Where does music come from?
Every human culture, without exception as far as anyone can tell, produces some form of music. And yet it seems as though the music that human cultures produce could hardly be more varied: From Italian opera to Croatian klapa to Tuvan throat singing,聽the assortment of rhythms, melodies, dynamics, and harmonies found in cultures large and small around the world stands as a testament to human creative diversity.
Like language, music is universal among humans and nonexistent 鈥� or at least unintelligible to us聽鈥� in even our closest nonhuman relatives. But music, unlike language, has no obvious adaptive function, prompting scientists who study music to wonder what forces originally gave rise to it. Is music an evolutionary adaptation, or is it purely a human invention?
It鈥檚 an old question, one that Charles Darwin took up in his 1871 book 鈥�,鈥� in which he suggested music might have evolved to help our species鈥� forebears woo potential mates. Others have argued that music evolved from聽, such as those observed in other social animals, including chimpanzees.
But many scholars, particularly ethnomusicologists, have been wary of this so-called adaptationist approach, which was heavy on thought-provoking explanations but light on hard evidence that links music with reproductive fitness. Musicality, according to one prevailing argument, is not a trait, but a technology, a happy result of pre-existing adaptations that, beautiful and uplifting as it may be, confers no evolutionary advantage.
One approach to resolving the debate has been to search for universals in music, commonalities in the pitch, melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre, texture, in the music of societies with no contact with each other. If music is, as Henry Wadsworth聽Longfellow said 鈥�,鈥� the reasoning goes, then humanity鈥檚 penchant for music may arise from a biological substrate.
鈥淎ny study that鈥檚 looking at comparisons of lots and lots of cultures, by its nature, is telling us something about human nature,鈥� says cognitive scientist Sam Mehr, director of the聽 at Harvard University鈥檚 psychology department. 鈥淚t鈥檚 telling us something about how all humans are alike in some way.鈥�
Psychologists have long argued that human language contains such universals. Beginning in the 1920s, the German-American Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang K枚hler conducted experiments in which he showed participants images of two shapes, one jagged and spiky and the other bulbous and rounded. When asked to label the shapes with the nonsense words 鈥渢akete鈥� and 鈥渂aluba,鈥� participants overwhelmingly associated the spiky shape with 鈥渢akete鈥� and the rounded shape with 鈥渂aluba.鈥� This effect has been shown to work in children聽. 聽
And perhaps a similar effect exists for music. In聽 co-authored with Harvard evolutionary biologist Manvir Singh and published last Thursday in the journal Current Biology, 聽Dr. Mehr and his colleagues gathered samples of vocal recordings from 86 small-scale societies, from the Highland Scots of the Outer Hebrides to the Chuukese of Pulap, Micronesia, to the Nanai of Russia鈥檚 far east. The team played 14-second excerpts to 750 internet users in 60 countries, and they found that listeners could correctly identify whether a sample was from a dance song, a lullaby, a love song, or a healing song.
鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 seem to matter where the listeners are,鈥� says Mehr. 鈥淭hey all seem to agree with each other quite quite strongly. There鈥檚 a very high consistency.鈥�
But why would songs from radically different cultures trigger the same feelings in diverse listeners?
鈥淭here are some words that sound like the thing they represent,鈥� says American-Canadian cognitive neuroscientist, musician, and record producer Daniel Levitin, author of two popular science books on music 鈥� 鈥溾�� and 鈥�.鈥� 鈥淎nd there are some aspects of music that sound like the thing they represent. Very slow music sounds more like somebody鈥檚 walking slowly.... And fast music sounds more like someone running or celebrating,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hese kinds of mappings have crept their way into this wonderfully diverse collection of different music.鈥�
Mehr, who says that this experiment is just the first of several in his multidisciplinary聽 project, is particularly interested in researching lullabies. These songs are thought to exist in every culture but have been historically ignored by researchers, who have tended to focus on music associated with courtship or public celebration.
鈥淚f there is music happening by women, and it鈥檚 usually the case that there is, you often don鈥檛 see it, or it doesn鈥檛 get reported,鈥� says Sandra Trehub, a psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who specializes in how infants respond to music. 鈥淚t tends not to be the music of that culture that celebrated or considered important.鈥�
As any parent of young children knows, efficiently getting one鈥檚 kids to sleep can free up resources that can be used for completing chores, sleeping, or even producing more children. 聽
鈥淚n the western world, we take pride for some reason in having babies who can soothe themselves,鈥� says Dr. Trehub. 鈥淏ut elsewhere, singing babies to sleep is the name of the game, and it works. I鈥檝e seen it work like magic everywhere.鈥�
Of course, lullabies are likely only part of the picture. 鈥淢usic didn鈥檛 evolve for a single reason but for several reasons. I think that new study supports that notion,鈥� says Dr. Levitin. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know of a primate group where more than 18 males can live together before rivalries and jealousies tear them apart. And yet humans have been living in cities of hundreds of thousands of people for thousands of years. So we came up with some way to get along and communicate our desire to get along.鈥�
