Instant Genius - Why do humans make music?

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

Our lives are full of music, from the songs we sing along to on the radio to the orchestral scores that bring a film to life. But why is it that humans love to make music, and how did it evolve in the first place? Musicologist Prof Michael Spitzer, author of the new book The Musical Human (£30, Bloomsbury), joins BBC Science Focus online assistant Sara Rigby on this week’s episode to explain. Let us know what you think of the Science Focus Podcast by filling out our survey. By submitting it, you enter the prize draw to win one of seven £100 Voucher Express Gift Cards. It should take no more than 5 minutes. UK residents only. Full T&Cs. Take part in the survey Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Sticher, RSS, Overcast Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: The psychology of the sea shanty: Why work songs are such earworms Could these gloves be the future of music? – Imogen Heap The neuroscience of happiness – Dean Burnett Dr Pete Etchells: Do video games encourage gambling behaviour? Why you can’t multitask (and why that’s a good thing) Phobias, paranoia and PTSD: Why virtual reality therapy is the frontier of mental health treatment Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as

the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. Our lives are full of music, from the songs we sing along to on the radio

to the orchestral scores that bring a film to life. But why is it that humans love to make music, and how did it evolve in the first place? Musicologist, Professor Michael Spitzer, author of the new book The Musical Human, joins us on this week's episode to explain. To start with, could you please just give us a brief overview of what your book is about? It's a history of the world as far as back as we can.

So dinosaurs up to the present day, but from the perspective of sound and music. So it's as a counterpoint between three levels of time, which is evolutionary time, then the start of world history. and present day, everyday life, all through music. So why do humans make music? Well, let us be picky and talk about why we use the word music, which only the West has. To cover all the complex and plural things that music does with one word,

only the West does that. And if you go outside the West, other cultures have lots of different words for the many things music does, which I can start to unpack. If you go back in time, then animals use vocalisation, what we call music, for adaptive purposes, as Darwin noticed. So sexual selection is about attracting a mate and deterring arrival. They also use sound and indeed bird song, which is very musical, to define their identity and establish a home. We think of music in much more aesthetic. terms for pleasure, but it can't just be about enjoyment because you get that from food and

sex and drugs. There's something which is not exhausted by pleasure. Things like spirituality, a bit like religion, music seems to give us access to the infinite and to connect us with nature and with the landscape and indeed with other people, with our own personal lives and other people's lives. At the same time, we use music for utilitarian functional purposes like, you know, it helps to regulate work, which is why we have sea shanties and cotton hollas. Music helps us whistle while you work. It brings people together. It also makes life less boring, so we bring music into work via our earpads and we play our phones in the office and office spaces. And just like animals, we are animals, of course,

and we use music for sex for love. Music is a food of love. And for war, in Guantana, Moberg, music was militarised by playing detainees, you know, pretty aggressive music. Music is used in the football terraces to bring a whole city together, football anthems. There are so many, so many uses of music. You can medicalize it.

makes you happy because it connects you to other people and perhaps the most, one of the most serious causes for unhappiness and ill health is loneliness. And music, this is one of the big take-home messages of the book. Music is fundamentally a social phenomenon. It arises from bringing people together. And you don't need to listen to music with other people to make music together to get the social parameter because music is full of cliches or conventions. And just by listening to music in your armchair, you're plugging yourself into a social network. Staying on the medical front, music has been shown to reduce stress level by reducing the levels of cortisol, and it can enhance neurotransmitters in the brain like dopamine,

which makes you happy, just like drugs and sex. but you have everything else that music brings to the table. So it's a bit like a huge Swiss army knife. It does so many things. And the word, you know, music doesn't do justice to its complexity. Do you think that all humans are capable of making music? Well, every culture has music. But there is a condition called musical Anhedonia or Amusia,

which afflicts a tiny, tiny minority of people. And that's due to a brain deficit or the loss of a link between the parts of the brain which control hearing and the parts which control pleasure. But that doesn't seem to affect their performance in other parts of their life. They can be completely, quote-unquote, functional and professional.

It's a mystery, why, but to all intents and purposes, music is innate. We're all born with a capacity to make music and we see that in the proto conversations which are enacted between a baby and her caregiver or mother or parent or in motherese which is infant directed speech so if we're all born with a capacity to be musical what happens well you look to culture and civilization which often teaches out this propensity and it goes away roughly when people join the shop market and life gets in the way.

And then when they retire, we discover the music by joining choirs or playing in a string quartet and so on. But it depends how you define music. And in the West, we tend to be a little bit precious about music. You have to be an expert, a virtuoso, to be counted as a musician. And this pushes out the vast majority of people, but I'm not a very good singer. I would love to sing if I was allowed to sing, but I feel intimidated by the very high standards we have in the West.

And these standards don't obtain in the rest of the world, which has a so-called participatory culture, where anybody can join in, and there are different degrees of expertise factored in into the musical genre to allow the most able people to dominate it, but without necessarily pushing away the less able people. We often hear people saying, oh, I'm not very musical, or I can't sing, or I can't hold a tune, things like that. What is it about some people that makes them better at holding a tune or better at musical skills than others?

