This week, So Curious takes to the stage! Exploring how and why humans play and perform music.

First, Bey and Kirsten sit down with jazz educator and researcher Dr. Martin Norgaard to learn about jazz improvisation, and what happens in the brain while musicians are improvising. Then, the two are joined by Dr. Jayatri Das for another Body of Knowledge segment, this time to explore the physiology of singing and why we find songs so moving. And to round out the episode, veteran music teacher Beth Carson joins to discuss her years in the classroom, the importance of music education, what it's like to teach young children to perform.

Links for Today's episode:

• Learn more about Dr. Martin Norgaard and his research into musical improvisation in the brain
• Explore those singing-responsive brain cells Jayatri spoke about further
• Listen to that moving performance of Creep on America's Got Talent that Kirsten referenced
• Check out the composer bust of Beth Carson that one of her students made of her

Hey, what's up? I'm the.

Bull Bay. And I'm Kirstin Michelle Cills.

We are your hosts, and this is The So

Curious Podcast presented by the Franklin Institute.

And this whole season of So Curious has been about the science of music.

And today, we are looking at what happens

in our brains and our bodies during musical performance.

Yeah.

First, we'll be joined by jazz educator and researcher Dr.

Martin Norgaard, to learn all about what's

going on in the brain during jazz improvisation.

And then we're going to sit down with our good friend Dr.

Jayatri Das, the Chief Bio-Scientist at

the Franklin Institute, for another Body of Knowledge segment.

This time we're going to be talking about singing.

And to close out, we're joined by Beth Carson, a veteran elementary school music

educator to share with us how we teach children musical performance along with

some stories from her years in the classroom.

I can't wait to hear what it's like teaching young kids music.

I have nothing but respect for people who can do that full-time.

So we are now here with Dr.

Martin Norgaard, and he is going to share some of his research with us.

Dr. Norgaard, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for being here. How are you?

Very good yourself. Good, good, good.

First, introduce yourself and what it is that you do.

My name is Martin Norgaard.

I'm an Associate Professor of Music Education at Georgia State University.

I have a music cognition lab where we

do improvisation research, music cognition research.

I actually came from Denmark a while back to study jazz in the US.

I got a Bachelor's and Master's in jazz performance.

I play the violin, and

I still do at times, not professionally, but ended up playing with my own jazz band

around New York for a while and moved to Nashville.

Oh, very cool. Nice!

I played some fiddling, was even on the road.

So as someone with a jazz background, how does jazz improvisation work?

How do you know what notes to be hitting and when to be all over the map?

And how does all of this work?

Well, how do you know how to speak? You have a certain idea in mind, right? And then you pick from certain patterns. There's rules that guide the way you speak, those are called grammatical rules, and then you have

certain phrases and words that you pick from.

So, are you speaking completely freely?

Yes, in a sense, but you are still following the syntactic rules of language.

So improvising is very much the same thing.

It's a very structured thing.

So if you are improvising in tonal jazz,

meaning that what you want to play fits the Western tonal system.

So Western tonal system can be bluegrass.

(bluegrass sample plays)

It can be pop. (pop sample plays)

You know, Mozart.

(Mozart sample plays)

But it cannot be Turkish makams, let's say.

(Turkish makam sample plays)

If you improvise within this tonal system,

there's a whole set of rules, just like there's rules within the English language,

about what to say at what times based on the context, which is this tonal context.

Now there's also free jazz, which is not actually entirely free, but

often free jazz is based on interactions between the musician.

So if I go "wak," then the person next to me go "wak wak" with a saxophone.

So there's still a relationship to the interaction, or possibly a

relationship to what Jeff Pressing called the reference.

But let's stay with tonal jazz.

So let's say you are playing on a blues

tune, then there's 12-bar progression, and then you are trying to hit the notes that

fits the chords within this progression, just like we are all trying to speak in a

way that makes sense within the syntactic structure of language.

That's awesome. Dr.

Norgaard, could I ask you, how does the brain respond when playing something

that's written versus something that is improv?

What is the brain doing?

What is that relationship?

I'm so glad you asked that because that was the subject of a prior study, and it's

actually a subject of a study we're just about to do.

We investigated this by asking advanced

jazz musicians in the FMRI brain scanner to scat sing a

known melody and then at the end of the melody, move into

an improvisation over the chord progression that fits that melody.

