Read The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Online
Authors: Daniel J. Levitin
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BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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Friendship songs like “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” and “Tobacco Road” legitimized and banded together tens of thousands of high school (or even junior high school) students who were otherwise marginalized at the fringes of their school, engaging in an illegal but oh-it-seems-so-cool activity. School songs and national anthems are an extension of this banding together song on increasingly larger scales, the ultimate perhaps being songs uniting the entire world, such as the Michael Jackson/Lionel Richie composition “We Are the World.” This sort of group formation and reinforcement finds its expressions in songs of friendship, and there is evidence that this type of song served a very important function throughout human history.
Love songs also bind people together; they express a love desired, a love found, or a love lost. They reflect a bond powerful enough to make people do things that are not always in their own best, personal interest. As Percy Sledge sang, when a man loves a woman, he’ll spend his last dime trying to hold on to the woman he needs.
He’d give up all his comforts
And sleep out in the rain
If she said that’s the way it ought to be.
Why does music have such power to move us? Pete Seeger says it is because of the way that medium and meaning combine in song, the combination of form and structure uniting with an emotional message.
“Musical force comes from a sense of form; whereas ordinary speech doesn’t have quite that much organization. You can say what you mean, but similarly with painting or with cooking, or other arts, there is a form and design to music. And this becomes intriguing, it becomes something you can remember. Good music can leap over language barriers, and barriers of religion and politics.”
The powerful mix of emotion and cultural evolution in our musical brains produced diversity, power, even history. And it has done it in six definable ways.
The study of human behavior has undergone a revolution in the past twenty years, as the methods of neuroscience have been applied to cognition and the musical experience. We can now actually see the brain at work, mapping those regions that are active during certain activities. Together with the work of evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists are beginning to build a picture of how the human brain has become adapted for thought, and to formulate theories about why it evolved the way it did. Part of my goal in writing this book is to bring these perspectives to bear on the question of music, the brain, culture, and thought. If music has lasted so long in our species, what are the cultural and biological forces driving its forms and uses?
In the beginning, there was no language. We may have had music before we had a word for it. We had sounds, of course, and they communicated to us. Thunder, rain, and wind. The sound of boulders or avalanches rolling down hills. The warning calls of birds and monkeys. The growls of lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!). And sights and smells added to our awareness of things happening-in-the-world, sometimes benign, sometimes a warning. Before language, we were critically limited in our ability to represent what wasn’t there. Was this a limitation of our brains or simply that we lacked verbal communication, words to serve as placeholders for things that weren’t immediately in our consciousness?
The evidence from evolutionary neuroscience suggests that these are really the same question. We usually think of evolution as governing our physical bodies—the opposable thumb, walking upright, depth vision—but our brains evolved as well. Before there was language, our brains did not have the full capacity to learn language, to speak or to represent it. As our brains developed both the physiological and cognitive flexibility to manipulate symbols, language emerged gradually, and the use of rudimentary verbalizations—grunts, calls, shrieks, and groans—further stimulated the growth potential for the types of neural structures that would support language in the broadest sense. So how did language and music happen—who invented them and where did they come from?
It is unlikely that either language or music was invented by a single innovator or at a single place and time; rather, they were shaped by a large number of refinements, contributed to by legions of developers over many millenia and throughout all parts of the world. And they were no doubt crafted upon structures and abilities that we already had, structures we inherited genetically from protohumans and our nonhuman animal ancestors. It’s true that human language is qualitatively different from any animal language, specifically in that it is generative (able to combine elements to create an unlimited number of utterances) and self-referential (able to use language to talk about language). I believe that the evolution of a single brain mechanism—probably located in the prefrontal cortex—created a common mode of thought that underlies the development both of language and of art.
