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We Got Rhythm; the Mystery Is How and Why
September 16, 2003
By NICHOLAS WADE
In lovers' songs, military marches, weddings and funerals -
every occasion where a degree of emotion needs to be evoked
- music is an indispensable ingredient.
Yet the ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists
because it does nothing evident to help survival. Why,
therefore, should evolution have built into the human brain
this soul-stirring source of pleasure? Man's faculties for
enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must be ranked
among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."
Music is still a mystery, a tangle of culture and built-in
skills that researchers are trying to tease apart. No one
really knows why music is found in all cultures, why most
known systems of music are based on the octave, why some
people have absolute pitch and whether the brain handles
music with special neural circuits or with ones developed
for other purposes. Recent research, however, has produced
a number of theories about the brain and music.
It could be that the brain perceives music with the same
circuits it uses to hear and analyze human speech, and that
it thrills to its cadences with centers designed to mediate
other kinds of pleasure. Dr. Anne Blood and Dr. Robert J.
Zatorre, of the Montreal Neurological Institute, recently
took PET scans of musicians' brains while they listened to
self-selected pieces of music that gave them "chills" of
euphoria. The works included Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto
No. 3 and Barber's Adagio for Strings. The music, the
researchers reported, activated similar neural systems of
reward and emotion as those stimulated by food, sex and
addictive drugs.
If music depends on neural circuits developed for other
reasons, then it is just a happy accident, regardless of
evolution, that people enjoy it. This is the position taken
by Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University.
Music, he writes in his 1997 book "How the Mind Works," is
"auditory cheesecake" - it just happens to tickle several
important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way,
as cheesecake tickles the palate. These include the
language ability (with which music overlaps in several
ways); 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.
That music can activate all these powerful systems at once
is the reason it packs such a mental oomph, in Dr. Pinker's
analysis. But since each of these systems evolved for
independent reasons, music itself is no more an
evolutionary adaptation than is the ability to like
dessert, which arises from intense stimulation of the taste
buds responsive to sweet and fatty substances.
But other evolutionary psychologists believe the faculty of
enjoying music is no accident. Darwin suggested that human
ancestors, before acquiring the power of speech,
"endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and
rhythm." It is because of music's origin in courtship,
Darwin believed, that it is "firmly associated with some of
the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling."
In his theory of sexual selection, Darwin proposed that
traits found attractive in courtship would enable their
owners to get more genes into the next generation. The
upshot would be the emergence of adornments that had no
immediately obvious survival value in themselves, like the
peacock's tail or the troubadour's ballads.
Darwin's ideas about music have been extended by Dr.
Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the
University of New Mexico. Dr. Miller notes their potency in
pointing to the opportunities open to popular musicians for
transmitting their genes to the next generation. The rock
guitarist Jimi Hendrix, for instance, had "sexual liaisons
with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term
relationships with at least two women, and fathered at
least three children in the United States, Germany, and
Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he
would have fathered many more," Dr. Miller writes.
Why on earth would nubile young women choose a rock star as
a possible father of their children instead of more
literary and reflective professionals such as, say,
journalists? Dr. Miller sees music as an excellent
indicator of fitness in the Darwinian struggle for
survival. Since music draws on so many of the brain's
faculties, it vouches for the health of the organ as a
whole. And since music in ancient cultures seems often to
have been linked with dancing, a good fitness indicator for
the rest of the body, anyone who could sing and dance well
was advertising the general excellence of their mental and
physical genes to a potential mate.
"Music evolved and continues to function as a courtship
display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract
females," Dr. Miller writes in "The Origins of Music," a
collection of essays by him and others.
But other psychologists argue that Dr. Miller's courtship
theory does not do full justice to another important
dimension of music, its role in cementing social
relationships and coordinating the activities of large
groups of people. Dr. Robin Dunbar, of Liverpool
University, has shown that monkeys spend a large amount of
time grooming other members of their social group, so much
so that they would scarcely have time to look for food if
their 50-strong groups were to grow any larger.
Dr. Dunbar believes that the much larger human groups, of
150 members or so, overcame the grooming barrier by
developing a new kind of social glue, namely language.
Group singing, or chorusing, may have been an intermediate
step in this process, he suggests. He has preliminary
evidence that singing in church produces endorphins, a
class of brain hormone thought to be important in social
bonding, he said in an e-mail message.