So we're still within that context.

And we analyzed the differences in the

brains as they move from the pre-learned to the improv cognition.

What happened was very interesting.

There was actually less activation and

less connectivity, specifically, when they were improvising.

Connectivity is very interesting.

It's a measure of which brain area talks to which brain area.

What happened was that the executive control network, that's the network that

supervises what we do, and it's also monitors what we do.

So when we speak in error, there's this

little monitoring device that says, "Oh, you spoke in error!

You got to fix that." Well, that little monitoring process,

that's actually less active when you improvise, which aligns beautifully with

this idea that we are in the zone, we are in the flow.

We're not worried about what it is that we are improvising.

So the executive control is like, the mental spell check almost?

Am I getting that right?

Yeah, both spell check, but also meaning.

It's like, does what you say fit the context?

Because you can ask me a question about

improvising, and I can say, "The moon is blue." What I say is syntaxically correct.

The syntax, the sentence itself made

sense, but the meaning, which is something we call the semantic level, was off.

So executive control network checks both levels.

I'm always amazed by this because it's a

clear note to how much the brain is doing at once.

I know!

Within a split second, constructing a

sentence, adding meaning, throwing in tone.

When you talk about improv versus something written, there seems to be like

an element of fidelity there. Like if you're faithful to the actual written

material or if you're not, if you're off a note, your brain then responds like, "Oh,

I did that wrong!" Versus something if you're improving, you don't have to worry

about being faithful to any written material.

You're just going.

And maybe that frees up the mind a little bit?

I think you're exactly right.

This idea that in improv, jazz musicians say - and I've done a lot of education of

classical musicians that want to learn to improvise, or even bluegrass musicians

that know a lot of fiddling, but don't improvise that well.

And what jazz musicians often say is, if you play a mistake, what do you do?

You play the same mistake again! Nice.

Ahhh, okay! Then you're playing and it's like, "Oh,

wow, this is, like, really hip!" So, there really is this idea that mistakes are

okay, as long as you're kind of within the basic context.

But to answer your question before, how do we improvise?

Let me say one other thing.

As I spoke about in the very beginning, we

have words that we use when we speak, but we also have phrases.

We probably started this interview by

saying, "How are you doing?" Or, "What's up?" Or something like that.

That's not just words, that's actually a word phrase.

And jazz musicians have the same thing.

They have these collections of musical patterns that they reuse all the time.

But what's really cool about it, and I have found this out from asking jazz

musicians about what they do after they improvise, and they listen to their own

improv, I say "Why did you play that?", this was before I put them in the scanner.

He said, "That's a link I learned from

somebody, but I'm not actually playing what I learned.

I'm playing something slightly different.

This is my own version of what I learned." This idea that improvisers insert exact

little Lego blocks that they've learned before is actually not quite accurate,

because they keep changing the block to fit the context.

So, if you guys know a little bit about

music, you probably know that there's something called major and minor, right?

It's different types of scales, right?

Let's say I learned a lick in major.

Well, I may use it in minor.

That's done very, very quickly and

probably without the executive control network even being involved.

It's this bottom-up process of these licks coming up, and then this adaptation

happens very, very quickly into the improvisation.

And what would you say are some of the brain benefits of learning how to improv?

Like, what happens

in our brain that's a benefit in terms of learning how to think on the spot?

Yeah, like what is it strengthening?

Because it is a skill.

We've been talking a lot about freestyling and rap and free-form and jazz.

I'm a comic.

We talk about improv-ing on the spot, and it's like, you can get better at the

skill, but you can't prep for what's going to happen, right?

But, like, what am I getting better at? Right.

What is that skill?

Well, I'm so glad you guys asked that question!

Because I did a study with a middle school concert band.

So in concert band, in a very traditional

curriculum, you play what's written, right?

Bunch of trumpets, saxaphones, and they

are in this big band and they play the music that's given, right?

Even though many of the instruments in

concert band are the same that are often traditionally part of a jazz band.

Well, we took three months with this middle school, and we had the same

teachers teach half of all the kids in concert band to

improvise, and the other half did not learn how to improvise.

Now, what's interesting is they still

learned about jazz, so there was still something new introduced to them.

But the kids that learned to improvise

got better in a measure of something called executive function.

And it's a type of executive function

that's referred to as cognitive flexibility.

