The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (17 page)

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Authors: Daniel J. Levitin

BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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We never saw Eddie again at the restaurant, and I read a few months later that his brother was killed in a knife fight in the state penitentiary. I did see him on the street a few times, standing in line at the unemployment office, and stopped to say hi. He called me “Dan Dan the Muffin Man.” We never spoke of the knife incident. Victor instituted a new rule that only he was to control the music in the back room. He hired another dishwasher, a man who was legally blind, whom he would taunt endlessly. “There’s a
spot
on this plate,” Victor would say, holding up a perfectly clean plate. “You’ll have to do it again. Be more careful—can’t you
feel
the spots? I thought you blind cripples had highly developed extrasensory perceptions. Can’t you
feel
the spots?”
 
In many of the places I’ve worked, music has been there as a soundtrack to help the employees get through their day. Of course there is no one song that everyone likes and it can be a challenge to please everyone, but when the right balance is struck, music helps to break the monotony, to comfort us through boring or stressful tasks. Many surgeons I know listen to music in the operating room—even brain surgeons! When I worked as an auto mechanic, the radio in the garage was going nonstop, tuned to the hit rock station. In my laboratory at McGill, where eight to ten people all work in a large room together, each computer workstation is equipped with its own stereo speakers and subwoofer. If the different music starts to compete, each computer station also has a set of headphones, and the students are typically found listening to their music as they perform their statistical analyses or analyze brain images. We all hear music in buses, train stations, dentists’ offices, elevators, Wal-Mart, when we’re on hold. The purpose of this is ostensibly to comfort.
Mothers from every culture sing to their infants, and have done so throughout time as far as we know. Singing can soothe and comfort infants in ways that other actions cannot, and this is in part because of how different auditory stimulation is from other senses. Sound can be transmitted in the dark, even when the baby’s eyes are closed. Auditory signals feel as though they come from inside our heads, unlike visual signals, which appear to be “out there” in the world. Before the infant’s visual apparatus is fully formed—before it can make out the difference between its mother and other adults—the auditory system is capable of recognizing the consistent timbre of its mother’s voice. Why is it that mothers instinctively sing rather than speak, and why is it that babies find song especially comforting? We don’t have the answers to this, but neurobiology shows that music—but not speech—activates areas of the human brain that are very ancient, structures we have in common with all mammals, including the cerebellum, brain stem, and pons. Song has repetition built into it—of rhythms, melodic motifs—and this repetition gives song an element of predictability that speech lacks. This predictability can be soothing.
The lullaby is the classic song of comfort. Most lullabies that we know of share structural similarities, according to my friend Jonathan Berger. Jonathan is a very highly respected composer and music cognition researcher, as befits his position as a tenured professor at Stanford. We met in his office on the Stanford campus to talk about
Six Songs,
then wandered down to the Stanford Bookstore, where, surrounded by musical scores in their extensive collection, we continued over lattes.
“I think lullabies are, in a way, arguably in a separate class because (a) they’re functional; they’re for calming someone else. They’re not for calming you. And (b) they have a formulaic pattern. David Huron mentions this, where it’s a big leap and then a slow descent down and the idea is that you grab the attention and then you decrease arousal. And so there’s sort of a melodic pattern to lullabies that puts them in a class by themselves.
“And almost any lullaby fits that melodic pattern. In my undergraduate music cognition class I ask—because it’s a very international group of students—‘Sing your first lullaby that comes to mind’ and they all fit that rule. There is none that I’ve come across that doesn’t fit. [Sings Brahms’ lullaby: da da dee, da da dee, da da DEE da da da dah] There it is, on the ninth note, the large leap. And then stepwise motion from there.”
Music theorist Ian Cross disagrees that lullabies are only for comforting the infant. “First-time mothers experience a great deal of uncertainty and apprehension about their newborns. ‘What do I do with
this
?’ ” Singing mutually calms the mother and child. Because it requires regular, rhythmic breathing, it can serve as a kind of meditation for the mother. The slow, steady rhythms of singing lullabies can stabilize respiration, and also heart rate, lower the pulse, and cause muscle relaxation.
Another and perhaps not obvious form of comforting music is music made for the disaffected and disenfranchised. Teenagers who feel misunderstood, cut off, and alone find allies in lyricists who sing of similar alienation. In affluent societies around the world, so many teenagers feel as though they don’t fit in, that they’re not among the cool; they feel lonesome and alone. These function as bonding and friendship songs, for sure, and simultaneously as comfort songs. In the seventies, some of us listened to musicians who sang about things that were not discussed—free sex, smoking cigarettes or marijuana out in back of the school (think Brownsville Station and “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” or the Animals and “Tobacco Road”). The implicit message of these songs was “You’re one of us—you’re not alone—the things you think and feel are normal.” Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” addressed the millions of teenage girls (and boys) who felt they didn’t fit in because they were not attractive enough:
To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me.
 
In the eighties and nineties, Michael Stipe with R.E.M. and Morrissey (first with the Smiths and then as a solo artist) reached millions of listeners with their songs of depression, alienation, and detachment.
Today when high schoolers feel misunderstood they listen to hip-hop and rap and lyrics such as “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio:
I’m living life do or die, what can I say?
I’m twenty-three now but will I live to see twenty-four
The way things is going I don’t know.
 
