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Ira Flatow: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Just a quick note before we get started. It has been a while, hasn't it? We miss talking to you. We really do. We want you to say hello. Please talk to us on the Science Friday VoxPop app, on Twitter, or even on that old fashioned email. We'd love to hear from you scifri@sciencefriday.com. Later in the hour, we'll talk about one bit of fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, and that is that vaccine rates for children are going way down.

First, hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug the president has been promoting as a treatment for COVID-19, has not only not been proven effective, but new research involving 96,000 patients around the world found heart problems and increased risk of death. The World Health Organization has paused a study of its own. Here with more is Amy Nordrum, news editor for IEEE Spectrum. Welcome back, Amy.

Amy Nordrum: Thank you, Ira.

Ira: Let's get into that story a little bit more. Tell us about this new research.

Amy: There's been controversy around using this drug, hydroxychloroquine, to treat COVID-19 patients. As you say, it's still not been proven safe or effective for that purpose. A number of trials are underway to see whether it might be. Last week, a study published in The Lancet reported more deaths and abnormal heartbeats among COVID-19 patients who took the drug.

This was an observational study. It wasn't a randomized control trial, which is the gold standard in medicine. It was quite a large observational study. Other scientists are now trying to decide what those results mean for randomized control trials that are now enrolling patients and underway. The World Health Organization said on Monday that it would temporarily suspend enrollment into its own randomized control trial for this drug and it would be reviewing the data and making a decision soon about whether to proceed.

Other scientists and trial organizers are taking different approaches. There's another randomized control trial in Australia that was also paused for review. France's Health Ministry this week banned the use of the drug in treating COVID-19 patients. A large trial called the Recovery Trial in the United Kingdom, actually the largest randomized control trial underway for this drug, those trial organizers have reviewed the study and have decided to proceed with their trial.

Ira: Is this the end of the use of the drug then or are people still going to be using it, do you think? [00:03:12]

Amy: It's likely at least that some of these trials will continue. Typically, it would be these randomized control trials that you'd want to see for definitive evidence and you'd want to know that the drug is not only safe but also effective. That's what these trials are trying to determine, and we're not there yet with this drug.

Then even then, if that were proven to be the case, doctors would be evaluated against their own standard of care that they use in treating patients and also against other potential treatments that are being tested right now, which might turn out to be better.

Ira: Let's talk now about new insight into when coronavirus tests are most accurate because this is something people want to know. Should I get tested? Can I trust the results of that test? Tell us about this new insight.

Amy: Testing is really important for tracking the spread of the virus. We know that and to figure out who should quarantine themselves or contact people that they might have come into contact with. The main test that doctors use called these RT-PCR tests, the kind that you get your nose swab for, aren't able to detect the virus with 100% accuracy.

A new meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins shows a high chance of false negatives with these tests. That means being told you don't have the virus when you actually do particularly early in a patient's infection. This is the first study to really measure the effectiveness of these tests during one patient's infection period over time.

They found that probability of getting a false negative went from 100% on the first day that you get the virus meaning that these tests couldn't really detect it at that point because there was a very low viral load to a low of about 20% a few days after someone starts showing symptoms.

Ira: There's an ideal window that the test needs to be done?

Amy: It's certainly more accurate less likely to return a false negative a few days after you start having symptoms. That's certainly the case. Physicians who are treating patients, the authors encourage them to not just evaluate these test results, but to also consider symptoms and recent contact with other infected people when they're evaluating a patient and recommending for them how to proceed.

Ira: On the plus side, though, there's some interesting engineering news people are designing masks that kill the virus.

Amy: Yes. Scientists at a few different universities are trying to figure out how to make masks that could deactivate the new coronavirus on contact. I talked with Omar Forha at Northwestern University. He's working on a design for a mask that would capture the coronavirus in a sponge-like structure on the front of the mask and then apply catalysts that cause the virus particles to break apart and that's just one project.

