The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  I have used the word song as a convenient shorthand and, in its most inclusive sense, as a stand-in for music in all its forms, to refer to any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics. I’m particularly interested in that portion of musical compositions that people remember, carry around in their heads long after the sound has died out, sounds that people try to repeat later in time, to play for others; the sounds that comfort them, invigorate them, and draw them closer together. I confess that I unwittingly came to this project with the bias that the best songs become popular and are sung by many. Maybe my background in the music industry put that bias in place. After all, “Happy Birthday” has been translated into nearly every language on earth (even into Klingon, as fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation can attest; the song is called “qoSlIj DatIvjaj”).

  Pete Seeger set me straight on this, telling me about how in some cultures, the best songs are meant to be sung and played for only one other person! Seeger is the great folk singer-songwriter who penned such songs as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer,” and “Turn, Turn, Turn” (the latter with lyrics taken from Ecclesiastes).

  “Among American Indians,” Seeger explained, “a young man got his eye on a girl and he would make a reed flute and compose a melody. And when she came down to get a pail of water at the brook, he would hide in the weeds and play her his tune. If she liked it, she followed and saw where things led. But it was her special tune. A tune wasn’t thought of as being free for everybody. It belonged to one person. You might sing somebody’s song after they’re dead to recall them, but each person had a private song. And of course today, many small groups feel their song belongs to them and they’re not happy when it becomes something that belongs to everybody.”

  The fact is we are all biased to some degree by our specific life history and culture. I carry the biases of an American male growing up in California in the 1950s and 1960s. But I was lucky to have been exposed to a wide variety of music. My parents took me to see ballet and musicals before I was five, and through them (The Nutcracker and Flower Drum Song) I gained an early appreciation for Eastern scales and intervals—neuroscientists now believe that such early exposure to other tonal systems is important for later appreciation of music outside one’s own culture. Just as all of us can acquire any of the world’s languages as young children if we are exposed to them, so too can our brains learn to extract the rules and the structures of any of the world’s musics if we’re exposed to them early enough. This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to speak other languages later in life, or learn to appreciate other musics, but if we encounter them as young children, we develop a natural way of processing them because our brains literally wire themselves up to the sounds of these early experiences. Through my father I developed a love of big bands and swing, through my mother a love of piano music and Broadway standards. My mother’s father loved Cuban and Latin music, as well as Eastern European folk songs. Hearing Johnny Cash on the radio when I was six conditioned me for country, blues, bluegrass, and folk music.

  A sentiment that I’ve heard many times is that classical music cannot be compared to anything else. “How can you honestly say that that repetitive, loud garbage called rock and roll is even close to the sublime music of the great masters?” To take this position is to ignore the inconvenient fact that a major source of joy and inspiration for the great masters themselves was the “common” popular music of their day. Mozart, Brahms, and even great-grandaddy Bach took many of their melodic ideas from ballads, bards, European folk music, and children’s songs. Good melody (let alone rhythm) knows no boundaries of class, education, or upbringing.

  Most of us could effortlessly construct a list of our favorite songs, of songs that just make us feel joyful, or comforted, or spiritual, that remind us of who we are, who we loved, of groups we belong to. When I ask people to do this in my laboratory, it is always surprising to see how diverse these lists are. Music is large. It is made by as many different types of people, with as many different backgrounds, as there are listeners. New forms of music are being invented and evolving from earlier forms every day. And each new song is a link in a millennia-long chain of evolutionary enhancements to previous song building—slight alterations in the “genetic structure” of one song lead us to a new one.

  Some songs celebrate a particular individual, but then become enhanced (or diluted) by overapplication and overgeneralization. Anyone named Maria or Michelle in the 1960s (think Bernstein and Beatles) or Alison or Sally in the 1970s (think Elvis Costello and Eric Clapton) knows what it is like to be accosted by the song bearing your name, mentioned by a friend or new acquaintance intoxicated by his own wit at having made this childishly simple connection. Anyone who has the lack of common sense to actually sing you the song with your name in it suffers from the doubly foolish notion that she was the first one to think of doing so. My own past has been bothered, annoyed, and taunted by endless choruses of “Danny Boy” or “Daniel” (Elton John), by people expecting me to howl at their cleverness. Steely Dan have made it a habit, a fashion even, to elevate main characters with uncommon names like Rikki, Josie, and Dupree. But the rarer the name, of course, the more exuberant is the tormentor. I have actually known people named Maggie Mae, Roxanne, Chuck E., and John-Jacob (think Rod Stewart, the Police, Rickie Lee Jones, and an old children’s song), and they are astonished when people sing these songs to them as though no one has ever thought to do this before.

  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 f
orces 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 pr
ocreate 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.