The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (19 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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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.
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]
or
Cinderella, 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 important 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]. )
Ubiquitous also in every culture are the kinds of knowledge songs that encode information vital to the survival of every member of the group, not warnings about crocodile aggression, but day-to-day guides such as how to cook certain dark green leaves so that they are less bitter, or where to get fresh drinking water without invading the territory of a neighboring tribe:
Over here is where we get our water
Over here is where we get our water
Where the large-winged birds drink
Once a long time ago the father of Erdu
Went to the watering place over there
Where the women of the Baklata go
And the men of the Baklata killed him
We never go there, we never go there
Over here is where we get our water
 
Early in our history, songs like this would have encoded knowledge about which foods were safe to eat and which weren’t, probably in the sort of singsong rhymes we know today as the yellow school bus songs. These knowledge songs were essentially “how to” songs: how to skin an animal; how to make a spear, a water jug, or a watertight boat. We see versions of them today in pop music, in songs such as “How to Save a Life” by the Fray, “The Locomotion” by Little Eva (and later by Grand Funk Railroad), “The Heist” by Busta Rhymes (“that’s how we make movies”), or the whimsical “How to Build a Time Machine” by Aussie singer Darren Hayes.
Some of these knowledge songs would naturally but unintentionally have encoded things that weren’t true, of course—superstitions or folk theories. Superstitions are nothing more than inaccurate conclusions drawn from observations, experience, or hearsay. They are mentioned in contemporary popular songs as diverse as Devo’s “Whip It” (“step on a crack/break your mother’s back ”), Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat,” Keith Urban’s “A Little Luck of Our Own” (“Black cat sittin’ on a ladder/Broken mirror on the wall”), and the Rolling Stones’ “Dandelion” (with the implicit message that to blow on this particular plant will give you the power to foretell the future).
With the invention of the printing press, the need for knowledge songs started to fade. In preliterate societies, they were the sole repository of cultural knowledge, history, and day-to-day procedures. They would have been fundamental to information transmission. Today knowledge songs are of a different stripe. The most well-known today is the alphabet song—every child in Western culture learns it. (“Thirty days has September” has musical aspects of rhyme, even though it is usually chanted rather than sung.) But new knowledge songs are being composed all the time. The children’s television show of the 1990s
Animaniacs
featured songs that a generation of kids used to learn such things as the states of the United States and their capitals (set to the melody of “Turkey in the Straw”) and the nations of the world (set in rhyme to the tune of the “Mexican Hat Dance”). The impressive thing about the latter composition is that composer Randy Rogel not only got the countries to rhyme, but mentions 160 of them more or less according to geographic region. Although he doesn’t mention
every
nation in the world, he excludes only a relatively small number of lesser-knowns, and even manages to slip in a joke:
United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru Republic Dominican, Cuba, Caribbean, Greenland, El Salvador too Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ven-e-zu-e-la, Honduras, Guyana and still Guatemala, Bolivia, then Argentina, and Ecuador, Chile, Brazil . . .
 
 
Norway, and Sweden, and Iceland, and Finland, and Germany, now in one piece
Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Turkey, and Greece Poland, Romania, Scotland, Albania, Ireland, Russia, Oman Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Cyprus, Iraq, and Iran
 
Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Rwanda, Mahore, and Cayman
Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Yugoslavia . . .
Crete, Mauritania
then Transylvania
Monaco, Liechtenstein
Malta, and Palestine
Fiji, Australia, Sudan

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