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From: MARK TRAMO To: Jeffrey Epstein Cc: Lesley Groff Subject: To Jeffrey re: Syllabus; books Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2017 23:42:22 +0000 Attachments: DrTramo.MusicMindAndBrain.Syllabus20170405.pdf Greetings, Jeffrey - I'm writing you from the new UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, which seceded from the School of Arts & Architecture and is now a stand-alone school with its own Dean in the UCLA system. Tonight is the first meeting of my Music Mind & Brain Seminar, which we started in our Harvard Mind Brain & Behavior Interfaculty Initiative 20 years ago (time flies!!!), a few years before I met you at the 21 Club. First course of its kind in the world, thanks to you and your colleagues on the MBB Advisory Board. I can't fit in all the students who want to take it here at UCLA - this year the Neuroscience Program is co-sponsoring the course with the Music School. I'm attaching a PDF of the Syllabus in this email. Have you read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? - a seminal work in the philosophy of language. How about Hermann Helmholtz's 1885 classic, "On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music"? That one was inspirational - the title alone! - when I was a pup. As I'm developing ideas in my "Music Instinct" book, I am harkening back to our conversation after my talk at the Mozart & the Mind in San Diego last summer, when you encouraged me to transcend the "mechanics" of why we have music - that has led me to forays into Chaos (hence a chapter on "Order from Chaos") and Evolutionary Psychology (it's Philosophy really, since there is no direct way to test hypotheses). I've been reading Darwin's book on the expression of emotions in animals and humans. Separating speech and prosody is artificial, reductionistic - changes in pitch, loudness, and timing are essential to communicating via spoken language - the only universal form of language. Competence and literacy are often confounded - writing dates back only about 5000 yrs, and Irving Berlin and Lennon McCartney & Harrison couldn't read or write music. Language is BOTH auditory-verbal AND auditory-nonverbal owing to the importance of prosody to meaning. Chomsky and Pinker's view of language fails to take prosody into account. Modulations of pitch are even a part of grammar! I was quoted in the NY Times on that point by Sandra Blakeslee years ago - listen to the difference between how we end a declarative sentence vs an interrogative sentence - one can say the same words with the same grammatical construction, but if the pitch goes up at the end it's a question, not a proposition. That chapter's working title is "It's Not What You Say But How You Say It". Thank you again from the bottom of my heart for providing the time and opportunity to develop these ideas and get my book going. Syllabus attached - Yours, Mark Mark Jude Tramo, MD PhD Dept of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA EFTA00448859 Dept of Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Director, The Institute for Music & Brain Science Co-Director, University of California Multi-Campus Music Research Initiative (UC MERCI) mtramo@ucla.edu http://www.BrainMusic.org http://merci.ucsd.edu EFTA00448860