Scientists at Indiana University are focused on electrosurgical fabrics that actually use tiny batteries to produce weak electric fields that can disrupt the electrostatic forces that hold the virus together. Neither of these have been tested on the new coronavirus yet but the teams are hoping to develop technology that could also work on other viruses, including possibly the seasonal flu.

Ira: I imagine these things are done on a testbed and they're just little models that would have to be redesigned for mass manufacturing.

Amy: Yes. It's pretty early. They've gotten some research funding to prove this concept. They would still need to show that it works against viruses, including the new coronavirus. They would need to partner with the manufacturer and make sure that this technique could be incorporated into the manufacturing process for masks and at a cost that would make sense for example, healthcare facilities that have to buy a lot of these.

Ira: Let's move on a little to other research because there is science going on out there, isn't there? Other stuff we can report on.

Amy: Absolutely.

Ira: [laughs] I know you covered a cool new data storage project this week, something I love to talk about material science storing information in glass. Tell us about that.

Amy: That's right. The world is always generating more data, and we need new places to put it. One option for long-term storage is an experimental technology that's been developed at Microsoft through an effort known as Project Silica. Researchers at Microsoft are using lasers to store data in small glass squares. Rather than writing on like the surface of a DVD or a CD, they actually write in many layers inside of the glass itself. They've shown that this approach can pack a lot more data in and they think it can last for much longer.

Ira: How much data are we talking about here?

Amy: In a disk about the size of a DVD, they could put 360 terabytes of data, they think. Compare that to the most DVD could store today would be about one terabyte.

Ira: Wow. It would last a lot longer than the stuff we have now the DVDs and maybe the thumb drives?

Amy: Yes. They did a bunch of tests of these squares. They exposed it to high heat and even flooded it with water and tried to influence them with magnetic fields and they didn't destroy the data. They believe that the data could last in these small glass squares for possibly centuries. They're actually working on creating what they call a Rosetta Stone for glass so that people far into the future would know how to access and read this data back.

Ira: Yes, because that's always the problem. We see that in science fiction movies. They've discovered something and miraculously know how to read it but that's not how it would work in real life.

Amy: Right. Exactly. They would need to communicate to future users of this data storage technology, what it is, and how to access data written to it.

Ira: I love this idea because I'm also worried that it's glass. It's fragile. You drop your glass cell phone and it cracks and goes away.

Amy: I know it seems like an interesting material to use, but they use a very pure form of glass. It's actually the same material that's found on the windows of the International Space Station. We've trusted it with important jobs before.

Ira: I can see data being written on the windows. No, that's a different story.

[laughter]

Let's go on to a new story behind this sound I'm going to play right now.

[sound]

What is that noise, Amy?

Amy: You just heard one kind of sound that a narwhal makes. Narwhals are a type of whale with a big tusk on the front of their face. They live far north and Arctic waters, and they're known for being pretty shy and skittish. It's tough to monitor and track them. Researchers from Japan recently took a creative approach. They actually joined a local hunting expedition in Greenland, and they use the underwater microphones to record sounds that narwhals make including that clip that you've just heard.

Ira: That was interesting because I know narwhals are pretty mysterious creatures. How did the researchers get these sounds?

Amy: They used a technology that's fairly typical for these kinds of projects that's kind of an underwater microphone. They were able to go out with local hunters that use kayaks and motorboats to track these narwhals. Then the hunters helped them locate the narwhals and find them on the horizon in the water and then they were able to get close enough to capture some of these audio clips.

Ira: I imagined, as always, this could help conserve narwhals, keep them from dying out.

Amy: Yes. It's not totally clear where these populations of narwhals live or where they move and why and when. They're hoping that knowing what they sound like and figuring out what sounds they use for different purposes would help scientists monitor these populations, which are threatened by things like climate change because they rely on the sea ice. They spend part of their winter under the sea ice, and so as it retreats, they're affected.

