We were both invited to deliver addresses at the International Music Meets Medicine conference hosted by the Gyllenberg Foundation in Espoo, just outside of Helsinki, in summer 2007. The days were long, with twenty-one hours of sunlight. I had never been that far north before, and Ian and I both noticed how different the color spectrum of the sun appeared—everything seemed a bit more yellow to us. We walked around the conference center taking in the new-to-us vegetation. The trees looked similar to trees we knew from our respective childhood homes, Scotland and California, but we noticed subtle differences in bark patterns, in the color of leaves, and—on the conifers—needles. We speculated about whether these were different species of trees than the ones we grew up with, or simply genetic variations that had adapted to fluctuations in the amount of sunlight they would be exposed to, varying seasonally from two to twenty-two hours a day. The fauna were also different—as we sat at a picnic table and talked about musical origins, our conversation paused frequently when we heard an unfamiliar bird, which prompted a spontaneous joint effort to try to see it and identify it.
We were also distracted by the calls of frogs in the pond next to our picnic table, and eventually were able to see some small, smooth-skinned brown ones that were unlike any we had seen in our own countries. The frogs and toads that Ian and I knew from childhood croaked together in a kind of amphibious symphonic tutti. The Finnish frogs—or at least those in our pond in Espoo—used what biologists call antiphonal calling. This, we read later in a field guide, is to maximize the chance that a female frog will be able to find her favored male. Frogs choose their mates largely on the basis of sound. A female frog can be swept off her legs by just the sound of a suitably enticing male frog call played over a loudspeaker, even trying to mate with a stuffed replica of a male. The reason that most frogs synchronize their calls is that it makes it more difficult for predators to locate them; the antiphonal calling in Espoo must have developed as a competitive advantage in mate attraction for those males who employed it, somewhat at their own increased risk of being eaten by predators.
Ian began our conversation on musical origins by considering what the requirements might be for any system of animal or human communication. “Clearly,” he said, “the survival prospects of individuals and groups are enhanced by a capacity to communicate certain information about states of affairs in the physical world, and in the social world that concerns the organism. Even more so by the ability to organize action in response to those states of affairs,” actions such as running, hiding, fighting, cooperating, and sharing.
“Of course,” I interjected, “as David Huron would say, survival is only enhanced by sorting out fact from fiction, meaning that the organism requires the ability to detect liars, manipulators, and exaggerators.” This is exactly the argument that Huron and others have made for the value of music over language. This is a bold and controversial notion that is gaining favor among researchers. What you want for a communication medium is one in which honesty can be readily detected, what ethologists call an honest signal. For a number of reasons, it appears that it is more difficult to fake sincerity in music than in spoken language. Perhaps this is simply because music and brains co-evolved precisely to preserve this property, perhaps because music by its nature is less concerned with facts and more concerned with feelings (and perhaps feelings are harder to fake than supposed facts are). Music’s direct and preferential influence on emotional centers of the brain and on neurochemical levels supports this view.
Ian continued that the ideal communication system would allow individuals to communicate knowledge about current conditions such as the availability and locations of resources, to make possible their sharing; perceptions of dangers would need to be identified and appropriate actions coordinated; finally social relationships would need to be articulated and sustained. Why is music necessary and even better than language for such tasks? I think it is because music, especially rhythmic, patterned music of the kind we typically associate with songs, provides a more powerful mnemonic force for encoding knowledge, vital and shared information that entire societies need to know, teachings that are handed down by parents to their children and that children can easily memorize. I believe that this is such a fundamentally important function of music that it may even have been the root of the first song (notwithstanding Sting’s and Rodney Crowell’s Chapter 3 lobbying for joy songs as the primeval musical form).
Imagine an early ancestor of ours, maybe a hundred thousand years ago, standing above a river where there is a gathering of crocodiles. Another early human is near them, and our ancestor hears one of the crocs make a certain noise before chasing and then devouring the nearby human. Our ancestor has learned that this noise is the signal that the croc is about to attack. Due to a random, unexplained mutation, his frontal lobe is a bit larger than anyone else’s. He has a greater than normal capacity to reason and to communicate; in particular, he has a perspective-taking ability, albeit a rudimentary one, an ability to imagine what other people are thinking. He realizes that this knowledge that he has is not knowledge that his children have. They are precious to him. He wants to warn them.
