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

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  “I think the first song was just abstract fun with sound. You know, opening your mouth and going ‘Aaaaa Ooooo Aaaaa Eeeee Aye!’ And once you’ve developed that as a sense of play, or a sense of opening the trachea and breathing—putting stuff out in the atmosphere—then songs come from there. But they’re essentially fun; it’s fun to make those sounds. I’ve noticed that when I sing in concerts, just playing with vowels, there’s a shamanic element to sound. Magical—creating a mood of a numinous feeling of connection to everything.”

  “Sound is different than sight,” I offered, “because when you see things, it feels like they’re out there, but when you hear them it feels like they’re in here.” I pointed to my head.

  “Yes—sound joins the inner world to the outer world. What I do in the live Police show a lot is I use a couple of vowels with the audience . . .”

  “Ee-oh-oh.”

  “Yes, I use ‘ee-oh’ a lot. In Italian it means ‘me.’ I don’t know what that says about my psychology! But it’s something that the audience clearly gets off on. And it’s a simple vowel thing—it creates this bond, it creates this link between us all. And you can fill the whole stadium with it. I don’t know whether it’s meaningless or not, but it definitely has some sort of power—and it’s not personal power. The thing itself has a power, has a sense of connection. They’re probably the most effective songs, really.”

  “You do that in ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,’ and in ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.’ ”

  “Yes, and you’ll hear me do it tonight in ‘Walkin’ on the Moon’ and another song too. It’s powerful. People relate to it; they feel the joy and the magic. So getting back, I think that the first ‘song’ was a caveman just playing with sound and other people joined him and they liked it—it felt good. And he would have been moving—there can’t be any music without movement.”

  “I think songs spring from the surrounding environment, and are archetypal,” Rodney told me. “I think the first song was probably the caveman equivalent of ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ If you go back to cavemen—if they were going to illustrate life using sound—the sun would be the first thing they’d want to sing about, and they’d sing about if joyfully. . . . You give music to what you feel in your senses, to your sensibilities, your perceptions; I would walk out on a day like today and the first thing I would notice was what the sun was doing. That would be my first song. Of course the Jimmie Davis song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ is about a person, but for a caveman, a song about the sun is really a song about Creation. The sun is this ball of fire; it’s light and heat and ultimately represents survival. What we do as songwriters, as creators, is to acknowledge our surroundings. We try to do with music what painters do with paint.”

  Joy songs are found in every corner of human experience where we might look for them. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was an immigrant to the United States from Germany. Like many, she came to the U.S. to escape terrible tyranny and oppression, leaving a country where her parents were shot by soldiers right in front of her eyes as they sat in their living room. She told me when I was eight that she woke early every morning to sing “God Bless America.” She sang it for me every time I saw her, her voice trembling through her thick accent, her body shaking and overflowing with joy and thankfulness that she had been saved, that she had lived long enough to see her freedom and the freedom of six grandchildren.

  When she turned eighty, my mother and I bought her a little eighty-dollar electronic keyboard. She didn’t know how to play it, but we attached pieces of masking tape with numbers on them to show her the correct order of the notes for that song. Within six months she had learned to plink it out, and she played and sang “God Bless America” every morning until she died at ninety-six. She sang it as if her life depended on it. And maybe it did. She eventually learned how to play a rudimentary harmony. I wonder if having music prolonged her life; it certainly made what time she had more purposeful and meaningful. Neuroscientists have recently found that playing music can modulate levels of dopamine, the so-called feel-good hormone in the brain. The exact mechanism by which this happens is not well understood, but the secretion of feel-good chemicals in the brain in response to playing and listening to music points to an ancient and evolutionarily advantageous connection between music and mood. As I showed in Chapter 2, those of our ancestors who were able to communicate with music, and who enjoyed musical communication, may well have been at a distinct advantage in their ability to forge social bonds, diffuse tense social situations (that might otherwise have led to combat and death), and convey their emotional states to those around them. What we know for certain is that increases in dopamine lead to elevated mood and help to boost the immune system. The joy of playing music, the sound and sense of mastery, may well have played Grandma into her late nineties.

  Her husband, my grandpa Max, bought a large conga drum on a trip to Cuba before I was born, and whenever he came over, he would sing songs to Grandma while beating his two hands on the skin of the drum. I know now that they had a difficult and stormy marriage, but all I remember of it is the look that came on her face when he sang to her and played that drum—a look of utter enchantment and forgiveness. He would sing—badly, by everyone else’s account—and she would melt, the lines in her brow relaxing until she would start to laugh, and gently stroke his hair. The ebullient joy he brought to his singing and drumming were infectous and disarming.

  Joy songs today are found everywhere from the scat singing of Ella Fitzgerald to that of the Azerbaijani singer Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, from “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” to Ren & Stimpy extolling the virtues of their favorite toy, in “Log Blues”:What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs

  Rolls over your neighbor’s dog?

  What’s great for a snack and fits on your back?

  It’s Log, Log, Log!

