How Music Makes Us
Human
It makes us better and brings us
together.
Published Dec 6, 2018, Orbiter
Magazine
https://orbitermag.com/how-music-makes-us-human/
Music is a
multi-billion-dollar industry. It is present in all cultures and
from day one of our lives. More than 30 million people visit YouTube each day, and of the
top 100 most-viewed YouTube videos of all time, a whopping 96 are music
videos. Music provides the best examples of what Richard Dawkins called a “meme”:
an idea or content that spreads and replicates as if it had a life of its own.
The prevalence
of music in human life makes us wonder: Why
do humans have music? What does music do for us as a species?
While the internet
is rife with examples of music from non-human animals, few have undergone as rigorous as
test of musicality as Snowball the cockatoo and Ronin the sea lion, who have been
trained to dance, even adapting their tempo to external stimulation. It is
worth noting, however, that these are domesticated animals trained by humans;
it is unclear whether they would have spontaneously developed this behavior if
left on their own in the wild. Birds, on the other hand, have evolved sophisticated
auditory-motor repertoires, but even for them the separation between music and
language is unclear. As far as we know, of all species
in the world, only humans have spontaneously evolved musical and linguistic
cultures side by side. Thus music, just like language, seems quite unique to
humans.
If music
is unique to humans, then why do we have it? Charles Darwin believed that music
was a kind of mating call, originally acquired to charm the opposite sex. While
that idea is attractive, it cannot be the whole story: lullabies and play
songs, for example, were never acquired for mating purposes. As an opposing
view, psychologist Steven Pinker famously believed that music confers no
evolutionary adaptation, likening it to auditory cheesecake (Pinker, 1997); this has
become the evolutionary null
hypothesis of music.
A third
view comes from Aniruddh Patel, who wrote that
music is a “transformative
technology of the mind,” which we humans invented, but which
then changed our biology. In this sense, music is analogous to fire; we
invented it, then used it to make food which, in turn, changed our digestive
systems. The field of music cognition has embraced the latter idea much more;
after all, fire has much more transformative power than cheesecake. Music makes
us better; cheesecake does not.
How does music make us better? A wealth of findings come
from Nina
Kraus’s work showing that people with musical
training have better neural encoding of speech sounds, resulting in better
detection of speech in noise from childhood through old age. A complementary
line of evidence, from our lab and others, shows that musical training changes
the arcuate
fasciculus, a superhighway of our brain’s
auditory-motor system (Loui et al,
Halwani
et al, Moore et al).
There are also compelling findings that music training strengthens children’s
executive function and empathy (Habibi
et al, Rabinowitch
& Cross), and that engaging in musical
behavior (e.g. dancing) together helps prosocial behavior (Cirelli
& Trainor). In short, music makes us better, because it
makes us hear and think more clearly, and it connects us to other members of
our species.
Of course, the thousands of people who pay to rock out at
concerts over the weekend do so not out of concern for their own cognitive and
brain development, but because they value something else about the experience.
Music makes us feel good, perhaps because it brings us closer to each other,
perhaps because it expresses an identity. We are a social species; thus, much
of what we do, including music, is social. In that regard, music is quite
analogous to language: having language means we can communicate with each other,
and this communication aided the survival of our species. There is no question
that language can appeal to emotion –– without language there would be no
Shakespearean tragedies — however, those relied explicitly on semantics, i.e.
language was a device that humans used to communicate to each other about something
else (outside the language) that they understand, and that something else is
emotional; therefore language can be emotional. Music, on the other hand, can appeal
directly to emotion without the need to refer to something outside itself.
Every time I hear Debussy’s
string quartet I tear up, not because it reminds
me of anything specifically, but because I find it profoundly bittersweet. Music
can elicit strong emotions that can be positive, negative, or both. Paradoxically,
we even find sad music rewarding to listen to, even though we would never seek
out sad experiences in real life.
Why does
music arouse emotions? There is abundant evidence that these emotions are tied
to the brain’s reward system. Neuroimaging studies from the Zatorre
lab have shown
that peak moments of intense pleasure in music (defined subjectively for each
person) activate the brain’s dopaminergic system — the same system that is active during
eating, sex, and addictive drugs (Salimpoor
et al, 2011).