Others, like Dr. Edward Hagen of Humboldt University in
Berlin and Dr. Gregory A. Bryant of the University of
California at Santa Cruz, believe the role of music in
human evolutionary history was not to create social
cohesion but to signal it to rival groups. By putting on a
better song-and-dance display, a group could show it had
the coordination to prevail in a scrap, and could thus
avoid a fight altogether, they write in an article
available on the Web.
Male chimpanzees sometimes chorus in a call known as a
pant-hoot, though usually to attract females to a new
source of fruit they have found. For human ancestors,
musical displays of this kind "may have formed the
evolutionary basis for the musical abilities of modern
humans," Dr. Hagen and Dr. Bryant write. The Pentagon's
vigorous support of military bands - $163 million in 1997 -
lends a certain resonance to this view.
The courting and social cohesion theories of music's
origins assume that there are structures in the human brain
that have evolved specifically to handle music. If no such
structures exist, then Dr. Pinker's theory or something
like it is correct.
A leading clue that points to music-specific structures,
yet is so far not conclusive, is that many features of
music are universal as well as apparently innate, meaning
present at birth. All societies have music, all sing
lullaby-like songs to their infants, and most produce tonal
music, or music composed in subsets of the 12-tone
chromatic scale, such as the diatonic or pentatonic scales.
Some of the earliest known musical instruments, crane bone
flutes from the Jiahu site in China, occupied from 7000 to
5700 B.C., produce a tonal scale.
Dr. Sandra Trehub, of the University of Toronto, has
developed methods of testing the musical preferences of
infants as young as 2 to 6 months. She finds they prefer
consonant sounds, like perfect fifths or perfect fourths,
over dissonant ones. A reasonable conclusion is that "the
rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather
than products of culture," she wrote in the July issue of
Nature Neuroscience.
But although certain basic features of music, such as the
octave, intervals with simple ratios like the perfect
fifth, and tonality, seem to be innate, they are probably
not genetic adaptations for music, "but rather appear to be
side effects of general properties of the auditory system,"
conclude two Cambridge scientists, Josh McDermott of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Marc Hauser
of Harvard, in an unpublished article.
The human auditory system is probably tuned to perceive the
most important sounds in a person's surroundings, which are
those of the human voice. Three neuroscientists at Duke
University, Dr. David A. Schwartz, Dr. Catherine Q. Howe
and Dr. Dale Purves, say that on the basis of this cue they
may have solved the longstanding mysteries of the structure
of the chromatic scale and the reason why some harmonies
are more pleasing than others.
Though every human voice, and maybe each utterance, is
different, a certain commonality emerges when many
different voices are analyzed. The human vocal tract shapes
the vibrations of the vocal cords into a set of harmonics
that are more intense at some frequencies than others
relative to the fundamental note. The principal peaks of
intensity occur at the fifth and the octave, with lesser
peaks at other intervals that correspond to most of the 12
tones of the chromatic scale, the Duke researchers say in
an article published last month in the Journal of
Neuroscience. Almost identical spectra were produced by
speakers of English, Mandarin, Persian and Tamil.
The Duke researchers believe the auditory system judges
sounds to be pleasant the closer they approximate to this
generalized power spectrum of the human voice. "A musical
tone combination whose power is concentrated at the same
places as a human speech sound will sound more familiar and
more natural," Dr. Schwartz said.
Some people are unable to appreciate music, raising the
question of whether some music-specific faculty has been
damaged. People who are tone deaf also fail to hear pitch
changes in the human voice, so this deficit does not seem
specific to music. Some patients have music agnosia, an
inability to recognize familiar melodies, even ones to
which they know the lyrics. But the brain has to store
memories about music somewhere, and the music agnosia
patients could have incurred memory damage that just
happened to hit the music archive, Mr. McDermott, of
M.I.T., said.
"Any innate biases on music must derive from something in
the brain, but at present there is little evidence for
neural circuitry dedicated to music," Mr. McDermott and Dr.
Hauser conclude.
Dr. Zatorre, of the Montreal institute, takes a similar
view. The brain has evolved faculties for perceiving
sounds, organizing events in time and maintaining memory
stores, he said. "Once you've got all that hardware in
place, it can be used for a lot of different purposes. But
I don't think it follows that music was selected for."
Whether music is cheesecake, courtship or cohesion, its
mystery remains unbreached.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/science/16MUSI.html?ex=1064826486&ei=1&en=f91899901688bb15
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