The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (22 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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Recall from Chapter 1 that a mark of most effective poetry is that it has its own rhythm, a music about it that we hear when we recite it out loud. If poetic rhythm, combined with the sorts of other poetic devices we looked at in Chapter 1, really helps us to remember poetic text, you might expect that people would have better memory for poems than straight text, and moreover, that their errors would be more similar to those we find in music recollection. Both of these turn out to be true. David Rubin asked undergraduates to recite from memory the 23rd Psalm, which contains many poetic elements but (in the English version) lacks rhyme. Here, most undergraduates started up again at a later point in the psalm after they stopped (and it was usually at the beginning of a new section that they came in). It seems as though the internal rhythms of the psalm kept on playing in the students’ heads, and they jumped in whenever they could recall a word. (Don’t forget that the Psalms, as originally composed, were set to music.)
Additional evidence for the notion that people “play back” such recollections in their heads comes from my own experiments with Princeton computer scientist Perry Cook. We found that when college undergraduates sang their favorite songs from memory, they tended to sing them at almost exactly the right tempo. If they forgot words, they kept going and jumped in later, again at what
would have been
the right place if they’d kept on going, as though the band kept playing and they simply came in at the next appropriate moment. And from their own subjective reports, all of them had vivid mental imagery of the music. They weren’t so much trying to reproduce the song from memory as
singing along
with a track in their heads.
Getting back to the memorization of text, when very long word sequences are involved, we typically resort to two tried-and-true mnemonic techniques: rote memorization and chunking. Rote memorization is simply reciting a sequence back over and over again (often in the quiet privacy of our own minds) until we’ve got it. This is how most of us learned our multiplication tables in grammar school, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Gettysburg Address, or the Preamble to the Constitution. The interesting thing here, though, is that not all words are created equal in rote memorization. Some words take on more importance because of the expressive emphasis we are taught to give them, some because they evoke particularly pleasant or vivid imagery, and some because they contain certain (preplanned, on the part of their writers) poetic qualities. Internal rhymes, assonance, and alliteration of a Cole Porterish quality help to reinforce the Gettysburg Address for example (maybe because assonance makes the heart grow fonder):
Four
score and seven years ago
Our
fathers
brought
forth
 
We see the repetition of the f sound here acting as a mnemonic, as well as the repetition of the long o sound in
four, score, ago, forth
.
When the text we’re trying to memorize is more than a dozen or so words long, we tend very naturally and without coaching to break it up into bite-sized, more readily memorized, sanitized and organized units, or chunks, and then stitch these chunks together later. This is also how musicians memorize pieces they perform. With the exception of special neurological cases of people with photographic memory (or the auditory equivalent, what I call
pho nographic
memory), most musicians, dancers, actors, and other performance artists, young and old, do not sit down and learn a new piece from front to back all at once. They concentrate on getting a small part of it just right and then they learn another small part. They then spend some time learning the transitions from one part to another. The evidence for this process remains long after the piece has been committed to memory and its performance is flawless: Actors who have to redo a take often ask to go back to the beginning of the line, paragraph, or scene. Musicians return to the beginning of the phrase. Bring out the score, point to an arbitrary note where you’d like them to start in a memorized piece, and most musicians will ask to start somewhere else, at the beginning of some chunk that they learned. When musicians make errors in prepared pieces, these errors provide additional clues to the way the piece was originally learned. It is more common for a musician to skip an entire section (a failure to remember how the chunks were stitched together) than for a musician to skip a note or short group of notes within a section.
Between
-section errors are far more common than
within
-section errors. Not all notes or words are equally salient.
The Gettysburg Address is substantially easier to memorize than multiplication tables, which typically require pure rote memorization. Personally, I remember having great difficulty with these in grammar school. I made a little card with them written down, and while I walked to school or had a spare minute, I would glance at the card and test my memory. With no rhythm or melody to attach the numbers to, pure brute force of repetition was required: two times two is four; two times three is six; two times four is eight. I got up to the sixes without too much difficulty, but well into high school I couldn’t remember the “twelves” unless I started from a part of the tables that had personal meaning for me, the one that represented my height in inches at the time I was originally trying to memorize them: Twelve times four is forty-eight. If I wanted to recall twelve times eight, I’d have to start my “poem” at this salient point and work my way up: twelve times four is forty-eight; twelve times five is sixty; twelve times six is seventy-two; twelve times seven is eighty-four; twelve times eight is ninety-six. Because of incessant teasing from my neighbor in third grade, Billy Latham (an excellent drummer at the time, by the way), who had learned
his
tables all the way up to twelve times twelve, I had also memorized the one that Billy taunted and drilled me with most frequently: twelve times nine.
The reality of these chunks has been demonstrated many times in psychology laboratories. Asked to sing song lyrics from memory, beginning from an arbitrary point, people have great difficulty. Asked even to answer simple questions about lyrics they know, people are influenced by the hierarchical structure of the lyrics—revealing in the laboratory certain organizational properties of human memory. Here’s an example. Does the word
my
appear anywhere in the lyrics to the song “Hotel California”? What about the word
welcome
? Both words do appear,
my
is the ninth word in the song, and
welcome
is the ninety-sixth word. But people take
longer
to say yes to the first question than to the second, and psychologists believe this is because
welcome
is the first word of the chorus, a privileged position in the hierarchy of your memory for the piece.
Most North American children learn the alphabet by learning the letters set to the melody of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” (the same melody as the beginning of “Ba Ba Black Sheep”). The song has phrase boundaries because of its rhythmic structure, gaps between the letters
g
and
h, k
and
l, p
and
q, s
and
t,
and
v
and
w,
forming natural “chunks”:
abcd efg hijk lmnop qrs tuv wxyz
 
