Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of

Happiness Podcast.

For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want

to share that science with you.

And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley.

I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that

calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC and for more details and much, much more thinking aloud go to our website at BBC.co.

UK.

Hello, during my years of university teaching I was always fascinated by the ingenious ways in which some of my

fellow lecturers tried to grab the attention of their well they're more listless students

there was the politics lecturer who dressed up as Mussolini for his seminars on Italian

fascism, and there was an elderly music professor who had positively skipped around the lecture

hall to the music of Brahms. But my favorite was the anthropologist who began his

lecture on classificatory schemes by playing this. Now, how would you describe what you've just heard? He'd asked. Well, inevitably some student would say that

Ornette Coleman's free jazz was nothing but noise. And that was the lecturer's

cue. Why'd you call it noise? You call it noise because it doesn't fit into your idea of music.

It sounds out of place. And from your perspective, that makes it equivalent to mere noise.

Or as anthropologist Mary Douglas would have it, that sound smudges or blurs or contradicts your accepted idea of music.

In her famous phrase, it is matter out of music. In her famous phrase it is matter out of place. Evidence that what we dismiss

as noise or dross or rubbish or dirt is not an independent attribute of things,

...