Ira: Let's also talk, lastly, about mysterious moss balls on glaciers. Moss balls [unintelligible 00:11:06] time fast.

Amy: Yes, it's a tricky tongue twister. Glaciologists for decades have found balls of moss, so the moss like you'd find on the forest floor, wrapped up in the balls about the size of your hand on glaciers in Iceland in Alaska. They've noticed that these moss balls tend to move around. Now researchers published recently in the journal, Polar Biology, track the movement of these balls over time. They found that groups of these balls actually move in a coordinated fashion.

They move together at roughly the same speed in the same direction, and all change direction at about the same time. Scientists really don't know why. The movements of these balls don't seem to correlate with things like the direction of the wind, or where the sun's shining, and the balls don't always roll downhill. This is an open question and they're still trying to come up with a theory for why these moss balls are behaving this way.

Ira: Are they just rolling around on the ice like tennis balls, how fast are they moving, how do they move?

Amy: They're not moving that fast. I think it was about 2.5 centimeters a year. It's a slow crawl, I would say. They're quite dense. In these balls, you can find often several kinds of moss and even small critters like the tardigrades that we know and love. They're little ecosystems of their own.

Ira: That's really fascinating. I want to thank you for enlightening this with some lighter, more fun news this week that we can all use, I think.

Amy: Sure, thanks.

Ira: Amy Nordrum is news editor at the IEEE Spectrum based in New York City. We're going to take a break. After the break, we're going to talk about a dramatic fall in vaccination rates for children as the COVID-19 pandemic stretches on.

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This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. There has been an unintended consequence of family sheltering at home. Vaccination rates for kids have gone way down. In New York, for example, vaccine doses for kids older than two dropped by more than 90% and that could mean we could see outbreaks of measles and whooping cough while we also struggle with COVID-19.

Joining me today to talk about decreasing vaccine rates are two pediatricians: Dr. James Campbell, professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, he's also a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Amanda Dempsey, professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado in Denver. Welcome to Science Friday.

Dr. Amanda Dempsey: Thank you, Ira.

Dr. James Campbell: Thanks for having us.

Ira: You're welcome. Let me ask both of you. Let me ask you, Dr. Dempsey, first. What are you seeing on the ground in terms of how much of an issue this is?

Dr. Amanda: We're definitely seeing an impact of vaccination rates from the covid pandemic. We hear a lot of reports around my area of clinics being closed because they don't have access to personal protective equipment or need to reorganize how they do their clinical workflows to make sure that their patients are as safe as possible. I think, as a result, there has been a market to decrease in the amount of well-child checkups, which is where we usually give vaccines.

Ira: Dr. Campbell, seeing the same thing?

Dr. James: The same thing here in Maryland, yes. There's been reported across the state a reduction of about 71% of measles-containing vaccine in the month of April with the last month that we have full data. It's same issue, I think, probably in every state.

Ira: What about vaccines of infants, newborns, and whatever? When they go in that schedule, are you seeing fewer of those?

Dr. James: The good news from some of the data is that the single-dose that's given at the time when babies are born, the hepatitis B vaccine, that because of those babies are still mostly being born in the hospital is still being given, but every age after that, the rates are down.

Ira: Here's the biggest fear and then we're talking about whooping cough and measles, and the triple shot?

Dr. Amanda: Yes, I think there's a lot of concerns, not just about those diseases, but really about all the vaccine-preventable diseases. Like any vaccine-preventable disease, there's a certain threshold above which there needs to be a population level of vaccination. If you fall below that, you really run the risk of increasing the number of outbreaks that you see.

For things like measles, we're right on that threshold, which is why we see more and more outbreaks happening over time. We're certainly at risk for other diseases as well. If there's a huge drop in vaccination rates, I would say any of those vaccine-preventable diseases have the possibility of coming back.

Ira: What do you say to parents who might be thinking, "Well, my kid can get their measles shot in a couple of months when things are a little more back to normal"? Why is it so important to have kids vaccinated, on schedule?