  It’s Log, Log, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.

  It’s Log, Log, it’s better than bad, it’s good!

  Everyone wants a Log! You’re gonna love it, Log!

  Come on and get your Log! Everyone needs a Log!

  In fact, advertisers in the last thirty years have become the chief creators and purveyors of pure joy music, as they vie to have our good moods and positive neural chemistry associated with their products. Based on their jingles, we are meant to believe that pure, undiluted joy will come to those who eat Peter Paul candies (“Sometimes you feel like a nut—sometimes you don’t”), drink Pepsi (“It’s the Pepsi generation, comin’ at ya, goin’ strong/ Put yourself behind a Pepsi/If you’re living, you belong”), or drive a Chevrolet (“See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet!”). The company that manufactured the children’s toy Slinky turned a spring into a perennial children’s favorite, largely on the basis of their catchy song! (And it was this song that Ren & Stimpy were parodying when they tried to show that even a log could be a fun toy if given the right song.)

  The prominance, if not dominance, of joy songs in the commercial sphere today points to a plausible role for them during evolutionary time frames. The group member who could make others feel good, either through grooming, sexual activity, providing more food, and so on, was one who became valued and could ascend to the position of group leader, in which case the community would work to meet his needs for him. Communication by sound allowed a potential leader to spread his influence around to many more at a time than could be done by one-on-one grooming.

  Confucius reportedly said, “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” Two thousand years later, Nietzsche—who on most other matters couldn’t be farther removed from the ideas of Confucius—wrote “My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection: that is why I need music.” Music and health are intimately related in human history, from shamanic healing to “witch doctors,” from the Hebrews to current-day programs of music therapy. King David played the harp to relieve the stress of King Saul (Samuel I, 16:1-23), and the ancient Greeks (in particu
lar Zenocrates, Sarpander, and Arien) used harp music to ease the outbursts of people with mental illnesses. Music-as-therapy was also employed by such geographically disparate cultures as the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Native Americans. Health benefits have been described whether patients sit and listen to music, improvise tunes, write songs, discuss lyrics, perform compositions, or actively participate in the production of music. Music is claimed to be beneficial for patients of any age, ethnic or religious background, or stage of illness.

  Before getting too swept up in this, however, let’s look at the science behind it. Scientists are understandably skeptical of claims that are not properly substantiated, or of findings that don’t reveal the mechanism underlying the observation. For example, we know that singing releases endorphins (again, a “feel good” hormone) but why is not known, and this lack of a causal understanding makes many scientists uncomfortable about the connection between singing and endorphins. Could it be primarily an artifact of the breathing involved? If it is specific to singing, why would this be so?

  As the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus reminds us, the brain has been shaped by evolution and adaptations that arose independently of one another to solve specific problems. Among other things, brain adaptations occurred in order to help us reach core goals of finding food, avoiding disease and predators, conserving energy, circumventing danger, seeking physical comfort (including homeostasis to protect our bodies and organs), encouraging reproduction, and ensuring the successful maturation of offspring. To this list David Huron adds adaptations such as the ability to anticipate the future, solve puzzles, distinguish animate from inanimate objects, identify friends and enemies, and avoid being manipulated or deceived.

  The way in which the brain encourages us to pursue adaptive goals is that it has assembled a system of rewards and punishments through evolution. These rewards and punishments are affected through our emotions—what I defined in Chapter 2 as neurochemical states in the brain that motivate us to act. In other words, emotions and motivation are two sides of the same evolutionary coin. We experience positive or negative emotions as a consequence of the particular neurochemical soup that is in our brains at any particular time, and these emotions cause us to act (or refrain from acting) in particular ways. Pain is one of nature’s ways of preventing us from doing things that are harmful; pleasure is a way to motivate us to undertake actions that will increase our adaptive fitness—reproducing, eating, sleeping, and so on. Recall Daniel Dennett’s argument that we don’t find babies cute because they are instrinsically cute; rather, we are the descendants of people who nurtured and protected their babies and were intrinsically rewarded (through cuteness detectors, let’s say) for doing so. If we find the smell of rotten food or feces disgusting, it is not because they really and truly smell bad (in any objective sense), but because those of our ancestors who had a genetic mutation that caused them to avoid these things (by co-opting their olfactory sense) were those who fared better in the genetics arms race to pass on their genes. When we find something pleasurable or displeasurable, it is often because tens of thousands of years of brain evolution have selected for those emotions; natural selection has favored them because they led to motivational states that served our ancestors well in the competition for resources, mates, and health.

  In “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” when Marvin Gaye sings:People say believe half of what you see

  Son, and none of what you hear

  I can’t help but bein’ confused—if it’s true please tell me dear

  he is expressing skepticism about his relationship, an evolutionarily adaptive trait if experienced under reasonable circumstances and in reasonable amounts, because it is maladaptive in the long run for a male to care for a female who might be mating with another man—in effect, the song’s protagonist might be tricked into sharing his resources with a child that is not his.