This new neural mechanism gave us the three cognitive abilities that characterize the musical brain. The first is
perspective-taking
: the ability to think about our own thoughts and to realize that other people may have thoughts or beliefs that differ from our own. The second is
representation
: the ability to think about things that aren’t right-there-in-front-of-us. The third is
rearrangement
: the ability to combine, recombine, and impose hierarchical order on elements in the world. The combination of these three faculties gave early humans the ability to create their own depictions of the world—paintings, drawings, and sculpture—that preserved the essential features of things though not necessarily the distracting details. These three abilities, alone and in combination, are the common foundation of language and art. Language and art both serve to represent the world to us in ways that are not exactly the world itself, but which allow us to preserve essential features of the world in our own minds, and to convey what
our
minds perceive to others. The awareness that what
we
are feeling is not necessarily what another is feeling, coupled with our drive to create social bonds with others, gave rise to language and art, to poetry, drawing, dance, sculpture . . . and music.
perspective-taking
: the ability to think about our own thoughts and to realize that other people may have thoughts or beliefs that differ from our own. The second is
representation
: the ability to think about things that aren’t right-there-in-front-of-us. The third is
rearrangement
: the ability to combine, recombine, and impose hierarchical order on elements in the world. The combination of these three faculties gave early humans the ability to create their own depictions of the world—paintings, drawings, and sculpture—that preserved the essential features of things though not necessarily the distracting details. These three abilities, alone and in combination, are the common foundation of language and art. Language and art both serve to represent the world to us in ways that are not exactly the world itself, but which allow us to preserve essential features of the world in our own minds, and to convey what
our
minds perceive to others. The awareness that what
we
are feeling is not necessarily what another is feeling, coupled with our drive to create social bonds with others, gave rise to language and art, to poetry, drawing, dance, sculpture . . . and music.
An important property of language is that we can talk about things that are not there. We can talk
about
fear without actually being scared, or talk about the word
fear
without having any feelings of fright. All this representing requires massive computational power. To support this kind of abstract thought, our brains had to evolve to handle billions of bits of simultaneous, often contradictory, information and to connect those bits to other things that came before and will come again.
about
fear without actually being scared, or talk about the word
fear
without having any feelings of fright. All this representing requires massive computational power. To support this kind of abstract thought, our brains had to evolve to handle billions of bits of simultaneous, often contradictory, information and to connect those bits to other things that came before and will come again.
One of the things that humans are good at and animals are not is encoding
relations
. We can easily learn the idea of one thing being bigger than another. If I ask even a five-year-old to select the
largest
of three blocks in front of her, she will do this effortlessly. If I then bring in a new block that is twice the size of the one she just selected, she can shift her thinking, and choose
that
when I re-ask the question. A five-year-old understands this. No dog can do this, and only some primates.
relations
. We can easily learn the idea of one thing being bigger than another. If I ask even a five-year-old to select the
largest
of three blocks in front of her, she will do this effortlessly. If I then bring in a new block that is twice the size of the one she just selected, she can shift her thinking, and choose
that
when I re-ask the question. A five-year-old understands this. No dog can do this, and only some primates.
This understanding of
relations
turns out to be fundamental for music appreciation; it is a cornerstone of all human musical systems. One such musical relation is
octave equivalence,
the principle that allows men and women to sing a song together and sound like they’re singing in unison, even though the women are (typically) an octave higher. This relative mode of processing also permits us to recognize “Happy Birthday” as the same song regardless of what key it is sung in, a process musicians call
transposition.
It is also the basis of composition in nearly every musical style we know of. Take the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth for example. We hear three notes of the same pitch and duration, followed by a longer note at a lower pitch. Beethoven takes this pattern and moves it lower in the scale, so that the next four notes follow the same contour and rhythm. Our ability to recognize that this pattern is essentially the same, even though none of the notes are the same, is relational processing. Decades of research on music cognition have shown that humans process music using both absolute and relational processing—that is, we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species, having not yet been confirmed in any species other than our own.
relations
turns out to be fundamental for music appreciation; it is a cornerstone of all human musical systems. One such musical relation is
octave equivalence,
the principle that allows men and women to sing a song together and sound like they’re singing in unison, even though the women are (typically) an octave higher. This relative mode of processing also permits us to recognize “Happy Birthday” as the same song regardless of what key it is sung in, a process musicians call
transposition.
It is also the basis of composition in nearly every musical style we know of. Take the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth for example. We hear three notes of the same pitch and duration, followed by a longer note at a lower pitch. Beethoven takes this pattern and moves it lower in the scale, so that the next four notes follow the same contour and rhythm. Our ability to recognize that this pattern is essentially the same, even though none of the notes are the same, is relational processing. Decades of research on music cognition have shown that humans process music using both absolute and relational processing—that is, we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species, having not yet been confirmed in any species other than our own.