So cognitive flexibility is you walk down a staircase and one of the stairs are

missing and you jump over it real fast, or you're making this recipe for something,

and there's an ingredient that's missing, and you figure something out.

So it's a control process.

And sure enough, we found that the kids

that learned to improvise became better at a measure of cognitive flexibility.

That's awesome.

You know, in life, inevitably, there's going to be a missing stair.

Yes! Sometimes in life, the steps are missing, right?

Pretty much my life, everynight. Dr.

Norgaard, thank you so much for joining us on So Curious.

Do you have any final thoughts that you

want the listeners to walk away with, sit with, and reflect on?

What is coming up in your field?

What are you excited about next?

Well, we are redoing the study with the improvisers in the scanner with a better

scanner, because scanner technology has come a long way.

We are hoping this time to be able to

analyze changes in connectivity in shorter time periods.

So let's say you are doing the pre-learned and you are about to move into improv.

Is there some kind of preparation in the brain as you're moving into improv?

Now, we couldn't look at that before, but we can look at that in the current study.

And we think there's this link to a sense

of flow, but we didn't ask the participants if they were in flow.

This time we're going to ask them.

But there are several other things on the

horizon that I'm also studying, this idea of patterns and network of patterns.

But to leave your listeners with an idea here, just in general,

it has been shown that playing an instrument,

not just listening to music, but actually playing an instrument is very beneficial.

It's beneficial to kids and it's

beneficial to people my age that's getting older.

The brain is slowing down.

You try not for that to happen, but it's really good for you.

And then for all the musicians out there, even if you think you can't improvise,

it's not true, because you have the vocabulary.

Even if you've never improvised, you have

all the tools that are necessary to learn to improvise because you've

internalized all the rules and you have all the phrases.

All you got to do is find a way to put them in a different order.

And a great way to do that is to find a jam.

If you can find a jam, a bunch of pickers get together and we help each other out.

We learn to improvise.

You can do that in all different styles.

Always love a good jam. Always.

Thank you.

So that was amazing.

Thank you so much, Dr.

Martin Norgaard, for being here with us. Wonderful.

It's been my pleasure.

Thanks so much to Dr. Norgaard.Yeah.

And moving right along, we are now joined

in the studio by Chief Bio-Scientist at the Franklin Institute, Dr.

Jayatri Das for another Body of Knowledge segment.

How's it going, Jayatri?

Great to be back with you.

Yeah, we love this segment, Body of Knowledge.

What are we going to be covering in this segment?

So, let's talk about the science of singing.

Ooooo... Let's!

I like that.

Where do you like to sing, first?

Where do I like to sing?

That's a great question, actually.

By myself and home in my apartment.

Yeah.

You do this as a living!

Yeah. You know what's so interesting, though?

I actually sing out in the street.

I don't do busking or anything like that, but I'll go for a walk, throw on my

earbuds, and throw on a beat that I'm writing to.

I'll just kind of hum and oh, and ooh and ahh and mumble and things like that.

And that's how I actually come up with a lot of my music.

What about you, Dr. Das?

Where do you sing?

I definitely sing in the car, in the

shower, and that should really be the only place that I sing!

What are you singing?

Yeah, what songs are you singing?

Well, what's interesting is I have this very funny relationship with singing

because for me, growing up, singing was one of the things that my parents made me

do to connect back to my cultural heritage.

They made me take singing lessons,

not to necessarily become a great singer, but because they wanted me to learn how to

sing in Bengali because that's the Indian language that my family speaks, and

there's this rich tradition of songwriting in the Bengali language.

And so for me, singing isn't really even just the act of singing.

There's all of these layers to what song means to who I am.

That's so incredible. Wow.

So singing legitimately was a bridge for

you to connect directly into your heritage?

Yeah, and that's one of the fascinating things that I actually wanted to read up

on a little bit, is because one of the things that I remember, this is why I

asked, "Okay, where do you sing?" So my parents would take us to relatives'

houses and they'd make us sing kind of on demand!

I know that's right.

Perform for your relatives!

But one of the things that my relatives would often comment on is that when I

spoke Bengali as just spoken language, I've got a pretty obvious American accent.

But that accent kind of goes away when I sing.

And that takes me to this interaction

between our voices, the physiology of singing, the environment that we sing in,

all together in terms of the science of singing.

