The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (33 page)

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

Authors: Daniel J. Levitin

BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
6.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Imagine now what is required in building and playing a flute. One needs to have at least an intuitive and practical (if not a reasoned and scientific) understanding that carving holes in a bone will allow for a change in pitch. One presumably has notes in mind before blowing, and if the flute sounds different from what is in mind, one plays around, experiments, iterates, forming some kind of convergence between the mental image and physical reality. This is of course what composers do, even the best of them, when they try out their ideas on instruments. Notwithstanding stories of Mozart and Beethoven composing entirely in their heads, the vast majority of pieces written by the vast majority of composers involved a “trying out” phase in the real world, an iterative process in which the physical and mental images of sound were brought closer together.
Indeed, many composers (like other artists) spend a great deal of time trying to match or approach some mental image, each new piece an experiment that brings them closer. If they’re not successful or otherwise unhappy with the outcome, they keep on trying. Think of Van Gogh’s series of paintings of sunflowers—why keep on painting sunflowers unless you are trying to perfect something about your representation of them? Paul Simon describes this process in music as an aesthetic goal that he approaches using a tool kit, a palette of musical ideas and techniques that he draws on to bring him closer to what he hears in his head.
“One of the main things that you have to decide when you make a record,” Paul says, “is what’s the
sound
you’re going to make on that record. And in a larger sense you have to be able to recognize what are the sounds that you like. We all have access to pools of sounds, clusters of sounds, your personal tool kit. They’re based on what you remember from a lifetime of music listening . . . what it is that you loved and collected in your mind as sounds that you like and then you go for those sounds all the time. Sometimes you don’t even
like
the sounds, but you’re stuck with them—take my voice. Sometimes I wish that that wasn’t the voice that was singing the song, but that is my voice, you know. I’m not going to cover it up or anything; sometimes it’s really appropriate to what I’m singing, sometimes it’s inappropriate, and then I wish it could be somebody else’s voice. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ is an example of where I don’t have the voice I wanted, so of course I got Artie to sing it. But if I could have had any voice, it would have been harder, more powerful, more like Otis Redding.”
This experimenting and iterating toward a specific aesthetic goal shows up in one way with Paul’s longstanding interest in polyrhythms and indigenous musics. He first explored these in 1970 with “El Condor Pasa” and “Cecilia,” further developed them on “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” and reached his artistic peak with them on a trilogy of albums,
Graceland, The Rhythm of the Saints,
and
Songs from The Capeman.
Similarly, Paul McCartney seemed to be trying to capture both the sound and the aesthetic essence of a forties dance-hall tune in a string of songs beginning with “When I’m Sixty-Four” (written in 1958, recorded in 1967), “Your Mother Should Know” (1967), and “Honey Pie” (1968). With each one, he got a little closer, until 1976, when he released “You Gave Me the Answer,” with production and orchestration sounding almost exactly like a Fred Astaire record. McCartney never attempted a dance hall-style song after this, and so I assume that he finally met his artistic goal and moved on to other experiments and other challenges.
Interestingly, this cognitive leap that brought about art didn’t follow a
sudden
change in brain size. All three features of the musical brain—perspective taking, representation, and rearrangement—arise from modes of thought that are surprisingly similar in other animals, and differences in brain anatomy that are quantifiable but not especially dramatic. This is because human mental abilities are built from existing structures found in other animals that show many similar features. In other words, there exists a continuum of mental skills in the animal kingdom, and in virtually every case of an ability, it is not that we humans have a wholly
different
ability (a difference of kind), rather, it is that we have
more
ability (a difference of degree). Darwin himself noted this.
How and why perspective taking, representation, and rearrangement came about in human brains we still don’t know, but the proximal cause of the difference was probably unexceptional. In other words, small adaptations in the prefrontal cortex, perhaps too small to detect from the fossil record, allowed neural circuitry to cross a threshold of complexity that bestowed on our lucky ancestors the brain power to make these significant cognitive leaps. But the unexceptionalness of the biological change (the cognitive result is quite exceptional) can be understood by appreciating how much of what we can do can also be done by other species.
Take language communication as an example. For years it has been argued that many species have forms of communication, but only humans have
language.
Scientists state very specific demands for what constitutes language and what doesn’t, and on the surface, the way that we humans communicate with one another does exhibit several key features that are different from what animals do. Among those features, there are no reported cases of animals
naming
things spontaneously. Some chimps and apes have succeeded in learning sign language, and dogs can learn to label objects differentially (my dog Shadow distinguishes several different toys by name including his “fuzzy man” from his “Cat in the Hat”), but this only demonstrates their ability to
link
a visual or acoustic stimulus with an object. There is no evidence that these animals understand that the name
refers
to the thing (that it has intensionality), only that they have associated the sign or sound and the object in a kind of Pavlovian, unconscious connection. Moreover, once they’ve learned to name things, animals don’t teach other animals to name things.
Another feature of human language is that it can be used reflexively. We talk about our language, discuss whether we’re using a word appropriately, we make a distinction between whether we’re relaying the gist of a conversation or quoting a person verbatim. We make “quote” symbols in the air with our fingers to indicate when we’re using a phrase literally or ironically, and we use the
music
of language—prosody—to help distinguish such literalness from irony.
A third important quality of human language is that it is infinitely expandable—every day humans produce or hear utterances that have never before been spoken, and yet we understand them. Human language is expandable in two ways. First, there is no such thing as the longest sentence in the English language (or any other language we know of), because whatever sentence you nominate for the longest, I can always make it longer by adding a clause to the front of it, such as “David Bowie thinks that . . .” So “My dog has fleas” becomes “