These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art. And as I said earlier, I believe they were made possible by the evolution of a common brain structure. All art seeks to represent some aspect of human experience, and it does so selectively. If an artistic object represents the thing-itself perfectly, it is just another copy of that thing. The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others—to focus on one or more aspects of the thing’s visual or auditory appearance or of the way we feel about it—in order to call particular attention to them. We may do it so that we can remind ourselves of how we felt about a certain experience, or to communicate that experience to others. Music combines the temporal aspects of film and dance with the spatial aspects of painting and sculpture, where pitch space (or frequency space) takes the place of three-dimensional physical space in the visual arts. The brain has even developed frequency maps in the auditory cortex that function much the way that spatial maps do in the visual cortex.
Our drive to create art is so powerful that we find ways to do it under the greatest hardships. In the concentration camps of Germany during World War II, many prisoners spontaneously wrote poetry, composed songs, and painted—activities that, according to Viktor Frankl—gave meaning to the lives of those miserably interred there. Frankl and others have noted that such creativity under exceptional circumstances is not typically the result of a conscious decision on the part of a person to improve his outlook or his life through art. To the contrary, it presents itself as an almost biological need, as essential a drive as that for eating and sleeping—indeed, many artists, absorbed in their work, temporarily forget all about eating and sleeping.
Ursula Bellugi of the Salk Institute discovered a form of poetry invented by people who are deaf and who communicate using American Sign Language. Rather than using a single hand to make certain signs, they’ll use two—holding one sign in the air with the left hand while the right hand takes over, creating a legato, overlapping visual. The signs will be altered, creating certain visual repetitions—a visual music—that are analogous to verbal repetitions, phrasing, and meter in spoken poetry. We create because we cannot stop ourselves from doing so. Because our brains were made that way. Because evolution and natural selection favored those brains that had a creative impulse, one that could be turned toward the service of finding shelter or food when others were unable to find it; toward enticing mates to procreate and care for children amid competition for mates. Creative brains indicated cognitive and emotional flexibility, the kind that could come in useful on the hunt or during interpersonal or intertribal conflicts.
Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems. But how did musical brains become attractive? Consider why we find babies attractive as an analogy. Suppose that some people, due to random processes that we don’t understand (and that they don’t understand either!), happen to find babies cute and other people do not. These random processes are formally similar to the ones that make you taller than your father, make you go bald at twenty-five, give you a keen sense of direction, or the ability to laugh when all around you is falling apart. The people who find babies cute—again, they may have simply won some sort of genetic lottery and be the first ones in their family to have this characteristic—are going to spend a lot more time with their babies, nurturing them, playing with them, and attending to them, compared to the people who just don’t find babies all that cute. Over millions of cases like this, the parents who just happen to find babies cute will tend to have babies that grow up to be more well adjusted, well educated, and healthy than the other parents’ babies. This difference in upbringing may well cause the nurtured babies to be more likely to find mates and have babies of their own, if only because they were more likely to be healthy and live that long, or to have the knowledge and support system necessary to acquire food and shelter when it is their time to mate. In the long run, the offspring of these nurtured babies will tend, therefore, to outnumber the offspring of the non-nurtured babies.
This is the basic principle of Darwinian natural selection. In other words, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett points out, we don’t think babies are cute because they are intrinsically or objectively cute (whatever that would mean). Rather, the process of evolution favored those people and their offspring who found babies cute, and in turn this characteristic became widely distributed in the population.
By analogy then, humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and—unbeknownst to them at the time—conferred a survival advantage on their offspring. Early musicians may have been able to forge closer bonds with those around them; they may have been better able to communicate emotionally, diffuse confrontation, and ease interpersonal tensions. They may also have been able to encode important survival information in songs, an easily memorable format that gave their children an additional survival advantage. Making and listening to music, then, feels good not because of anything intrinsic in the music. Rather, those of our ancestors who just happened to feel good during musical activities are the ones who survived to pass on the gene that gave rise to these feelings.
BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
6.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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