I love that. So let's break it down.

So there's a basic physiology of singing, right?

We have vocal cords in our throat, and those vocal cords are essentially muscle

folds that evolved as valves when we started breathing with our lungs.

It's a way to protect what's going in and out of our lungs.

And interestingly, anatomically, we all

have roughly the same size of lungs and the same size of vocal muscles.

All of us? All of us.

So does that mean everyone can sing, or should we remain in our silos of singing?

So, the larynx, which is that voice box

that encloses the vocal cords, that's where air becomes sound.

And so even though you can't control the

length of your vocal cords, it does vary with the size of your body.

So kids have shorter vocal cords.

They lengthen as you grow.

And on average, men generally have longer vocal cords than women do.

And that, again, on average, adjusts the range of your voice.

What differentiates a professional singer from me is the technique.

I'm sure you sound good, too.

You keep like - you sound great!

I'm fine.

I can carry a tune!

Again, what was my training for?

And wasn't for the quality of my sound.

But the technique of singing has so much nuance in it.

It's about your breathing.

There are different breathing patterns.

It's about the posture of how you're sitting or standing when you're singing,

because that affects the constriction of your vocal tract.

It's the shape of your mouth.

It's the position of your tongue.

And for singers who can do vibrato, it's being able to control your larynx and your

diaphragm to be able to make that sound go back and forth in that way.

So that's all really fascinating to me

that we all have the same tools, but the more training you have, the more

skilled you are at using those tools to make different sounds.

Yeah, no, I love that. In this moment, when you talked about the

posture and the physical, I guess, stance that you take, it made me think of Chester

Bennington, one of the lead vocals of the acclaimed band, Lincoln Park.

He always has his back foot way behind him

and he's stepping forward with his chest and he's got his arm in the air.

It's like, he's about to scream something!

Yeah, and posture is, I mean, such a huge part of it.

That's such a huge reason why to do musical theater, we have so much

training, because you can't always choose your posture because you're dancing.

So there's times where you do have to be

singing at the top of your lungs and you're moving, you're on the ground.

But then when you see these opera singers,

they have the most perfect, the way that it's always described for our posture when

we sing should always be that it's like there's a string on the top of your head

and it's being pulled up, and that would be the way that you should be singing.

We all just sat up in the studio.

I know everyone did it!

It's such a great image, but you can't always guarantee you can do that.

That's awesome. I know sometimes there are simple phrases

like, "I love you," but when it is sung, it becomes this incredibly moving thing.

I'm just curious as to why singing changes

a message, and how singing might change a message.

Well, I think when you add song to

something, it adds another level of interpretation.

So I could just say, "I love you," but if

I want to sing "I love you," I have to put more thought into it.

Maybe that adds to the meaning of what I'm

saying, but it also requires you to express yourself differently.

And maybe this is where some of the

physiology comes back into it, is that when you're doing these different

techniques, the vowel quality is different.

You're stretching out your vowels, and

that changes the perception of what you're saying.

So maybe that elevates it a little bit!

Yeah, I've heard really wonky messages, right?

Sung beautifully.

And then it becomes like, wow, they just said, I don't know.

I like animaniacs!

But they sung it so beautifully.

And so now it takes on, I guess, a different meaning.

Yeah.

Like, did I care about Alexander and Eliza Hamilton?

No, not particularly. But do I care now?

Yeah, they're really an important part of my life, because of the musical Hamilton!

And that would not be nearly as

interesting to people if it were a straight play, like no music, right?

It's about the fact that it's being told

so emotionally and so humanizing that you're like, :Oh, wow, these were people."

That's so true.

I think in this moment, I realize why people go to musicals. Because it's people

talking and things like that, but once they start singing like, "I'm hungry," or,

"Where is this person?" And it becomes a big thing.

It's like, whoa, that is amazing.

I've never thought about it like that.

Yeah, and there's also the levels of

creativity that are involved in coming up with lyrics.

So I think there's a lot to it once you

get into music that you're always amazed at how, whether it's an opera singer,

whether it's musical theater, how people are able to really project that

message in a way that has such presence, and then layering on the creative lyrics

and the music and all of that on top of it.

It'd be nice to have somebody sing to me all the time.

Yeah, right.

Everything would feel important or dramatic.

I don't know. Actually, I'm rethinking it.

It would feel both.