David Bowie thinks that
my dog has fleas.” Or the longish sentence, “The album
Brothers in Arms
by Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits, in addition to containing great songwriting and performances, may well be one of the most perfectly engineered and mixed albums in the history of recorded sound” becomes “
David Bowie thinks that
the album
Brothers in Arms
. . .” (and so on). In this respect, human language is like the natural numbers—there is no number larger than all the others, because I can always add the number 1 (or any other positive number) to the number you nominate as the largest. (In fact, mathematicians have found utility in talking about the difference between ∞ and ∞ + 1.)
The other way that human languages are expandable is that words can be combined in different ways. No child learns a list of all the possible sentences he will need; rather, he learns words, and then rules about how new words are formed and about how they can be combined. This comes under the musical brain’s capacity for abstraction—we know that the words are merely elements of an utterance that
stand
for specific things, and that they can be recombined or substituted to change the meanings of utterances. “The cat chased the dog” means something different than “The dog chased the cat” by virtue of the ordering of the words. (Grammar specifies, among other things, rules about who is doing what to whom based on where in the sentence the elements appear.) We can say “I am going to the park ” or “I am going to the zoo” using similar form and structure, but different words.
Animals use fixed, irreducible phrases. The black-capped chickadee of North America has thirteen distinct vocalizations, but there is no evidence that they can be combined, or that part of one can be substituted or inserted in another. The “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” call
is
the whole message. “Chick-a-dee-dee-doo” or “Chuck-ee-dee-dee-dee” are not possible messages in chickadee language.
Steven Mithen argues in his book
The Singing Neanderthals
that Neanderthals may have communicated using a kind of protomusic with pitch, rhythm, timbral, and loudness variations. Moreover, Mithen believes they employed a repertoire of fixed calls, constituting something slightly more sophisticated than those in use by crows and vervet monkeys, for communicating such holistic thoughts as “Look out! There’s a snake!” and “Come get some food.” Unlike human languages, in which words can be substituted in sentences to alter their meanings (“Come get some water”), the holistic Neanderthal utterances would have been more like monkey or bird calls—fixed and not extendable or changeable. They were neither language nor music as we think of them today. Darwin believed that music as we know it is a kind of fossil, a remnant of an earlier communication system or “musical protolanguage.”
Noam Chomsky, the Hunter S. Thompson of linguists, proposed that language may be decomposable into two components—
conveyance
and
computation.
The distinction maps to two different, historically sequential forms of language. The first kind to appear was an unstructured protolanguage that conveyed concepts, meaning, and emotions, like Mithen’s Neanderthal language, and like contemporary chimpanzee, monkey, and gibbon communication (and presumably like that of Australopithecines
).
The
conveyance
form of language served to communicate the
right-now
: the emotional state of the communicator, the existence of a predator or of food, and so on. The second kind arose later, when the human brain evolved computational modules capable of rearranging elements to a preconceived plan, and of imposing a complex hierarchy on objects, including linguistic objects; in the case of utterances, this constitutes a structure and order we call syntax. (I prefer the term
rearrangement
to the Chomsky’s
computation,
and so I’ll use that here.) This ability to understand, form, and analyze hierarchies is a key development that led both to music and to language. Chomsky doesn’t say so explicitly, but it seems that along with this hierarchical processing came the ability to communicate about things beyond the right-now—to talk about things that happened in the past or might happen in the future.
I believe that Chomsky’s conveyance and computational (rearrangement) system has parallels in religion, love, and music. As we saw in Chapter 6, nearly
all
religious acts involve repetitive, stereotyped motor action sequences—rituals. The distinction to be made here is that all primates engage in ritual—a way of displaying (or, in Chomsky’s terminology,
conveying
) an emotional state. The ritual is the conveyance system. Religion adds to ritual a computational component—the ability to recombine, conceptualize, and recontextualize the ritual—to give it
meaning
and order. Human love is more than the ability to show attachment; it entails thinking about a hierarchy of importance, to
plan
to be in love in the future, and to communicate this plan to others.
Darwin, in
The Descent of Man
, spoke about animal “love,” and it is clear from this that he is referring to conveyance and to attachment rather than to the (human) computational component:
Animals of many kinds are social; we find even distinct species living together; for example, some American monkeys; and united flocks of rooks, jackdaws, and starlings. Man shews the same feeling in his strong love for the dog, which the dog returns with interest. Every one must have noticed how miserable horses, dogs, sheep, &c., are when separated from their companions, and what strong mutual affection the two former kinds, at least, shew on their reunion. It is curious to speculate on the feelings of a dog, who will rest peacefully for hours in a room with his master or any of the family, without the least notice being taken of him; but if left for a short time by himself, barks or howls dismally.
 
Later, Darwin discusses the evolutionary origin of attachment, which led to what we think of as human love:
In order that primeval men, or the apelike progenitors of man, should become social, they must have acquired the same instinctive feelings, which impel other animals to live in a body; and they no doubt exhibited the same general disposition. They would have felt uneasy when separated from their comrades, for whom they would have felt some degree of love; they would have warned each other of danger, and have given mutual aid in attack or defence. All this implies some degree of sympathy, fidelity, and courage. . . . Let it be borne in mind how all-important in the never-ceasing wars of savages, fidelity and courage must be. . . . Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and be victorious over other tribes: but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other tribe still more highly endowed. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world.
 

Other books

Bolts by Alexander Key
All In by Molly Bryant
Take a Chance by Jaine, Simone
Mike on Crime by Mike McIntyre
Void in Hearts by William G. Tapply