SOUND EFFECTS
STEWART COPELAND IS SEARCHING FOR THE SECRETS OF OUR EMOTIONAL CONNECTION TO MUSIC…
STEWART COPELAND’S ADVENTURES IN MUSIC | BBC4 FRIDAY
Why does music have the power to give us chills, to bring us joy, to make us cry? That’s a question that some of the world’s smartest people are still trying to figure out the answer to, and in this new three-part series musician and composer Stewart Copeland – best known as the drummer in The Police – travels the world to speak to composers, DJS, musicians and scientists in order to get their perspective on how music works.
“We spoke to the eggheads at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and so on and actually got the physiology, the biology, the brain chemistry of it,” shares Stewart with Inside
TV. “As well as talking to Sting and all these other musicians for their end of it.”
While you might assume that musicians would have a great many thoughts regarding the internal chemistry that generates emotions when we listen to certain sounds, not everyone Stewart spoke to wanted to think about it too deeply…
“I talked to Steve Reich, who is one of the most seminal figures in modern classical music,” he recalls. “I asked him why music has this effect on people, and his answer was classic: ‘I dunno, I just work here!’ Similarly, many of the artists I talked to were afraid to look under the hood – there was some fear that they might break the spell somehow if they knew the mechanics of it.”
In this week’s opening episode, Stewart’s keen to discover how music can, in the words of Madonna, make the people come together. It’s a journey that takes him from a cave where a 40,000 year old bone flute was discovered, to the home of DJ Honey Dijon in search of the perfect floor-filler.
“Music was invented 40,000 years ago – and we only invented agriculture 10,000 years ago!” grins Stewart. “Let’s get our priorities right – before we discovered how to feed ourselves, we were bonding, and that’s why homo sapiens won over our competitors.”