Why Music?

There is hardly anything more engrossing to a man than music. We listen to it. Our moods are guided by it. We are touched by it. We dance by it. We worship with it. We lose ourselves in it. Whether it be in a shopping mall, walking in the streets with earphones, in the enveloping darkness of a cinema, working on some routine and boring stuff in the office, preparing dinner at the kitchen, watching a video with beautiful photos, poetry or epigrams on the computer screen, swinging our bodies and moving our feet to the deafening din of rock sounds in a disco, sitting or standing in a church, at a wedding, a funeral, birthday parties, sitting quietly with attention focused on the stage in a formal concert, or even turning our eyes in the direction of the TV when our favourite program starts with the theme song, we are surrounded by music, drenched in it or even drowned by it. I cannot now imagine a life without music. I do not think I am alone. Music is not just something which figures only in our personal lives. Music is at the heart of our public economy. It is a multi-trillion dollar business. Music is an industry. Why do we have music? Why do human beings evolve music? As I also like studying that most complex organ in the entire universe called the human brain, I bought a book on this my double fad. It's called "This is your Brain on Music"(2006)  by Daniel J Livitin, who runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at the McGill University, himself a neuroscientist, session musician, sound engineer and record producer. So he ought to know what he is talking about. What follows are some of the stuffs I learned from him from the last chapter of this book, "The Music Instinct: Evolution's #1 Hit".

According to Livitin, at the moment, there are about 250 people worldwide studying music perception and cognition as a primary research focus. Some people think of music as a kind of language. Stephen Pinker, the author of numerous books on the brain, thinks that language is "clearly an evolutionary adaptation". The memory, attention, categorization and decision making studied by the cognitive psychologists and scientists all have a clear evolutionary purpose. But he says that once in a while, they find a behavior or attribute of an organism which lacks any clear evolutionary basis, something which Stephen Jay Gould calls a "spandrel" ie. something which is a by-product of a design originally intended to solve a different kind of problem but which the organism adapts for new purpose e.g birds originally developed feathers to keep warm but they later co-opted them for another purpose, flying. In the same manner, artists decorated the spandrel between arches of a church and turned them into one of its most beautiful parts. To Pinker, music is such a by-product, an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language. "Music is auditory cheesecake. It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way as cheesecake tickles the palate". Humans didn't evolve a liking for cheesecake but only a liking for fats and sugars which were in short supply during our evolutionary history. Hence they evolved a neural mechanism that caused our reward centres to fire when eating sugars and fats because in the small quantitites they were then available, they were beneficial to our well-being, like eating and sex.

Normally, evolution works by encouraging us to engage in behavior which is important for our survival eg. eating and sex by producing certain pleasure inducing chemicals in our brain. But we can "short-circuit the original activities and tap directly into these reward systems". Thus we will get addicted to food with no nutritional value and we can have sex without procreating or take drugs which directly exploit the normal pleasure receptors in the brain. This may not be adaptive. To Pinker, music is just such a pleasure seeking behavior that exploits one or more existing pleasure channels that originally evolved to reinforce an adaptive behavior ie. linguistic communication: " music pushes buttons for language ability (with which music overlaps in several ways)...in the auditory cortex, the system that responds to the emotional signals in a human voice crying or cooing, and the motor control system that injects rhythm into the muscles when walking or dancing.". To him, music is useless: it does not promote long life, grandchildren or accurate perception and prediction of the world. "Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyule would be virtually unchanged," he says. D Sperber also thought that music developed parasitically to exploit our capacity to process complex sound patterns that vary in pitch, duration and which evolved for true communication. Music exists "simply because of the pleasure that it affords; its basis is purely hedonic". But Livitin does not agree.

Livitin quotes Charles Darwin: "musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. Thus musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling, and are consequently used instinctively". Music may indicate biological and sexual fitness and thus serve to attract mates. He believed that music preceded speech as a means of courtship, equating music with the peacock's tail. Livitin cites the experiences of Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin and Mick Jaggers who had numerous women on their rock tours.Geoffrey Miller suggests that throughout evolutionary history music and dance were advertisements of sexual fitness in two ways: symbols of a man's stamina and overall good health, physical and mental and also that he had so much resources that he could afford to waste valuable time on developing a purely unnecessary skill, just like rich people who build magnificient houses, drive expensive sports cars, wear designer clothes, go to expensive and exclusive restaurants. To the extent that someone had time to develop his musicianship, it would indicate resource wealth. According to Livitin, interest in music also peaks during adolescence in contemporary society. Miller says, "music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, most broadcast by young males to attract females." Most tribal dancing includes repeated high-stepping, stomping, and jumping, using the largest, most energy-hungry muscles of the body. Evolution may also have selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness: improvisation and novelty in a combined music/dance performance would indicate cognitive flexibility of the dancer: signalling his potential for cunning and strategizing while on the hunt. Miller and Martie Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth in female mate selection because whilst wealth may predict who will make a good dad (ample food or symbolic tokens of wealth such as jewelry or cash) for child rearing, creativity may better predict who will furnish the best genes for child fathering. Their studies show that when women were at their peak fertility, women preferred the creative but poor artist to the not creative but rich man as short term mate or brief sexual encounter but at other times in their mentrual cycle, women did not show any such preferences. Far more women want to sleep with rock stars and athletes than to marry them. In short the best fathers biologically do not always make the best dads for child rearing. A European study shows that 10% of the mothers report that their children were being raised by men who falsely believed the children were theirs.