Dr. Amanda: Every day that a child could receive a vaccine, but actually doesn't for whatever reason is one more day when they are unnecessarily being put at risk for contracting a vaccine-preventable disease. Even though people are staying indoors more than they have in the past, there's still really no way to predict when you might come into contact with somebody who's infected.

People are still going out even if children themselves aren't going out much but if they're adults in their family are going to work or going to the grocery store, or really anywhere, or if they're going to the playground and even just like sometimes for example, in measles, which is highly infective, even just potentially passing people on the bike path can infect you.

It's really important to get your vaccines on the schedule as much as possible, not only for the vaccine-preventable disease prevention, but also because during those visits, pediatricians will do a lot of other things, screening for developmental problems, or growth problems, or lots of other things that could be going on during childhood that can be really important to pick up early.

Ira: Dr. Campbell, I have heard that some of these diseases like whooping cough have similar symptoms to COVID. Is that right?

Dr. James: Some would. Whooping cough, which can be a very severe disease, especially in the youngest children, also can have respiratory-related symptoms, meaning obviously cough, and you can see cough and other respiratory symptoms with COVID-19. There's some overlap, not only with whooping cough, but with other respiratory diseases, or other diseases that cause fever.

Yes, it is possible and as we get further along here in this through the summer is when influenza vaccine will become available, and among all of the respiratory diseases that we have vaccines for influenza and COVID-19 have the closest relationship in terms of the constellation of symptoms that you'd say.

Ira: I suspect as a parent, I am a parent and my kids went through the vaccination process, but I would suspect that parents today are thinking it's not safe for kids to come into the doctor's office to get vaccinated. James, what precautions are going on there?

Dr. James: I understand those parents' concerns because we've all been concerned about where is it safe for us to go and what things should we consider essential? I think the best way for parents to think about it is that is where their medical home is. Pediatricians and other care providers for children and families obviously think about this quite a bit and they're not going to offer you to come in without having safety measures in place.

People will see when they're calling their pediatrician that they'll be asking screening questions, and they may have a way where only certain times for well children versus those who might be ill. They have new cleaning policies and what's called personal protective equipment, like gowns, and gloves, and masks, and things. Some people are checking in outside rather than coming in the clinic first, just to be sure, or in your car, if it's a clinic with a parking lot, and things like that.

There are many things that pediatric practices have put into place to make it the safest place for you to go. I think people should have not to worry about their own particular practice. Call first, of course, but we all have thought this through quite a bit and we have new policies that protect our families.

Ira: What about the fear that some parents may have. "If I get the vaccine, my kids immune system is going to be downshifted so they might be more susceptible to COVID-19," is bad worry.

Dr. Campbell: Yes, that is something maybe out in some social media circles, but it's just not true. What happens when you get a vaccine is just the opposite. It pokes your immune system. It triggers your immune system to actually be activated specifically against whatever that vaccine is for.

It will not reduce your ability to fight off the thing you were vaccinated for or any other disease at all. There have been excellent studies looking at that exact question of, do you have reduced immune response or ability to fight off another infection or any disease, and it's just not true.

Ira: Let's get into some of the disinformation that you mentioned. Amanda, there's been a lot of disinformation out there about COVID-19. Are you concerned that by the time there's a vaccine in the market for it that you'll have to battle vaccine disinformation for that, too?

Dr. Amanda: Yes, I think that's definitely a concern that a lot of medical providers have. There's a lot of vaccine misinformation out there right now, along with a lot of COVID misinformation. It can be really difficult for people who aren't in the medical profession to be able to sort out what's a reputable website and what's a disreputable website. I definitely think it's a concern.

I imagine that with the way that COVID vaccine is being fast-tracked through the regulatory process, there may be even more questions and information out there that's surrounding the vaccine because it'll definitely make a big media splash when and if it does come out. We're going to have to be really, I think, proactive as a medical community and public health community to try to make sure that we have avenues where very clear and reputable messages are able to get out into the public.

