Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man

by Mark Changizi

  So, what is great music? I don’t know. My only claim is that it tends to be written in the language of human movement. Music is movement. But it is not the case that movement is music. Just as most stories are not interesting, most possible movement sounds are not pleasing. What good composers know in their bones is which movement sounds are expressive, and which sequences of movement sounds tell an evocative story. But they also know even deeper in their bones which sounds sound like humans moving, and that is what we’ll be discussing next, in the upcoming chapter and in the Encore.

  [1] Researchers in this tradition include Alf Gabrielsson, Patrick Shove, Bruno H. Repp, Neil P. McAngus Todd, Henkjan Honing, Jacob Feldman, and Eric F. Clarke (see his Ways of Listening).

  Chapter 4

  Musical Movement

  Serious Music

  This dictionary of musical themes, by Harold Barlow and Sam Morgenstern, supplies an aid which students of music have long needed . . . We should now have something in musical literature to parallel Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Whenever a musical theme haunted us, but refused to identify itself no matter how much we scraped our memory, all we should have to do would be to look up the tune in Barlow and Morgenstern, where those ingenious dictionary-makers would assemble some ten thousand musical themes, with a notation-index or theme-finder, to locate the name of the composition from which the haunting fragment came, and the name of the composer.

  – John Erskine, 1948, in the preface to Barlow and Morgenstern’s A Dictionary of Musical Themes.

  In the 1940s it must have been laborious to construct a dictionary of musical themes, but that’s what Barlow and Morgenstern went ahead and did. It is unclear whether anyone ever actually used it to identify the tunes that were haunting them, and, at any rate, it is obsolete today, given that our iPhones can tell us the name and composer of a song if you merely let it listen to a few bars. The iPhone software is called “Shazam,” a great advance over locutions such as, “Hey, can you Barlow-and-Morgenstern this song for me?” Now, in defense of Barlow and Morgenstern, Shazam does not recognize much classical music, which makes me the life of the party when someone’s Shazam comes up empty-handed in the attempt to identify what the pianist is playing, and I pull out my 642-page Barlow and Morgenstern and tell them it is Chopin’s Concerto No. 1 in E minor. And, I add, it is the third theme occurring within the second movement . . . because that’s how I roll.

  The other great use I have found for Barlow and Morgenstern’s dictionary is as a test bed for the movement theory of music. Each of its 10,000 themes nicely encapsulates the fundamental part of a tune—no chords, no harmony, no flourishes. Most themes have around one to two dozen notes, and so, in movement terms, they correspond to short bouts of behavior. (Figure 18 shows three examples of themes from Barlow and Morgenstern.) There are at least two good reasons for concentrating my efforts on this data set.

  Figure 18. Example themes from the Barlow & Morgenstern dictionary. Top: A theme from Bach’s Partita, No. 1 in B minor. Middle: A theme from Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7 in D. Bottom: A theme from Sibelius’s Quartet Op. 56 “Voces Intimae.”

  First, the dictionary possesses a lot of themes—10,000 of them. This is crucial for our purposes because we’re studying messy music, not clean physics. One can often get good estimates of physical regularities from a small number of measurements, but even though (according to the music-is-movement theory) music’s structure has the signature of the physical regularities of human movement, music is one giant leap away from physics. Music is the product of cultural selection among billions of people, thousands of years, and hundreds of cultures, and so we can only expect to see a blurry signature of human movement inside any given piece or genre of music. On top of that, we have the wayward ways of composers, who are often bent on marching to their own drum and not fitting any pattern they might notice in the works of others. Music thus is inherently even messier than speech, and that’s why we need a lot of tunes for our data. With enough tunes, we’ll be able to see the moving humans through the fog.

  The Dictionary of Musical Themes is also perfect for our purposes here because it is a dictionary of classical music. “What’s so great about classical music?” you might ask. Nothing, is the answer. Or, at least, there is nothing about the category of classical music that makes it more worthy of study than other categories of music. But it is nevertheless perfect for our purposes, and for an “evolutionary” reason. We are interested in analyzing not just any old tune someone can dream up, but the tunes that actually get selected. We want our data set to have the “melodic animals” that have fared well in the ecology of minds they inhabit. Classical music is great for this because it has existed as a category of music for several centuries. The classical music that survives to be played today is just a tiny fraction of all the compositions written over the centuries, with most composers long dead—and even longer obscure.

  Ultimately, the theory developed here will have to be tested on the broad spectrum of music styles found across humankind, but, for the reasons I just mentioned, Western classical music is a natural place to begin. And who is going to be motivated to analyze broad swaths of music for signs of human movement if their curiosity is not at least piqued by the success of the theory on a data set closer to home? As it happens, for many of the analyses carried out in the following chapters, we did also analyze a database of approximately 10,000 Finnish folk songs. The results were always qualitatively the same, and I won’t discuss them much here. At any rate, Finnish folk are universally agreed to be a strange and taciturn people, and they are (if just barely) in the West, so they don’t really broaden the range of our musical data.

  With the Barlow and Morgenstern app installed in our toolkit, and with good Finyards slandered without reason, we are ready to embark on a quest for the signature of expressive human movers in music.

