Face the music: why are we such a musical species —and does it matter

Natural History, Dec, 2001 by Susan Milius

"In our village there was a man who had a daughter, and a guy wanted to marry her," reminisces Dadie Aime Loh, from southwestern Ivory Coast. The suitor was of another religion, however. "The father said the guy must change his religion. He did. They made a song about it in the village, and everybody was singing it. They were making fun of him: `Just to have a wife, you gave up your religion.' People back home make songs about everything."

For the Dida people, Loh asserts, music is not the same thing it is for most contemporary Westerners, and not just because the drums and bells, calls and responses, sound a different beat. Loh, who demonstrates and teaches Dida music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conjures up a world in which gifted singers may be celebrated but the talents of a few don't silence the voices of everyone else. "If you can speak, if you can think, you can make a song," he says.

The truth is that just about everybody everywhere is musical. The most off-key croakers among us respond to music, feeling the chill in a dirge, quickening to the frolic in a reel, or waiting nervously for a twenty-foot spider to jump out of the darkness when a movie soundtrack turns jittery. Human beings appear to be musical beings--but why? Does music have a biological function? Has musicality mattered in the ev61ution of our species?

The first challenge faced by any theory about the origins of our musical capacity, emphasizes David Huron, head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory at Ohio State University, is to explain why music is not just widespread but truly universal. Every culture that anthropologists have observed has its own music. (Music may be forbidden in some cultures at some points in their history, but repression of music is not the same as the absence of the desire to make it.) Styles of singing and types of instruments vary enormously--to the delight of fans of "world music"--but some form of music is present, often as part of important cultural traditions, from the arctic tundra to the tropical rainforests, whether for pursuing seals or for communicating with the spirits of birds.

Pervasiveness alone, of course, does not mean that a trait matters a lot in evolution. Music could be just a happy accident, notes psychologist Steven Pinker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Think about food. The vagaries of prehistoric nutrition may have favored hominids with a taste for fruit or for calorie-packed fats. Nowadays we can titillate those tastes whenever we want, but it's hard to argue that survival advantages drove humanity to evolve an enthusiasm for strawberry cheesecake. In theory, Pinker maintains, music, too, could tickle pleasure out of cognitive circuitry that evolved for more practical purposes, such as sorting out individual sounds from a noisy environment. In his 1997 book How the Mind Works, he writes, "I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake."

So far, that has been a hard statement to prove or disprove. But it is a view that Ian Cross, university lecturer in music at the University of Cambridge, disputes. Cross argues that dismissing music as a useless frill smacks of ethnocentricity. He concedes that the view is perhaps a fair description of "what music has become over the last hundred years within technologized and capitalistic Western society," in which a booming industry for recording and selling sounds has turned music into "a commodity to be consumed, dispensable on demand." But elsewhere in the world, people turn to music for reasons other than entertainment--from keeping workers on task to 'powering spiritual events.

David Huron agrees, pointing to the Mekranoti Indians in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil as an example. Mekranoti women settle down on palm leaves and sing during months-long naming ceremonies. The men typically gather to sing in the predawn hours; their singing helps keep them roused find ready for any attack. Slugabeds get roundly taunted.

Huron describes himself as open minded on the question of an evolutionary value for music. "I think we should investigate matters further before we dismiss the notion," he says. But where to look? If music is indeed a universal human trait, then clues about its functions and origin may reside in our brains. One optimist searching for brain tissue devoted to musical matters is neuropsychologist Isabelle Peretz, of the University of Montreal. Peretz has studied people who suffered brain injuries that shut down their musicality but left other mental faculties intact. For instance, she has tested three people who, after recovering from ruptured aneurysms, were able to speak normally and even to recognize sounds in the environment (barking dogs, cars rumbling by) but could not recognize the tunes of songs they once knew, such as Christmas carols or "Happy Birthday." One of these people said she still enjoyed music, however, and Peretz found that even though the woman couldn't recognize a tune, she was able to rate the happiness or sadness of a composition as readily as an uninjured listener could. (A different misfortune struck Russian composer Vissarion Shebalin: a severe stroke deprived him of almost all his language ability, yet he went on to compose his Fifth Symphony.)