Ira: It's interesting that you bring that up because perhaps you're referring to an Associated Press survey this week that found that half of the people they surveyed said they were fearful of getting a COVID vaccine when it's available because they feared that the vaccine was being rushed to market too soon.

Dr. Amanda: Yes, that doesn't surprise me. If you look at vaccine hesitancy among parents of young children, about half of parents are what we would define as vaccine hesitancy already, which in that definition is people who have significant concerns or questions about vaccines, even if they go ahead and get their children vaccinated. What you're describing that statistic seems right in line with what we already knew, at least from the parent perspective.

Dr. Campbell: One of the benefits, I think, and that may be a positive, through all of this is that most of the time what's going on with vaccine development, which is typically long process, lots of people being tested before the vaccines are licensed, goes on without a lot of press and media coverage and without people really seeing what all goes into it.

On the positive side, even though there may be some people who would be hesitant and worried, is it out in the open and people are seeing. Every day they're hearing about what's going on with this vaccine or that vaccine for COVID. Seeing what the evidence is it will be more available or in the open for people. I think they will realize just how much work goes into looking at the safety and the advocacy as we develop vaccines.

Ira: For a parent who wants to take their child to get vaccinated to the doctor's office, are there barriers to finding doctors who will do that? Are some of them closing up or what are the barriers that they might have to face?

Dr. Amanda: Yes, there definitely are some unique barriers that have arisen during this pandemic time. As I mentioned earlier, some practices have closed their doors temporarily and in a few cases, maybe even permanently as the financial toll of the pandemic has percolated through communities, it affects practicing providers, as well as other types of businesses.

We've heard reports of some practices as much as 20% to 30% that might not be able to reopen because of the financial impact. There's definitely that as a barrier. Even among practices that are opening, a lot of times they have different hours or procedures that may make it harder for some families to be able to access their services.

For example, we've heard of some practices where they're only seeing well children at one of the clinics in town and sick children at the other clinic in town. If you happen to live far away from the clinic within the system that's seeing the well children, that might be difficult for you to get transportation to that area. There can be some barriers that way.

Then I think, we've also heard some concerns from parents about the finances of paying for vaccines, although vaccines are generally a covered entity under the Affordable Care Act. There are other government programs that can provide vaccines for free to children who don't have enough insurance or uninsured.

The reality behind those finances is actually pretty favorable and that almost all children are able to get vaccines for free if they can't pay for them within their families themselves. I think there is still concern among parents that that might not be the case, and so that could also be a barrier.

Ira: In case you've just joined us, I'm Ira Flatow. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm curious, wondering how this issue is being treated outside of the United States, Dr. Campbell. Are other countries also worried similarly or do they not face the same challenges?

Dr. Campbell: They definitely faced the same challenges. In low and middle-income countries, they've been hit very hard and they are at even higher risk for some of these vaccine-preventable diseases, some of which we have either very low or no cases in the United States.

In some of those places, they depend not only on the way we vaccinate, which is what you call routine vaccination services where you have certain ages that children are expected to go to their doctor, have an exam, a developmental assessment, et cetera, and get vaccinated, but they have what are called campaigns so where they'll say all children under a certain age in a certain region are going to receive, for example, polio vaccine or measles vaccine.

Those helped quite a bit to reduce epidemics. There have been disrupted programs in dozens of countries that have had to suspend those campaigns. The WHO estimated 80 million children miss getting vaccines due to COVID-19 over the last few months. So very high risk that some of these diseases that we were ahead of are going to come back.

Ira: I didn't realize it was that big a number. It's hard to break through. It's hard to break through the concern and the focus that's on COVID-19 to talk about the other one. I guess that's a real challenge.