Yeah, I'll do it if you want, Bey! Oh, man.

Yeah, but it is also like there are songs.

I think about this one video from years ago, of a guy on America's Got Talent, and

he's singing a cover of the song Creep by Radiohead.

And the notes he's hitting are very

impressive tenor notes for a six-foot-something man.

It's one of those that I have heard people talk about a lot because it makes people

innately start to cry because of the notes he's hitting, the power behind it.

It's not like he's crying.

It's not like it's an emotional reaction in that way.

It's like a physiological cry.

You can't explain it, but it's like when something gives you chills, hearing

someone hit something so powerfully, and it makes you upset, but not upset.

It's not in the front of your mind.

It's just your body reacting to it.

I think there's a lot that we still don't know about how our brains process music.

There was a recent study at MIT that showed that apparently we have some brain

cells or some neurons that respond only to singing, which is fascinating.

That might be it. Yeah.

That's amazing. And this is really interesting because

they just collected this data from patients who had epilepsy, who had

electrodes in their brain for other reasons.

So this is a sample, not a necessarily a representative sample.

But using these patients and their

responses, they were able to see that these certain regions of the brain were

activated only in response to music and not in response to speech.

And the question is why? It's always why.

But I love that, though.

Jayatri Das, we love this segment, Body of

Knowledge, and we absolutely love it every time you come here and you play us

something, you share something, you show us something.

You blow our minds. Every time.

Every single time. Thank you so much.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

As always, thank you to Dr.

Das for finding the time to come to speak with us.

It's really always a treat to have her in studio.

It really is.

And now we're going to take it back to elementary school, because we are now

joined by Beth Carson to get a perspective of a music educator.

So Beth, thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast.

We are a huge fan of your work, both as a musician and your work being

your amazing daughter, who is our producer!

First off, introduce yourself.

Tell us what you do and your history, your work.

Tell us all about it.

Hello, I'm Beth Carson.

I'm a retired music educator.

All of my career was spent in the East Palestine School district.

It's a small town on the Eastern edge of Ohio.

I have over 30 years experience teaching

5 to 10 year-olds elementary general music.

Yeah, a lot of context was already explained a little bit.

You are a mother and an educator and all those different things.

When it comes to child development, what

are some of the benefits of learning musical skills at a young age?

Oh, my goodness.

It's the most important thing in the world, from my perspective!

More parts of the brain are used in music making than any other human activity.

It also promotes cooperation and good social interaction, but most

importantly, it engages the emotions, the heart, and the soul.

It fundamentally is heart-to-heart communication.

Each teacher in my school was tasked with developing a mission statement.

Mine was rather bold.

It went something like, "Through singing,

playing instruments, dancing, listening, composing, and discussing, we will become

more expressive, more sensitive, more human."

Oh, man, I love that. More human.

And, Beth, you yourself are a musician, correct?

What do you play? Well, I play a few instruments.

Currently, guittar and voice are my primary musical instruments,

but my primary instrument that I studied seriously, 13 years of lessons, is flute.

Could we hear a little snippet of you playing?

I have sent along some audio clips back in my days as a high school hot shot.

I performed with a Greater Area of Pittsburgh Youth Ensemble.

(Clip of Beth playing)

Nice. Thank you.

Yeah.

And, music can be a really, really complex thing, right?

So how do you break this down for children?

How do you make this digestible and approachable for young minds?

First of all, I will contradict your statement that it is complex!

Is actually innate.

Babies, that's their primary form of communication.

They cry and coo and laugh long before

they speak. So I would always address that fact that we are all musical from birth.

But as far as some complex ideas such as

vibrational frequency and pitch can be easily grasped by anyone.

If you twang a roller over the edge of a

desk, you'll see the wiggle, the vibration, and you'll hear the pitch, the

visual and tactile experience of what vibration, what music actually is.

Very cool.

What are some of the musical practices you would use in your teaching?

I always employed American folk songs and historical children's game songs.

I could always infuse history and culture through those.

We always enjoyed classroom percussion

instruments, handheld drums, small xylophones, and boomwackers.

Oh, those are really cool. Boomwackers?

Very colorful tubes, different sizes, and

when you whack them, they boom different pitches.

(boomwhackers sample)I love that.

I also taught recorder.

That was a very simple instrument that

allowed students to understand how wind instruments work.