  The emotional flip side of the song might well be “Suspicious Minds” (as recorded by Elvis Presley):Why can’t you see

  What you’re doing to me

  When you don’t believe a word I say?

  We can’t go on together

  With suspicious minds

  And we can’t build our dreams

  On suspicious minds.

  Too much suspicion erodes the foundation of trust necessary for most long-term human cooperative ventures. The crucial point of all this is that suspicion, trust, conciliation, and even love—indeed all emotions—are products of evolution by natural selection. David Huron sums it up eloquently: “The only emotions we experience are emotions that have arisen through natural selection as adaptations that enhance survival. Jealousy, embarrassment, hunger, disgust, ecstasy, suspicion, indignation, sympathy, itchiness, love—all are adaptations. . . . Nature doesn’t build mental devices whose purpose isn’t related to adaptive fitness.”

  How does music fit into the pleasure and fitness story? There is no debating that music can induce pleasure, and that those same chemicals help to boost the immune system. But the neurophysiological machinery involved in pleasure is highly complex. Although there do exist discrete “pleasure centers” in the brain, dozens of neurotransmitters and brain regions contribute to feelings of pleasure. On the research side, while there are many reported cases of music having a positive, and sometimes extraordinarily powerful, effect on the ill, there have been few true experiments performed to document this. The sheer number of anecdotes is impressive, but does not constitute scientific proof, any more than the sheer number of reports of alien abductions constitutes proof of little green men conducting grisly experiments aboard metal saucers that hover above Kansas and Nebraska. (Why the alien abductions seem to happen with greater frequency in the Plains states is another mystery calling out for an explanation.)

  Scientists are in the business of wanting proof for everything, and I find myself caught somewhere in the metaphorical middle on this issue. As a musician, I’m reminded on a daily basis of the utterly ineffable, indescribable powers of music. I’ve also witnessed the healing power of music firsthand. In old people’s homes and convalescent hospitals, when people have lost their memory due to Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, or other degenerative brain trauma, music is one of the last things to go. Old people who are otherwise unable to remember the names of their spouse or children, or even what year it is, can be brought arrestingly back to focus by hearing the music of their youth—songs that they sing along with, tap their feet to, and can remember all the notes and lyrics of. I’ve seen patients who could barely move, people with Parkinson’s who couldn’t walk, who can suddenly walk, trot, dance, and skip as soon as I start playing Glenn Miller or Artie Shaw on the rest-home CD player. There are reported cases of children with Down syndrome who can’t tie their shoes unless the sequence is set to music.

  This ineffable power of music shows up not just in listeners but also in creators of music. The great songwriters and improvisers talk about not so much creating music, but having it written through them, as though the music comes from outside their bodies and their heads, and they are merely the conduit for it. Many great musicians, particularly in Third World cultures, reach a state of total ecstasy, a trance state, while playing music, in which their minds and bodies seem to be possessed by otherwordly forces. I’ve also felt this, whether improvising onstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with Mel Tormé, or writing incidental music for the film Repo Man. In describing the writing of one of my favorite songs of hers (1990’s “What We Really Want”), Rosanne Cash told me “It felt like I had just stuck up my hand and caught the song like you’d catch a ball in a catcher’s mitt—like it was out there all along waiting for me to grab it.” Our scientific theories have to be able to reconcile this common experience and the strong intuition that music is—dare I say it?—magical.

  On the research front, many of the studies on the effectiveness of music therapy were not performed according to rigorous scientific standards, and so their claims remain unproven. This
situation parallels the unfortunate history of psychic research. One of the most crucial features of a rigorous experiment is the use of the comparison or control condition. In essence, we need to ask the following question: If there were no effect at all from the thing I’m studying, would this outcome have happened anyway? Too many music therapy experiments had inadequate controls, meaning that we aren’t shown what might have happened to the people in the experiment without music therapy.

  Consider, for example, that out of twenty people who complain of headaches, a certain number are going to get better anyway if you just wait a few hours. If we play soothing classical music to twenty people with tension headaches and six of them say their headaches went away, we don’t know if some or all of those six headaches would have just gone away on their own. A control group in such an experiment should be similar in all respects to the people we’re studying, and get all the same treatment except for the one thing we’re interested in. If we give ten headache sufferers classical music and have them sit in a comfortable, sunlit room, and we give another ten headache sufferers no classical music but have them sit in an uncomfortable, darkened room, we have made the mistake of varying three parameters at once: We can’t determine which of those parameters had the effect.

  In one published study on music therapy, a group of Korean researchers took stroke survivors and gave them an eight-week program of physical therapy that involved synchronized movements to music. The patients recovered a wider range of motion and flexibility compared to a control group. So far so good. But the control group had no therapy—no personal contact, no movement (with or without music), no one rooting for them or telling them that they would get better. We don’t know now whether the benefits to the first group came from the music, the movement, or simply the good feeling that came from knowing that a medical professional was looking out for and following their progress. Health improvements have been observed with far less.