I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I'm here with my executive producer Graham Ched. Graham, I think he discovered something interesting in this season's shows.

You found a theme.

Yeah, I think so.

I think it's language.

We have people talking about babies,

picking up clues from their mother's language

while they're still in the womb.

We have male fruit flies

flapping their wings to signal

to a female fruit fly that he wants to mate.

I love that language.

That's great.

It makes great noises you'll hear them later on.

We have a best-selling novelist who's second-guessing some of the language she used in her best-known novel.

And you even have a fun time, well, I think it's a fun time, wrestling with the language of quantum field theory. But we start with an episode on the

language of music. Yeah, this is Daniel Levitton. He's a neuroscientist, but he's also an accomplished

musician. And his new book is called, I heard there was a secret chord. And it explores the

curative power of music, which really interests me because we get into

Parkinson's, which I'm intimately acquainted with now. He's how our conversation began.

This is going to be great talking with you, because you have such interesting ideas about music

and not just ideas. You studied it as a neuroscientist and as a musician

...