A second argument against Pinker's view is that when we consider the evolutionary use of music, we ought to consider the situation as it existed about 500,000 years ago and not now because that is the time it takes between the time when an adaptation first appears in a small proportion of the population  when our ability to make and enjoy music first began and the time when it became widely distributed in the population. There is always what is called an "evolutionary lag". Hence we ought not to consider the situation of  the disembodied sound in a classical concert performed by a class of professional expert musicians before a hushed  and appreciative audience in a modern concert hall, which is something entirely novel in human history. It would be more appropriate to think of a rock concert in which people would participate in a kind of mass frenzy. Anthropological discoveries in cave paintings and instruments recovered from archeological sites amongst hunter gatherer societies indicate that in every primitive society, music has always been inseparable from the dance in primitive societies. According to the anthropologist John Blacking ( Music Culture and Experience 1995), music has always been indivisible from movement across cultures and across times. Collective music making is a good way for social bonding. Singing around an ancient campfire might have been a way to stay awake, to ward off predators and to develop social co-ordination and social co-operation within the group.

Scientists have found that the neo-cerebellum, the oldest part of the cerebellum and which is important for musical cognition is larger than normal in patients with Williams syndrome (WS) which are unusually gregarious and musical and smaller than normal in autistic patients who are unable to empathize with others and brain scans of people with WS show that they are more fully immersed in music than most people as they listened to the music and they are using a larger set of neural structures than everyone else eg. their amydala and cerebellum: the emotional centres of the brain. This indicates the importance of music in creating empathy.

A third argument in favour of the evolutionary importance of music is that music may have served to promote cognitive development of our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and the cognitive flexibility necessary to become humans: singing and instrumental activities might have helped our ancestors to refine motor skills required for vocal speech. Music is a form of play, an exercise that involves higher level integrative processes that nurture exploratory competence, preparing the child to eventually explore generative language development through babbling, and ulitmately more complex linguistic and paralinguistic productions. Mother and child interactions involving music almost always involve both singing and rhythmic movement such as rocking or caressing across all cultures. During the first six months of a baby's life, it is unable to clearly distinguish the source of sensory inputs like vision, hearing and touch which all meld into a unitary perceptual representation: the brain regions which will later become the auditory cortex, the sensory cortex and the visual cortex are functionally undifferentiated and inputs from the various sensory receptors may connect to many different parts of the brain, pending pruning that will occur later in life. The music of our ancestors are heavily rhythmic. Rhythm stirs our bodies and tonality and melody our brains. The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum (the motor control, primitive little brain) and our cerebral cortex ( the most evolved and human part of our brain)

In sum, music is present across all human societies, has been around a long time, involves specialized brain structures including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional even when other memory systems fail (e.g in WS patients) and is analogous to music in other species. According to Livitin, "rhythmic sequences optimally excite recurrent neural networks in mammalian brains, including feedback loops among the motor cortex, the cerebellum and the frontal regions. Tonal systems, pitch transitions and chords scaffold on certain properties of the audidtory system that were themselves products of the physical world of the inherent nature of vibrating objects. Our auditory system develops in ways that play on the relation between scales and the overtones series. Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability." Memorable music would impress the mind of a potential mate, leading her to think of him even when he was not around, predisposing her to him when he returned. The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song--rhythm, melody and contour--cause music to stick. As a tool for arousing emotions and feelings, music is better than language. The combination of the two in a love song is the best courtship display of all!

As emphasized by Schopenhauer in my previous blog, sex is truly the most potent force in the universe. Sex and its handmaid, love, truly make the world go round. There is no better way for it to go round than through a love song or through music. Ultimately, sex provides both a motive and a purpose for the creation of music in one way or another, directly and indirectly, in the past as in the present. And everything can be subsumed under the ultimate object of all life:  the generation of more life. Music therefore, like all other forms of human activities, provides a most colorful and enjoyable platform for the performance of this ultimate task!