Another Radio Lab gem! This hour-long piece does not show us the ABC's of the musical language, but takes us on a journey and opens the eyes of our ears. What is it that makes Chinese children 60% more successful in recognizing pitch compared to American children? Can verbal language, no matter how foreign to one another, have similar musical grammar to touch, soothe, and praise the minds of infants...and adults, years later? Why did Stravinksy's 'Rite of Spring' performances, separated by just a year, have two completely different effect on the audience?

Truth is, the exploration-which what this piece is really- of musical language posed is just the surface being scratched and played with. Would you believe it if you were told that all the beautiful and all the awful sounds you hear every second of your life is the result of information being tapped either in harmony or disharmony inside your ears? Ravi Shankar had once mentioned that he gets physically sick when he hears dissonance played without context. Yes, dissonance revealed in context is music too.

There is a revealing moment in the piece when Krulwich and Abumrad talk about the amazing ability of the ear - the brain- to tune itself, to be prepared to receive the same information with more acceptance over time. Abumrad mentions composers have created works that take dissonance even further. "Some people love that stuff," he says. The revealing moment. Why do some people love that stuff? Perhaps their ears are more accepting to that; perhaps it's a familiar voice - minus the words - they've grown up listening to. When the heavy metal band, Black Sabbath, was once asked to describe where their sound came from, they recalled the industrial area they'd grown up in and the sounds had simply become part of their musical language.

I'll spare you what may seem like a broken record, praising and admiring Radio Lab. This is a series you should never miss or never hesitate to share with others. You should have heard me say the last two sentences out loud. The intonation in that alone would have made you a believer. Oh, the way we marry our words with our personal music. Sometimes, they do behave so strangely.