Dr. Campbell: It is, especially with limited resources. In many countries, there are a limited number of healthcare workers and providers that can offer these services. Then when there's things like epidemics, they often are redirected in those services to help with the epidemic. The WHO and others, including UNICEF, have come out with statements very recently to try to reverse this and to give countries and others tips and means to try to get back on track.

Ira: What's the message that pediatricians should communicate to people that it's safe to get your kids vaccinated?

Dr. Campbell: I think that message needs to come from multiple sources, including pediatricians, obviously, who are talking to their families. Some are doing it through their-- they have websites or they're doing reach out through their front office staff or the pediatricians themselves. Then I think we need to have that message also to be coming from, for example, our group in the American Academy of Pediatrics, from the Centers for Disease Control, from the authorities that make recommendations, one, to let people know.

I think everyone may have had the thought that there might be some reduction in pediatric vaccinations with COVID-19. I think we didn't expect just how bad it would be. Then second is, just as you said, for people to be reassured about the safety of coming to a pediatric provider in order to get one's active child to get vaccinated.

Grace: Dr. Dempsey.

Dr. Dempsey: Yes, I really encourage parents to call their pediatrician's office and talk through what the safety measures that that practices put into place are because every practice has done so. I think that that can really provide a lot of reassurance for parents once they know what to expect and how much the risk has been mitigated through these procedures.

It can go a long way and making people feel comfortable, and just reminding parents that the same things that we've always focused on in pediatrics and in terms of well-child care and, and screening, and all that, none of that has changed. Those problems are still occurring at the same levels as they always have.

We still need to be diligent about making sure that we catch those early on and provide the necessary treatment if needed for those things. There's a lot of reasons to be going to pediatricians besides vaccination, all of that's obviously a really important one. There's a lot of things that we have done to make sure that our families can remain safe.

Grace: We've run out of time. Very interesting. I'm glad that we could do something here to advance that conversation that we need to have about the kids. Dr. James Campbell, professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, also a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases. Dr. Amanda Dempsey, professor of pediatrics, University of Colorado, in Denver. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

Dr. Dempsey: Thank you so much.

Grace: We're going to take a short break and then a conversation with musician and researcher, Grace Leslie. She uses brain waves and heartbeats to accompany her flute solos. I'm Ira Flatow. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

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Ira: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Listen for just a moment to this.

[music]

Grace Leslie: Pretty cool, huh? That's the work of musician Grace Leslie. She's also a professor of music technology at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Grace's method for making music sets her apart from most other electronic musicians. She uses things happening in her body like brainwaves and heartbeats to make music. Grace Leslie's work is the subject of our latest site arts video, which you can find at sciencefriday.com/bodymusic. Welcome to the Science Friday.

Ira: Thank you for having me.

Grace: Your style of music is called brain-body music. What the heck is that?

Ira: [laughs] This is a style of music where I record my brain and body signals in real-time and then I turn them into music when I'm on stage.

Grace: I'm almost afraid to ask this question. What kind of body functions do you use to make your music, just the brains and heartbeats?

Ira: Using all different kind of sensors, I can record EEG, which is voltage off of the scalp that's showing us my brainwaves when I'm on stage, and then ECG or EKG, which is measuring my heartbeat. I've also worked with skin conductance levels, which generally shows us what the arousal level is of the autonomic nervous system and also breathing.

Grace: Do you like one over the other? Are you specializing in any brainwaves, heartbeats?

Ira: I think I would say that I specialize in the brain music performance aspect. What I've learned over the course of performing this music for almost 10 years is that they're very intertwined. Oftentimes, what I found is the best way to perform using brainwaves is actually to pay attention to the body.

Grace: I noticed in your performance, which I was watching, it was really soothing music.

Ira: Thank you.

Grace: Is that intentional?

Ira: I didn't necessarily set out to create music that would be soothing for the audience. What I found is that when I went on stage and paid very close attention to my cognitive process, my body signals, what ended happening is that I was reaching this very calm state and then that ended up being communicated through the music.

