 December 2001–January 2002 |
Face the Music
Why are we such a musical species — and does it matter?
By Susan Milius
“In our village there was a man who had a daughter, and a guy wanted to marry her,” reminisces Dadie Aime Loh, from southwestern Ivory Coast. The suitor was of another religion, however. “The father said the guy must change his religion. He did. They made a song about it in the village, and everybody was singing it. They were making fun of him: 'Just to have a wife, you gave up your religion.' People back home make songs about everything.”
For the Dida people, Loh asserts, music is not the same thing it is for most contemporary Westerners, and not just because the drums and bells, calls and responses, sound a different beat. Loh, who demonstrates and teaches Dida music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conjures up a world in which gifted singers may be celebrated but the talents of a few don’t silence the voices of everyone else. “If you can speak, if you can think, you can make a song,” he says.
The truth is that just about everybody everywhere is musical. The most off-key croakers among us respond to music, feeling the chill in a dirge, quickening to the frolic in a reel, or waiting nervously for a twenty-foot spider to jump out of the darkness when a movie soundtrack turns jittery. Human beings appear to be musical beings—but why? Does music have a biological function? Has musicality mattered in the evolution of our species?
The first challenge faced by any theory about the origins of our musical capacity, emphasizes David Huron, head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory at Ohio State University, is to explain why music is not just widespread but truly universal. Every culture that anthropologists have observed has its own music. (Music may be forbidden in some cultures at some points in their history, but repression of music is not the same as the absence of the desire to make it.) Styles of singing and types of instruments vary enormously—to the delight of fans of “world music”—but some form of music is present, often as part of important cultural traditions, from the arctic tundra to the tropical rainforests, whether for pursuing seals or for communicating with the spirits of birds.
Pervasiveness alone, of course, does not mean that a trait matters a lot in evolution. Music could be just a happy accident, notes psychologist Steven Pinker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Think about food. The vagaries of prehistoric nutrition may have favored hominids with a taste for fruit or for calorie-packed fats. Nowadays we can titillate those tastes whenever we want, but it’s hard to argue that survival advantages drove humanity to evolve an enthusiasm for strawberry cheesecake. In theory, Pinker maintains, music, too, could tickle pleasure out of cognitive circuitry that evolved for more practical purposes, such as sorting out individual sounds from a noisy environment. In his 1997 book How the Mind Works, he writes, “I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake.”
So far, that has been a hard statement to prove or disprove. But it is a view that Ian Cross, university lecturer in music at the University of Cambridge, disputes. Cross argues that dismissing music as a useless frill smacks of ethnocentricity. He concedes that the view is perhaps a fair description of “what music has become over the last hundred years within technologized and capitalistic Western society,” in which a booming industry for recording and selling sounds has turned music into “a commodity to be consumed, dispensable on demand.” But elsewhere in the world, people turn to music for reasons other than entertainment—from keeping workers on task to powering spiritual events.
David Huron agrees, pointing to the Mekranoti Indians in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil as an example. Mekranoti women settle down on palm leaves and sing during months-long naming ceremonies. The men typically gather to sing in the predawn hours; their singing helps keep them roused and ready for any attack. Slugabeds get roundly taunted.
Huron describes himself as open minded on the question of an evolutionary value for music. “I think we should investigate matters further before we dismiss the notion,” he says. But where to look? If music is indeed a universal human trait, then clues about its functions and origin may reside in our brains. One optimist searching for brain tissue devoted to musical matters is neuropsychologist Isabelle Peretz, of the University of Montreal. Peretz has studied people who suffered brain injuries that shut down their musicality but left other mental faculties intact. For instance, she has tested three people who, after recovering from ruptured aneurysms, were able to speak normally and even to recognize sounds in the environment (barking dogs, cars rumbling by) but could not recognize the tunes of songs they once knew, such as Christmas carols or “Happy Birthday.” One of these people said she still enjoyed music, however, and Peretz found that even though the woman couldn’t recognize a tune, she was able to rate the happiness or sadness of a composition as readily as an uninjured listener could. (A different misfortune struck Russian composer Vissarion Shebalin: a severe stroke deprived him of almost all his language ability, yet he went on to compose his Fifth Symphony.)