  In this chapter we will successively take on rhythm, pitch, and loudness. As we will see, when we humans move, we have our own signature rhythm, pitch modulations, and loudness fluctuations. I will introduce these fingerprints of human movement, and provide evidence that music has the same fingerprints. I have at this point accumulated more evidence than can be reasonably included in this chapter, and so I have added an “Encore” chapter at the end of the book that takes up many other converging lines of evidence for human movement hidden inside music.

  Drum Core

  When most people think about the auditory features peculiar to music, they are likely to focus on melody, and in particular upon the melodic contours, or the pattern of pitch rises and falls. Perhaps this bias toward melody is because the most salient visible feature of written music is that the notes go up and down on the staff. Or maybe it is because our fingers go up and down our instruments, pressing different buttons for different pitches; or because much of the difficulty in playing an instrument is learning to move quickly from pitch to pitch. Whatever the reason, the pitch modulations of the melody get a perceived prominence in music. This is an eternal thorn in the side of percussionists, often charged with not really playing an instrument, and of rappers, dismissed as not really being musicians.

  But in reality, the chief feature of music is not the pitch contours of melody at all, but rhythm and beat, which concern the timing, emphasis, and duration of the notes. Whereas nearly all music has a rhythm and a beat, music can get by without melodic pitch modulations. I just came back from a street fair, for example, where I heard a rock band, an acoustic guitarist, and a drum group. All three had a rhythm and beat, but only two of the three had a melody. The drum group had no melody, but its rhythm and beat made it music—the best music at the fair, in fact.

  The rhythm-and-beat property is the hard nugget at the core of music. And the diamond at the very center of that nugget is the beat, all by itself. Let’s begin our examination of musical structure, then, with the beat.

  We humans make a variety of beatlike sounds, including heartbeats, sexual gyrations, breathing,
and certain vocalizations like laughing and sobbing. But one of the most salient beatlike sounds we make is when we walk, and our feet hit the ground over and over again in a regular repeating pattern. Hit-ring, hit-ring, hit-ring, or boom, boom, boom. Such beatlike gaits resounding from a mover are among the most important sound patterns in our lives, because they are the centerpiece of the auditory signature of a human in our vicinity, maybe a potential lover, murderer, or mailman. This is why the beat is so fundamental to music: natural human movement has a beat, and so music must have a beat. That is, from the music-is-movement theory’s point of view, a beat must be as integral to music as footstep sounds are to human movement. And because most actions we carry out have regularly repeating footsteps, most music will have a beat.

  And music is not merely expected to have a regularly repeating beat, but to have a human steplike beat. Consider the following three prima facie similarities between musical beat and footsteps. First, note that the rate of musical beats tends to be around one to two beats per second, consistent with human footstep rates. Second, also like human footsteps, the beat need not be metronome-like in its regularity; rather, the beat can have irregularities and still be heard as a beat, because our auditory footstep-recognition mechanisms don’t expect perfectly metronome-like human movers. In fact, musical performers are known to sometimes purposely add irregularities to the beat’s timing, with the idea that it sounds better. And a third initial similarity between footsteps and musical beats is that when people go from moving to not moving, the rate of their footsteps slows down, consistent with the tendency toward a slowing of the beat (ritardando) at the end of pieces of music (a topic of study by researchers such as Henkjan Honing, Jacob Feldman, and others over the years). Not all objects stop in this fashion: recall from Chapter 2, on solid-object physical events, that a dropped ball bounces with ever greater frequency as it comes to a stop. If musical beat were trying to mimic simple solid-object sounds instead of human movers, then musical endings would undergo accelerando rather than ritardando. But that’s not how humans slow down, and it’s not how music slows down.

  In addition to beats being footsteplike in their rate, regularity, and deceleration, beats are footsteplike in the way they are danced to. Remember those babies shaking their stinky bottoms that we discussed in the previous chapter’s section titled “Motionally Moving”? They dance, indeed, but one might suspect that they aren’t very good at it. After all, these are babies who can barely walk. But baby dancers are better than you may have realized. While they’re missing out on the moves that make me a sensation at office parties, they get a lot right. To illustrate how good babies are at dancing, consider one fundamental thing you do not have to tell them: dance to the beat. Babies gyrate so that their body weight tends to be lower to the ground on, and only on, every beat. They somehow “realize” that to dance means not merely to be time-locked to the music, but to give special footstep status to the beat. Babies don’t, for example, bounce to every other beat, nor do they bounce twice per beat. And dancing to the beat is something we adults do without ever realizing that there are other possibilities. MCs never yell, “Three steps to the beat!” or “Step in between the beat!” or “Step on the sixteenth note just after the beat, and then again on the subsequent thirty-second note!” Instead, MCs shout out what every toddler implicitly knows: “Dance to the beat!” The very fact that we step to the beat, rather than stepping in the many other time-locked ways we could, is itself a fundamental observation about the relationship between movement and music, one that is difficult to notice because of the almost tautological ring to the phrase, “Step to the beat.” Why we tend to step to the beat should now be obvious, given our earlier discussion about the footsteplike meaning of the beat, and (in the previous chapter) about dance music sounding like contagious expressive human behaviors. We step to the beat because our brain thinks we are matching the gait of a human mover in our midst.