[music]

Ira: Then what I found from audience members is that they say that there's kind of empathetic reaction that will happen just through witnessing this process and hearing these body signals being turned into music.

Grace: Are there certain body sounds that work particularly better than others?

Ira: I think that the heartbeat is such innate and evolutionarily important sound. I think it's incredibly powerful to work with that on stage. I think that we have all these different kinds of inner bodily rhythms that our body uses that are all synchronized together, but they all work on different frequencies. Our bodies will entrain to different musical sounds at all different frequency bands.

For instance, a musical beat that we hear very often is 120 beats per minute, which is the tempo of most dance music. That's a very, very natural tempo for us to walk to. Innately, we really want to move to music that happens at that speed. Then when I create music that is synchronized to a heartbeat, that will usually happen around maybe 70 beats per minute.

Then also with a team at the MIT Media Lab, when I was a postdoc there, we did some research where we used a music track that would really subtly breathe with the participant. When that was pegged around, maybe six breaths per minute, we found that people, even if the music was just playing in the background, they would subconsciously slow down their breathing in order to synchronize with that music.

Grace: Could you actually use breathing as one of the metrics that you use to create your music?

Ira: Yes, definitely. In some ways, that's what I got started with because I'm a flute player. What ends up happening through the course of playing very slow music on the flute is that my breathing slows down very dramatically. I play these very, very long tones. The breathing process when I'm performing this music is very obvious to the audience. Even without using the technology, you could say that the breathing pattern and process comes through very strongly in the music.

Grace: Since we're in an audio, and not a visual medium right now, you've decided you want to make music with your heartbeat, walk us through how a piece of your music comes together.

Ira: I start with connecting the heartbeat to my software in some way. With the heart, I actually have the option of using the natural sound from the heart. I've actually developed a stethoscope that I put a microphone inside and then record the heartbeat sound directly into my music track. Also, I've worked with using electrocardiogram sensors over the chest, and then I record that voltage into the software.

Then I've developed an algorithm that can take any physiological time series data, and then it mashes together that signal with a pre-recorded music sound. By pre-recorded, I mean that I generally have a bank of sounds of me playing the flute or me singing on my computer hard drive. I can also record these sounds during an actual live performance.

Grace: Why did you decide to get into this kind of music-body interaction?

Grace: I think I was always very interested and trying to understand on a scientific level how music works in the brain and in the body. I was very lucky to be hired as more or less a lab tech at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at UCSB when I was studying music technology in grad school there.

What I found was that the kind of audio engineering mathematical background that I had for my music technology training actually transferred very naturally into studying EEG. Because when you think about it, a brainwave and a sound wave have a lot of shared mathematical properties. It's only that the brainwaves are actually operating at a much slower speed. I became very interested in trying to unpack these common shared features between music signals and brainwaves.

Ira: Well, you do. You have some music that you use your EEG headset in some of your performances. How does that work? Are you watching the waveforms on a screen from your brainwave as you're playing your flute?

Grace: The EEG headset sends multiple channels of the EEG signal to my computer. I don't really watch it on the computer. I just pay very close attention to how it sounds. Instead of using biofeedback techniques where I'm actually trying to produce high levels of alpha signals or beta signals while I perform, I actually rather just pay attention to what the sound is. Then through a process of musical practice, I just learned how to be able to reproduce different types of tambours with this brain instrument.

Ira: Interesting, interesting. As we mentioned, you also are a researcher. What is it about the brain and music that interests you so much?

Grace: I think that when you look at the history of psychology research and early neuroscience, people have always used behavior as a way to have insight into how the brain works. Language for a long time was one of our best windows into the human brain.

The thing about music is that it operates like a universal emotional language. It has this ability to create this very potent emotional response. For that reason, I think it's a very, very important reason just from a neuroscience point of view in order to study the reason why music has this effect on us.