Recently Peretz has begun to work with ten people who have no visible sign of brain injury but who describe themselves as profoundly tone deaf. Indeed, her tests have confirmed that these individuals cannot discriminate among pitches well enough to distinguish one tune from another. Such a limitation should not influence their conversation, Peretz points out, since speech, while often inflected and modulated, does not require the fine distinctions that music does. Peretz suspects, based on memoirs, that Latin American revolutionary leader Che Guevara shared their condition. Despite remarkable abilities in other areas, he remained unable to distinguish one musical piece from another—an awkward problem when it came to standing up for the national anthem.
Another intriguing line of inquiry focuses on babies’ considerable responsiveness to music. Much of this research takes advantage of their tendency to react to something novel—by turning their head or body toward it—but to get bored with and stop responding to the familiar. Sandra Trehub, of the University of Toronto, for example, has found that infants can distinguish very small changes in musical patterns. Interestingly, six-month-olds react much as adults do to changes in pitch and pitch relations.
Jenny Saffran, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has explored babies’ sense of pitch. She and her colleagues tested both adults and eight-month-olds with a series of bell tones. The infants proved far sharper than the adults at noticing sequences with the same relative pitches but different absolute pitches. Saffran proposes that people may be born with perfect pitch but lose the ability as they mature.
If such research does confirm built-in musicality, we’re back to asking why. Charles Darwin addressed this question in his 1871 Descent of Man: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” Darwin suggested one answer: that music evolved as part of courtship. Initially he proposed to explain birdsong as a display, enabling a discerning female to select a mate from among a number of males. “They charm the female by vocal or instrumental music of the most varied kinds,” he wrote. This process, which Darwin called sexual selection, enabled traits for the sexiest display to spread through the population. Darwin then extended his idea to the origins of human music: “[I]t appears probably that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.”
In recent years, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, of the University of New Mexico, has taken a fresh look at Darwin’s notion that music arose through sexual selection. If Darwin was right, music might have evolved as a display, bursting forth naturally. And, claims Miller, so it does: “Music differs clearly from other human abilities such as proving mathematical theorems, writing legal contracts, or piloting helicopters, which depend on a tiny minority of individuals being able to acquire counterintuitive skills through years of difficult training.” Ultimately, Miller says, he’s trying to explain why “music is so primordially sexy. A wonderful musician is just more compelling than the world’s best tax accountant or a man who’s assembled the world’s largest ball of string.”
While understanding the visceral messages of music and developing enough skill to warble a recognizable “Happy Birthday” may be easy for most people, reaching the heights of musical prowess takes time and effort and, Miller suggests, special genetic gifts. As a result, music might serve as an opportunity for sexual competition.
Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar in Seattle who writes on the origins of artistic elaboration (see “Birth of the Arts,” December 2000/January 2001), agrees but says, “Geoffrey’s argument doesn’t explain enough.” She finds a much stronger case for music’s origins in its power to foster cooperation. The cradle of music, she argues, literally was the cradle, and in human evolution, music came from the bonding duets between mothers and infants. Modern humans evolved to bear especially helpless young, compared with those of other primates, so anything that strengthened the bond between mother and infant would have had strong, immediate survival benefits and would have spread widely.
Dissanayake sees evidence for this hypothesis in the tendency of caregivers around the world to engage infants in cooing, crowing, and peekabooing interactions that display many of the components of music. In many cultures, adults playing with babies tend to pump up the high inflections and drop the lows, so that the sounds they make take on a melodic quality. Think, for example, of simple statements such as “Look at YOU-oooo” and of many nursery games, such as the one that ends with “THIS little piggy went WEE-WEE-WEE all the way home.” In addition, phrases are repeated, and adult and baby fall into rhythms.