  Recall the drum group at the festival I mentioned near the start of this section. There is something I didn’t mention: there was no group. More exactly, there was a tent exhibition with a large variety of percussion instruments, and the players were children and adults who, upon seeing and hearing the drums, joined in the spontaneous jam sessions. These random passersby were able to, and wanted to, make rhythms matching those around them. Watching this spectacle, it almost seems as if we humans are born to drum. But is it so surprising that we’re able to drum to the beat if our actions are the origins of the very notion of the beat?

  Before discussing further similarities between beats and footsteps, we need to ask about all the notes occurring in music that are not on the beat. Beat may be fundamental to music, but I doubt I’d be bothering to write this—or you to read it—if music were always a simple, boring, one-note-per-beat affair. It is the total pattern of on-beat and off-beat notes that determines a piece of music’s rhythm, and we must address the question: if on-beat notes are footsteps, then what human-movement-related sounds might the off-beat notes sound like?

  Gangly Notes

  The repetitive nature of our footsteps is the most fundamental regularity found in our gait, explaining the fundamental status of the beat in music. But we humans make a greater racket than we are typically consciously aware of. Much of our body weight consists of four heavy, gangly parts—our limbs—and when we are on the move, these ganglies are rattling about, bumping into all sorts of things. When our feet swing forward in a stride, they float barely above the ground, and very often shuffle on their way to landing. In natural terrain, the grass, rocks, dirt, and leaves can get smacked or brushed in between the beat. Sometimes one’s own body hits itself—legs hitting each other as they pass, or arms hitting the body as they swing. And often we are carrying things, like a quiver of arrows, a spear, a keychain, or a sack of wet scalps of the neighboring villagers, and these will clatter and splat about as we move.

  Not only do our clattering ganglies clang in between our footsteps, they make their sounds in a time-locked fashion to the footsteps. This is because when we take a step, we initiate a “launch” of our limbs (and any other objects carried on our bodies) into a behavior-specific “orbit,” an orbit that will be repeated on the next step if the same behavior is repeated. In some cases the footstep causes the gangly hit outright, as when our step launches our backpack a bit into the air and it then thuds onto our back. But in other cases the step doesn’t directly cause the between-the-beat gangly hit so much as it triggers a sequence of motor events, such as our arms brushing against our body, which will recur at the same time delay after the next step. Exactly what the time delay will be after the step depends on the specific manner in which any given gangly part (appendage, carried object, or carried appendage) swings and bounces, which in turn depends on its physical dimensions, how it hangs, where on the body it lies, and how it participates in the behavior.

  From the auditory pattern of these footstep-time-locked clattering ganglies, we are able to discern what people are doing. Walking, jogging, and running sound different in their patterns of hits. A sharp turn sounds different from a mover going straight. Jumping leads to a different pattern, as does skipping or trotting. Going up the stairs sounds distinct from going down. Sidestepping and backing up sound different than forward movement. Happy, angry, and sad gaits sound different. Even the special case we discussed in the previous chapter—sex—has its own banging ganglies. Close your eyes while watching a basketball game on television, and you’ll easily be able to distinguish times when the players are crossing the court from times when they are clustered on one team’s side; and you will often be able to make a good guess as to what kind of behavior, more specifically, is being displayed at any time. You can distinguish between the pattern of hits made by a locomoting dog versus cat, cow versus horse. And you can tell via audition whether your dog is walking, pawing, or merely scratching himself. It should come as no surprise that you have fine-grained discrimination capabilities for sensing with y
our ears the varieties of movements we humans make, movements we hear in the pattern of gangly bangings.

  If the pattern of our clanging limbs is the cue our auditory system uses to discern a person’s type of behavior, then music that has culturally evolved to sound like human movement should have gangly-banging-like sounds in it. And just as gangly bangings are time-locked to the steps, music’s analog of these should be time-locked to the beat. And, furthermore, musical banging ganglies should be crucial to the identity of a song, just as the pattern of a mover’s banging ganglies is crucial to identifying the type of behavior.

  Where are these banging ganglies in music? Right in front of our ears! Musical banging ganglies are simply notes. The notes on the beat sound like footsteps (and are typically given greater emphasis, just as footsteps are more energetic than between-the-steps body hits), and the notes occurring between the beats are like the other body hits characterizing a mover’s behavior. Beats are footsteps, and rhythm (more generally) is the pattern of a mover’s banging ganglies. Just as between-the-steps body-hit sounds are time-locked to footsteps, notes are time-locked to the beat. And, also like our gait, pieces of music that have the same sequence of pitches but differ considerably in rhythm are perceived to be different tunes. If we randomly change the note durations found in “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” thereby obliterating the original rhythm, it will no longer be “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Similarly, if we randomly change the timing of the pattern of banging ganglies for a basketball player going up for a layup, it will no longer be the sound of a layup.