyn Trevarthen, doing microanalyses of parent infant interactions, except I was focusing on the sound of it. I subsequently did try to also look at the movements between parents and infants, that’s much harder because movements occur in three dimensions and the, A - it’s very hard to track, the technology has moved along. And B - it's has so much data to deal with. That I focused and continue to focus on the vocalisations that occur, nowadays I focus on the vocalisations between adults in therapy. But back then it was vocalisations between infants and their parents just because it's amenable to analysis. Video analysis is much more difficult. >> Well I'm really glad you mentioned that because the video footage that we're putting together for this topic actually involves a beautiful Italian baby boy and his mother. And actually he does use a lot of that multimodal interaction. So, it is, you can see it in his body as well as when he chooses to use sounds. You can hear it too but it is important to note that there's both and that you've chosen as a researcher to focus on that which you are able to capture and measure in order to meet the requirements for the kind of research that you were doing. And that researchers make these decisions all the time. >> Yeah, you have to. When I had tried to analyse film it's been very difficult, I've had some success in it. But the difficulties, at least when I last tried to do it some years ago, it basically wasn't worth the effort. [LAUGH] It was just too hard. >> Yeah, it was >> [CROSSTALK] >> Has done an analysis of the Swedish baby seeming to conduct as the mother might sing a Swedish nursery rhyme to her. So it's certainly possible to do it. It's just more difficult.