Experiments have shown how important this timing can be. In one experiment, mothers and babies were in separate rooms but able to see and hear each other via closed-circuit television. All proceeded smoothly—mother and baby happily gazing and chirping back and forth—until the researchers manipulated the tapes so that the baby was watching a replay of an earlier reaction from its mother. When the rhythms of the mother’s actions and reactions were out of sync with the baby’s reactions, the baby showed signs of distress by fussing and frowning. As soon as the researchers restored real-time communication, the baby resumed gurgling and kicking its feet contentedly. The motions in such duets matter as much as the sounds, Dissanayake says.
Perhaps the most sweeping view of music’s benefits for emerging humanity comes from Cross. He proposes that music evolved as what he calls a “play-space” for the mind. Cross offers due respect to our predecessor species, some of which had superb skills in certain domains, such as understanding inanimate materials well enough to shape them into tools. But modern humans seem to possess a trait found in no other species—immense mental flexibility. As Cross puts it, modern humans can transfer insights from one domain to another, often to a domain that is metaphoric or symbolic. As a result, a tool is no longer just a tool. Take a knife, for example. It can slice through a slab of meat, but it can also suggest purely mental operations, such as cutting through an argument to the main point.
If music played any kind of conceptual role for our ancestors, it must have deep roots in the evolution of our species. Archaeological evidence now suggests such roots. The earliest unambiguously musical object that Cross recognizes is a bone pipe found in southern Germany. (He discounts another flutelike find, from Slovenia, as being not clearly musical. Besides, he points out, it is from a Neanderthal site.) The German pipe, which was found along with other signs of modern humans, dates back to about 36,000 years ago—toward the farther end [that is the beginning],” of what musicologist Ian Cross called, “of the sudden efflorescence of visual art and symbolic artifacts that marks the undoubted emergence of modern human capacities.”
Cross has also begun a quest for other kinds of early musical instruments. He was intrigued by stalagmite structures in some of the caves in France, Spain, and Portugal that were frequented by people some 30,000 years ago. These stalagmites—some of which show signs of ancient decorations, such as red ocher dots, as well as chipped spots and other traces of wear—ring with resonant tones when struck. Cross proposes that ancient peoples may have “played” stalagmites like chimes. He and two archaeologist colleagues suggest that flint tools of this era might likewise have served early rock musicians. Inspired by the pleasant ringing sound that many tools make when struck, the researchers experimentally tapped a lot of rocks to get an idea of the kinds of wear marks that music-making would leave. Now Cross and his colleagues will be looking for those marks on ancient tools.
Regardless of the outcome of the rock project, the old German flute has already convinced Cross that “musicality is human and ancient”—so ancient, he says, that it could easily have played a role in that quantum leap in mental flexibility. The reason music might be an excellent promoter of mental flexibility, says Cross, is that it isn’t inherently about anything, the way language is. Play around with language . . . ooglu, oggli, ugly . . . and you might be in big trouble if your word play gets overheard by someone big and cranky. Stick to instruments or meaningless sounds such as la la la, however, and you’re safe.
Looked at slightly differently, Cross observes, music can be about many things. A musician might muse about how a melody that rises and falls is like a wave breaking on a beach or a bird soaring and then diving for a fish. That’s a shift from one domain to another. The melody has led the musician through a bit of cognitive acrobatics. And therein lies the value of the musical play-space: it provides opportunities to experiment with conceptual leaps while incurring little risk that anyone will spear you for doing so.
That’s a difficult hypothesis to test, Cross admits. “Music leaves few traces except in the minds of those who engage in it.” Of course, the agility of human thought and the ability to take one kind of idea and recast it for another domain might be just the sorts of traces he’s hoping to find. “Without music,” he says, “it could be that we would never have become human.”
But maybe looking at how music benefits individuals is narrowing the focus too much, says Steven Brown, of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Like Dissanayake, Brown holds music’s salient feature to be its fostering of strong bonds, although he focuses not on the mother-infant duo but on groups of people.