Is it just training, or is there something more than that? The jury seems to think it's training, but the support of your parents, Because to tell a child that they're a genius is almost self-fulfilling, there's a reinforcement feedback loop going on. So practically anybody can be trained to be highly skilled. Whether they're going to be a genius, as we call them, like Mozart, and that word genius is very problematic because it suggests that they're supernatural or god-given.

I think the analogy with sport is interesting that we can't all run a four-minute mile or a three-minute mile, at a mile, you know. Some people have a propensity to excel in physical sports, just as they do in exercising the various faculties of music that may have a better ear or a better memory. It's not that different from being better at maths or being better at memorising your homework or preparing for an exam. I don't think in that respect music is that different from other walks of life. When we listen to music, a lot of people listen to music because it makes us feel very strong emotions. But how does music evoke emotions in our brains? Partly it's dopamine.

There are various hormones and neurotransmitters which are associated with emotions. Partially, it's the various levels of the brain going back to the reptile brain. or the brain stem reflex, which reacts to crude reactions like shocks and simple organisms have that. Whether you call what a mold organism feels an emotion or not, it's certainly a startle reaction. And the very complex emotions which go into human music

supervene or build upon these very basic biological reflexes. But just as the brain has different layers, you can track the evolving complexity of these mechanisms as you go on. So going back to the brainstem reflex, our deepest and oldest part, the amygdala is associated with slightly more complex emotions, which reptiles have. These are pleasure or displeasure, as opposed to just being startled or shocked. So what's interesting is that newborn babies have,

have also capacity to feel basic emotions like mammals. So dogs and cats feel the same range of emotions as a newborn baby. But then preschool children evolve rather more complex emotions like jealousy or pride or shame, which as far as we know, I don't think dogs really do feel shame. They may do, by the way they behave. The other way of thinking about the emotion, is as behaviour. And Darwin's epoch-making book called the expressions of emotions in animals and creatures and humans

talks of what psychologists call action tendencies. So you think of an emotion in behavioral terms as the action which is adaptive. So if you're happy, it's because the animal or the human being achieves a goal. If you're angry, that goal has been blocked. If you're sad, you've lost an important family member. So all of these actions can then be unfolded by musical processes. For instance, dancing. A lot of music is happy because its process is dance-like.

And when we dance, we discharge a lot of surplus energy. When we're sad, we droop, we're exhausted, we're exhausted, we're depressed. We have a loss of energy, which is why sad music is slow and very quiet, or pianissimo, as we say. It doesn't seem to have any goal. When we're angry,

angry music is very dissonant and loud, and it's all about interruptions, interruptions of its process. So in a very literal sense, the way music moves in time is recreating what animals do out in the field, the adaptive behaviours of, animals. So emotion used to be banned from universities until the last 30 years. Psychology went

through behaviourism until the 1960s, so arguing we were essentially just glorified lab rats with no inner feelings. Then a series of famous psychologist brought emotion back as a valid object of scientific investigation. And there's a really growing field of music psychology in academia, which looks to all intense, perfectly scientific. They conduct experiments on guinea pigs, which are usually first-year university music students, and they play their music,

and then they measure how these students react to various musical emotions, and then they process the results using statistical methods. So it's absolutely scientific and empirical. So you mentioned that happy music tends to be upbeat and dance-like, whereas sad music tends to be sort of quieter and slower. Is that the same in music from all the way around the world? So if I, for example, were to listen to Native American music or something like that, would I recognise the same emotions?

Well, if you go back to, it's a very important question, if you go back to the layering of the brain and the language, layering of emotions, the deeper you go, the more universal it is. So across every musical language in the world, loud and sudden noises are shocking, right? Generally speaking, it's unusual to find happy music in Papua New Guinea or in parts of Africa, which is slow. And happy music tends to be high energy. So mammalian emotions, again, seem to be universal. But once you start looking at a very, very subtle and nuanced emotions a music can convey

and one question is, can music ever express jealousy or envy in any language without the words to prime you actually can't. One of the limits conditions of music, it doesn't seem capable of expressing envy or jealousy. and that's discussed a lot by psychologists. But let's say for the sake of argument that he can express complex emotions, there you wouldn't find any similarity between musical cultures. Another constraint is a little bit like listening to Japanese haikus, whether or not the haiku is expressing anger or sadness,

you would have no idea without known Japanese. And the musical analogy is musical grammar, that every culture has its own scales and harmonies and rhythmic patterns and you have to know them to be inculturated into them to break through that language barrier after all. So it's complex. In your book you tell quite a sweet story of when you took your daughter to a concert for children when she was little

and they played the William Tell Overture and she started to, along with all, all the other toddlers in the room started to bounce up and down along to the rhythm of the music. Why is it that music makes us want to move? There's a very simple physiological reason to do with the vestibular system. That's a sense of balance in your inner ear, and that connects the motor parts of your brain to do with motion with hearing. And that's been connected from the very beginning of our evolution.