Yeah. And Bey and I both went to public school in the greater Philadelphia area.

So, Bey, I mean, I had music.

We had music classes in early elementary school where I went to school.

Did you as well? Yeah.

Hot cross buns, a staple.

Super was not fun.

But I also had the chance to grow up around like, djembe drums?

Definitely a musical environment that I came up in and out of school.

Beth, when you were in elementary school, was that something that was being taught?

Did you get music classes and all of that?

And has the recorder always been a staple?

I did have music classes.

I was a shy child, and the singing part scared me to death.

But when I was introduced to recorder, actually, a neighbor gave me a recorder

the summer before the school district would have begun teaching recorder.

So I had a little bit of a head start and I felt very confident.

It was my pathway into music, it was that little piece of plastic that I blew into.

That's amazing.

So, I'm curious, obviously not every kid is drawn to music as much as others.

How do you keep things fun and engaging for these kids that maybe aren't

musically, I don't know what you would say, gifted, drawn, whatever it may be?

Well, I would rely on my own sense of my inner child.

I infuse a sense of wonder and a lot of imaginative play.

I would sneak in musical concepts through something I always called Game Day.

Mmmmm... It wasn't a full day of games.

Awww! It wasn't a full lesson of games.

Literally, it was five minutes at the end of a lesson.

But the kids just thought, now we're just going to have fun.

I would be practicing, for instance, the

head voice, the upper registers of the voice.

They thought they were just sounding like

little piggies, talking and singing like little piggies would.

I knew they were getting good practice in that part of the voice we sing with.

Wow!

That's a really good way to reframe it so you don't really think too hard about the

fact that you're making music, but you totally are.

You know, what is the experience of

preparing a bunch of little kids to perform on stage?

Which has to be both fun and chaos at the same time.

Well, W.C. Fields famously said, "Never

work with children or animals." I think the implication being you can practice for

ages and yet they're unpredictable, but still they're going to steal the show.

So I didn't only teach notes and words to songs.

I taught this is how we make a line.

This is how the line moves to the stage.

This is how we step up onto the choir risers.

Here's how to stand safely on choir risers.

Where do you look? Well, you look at your leader.

That's me. I'm your conductor.

How do you react when the stage lights come on?

You need to avert your eyes.

Above all, avoid wincing and saying, "Oh,

it's so bright!" I tried to teach them to look like you belong there, look like you

belong on a stage, look like you are a performer.

It truly was their first time on a stage, under lights, with an audience.

I love that.

I love that because, yeah, if you are on stage and performing, guess what?

You are a performer. 100%.

I love that. That's awesome.

You taught for so, so many years.

Have you been able to see the impact that teaching has had on your students?

Do you ever run into former students who tell you, I do music for a living now?

There are a few of my former students that have entered the musical world.

Some as performers, some as music producers.

In other realms of the arts, some dancers, some actors.

I take a little credit for that. You should!

Absolutely.

But mostly my favorite interactions are with just general people.

I'll run into them in my general day and they'll remind me, "Hi, Mrs.

Carson!

I remember you as my music teacher." And they'll mention specific songs or game

day, that it was an important part of their life that they remember fondly.

I'm thinking about how formative that time of your life is.

Those ages, you said 5-10, right? Yes.

So you pointed out those interactions between former students.

Does that stand out to you as memorable

moments of your time being in classrooms and working with students?

What are some of the most memorable moments that you hold on to?

Yeah, we love stories.

Well, this one, I was talking with a former student.

She shared with me that after college, she went to China to teach English to Chinese

children, and she used my pizza song to help them learn words like "mushrooms" and

"pepperoni." And my goodness, my little game song went international!

Absolutely.

Can I ask about the pizza song?

Can you sing some for us or teach it to us a little bit?

(singing) Saturday night when the hungries hit, I ordered a pizza and what did I get?

A 60-inch extra, extra large size with the following toppings.

Now don't be surprised it had...

And at that point, whoever was holding the pizza tray had to add a pizza topping.

Well they had to sing it.

Kirsten, what are you adding?

Oh, yeah, I'm going to add pepperoni - or (singnig) pepperoni!

(singing) Olives for me.

And the students could also get silly and put a shoe or...

I did have a certain line that we couldn't cross it.

It couldn't be a human body part or anything involving a bathroom.