Singing together, dancing, even listening to the same music can help weld individuals into a team, a village, a nation. Before anybody gets too sentimental about the blessings of music, however, Brown points out that music can also transform crowds into a dangerous mob. But whatever kind of solidarity music promotes, he argues, members of such groups are more likely to survive and reproduce than are members of ragtag assemblages prone to infighting.
That train of thought assumes that evolution operates at the level of the group as well as that of the gene or the individual. The idea of group selection has been much criticized as woolly thinking in the past. Brown is not deterred, finding the evidence convincing that evolution plays favorites at many levels: “Multilevel selection is a fact of biology,” he says.
One of group selection’s longtime proponents, David Sloan Wilson, of Binghamton University in New York, says that he sees modern formulations of the idea increasingly invoked in studies of sex ratios and of disease virulence. “Now, denying the role of group selection is beginning to appear like woolly thinking,” he says.
Wilson heartily endorses Brown’s assertion that group-level benefits might have driven the evolution of musicality. “I think it’s entirely plausible,” he says. Music strikes Wilson as a particularly promising place to look for group selection, because (unlike Geoffrey Miller) he finds the evidence for individual-level selection weak. “Music is employed in many ways that seem to benefit the whole group more than the relative fitness of the individual musician within the group,” he says.
Brown agrees, drawing support for his hypothesis from what he calls the “groupishness” of music, especially outside Western societies. “In the rest of the world, there’s not this 'I love you so much I can’t live without you' stuff,” he says. Instead of emphasizing individual travail, especially in romance, much of the planet’s music addresses group concerns. The Aka pygmies of central Africa, for example, sing some two dozen kinds of music, each for a different occasion. Brown lists categories of songs—for hunting, for gathering, for the death of an elephant—and points out the predominance of topics that affect the welfare of the group.
Even in Western societies, Brown finds, music often functions as social glue. In 1941 Dmitri Shostakovich composed a work, now called the Leningrad Symphony, to rally support for the city’s 872-day resistance to the German siege. A live radio broadcast of the piece in 1942 was considered so important that soldiers with musical training were temporarily excused from front-line duty so they could play in the concert. A recognition of music’s bonding power led Nazi occupiers in Poland and Czechoslovakia to issue a very different order—the disbanding of the national symphonies.
Solidifying membership within a group fulfills only one of music’s roles, however, Brown maintains. Music also conveys information, with goose bumps added. It creates the visceral rush solemnifying the news that a child has reached adulthood, that a man and a woman are now one couple, that a community prays for healing. Loh offers examples from his village. “We sing when someone dies. The singing is about the life of the person, what he did bad, what was good. Also when we have a baby, there is special music, praying for him, telling him to be polite.”
Catharsis is another group use of music. Brown argues that it channels grief or rage or other nearly overwhelming emotions for shared public release. Just ask people who watched the collapse of the World Trade Center towers how it felt to sing the national anthem in the following days. Most—even those who are neither religious nor nationalistic and who may be against the use of military force—are likely to say that singing with others who were going through the same experience brought some sort of relief.
Such groupish powers arise from the very structure of music, Brown maintains. “Conversation is about one person speaking and then the other,” he says. “Music is about blending pitches, entraining to rhythms.” If divided we fall, united we sing.
|
Susan Milius is a life sciences reporter for the weekly magazine Science News. She says that when she was growing up, her mother insisted the household keep quiet during broadcasts from New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. “The singers sounded so miserable so much of the time,” Milius remembers, that she often fled into the woods. As a result, she says, she owes much of her interest in nature to “the emotive powers of the Met’s singers.” Now, in addition to birdsongs and frog calls, Milius enjoys many kinds of music—from Chinese opera to her nephew’s computer creations—but finds only certain recordings conducive to writing. The present article was written under the influence of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.”
Copyright © 2001 American Museum of Natural History