He runs home and (like all other humans at that time) has no language, but he feels it necessary to communicate to his children the danger he just witnessed. He doesn’t want to bring them to the scene; too dangerous—they could become dessert. He needs to communicate the danger symbolically. He imitates a croc. He gestures, wiggles on the ground, uses his body to make the motions of a croc. He brings his arms and hands together to mimic the jaws opening and closing, then makes the noise. This type of symbolic gesture may be practiced for thousands of years until a further refinement is introduced, precipitated by an even more enlarged frontal lobe. The young children don’t necessarily pay attention to this vital message; they are playing, babbling, making noises, laughing, moving, wiggling. The father incorporates their behaviors into his in order to attract their attention. He laughs, moves, makes funny noises. He surrounds the important message about the crocodile and the crocodile’s noise with an attention-getting dance, accompanied by pitched and rhythmic vocalizations. The first song is born, and it is born to simultaneously educate, grab the attention of, and entertain children. Today children are remarkably attuned to the music around them; they rock and sway to music in their environment, and within their first two years develop their own preferences for music. They are also attuned to the music within them, genetically encoded, entering a period of musical babbling often even before their linguistic babbling begins.
Children’s penchant for music seems to begin in infancy. By seven months, infants can remember music for as long as two weeks and can distinguish particular strains of Mozart they’ve heard versus very similar ones they haven’t, suggesting an innate—and evolutionary—basis for music perception and memory. And as Sandra Trehub has shown, mother-infant vocal interactions exhibit striking similarities across a wide range of cultures. These interactions tend to be musical, with wide pitch ranges, repetitive rhythms, and with clear emotional and instructive (knowledge-giving) content. Instinctively, mothers and infants co-regulate affect through these interactions, mothers reassuring their infants that they are nearby and attending to them. Mothers also use these musiclike vocalizations to direct their infants’ attention to important perceptual features in the immediate environment.
David Huron suggests that the first song may have been more related to pride than fear, as in my crocodile scenario. “Imagine,” he says, “you’ve gone out on the hunt and you’ve come back—a group of you—and you want to share what happened with the others who weren’t there. And yet, you want to give them an aesthetic experience of it; you don’t want to report the way a bee would, ‘This is where the meat is.’ You want to report in an artistic fashion; in a highly stylized form to convey the sense of danger, your difficulties, your ultimate accomplishment.” This may have begun as pantomime and evolved into something recognizable as music-dance.
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sp; Alternatively, Ian Cross suggests, the first song may have grown out of a children’s chanting game, a turn-taking game such as “Patty-Cake” that helped them to coordinate their movements with those of another person.
In all cultures that have a number system, children have counting songs, rhyming ditties, to help them learn their number line by rote. In our culture these can be partly sung and partly spoken, and they typically do double duty to train motor coordination as in jumping rope songs:Down by the river, down by the sea,
Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me.
I told ma, ma told pa,
Johnny got a spanking so ha ha ha.
How many spankings did Johnny get?
1, 2, 3 . . . [keep counting until the jumper makes a mistake]
orCinderella, dressed in yella
went upstairs to kiss a fella
made a mistake
and kissed a snake
how many doctors
did it take?
1, 2, 3 . . . [keep counting until the jumper makes a mistake]
By the age of three, many children are already making up their own songs, or versions of songs they’ve been taught, generating variations on the heard melodic/rhythmic patterns of their culture in much the same way they generate variations of speech patterns. This sort of spontaneous experimentation suggests that the predisposition toward melody and rhythm variation is hardwired in the brain; it may have been necessary to our ancestors, contributing to reproductive fitness.
Ian and I continued to talk by the Espoo pond. “Ultimately,” Ian continued, “music developed as a ‘communicative medium optimally adapted for the management of social uncertainty.’ ” Whether music preceded or followed language is not the point, Ian argued, because for tens of thousands of years both would have existed, and evolution, the brain, and culture would have accommodated to both.
“The very thing that music lacks—external referents—makes it optimal for situations of uncertainty,” Ian continued. “When social situations are difficult, confrontational—such as encounters with strangers, changes in social affiliations, disputed courses of action—the fact that language so unambiguously denotes individual feelings, attitudes, and intentions can tip situations into dangerous physical conflict. Language can become a social liability. But let’s imagine the possibility of access to a parallel system of communication, one that by its very nature tends to promote a sense of affiliation, unity, bonding. And . . .” Ian paused, his eyes reflecting the water of the pond, “one that conveys an honest signal—a window into the true emotional and motivational state of the communicator.”
And as a signal of emotion, there may be none better than music. Consistently, across all cultures we know of, music induces, evokes, incites, and conveys emotion. This is especially true of the music in traditional societies. And in laboratories, music is probably the most reliable (nonpharmaceutical) agent we have for mood induction. If music and mood/emotion are that closely tied, there must be an evolutionary explanation.