Indeed, most children don’t memorize this all at one sitting, but rather they work their way up, memorizing these small units. The rhyming scheme helps too: The ends of all the chunks rhyme with each other except chunks three and five. Even though as adults we know the letters of the alphabet (or think we do), many of us still rely on that song when searching for the specific location of a letter. In one experiment, it was found that it takes college undergraduates much longer to say what letter comes just before
h, l, q,
or
w
than before
g, k, p,
and
v.
Crossing the chunked boundary carries with it some cognitive cost.
Notwithstanding what I said about errors at phrase boundaries, some professional musicians and Shakespearean actors do indeed have perfect recall for a memorized string and can begin anywhere; this ability probably develops from
overlearning
processes, and under stress it may disappear. Something like it shows up in even semiprofessional or amateur actors and musicians when they need to start from the very beginning of a piece. Effectively, their “stitching together” of subcomponents has worked so well that the entire piece, though at one time consisting of small units, has become a single memory trace, not easily disassembled, occasionally indestructible, lasting a lifetime, and sometimes outlasting even the memory of their own family members’ names.
The use of chunking and the occasional inviolability of long, overlearned sequences is not confined to contemporary Western society. The Greeks discussed these ideas in formulating instructions for mnemonics two thousand years ago, and the anthropologist Bruce Kapferer (from the University of Bergen in Norway) has observed them in researching the myths of Sri Lanka. In trying to form a catalog of different demons and their characteristics in a cultural group he was studying, he would ask a local oral historian to describe the myth of a particular demon. The historian would respond that the exact details were contained in a certain song. “I will sing it and you tell me when the demon you want has his name mentioned. Then I will go slow so that you can put it onto your tape recorder.” The myth information was stored in the song, and the song was known only sequentially, and only from the beginning.
Getting back to the Greeks, the 2,500-year-old
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
represent great feats of memorization, without music, but with clear poetic, rhythmic constraints doing much of the work and thus creating less demand on the brain. Their prosody is very tightly constrained. As just one example, the number of syllables per line is almost always constant, and the last five syllables in a line are almost always long-short-short followed by long-short. The ordering of short and long syllables, and the preferred locations for word breaks are formulaic—not just any word will fit the rules. For example, words containing a long-short-long or short-short-short syllabic structure can’t be used in Homeric epic at all. Obviously, if one has learned the rules for such a form, opportunities for inserting the wrong words are extremely limited.
According to Jewish tradition, the complete Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) was completely memorized by Moses, and then taught to the elders and leaders of the Hebrew people in the Sinai Desert, who in turn taught it to the million or so people who left Egypt as part of the Exodus, sometime around 1500 B.C.E. We know that the Hebrews had written language (the tablets of the Ten Commandments were written), but on Moses’s strict instruction, not one word of the Torah was to be written down, and for more than one thousand years the history, knowledge, religious customs, and practices were reportedly handed down only through oral transmission. And the form of that oral transmission, according to all accounts, was song.
Jewish mystics believe that the very
sound
of the words will bring divine favor, even if the speaker doesn’t understand the words themselves. Similarly, in the Zoroastrian tradition, it is believed that the soul (Urvaan) can be reached by the specific vibrations that come from chanting the Avesta Manthras. It’s not just the meaning of the prayers, but also their
sound
that matters, for the “attunement” of the soul. In Zoroastrianism, Staota Yasna is the theory of auditory vibration. That’s why the prayers are still recited in the original language, Avesta, even though it isn’t spoken any more.
The Qur’an was also set to rhythm and melody—a chant—and learned in a similar fashion, although it is explicitly not considered “music” and is structurally very different from Arab music we hear today; in fact
singing
the Qur’an is strictly forbidden. The Qur’an itself describes the means of its recitation (
tarteel
) in verse four: “and recite the Qur’an in slow measured rhythmic tones.” The power of song to aid memory is evidenced in a following fatwa against singing. Islamic scholars believe that “music and singing carrying obscene content, instigating to sin, lechery, destroying noble intentions and leading into temptation, are inadmissible (
haram
). . . . The degree of inadmissibility becomes higher if an obscene vocabulary acquires a musical accompaniment that contributes to a better remembering and thus enhances its impact.”
In the case of the Torah, the melody itself contained clues not only to the words, form, and structure of the narrative, but also to interpretation of words or passages that might otherwise be ambiguous. That is, the assignment of words to melody (and vice versa) was not arbitrary—it helped not only as an aid to memorization and recall but also to ensure the correct interpretation.
This sort of interplay is not at all unusual 3,500 years later. In the song “Superstar” as sung by the Carpenters (written by Leon Russell), Karen Carpenter sings the line “Long ago, and oh so far away” using a vocal technique that artfully reinforces the meaning of the words. She delays the pronunciation of the word “far,” reinforcing the idea of distance. While holding the word “away,” she brings out a subtone in her voice that conveys the sense of deep loss and separation. In Steve Earle’s “Valentine’s Day,” the singer is surprised by the arrival of the day, and realizes too late that he has forgotten to get his girlfriend a present. He writes her a song instead. The appearance of surprising and nonstandard chords underscores the meaning of the words, adding tension and deeper meaning to the lyric.

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