Ira: That's true because if you're feeling one way, maybe you're in a bad mood, you can turn on some of your old favorite music and it evokes a feeling that you've had at a good time and it can change your whole mood.

Grace: Right. It has this ability to conjure up a memory that you didn't know that you had. I think that in my research, I'm really interested in seeing, is there any element of this response that happens at a very low physiological level? Is there any way that looking at the tempo of the music, the actual physical characteristics of the signal? Is our brain and body and training to that music in a way that can take some responsibility for that incredibly strong effect that it has on us?

Ira: Yes, because we also see that in people who are suffering from Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative diseases and they're not responding. Sometimes, if you play them the right music, you get this response you would not have expected.

Grace: Exactly. There's a lot of research showing that music has very strong beneficial effects for all kinds of conditions. I actually worked with a neurology team at Dartmouth hospital. We are trying to see if we can engineer new music that can have a similar effect on the brain as more traditional neurostimulation protocols. We're trying to see if we can approximate electrical stimulation using a musical signal.

Ira: What kind of reaction when you're playing your music, that wonderful, it's beautiful music I've been listening to for an audience, how do they react? Are they in tempo with you or are they going off on their own now that you've played some evocative music?

Grace: Sometimes that's hard to tell but I have to say that this kind of music performance has been very different than other kinds of music that I've performed in the past. I've had audience members come up to me, I've had people send me emails.

Some people who found my music on Bandcamp, for instance, and they say that the music has a very strong effect on them, has the ability to conjure up memories of a better time that they become relaxed, that it helps them sleep. As a musician, I think that's the most gratifying thing that I can hear.

Ira: Just a quick note that I'm Ira Flatow, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's talk about research that you're doing. What kind of research, moving forward, are you looking into these days? Where would you like to take your research?

Grace: My general goal is that I would love to see doctors be able to prescribe music to a patient. I think we need to apply our scientific skills, we need to run the experiments to be able to validate on a very physical level, what is happening in the brain and the body when we play this music? How can we target very, very specifically engineered musical sounds for specific conditions in the brain or in the body? I'm working with colleagues on a music that targets Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, anxiety.

Ira: Oliver Sacks wrote about this extensively about music on the brain. You ever tap into that?

Grace: Oh, yes, of course. His research is so amazing. I'm very inspired by the way that he would work with individual patients. I think that in a lot of ways, the kind of individual response that each person has to music is the most interesting one.

When we look at trying to develop a clinical intervention or to examine scientifically how music works in the brain, it's an unfortunate feature of the scientific method that we have to look and see what happens across a whole population of people. There's also incredibly interesting ways that you can scientifically look at what happens inside one person and their individualized response. In the future, I would love to be able to work a little bit more in that direction.

Ira: I hope you do and I hope you'll come back and tell us more about it when you do.

Grace: Oh, thank you.

Ira: Unfortunately, we have run out of time, Grace. That was terrific. I'd like to thank Grace Leslie, musician, and professor of music technology at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Again, you can watch our video profile of Grace Leslie at our website at sciencefriday.com/bodymusic.

Grace: Thank you so much.

[music]

Ira: One last thing before we go. Larry Kramer, writer, and AIDS activist died this week. Kramer was instrumental in helping reporters like me understand the scope of the outbreak of AIDS and its impact on New York City when it first broke out in 1981. He introduced me to victims, researchers, and doctors working on a disease no one understood. He was a loud voice at a time when others could not be heard. Condolences to all.

Charles Bergquist is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christie Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. BJ Lederman, composer theme music. If you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, please subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

On the Science Friday VoxPop app, are you a health care worker feeling burnt out? Boy, we want to hear from you. Maybe you're dealing with a lot of COVID patients or you're seeing layoffs in your workplace. Whatever is going on, if you're a healthcare worker, tell us how you're feeling. That's on the Science Friday VoxPop app wherever you get your apps. Normally, you can always email us the regular way. Our address is scifri@sciencefriday.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flatow.

 

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