Some comfort songs are refrains, intended to calm us in the face of danger, or soothe us when facing death (either our own, or the death of a close one). In “Death Is Not the End,” Bob Dylan creates a simultaneously anthemic and anesthetic refrain: “When you’re sad and lonely and you haven’t got a friend, just remember that death is not the end . . . When the cities are on fire, with the burning flesh of men, just remember that death is not the end.” As with many songs, the lyrical intent is ambiguous. Is Dylan singing to someone who has just lost a friend, telling her that the friend is not really dead? Or is he suggesting the recipient of the song might consider suicide? Either way, the message that death is just a portal, not the end, and you will live on afterward, is more comforting than the alternative, that death ends everything definitively.
David Byrne described three songs that he reaches for when he feels he needs comfort, or in his words, “consoling”: “I Don’t Wanna Talk About It Now,” “Michelangelo,” and “Boulder to Birmingham,” all written by Emmylou Harris, whose voice Rodney Crowell describes as “equal parts siren and Earth angel—the embodiment of the feminine, the voice you’d want to take to the oft mentioned deserted island.” (“Boulder” was cowritten by Bill Danoff, who wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the John Denver hit, and “Afternoon Delight,” a hit for the Starland Vocal Band.)
I don’t want to hear a love song, I got on this airplane just to fly
And I know there’s life below
But all that it can show me is the prairie and the sky
 
“ ‘Boulder to Birmingham’ is the one she did with Gram Parsons. Somebody beautifully pouring out some pain but not just screaming out like they hit their thumb with a hammer. Pain, but in a much more slow, heartfelt way.”
I asked if he ever picked up the guitar and sang one of his
own
songs for consolation, if they had that effect on him.
“Once in a while,” he said. “There’s a few—usually more of the recent ones. There are a few that I occasionally play, that I enjoy. The singing is kind of consoling, or cathartic, or soothing to me; which is something that I always wanted to be able to do: to write a song that would be a tool that I could use for myself the way I’ve been able to use other people’s songs. There’s two from my album
Look into the Eyeball:
‘The Revolution’ and ‘The Great Intoxication.’”
 
The Revolution
Amplifiers & old guitars
Country music sung in bars
& when she sings the revolution’s near
 
 
Beauty holds the microphone
& watches as we stumble home
& she can see the revolution now
 
Dirt & fish & trees & houses
Smoke & hands up women’s blouses
Not like I expected it would be
 
Bubbles pop in every size
It’s analyzed & criticized
& beauty knows that it is almost here
 
Beauty goes to her address
She shuts the door and climbs the stairs
& when she sleeps the revolution grows
Beauty rests on mattress strings
Wearing just her underthings
& when she wakes the revolution’s here
& when she wakes the revolution’s here
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans were in need of comfort. To a majority of us, the unthinkable, the unanticipatable had occurred with the sudden, coordinated set of surprise attacks on U.S. soil. It wasn’t just our national pride that was injured, but our very sense of safety and security. Many commentators noted that interviews taken with Americans on the street over the few weeks immediately following the attacks were notable for this profound sense of injury, and also for a relative lack of aggressive feelings of wanting to retaliate—those feelings of a militaristic nature came only later, and (arguably) as a result of political rhetoric from the White House. During the initial aftermath, radio and television stations, train stations and bus depots, and many public places began to pipe music to Americans. And what did they play? Not the battle-tinged refrains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but a song written by an immigrant in 1918, near the end of World War I, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” “That song spontaneously became our de facto national anthem,” says Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, a spiritual leader in Los Angeles, “at a time when people were looking for something with which to express themselves, and to bond. It’s amazing—the capacity of that simple melody to unite the country in a way that was both comforting and brought strength—it crossed all divides.”
 
My friend Amy was diagnosed with a brain tumor a few months ago and is now undergoing radiation therapy. Every day she has to report to the hospital and lie perfectly still for an hour, with a Hannibal Lecter-style titanium mask bolted to her head to prevent even the slightest movement that could cause the proton density beams to miss their mark. It is a very uncomfortable and frightening experience for her. The neurosurgeon who is treating her told her to bring in music every day to the treatment sessions because he knew, based on published research, it helps to relieve anxiety and reduce the painful effects of the procedure. Amy brought in Sting’s
The Dream of the Blue Turtles
for her first session, and
Nothing Like the Sun
for the second one. I doubt Sting ever imagined his masterpieces being used in this context, but it has transformed for Amy what could have been a nausea-filled, adrenaline-toxic ordeal into a tolerable if not somewhat aesthetic experience.
Country music lyrics often tell of a love gone bad, or of Hank Williams’s now iconic “cheatin’ heart.” So much of recovery is knowing we’re not alone and that we’re understood. And good music, like good poetry, can elevate a story to give it a sense of the universal, of something larger than we or our own problems are. Art can move us so because it helps to connect us to higher truths, to a sense of being part of a global community—in short, to not being alone. And that is what comfort songs are all about.
While I was dining with Joni Mitchell at an outdoor restaurant once, two women in their late forties approached us, recognizing her. “We just wanted to thank you,” they said, apologizing for interrupting her meal. “We had a really hard time getting through our twenties. This was the 1970s,” they explained. “We listened to your album
Blue
and it made us feel better. Before Prozac there was
you
!”
When we are sad, many of us turn to sad music. Why would that be? On the surface of things, you might expect that sad people would be uplifted by
happy
music. But this is not what research shows. Prolactin, a tranquilizing hormone, is released when we’re sad. Sorrow does have an evolutionary purpose, which is to help us conserve energy and reorient our priorities for the future after a traumatic event. Prolactin is released after orgasm, after birth, and during lactation in females. A chemical analysis of tears reveals that prolactin is not always present in tears—it is not released in tears of lubrication of the eye, or when the eye is irritated, or in tears of joy; it is only released in tears of sorrow. David Huron suggests that sad music allows us to “trick ” our brain into releasing prolactin in response to the safe or imaginary sorrow induced by the music, and the prolactin then turns around our mood.

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