One evolutionary explanation for the relationship between music and emotion comes from the awareness that emotion is intimately related to motivation in humans and animals. So in looking for the connection, we might first ask: How could music have served as a motivator among nonhuman animals? Brains co-evolved with the world and have incorporated certain physical regularities and principles of the physical world. One of those principles is that larger objects, because of their increased mass, tend to make sounds of a lower pitch when they impact with the earth, or when they are struck (because in the latter case, their resonant frequency is lower as a function of their larger size).
The ancestral mouse that learned to pay attention to low-pitched sounds would have avoided being stepped on by elephants. In fact, very few of those that lacked this ability would have ended up being ancestors to any future mice, because they would have gotten stepped on. A sensitivity to certain frequencies, and to intensity and rhythm, would have been important. You don’t want to be too sensitive and startle to everything, or you end up staying in your mousehole all the time and you never get out to acquire food or a mouse mate. You need to startle to all the right things but only those. At the same time, if low-frequency signals indicate large size, some mice might have stumbled upon the fact that if they made low-pitched sounds with their throats and mouths, it might serve to intimidate other mice (if not elephants).
It may be a long way from frequency sensitivity in mice to music in man, but it is a robust beginning. Thousands of small adaptations would have helped different species to find their ecological niche. It only takes one line of mutations in a single family tree to combine pitch selectivity with rhythmic sensitivity, and the foundations of the musical brain are there, waiting to be exploited when an enlarged prefrontal cortex figures out what to do with all that auditory discriminability. Before looking at how these brain developments may have occurred, however (which I’ll unpack in Chapter 7), I’d like to look more closely at just what knowledge songs really are and how they work.
Today, music is produced by few and consumed by many. But this is a situation of such historical and cultural rarity that it should hardly be considered. The dominant mode of musicality throughout the world and throughout history has been communal and participatory. We’ve seen the change even in a few generations. One hundred years ago, families would gather around after supper and sing and play music together to pass the time. In her memoir of 1880s Manhattan, Paula Robison writes:Vicarious musical pleasure by radio and phonograph, while it encourages listening to good music, seems to put a damper on musical self-expression. [In our childhood] we sang more. Children sang at school and in their play. Folks sang as they worked, indoors and out. Even drunks do not sing in the streets and buses as entertainingly as in [those] days.
We see echoes of our shared history today in summer camps and on school buses. Knowledge songs may well have been the first, and David Huron observes that the flavor and sense of them is preserved here in North America in what he calls “yellow school bus songs.” These are songs such as “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and “The Ants Go Marching” and even “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.” Songs like this are primarily teaching songs. “99 Bottles” and “The Ants” teach children to count. “The Wheels on the Bus” helps to construct and reinforce the physical and social order of the environment, encoding the perceptions into age-appropriate schemata: The baby in the bus cries, the wheels go round and round, the wipers go whoosh-whoosh, and so on. These songs simultaneously teach children things they need to know about the world and about musical forms and structure.
Another class of songs sung or chanted by children all over the world is selection or counting-out rhymes, the most famous of which in North America is probably this one:Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe
[At this point, regional variations kick in; one researcher found
several dozen different endings. The one I learned went like this:]
My mother told me to pick the very best one and you are not it.
[The person pointed to is “out,” and the game continues until only
one player is “in.” That person then is “it” in whatever activity
is being selected for.]
The interesting thing about such rhymes is that they are passed on almost entirely by oral tradition. No child reads the rhyme in a book, and typically children learn them from other children, not from adults. The rhythmic aspects of the songs and the vocal-motor coordination required to point and recite them effectively are practice for more adult activities. Children who are part of such a circle of counting out are very vigilant about violations of pointing or counting, making the reciter start over if there is even the slightest mistake. The game is socially reinforced and serves as preparation for more sophisticated songs that children inevitably learn, and that carry more i
mportant meaning. Across all of North America, the fixedness and similarity of different versions is extraordinary.
Many children’s songs also help to train memory, and although the songs themselves do not impart knowledge, they are the juvenile precursors of epics and ballads that do. “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” or “An Only Kid, An Only Kid” are examples of songs that continue on, with each verse invoking earlier verses in an interconnected narrative, so that by the end of the song the memory load is quite high. Young children typically remember isolated phrases and try to emulate older children who can make it all the way (or nearly all the way) through the entire story. Vivid imagery and animals—both things that appeal to children’s developing imaginations—help to preserve the concepts of these songs, and the children may learn the words as secondary, or subsidiary, to their mental images of the story. The most effective of these songs additionally use poetic devices—rhyme, alliteration, and assonance—to help constrain the possible words and give children a jump start in memorizing them. It is through songs such as “I Know an Old Lady” that many children first learn about the food chain: The spider swallows the fly, the bird eats the spider, the cat eats the bird, and so on. (It is also the first exposure of many children to a more adultlike vocabulary word, “absurd” [placed to rhyme with “bird” in the second verse]. )
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 14