Furthermore, auditory areas in the brain show the most functional connectivity
to these same reward-sensitive areas when we listen to music that we value (Salimpoor et al, 2013). Additionally, our lab has shown
that people who frequently experience chills when listening to music have
stronger connectivity between auditory regions and areas of the brain that are
important for social and emotional processing (Sachs et al, 2016).
In a way,
these findings dovetail well with musicologists’ approach to the same question.
In his seminal book Emotion
and Meaning in Music,
Leonard B. Meyer (1956) posited that slight violations of expectations are
emotional and meaningful in music. Auditory signals that arouse reward
centers include the musical devices that composers, improvisers, DJs, and all
who produce music are familiar with, both through their training and their
intuition (which is refined by training, of course): syncopation, chord
changes, melodic twists, the slow buildup, the beat drop … an arsenal of tools
to manipulate and violate the expectancies that our brains are constantly
forming. A prime example of these expectations in action comes from the opening
theme of Adagio Cantabile from Beethoven’s
Pathétique Sonata: the slightly unexpected V7/ii
chord in the opening theme gives the theme an especially emotional touch (Yundi Li takes great care with it at 1:02 in his performance).
Philosopher Dan
Dennett wrote, “A mind is fundamentally an
anticipator, an expectation-generator.” At its best, music plays the mind by playing
with these expectations.
The
mapping of specific musical tools to their corresponding emotions is a very
active area of research, but a major challenge is that these mappings are
highly individualistic. They are wonderfully diverse, much like the human
experience: a chord change that gives me the chills (take the slow movement of
Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, performed by Yuja
Wang here:
check out 9:57-10:05!) may sound trivial or even boring to you, and while some
people may feel emotions for music all the time, others may hardly feel
anything.
On an
extreme end of the spectrum are those with specific musical anhedonia, an individual’s incapacity to
enjoy listening to music. This newly coined disorder is tied to different
patterns of structural and functional connectivity between auditory and reward
areas (Mas-Herrero et al, Martinez-Molina
et al, Loui et al). Musical anhedonia is very
different from misophonia, which is the hatred of bodily
sounds (such as gum-chewing and pen-clicking) (Kumar et al, 2017; Edelstein et al, 2013). Rather than hating any sounds, those
with musical anhedonia just do not care about sounds at all.
I recently
worked with a severe case of specific musical anhedonia (more about it here). Despite having knowledge that
certain music was composed to evoke certain emotions, he reported feeling no
such emotions. His experience to music was rather like, to quote Oliver Sacks,
an anthropologist on Mars: he would see people bopping to music in their
headphones at the checkout line, and he would wonder why they would want to do
so. As a result, he lives a music-less existence, only feeling mildly annoyed
when music enters his life incidentally. Interestingly, he does enjoy
photography and visual art.
The case of musical anhedonia brings us back to the
question: Why do we need music at all? At its core, music is composed of
patterns of predictable, structured sound; that in itself might not be special,
because in that regard it is similar to language. Music arouses reward-related
emotion and brings people together, but these rewards are not unique to music: many
other experiences are also rewarding, bring people together, and arouse
emotion.
But there appears to be something special about the conjunction
of structured sounds and reward-related emotion. This leads us to an intriguing
hypothesis: through an auditory pathway to the reward centers of the brain,
music achieves the evolutionary goal of social bonding, of which language is
incapable.
Perhaps our early human ancestors, after getting warm and
dry and fed, still felt dissatisfied. Perhaps they realized they had an unmet
need. Music fulfilled that need. As a result, our ancestors made bone flutes
and early concert spaces (see archeological evidence in Steven
Mithen’s, Singing Neanderthals),
and likely sang and drummed, and music began. Thus music, and art more
generally, are sensory experiences that drive our cognitive and affective
systems.
In
summary, the human capacity for music can be thought of as the tendency to
derive strong emotions from complex sensory patterns. We have evolved the
perceptual, cognitive, and neural apparatus to detect, appreciate, and transmit
these patterns, and doing so brings us closer together.
That is
how music makes us human.
— Psyche Loui, Northeastern
University