And of course, dealing with kids all day,

you don't know you have to make that rule until somebody does it.

And then you're like, "so now we know we don't say this!"

Yeah, someone's going to be like, (singing) "partially chewed gum!"

Yeah, right!

I always taught a wide range of styles and historical periods.

If I was speaking of one of the famous composers, I not only had a

composer of the week, Bulletin Board, where I put their picture up, I had some

of those sculptured heads, Beethoven, Mozart, and such.

As I mentioned, I would compose some of my own music for game time or if the school

was celebrating, write to read week, I might write a song to match the theme.

So sometimes I would share my own music and I would shamelessly put my own picture

up on the Composer of the Week bulletin board.

Yes!

I wanted the students to realize that not just these old, dead people made music,

but people alive and well in their own town were writing music.

So they could see themselves as, "I can

write a song too!" Well, one time one of my third grade students said, "Mrs.

Carson, why isn't there a sculpture head of you?" And I had to fully admit,

my fame is only known within the walls of this building.

But she insisted, she said, "no, you're a composer.

There should be a sculpture head of

you." And later in the year, she came back to that, "Mrs.

Carson, there needs to be a sculpture head of you!

You are a composer." And

wouldn't you know, she took matters into her own hands.

I'll show you - with play dough.

She created a two-inch sculpture of my shoulders up.

I think she captured my expression and my hair quite well.

I love how much she put a C on my shirt, almost like a superhero.

I treasured this and I put it right

between Beethoven and Mozart in my classroom.

She recognized that I was a composer,

and I know that she could see herself as doing something just like that.

Well, Mrs.

Carson, you are without a doubt, a brilliant composer, a brilliant teacher.

So thank you so much for coming on, sharing your insights, your knowledge.

That was truly incredible. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you. And I want to close with one last

question, because it's something that I know Bey and I are passionate about.

It's a hot topic. We'll try not to get too heated.

But when school districts have to make

budget cuts, we all know music tends to be one of the first ones to be slashed.

Tell us why it is important to keep music

education in schools, and why is music education undervalued?

Well, as I mentioned, music is inate.

It's part of being human.

It engages the whole brain.

It is a cooperative activity that supports social skills and interaction.

Music is all of the school subjects at once.

The rhythm in music is math.

Music is language and communication.

Music is history and culture.

Music is a physical activity.

Music is science.

Music is art. It's everything.

It should be the last thing cut

! Maybe in our culture, people view musicians as that elite, the rare, the

few, the gifted, and the rest of us just consume it as entertainment.

But music is not entertainment.

It's not just fluff.

It's part of being human.

It's something all of us can do and all of us should do.

Wow. Mic drop.

Thank you, Beth.

It was so amazing to talk to you.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Well,

thank you so much, Beth, both for sitting down with us and for all of your years of

service in the classroom because, damn, you are doing the work.

We heard a little bit about it, but I can

only imagine the impact you made on so many people's lives.

I mean, we heard it, right? Outstanding, outstanding.

Iconic. Next week's episode is our last for the

season, but don't be sad, because we're going out dancing.

You better believe we are.

That's right, because next week we are looking at the science of rhythm.

Why does it make us move? Because it sure does!

Babies, if you just look at their spontaneous movement, they're a little

more likely to move when they're listening to rhythms, compared to speech.

So that shows that at least from a very early age, they've got this association.

Rhythms and movement are linked.

So to make sure that you don't miss out on

any of our dance party, please be sure to subscribe to The So Curious Podcast,

presented by the Franklin Institute, wherever you listen.

And please, if you like what you're listening to, write us a review.

Tell us what you like. Tell us what you want more of.

That way we can bring it to you.

And in the meantime, Go Birds!

This podcast is made in partnership with

RADIO KISMET, Philadelphia's premier podcast production studio.

This podcast is produced by Amy Carson.

The Franklin Institute's Director of Digital Editorial is Joy Montefusco.

Dr.

Jayatri Das is the Franklin Institute's Chief Bio-Scientist.

And Erin Armstrong runs marketing, communications, and digital media.

Head of operations is Christopher Plant.

Our mixing engineer is Justin Berger, and our audio editor is Lauren DeLuca.

Our graphic designer is Emma Seger.

I'm the Bull Bey.

I'm Kirstin Michelle Cills. Thanks.

Thank you! See ya!