What is music? It’s a simple question, but it leads director Christopher Pomerenke in many complicated artistic and scientific directions in his documentary The Heart Is a Drum Machine, out Tuesday on DVD.
It’s an expansive, inviting film, which embraces everything from Voyager’s Golden Record and aboriginal funeral chants to brain-music therapy and pop music branding. Along the way, Pomerenke’s mostly unassuming movie is enhanced by interviews with artists, scientists and others deeply invested in charting the pathways of the heart, the prenatal vibration that establishes our musical universe, as well as the mind that modifies those vibrations into meaning.
The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante, actor and indie label mogul Elijah Wood, funk doctor George Clinton and many others pay homage to the transformative nature of music in often eloquent and humorous ways in The Heart Is a Drum Machine. Keenan’s thesis — that music’s primacy lies in the friction between bodies and instruments — is delivered in text, as he sits silently in front of the camera.
The Postal Service and Figurine’s Jimmy Tamborello stares into space, trying to come up with an answer to the simple question posed by Pomerenke. Comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim say immortal pop, jazz and rock tunes written by geniuses like Miles Davis, Carlos Santana and others can be traced back to “The Farmer in the Dell,” “Frere Jacques” and other timeless childhood sing-alongs.
Some of the quotes are brilliantly funny. “Music makes me feel like people aren’t so bad after all,” Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss laughs. “It’s better than a wife,” says blues guitarist Little Freddie King. “Get some soul first, and then mess with the machines,” says free-jazz percussion pioneer Milford Graves, counseling musicians and others to put their hearts before technology.
But Graves, like others involved in the film, knows that the two are inseparable. His house is littered with machines, lights, skeletons and other scientific gear, and he never lets any of his Bennington College students — or anyone else, he says — out of the house until he has recorded their heartbeats.
Other scientists and engineers are similarly engaging, and keep the film from being a love song written by wholly recognizable musicians and actors. In fact, it begins with Carl Sagan’s wife and Cosmos co-author Ann Druyan explaining the inclusion of the Golden Record in NASA’s historic Voyager missions. The recording contained music from around the world as well as the sound of a human heart. The Golden Record, Druyan explained, was representative of the entire planet, “the music that earthlings make.”
“We were hoping that [extraterrestrials] would hear [the Golden Record] and say, ‘That’s a cool planet,'” Druyan says. “They’re making some good music.”
Dr. Orli Peter’s brain-music therapy is equally interesting. Converting EEGs to musical sounds, Peter and others have found that everyone not only makes their own brain music, but that they all possess unique signatures, like fingerprints. And they work fabulously in therapeutic capacities: Music that thumps at 60 beats per minute, roughly a heartbeat a second, tends to enhance cognitive skills, while music with higher BPM rates releases temporary antidepressant effects.
Cardiologist Edward Marban explains how such musical therapy can counteract the broken-heart syndrome, in which patients — “mostly women,” he says — experience a huge surge of emotion and can be left afterward with a paralysis of the heart so powerful that it can mimic a heart attack and become life-threatening.
That flux between emotion, creativity and biology is accentuated by Dr. Andy Vermiglio’s trip through the ear of famous audio engineer Eddie Kramer (who worked with Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin), in which the ear’s various parts, shot in close-up by Pomerenke, come to resemble alien architectures. The interstellar ambiance is perfectly transmitted by the soundtrack of The Flaming Lips’ Steve Drozd, who intersperses heart beeps throughout his humming space-age synth sounds.
Taken together with all the scientific and creative anecdotes, The Heart Is a Drum Machine turns out to be a lighthearted exploration of how music shapes us from the uterus to the grave and all the way to outer space, where we might find ETs with their own intrinsically creative biology. Like Drozd and Keenan’s cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” the documentary is a head trip about the heart, and openly appeals to both without pretension. Carl Sagan would be proud.
WIRED Cool interview subjects, excellent balance of art and science, Drozd’s spaced-out soundtrack, Coyne’s Santa pin.
TIRED Scant bonus features, Sybill Hall and Phoenix Stone’s pop-star branding, Isaac Brock’s self-conscious ineloquence.
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