But it also goes back to fish, as I say in the book, that the fish have a lateral line to which they sense to motions of other fish in the water. They don't hear, they sense sound. And that ultimately became the organ of corti in a cochlear, a tiny version of the fish's lateral line. So we're also hardwired to hear music as touch as physical motion. It's part of us.

Another reason is when we first started to walk four million years ago with astralopithecines. So R.D. and Lucy, the first hominins. Just the act of getting up and walking was so seminal for the fate of music because it starts to create links between the brain and muscular exertion and sound and also time predicting patterns or footfalls. And this is why human music is all about walking. We can hear the rhythm of walking in all music of the world. Not just that, but the metaphor of motion and the metaphor of travelling or journeying.

It's funny how much of human music is about motion. We don't see notes moving at all. It's a metaphor. Notes don't move through the air. But we do hear music as motion, up and down, or walking in a line. And indeed, we think of songs or tracks or something. and finishes. It all goes back to the first steps, which happened four million years ago.

You can't prove that. It's a kind of unforesifiable hypothesis, but it's too good not to be true. So sometimes if you hear a piece of music and it's going a bit too slowly, a bit more slowly than you'd expect, you'd describe it as sluggish. Does that come from the same sort of place? Yeah, it does. And with the emotions attached of being sad or exhausted, because you can't really detach emotions from behaviour ultimately.

Right, I see. So you've actually touched on this just a little bit when you mentioned the lateral line, but there was one particular sentence in your book that just absolutely blew my mind. So I'd like you to just explain it for me, please. And you said, our liking for octaves is an evolutionary memory of when we were fish.

So can you just explain the idea behind that, please? Yeah, it's periodicity. periodic or repeated action. So when we're walking, there's periodic or repeated cycles between instability and stability as we periodically move away from our line of balance and return to our line of balance. If you climb up the scale from the tonic,

do-rame, I can't sing, day-rim, after the full octave, you're leaving home, which is your starting note, the tonic, and you're climbing up to the top. But then, and all of the, paradox happens where once you've left eight notes behind, you go back to the tonic, but eight notes above that. So the octave is the same note, but a return to stability. So all music swings back and forth between leaving stability and returning to balance. And that is because we

walk. Walking does the same thing. And because of fish, we connect periodicity with touching or with physical sensation. So you've said that our history of music sort of begins back when we were fish. Could you give us a brief tour through the history of our evolution of music from the fish onwards to humans, please? Let me start by one of Charles Darwin's most extraordinary insights.

He said that mammals, including humans and apes, hardly ever sing, they don't tend to vocalise. Mammals are visual creatures. Reptiles, including dinosaurs and where birds came from, aren't that auditory either. They rely on smell, on chemicals, and vision for communication. So the story starts when birds take to the air and why they need to evolve sound and in due course music.

part of their way of navigating three-dimensional space, because what sound gives you is the same as what flight gives you, which is increased access to food and sex, and flight literally from predators. So the evolution of birdsong is in tandem with the evolution of flight or air control. It's about air. It's all part of the same package. And birds were singing songs just as complex as human songs

many millions of years ago. They have what's called vocal learning, a faculty of creating new songs, and not just inheriting old songs. And since the invention of spectrogams, we can analyse acoustically exactly what birds are doing. And what we find is extraordinary subtlety by which they improvise,

in a bit like jazz musicians improvise, on templates and patterns. And there's no way of differentiating what they're doing to what human musicians are doing. It's just as interesting. So vocal learning or music happens about four times quite independently in evolution. It happens with birds.

It happens with bats. It happens with cetaceans, whales and seals. And it happens with sapiens. These are quite independent you know, happenings. They're not convergent and not linear, different branches of the tree of life. What's interesting is that apes were never musical. There's a disconnect or evolutionary discontinuity between what whales and birds could do and what apes couldn't. Apes have no sense of rhythm. They can't keep to a beat or, as we say, entrain to a beat. Insects can do that. Fiddler crabs and the bush crickets can

pulse in choruses metrically. They've tried experiments with apes or chimpanzees, and they fail to keep to a beat. Nor can they vocalise. They can't create new songs. And the cosmic joke is that humans evolve on the ape line, and we are profoundly unmusical. So the evolutionary story is that we've learned to learn.

We've learned from scratch how to become musical. which means a music is somehow not intrinsic to Sapien, it's not natural to us, and we're haunted by a jealousy or a nostalgia towards birdsong culturally. Okay, thank you very much. And just to finish up, what is the most surprising thing that you learned while researching this book?

How much I enjoyed whale song. When I first listened to them, I thought, okay, it's going to be interesting. But because we're mammals, possibly, I relate much more to them than to birds. I really warm to Wales song, and my mind has blown that they were doing this many millions of years before we do. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. If you have five minutes to spare and want the chance to win £100, please fill out our survey to let us know what you think of the podcast.

To take part, simply go to b.it.l.org slash science focus survey. The April issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. In this issue, we ask, where next? From deep sea mountains to distant earth-like worlds, we dive into the missions that will boldly go where no one has gone before. Of course, there's much more inside and on sciencefocus.com. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly,

available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist Focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation, with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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