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

Natural History, Dec, 2001 by Susan Milius

Solidifying membership within a group fulfills only one of music's roles, however, Brown maintains. Music also conveys information, with goose bumps added. It creates the visceral rush solemnifying the news that a child has reached adulthood, that a man and a woman are now one couple, that a community prays for healing. Loh offers examples from his village. "We sing when someone dies. The singing is about the life of the person, what he did bad, what was good. Also when we have a baby, there is special music, praying for him, telling him to be polite."

Catharsis is another group use of music. Brown argues that it channels grief or rage or other nearly overwhelming emotions for shared public release. Just ask people who watched the collapse of the World Trade Center towers how it felt to sing the national anthem in the following days. Most--even those who are neither religious nor nationalistic and who may be against the use of military force are likely to say that singing with others who were going through the same experience brought some sort of relief.

Such groupish powers arise from the very structure of music, Brown maintains. "Conversation is about one person speaking and then the other," he says. "Music is about blending pitches, entraining to rhythms." If divided we fall, united we sing.

RELATED ARTICLE: Singing's a hoot.

Lest we humans get too smug about our standing as a musical species, consider the gibbons, our most distant living ape relatives. All twelve species sing, and in ten of them, mated pairs engage in duets. (To hear gibbons sing, go to www.gibbons.de.)

To qualify as a singer, an animal must repeat several series of notes in a recognizable temporal pattern, explains zoologist Thomas Geissmann, of the Tierarzliche Hochschule Hannover in Germany. He's analyzed singing in nonhuman primates and proposes that their "music" might have developed along an evolutionary path that human ancestors wandered down too.

Singing evolved independently at least four times among nonhuman primates, contends Geissmann. Depending on which classification scheme is used, some twenty-six species sing. Besides gibbons, singing primates include the Madagascan lemurs called indris, the tarsiers of Sulawesi, and the tiff monkeys of South America. None of these groups perch particularly close together on the primate family tree.

Geissmann proposes that the songs of all these species may have evolved from common primate vocalizations known as loud calls. Many primates, particularly adult males, belt out characteristic notes when groups meet or when something alarming happens. The singing routines of modern species are more elaborate than these calls, but there are some suggestive similarities. All songs and many calls, for example, contain runs of relatively pure notes.

Oddly enough, all the singing primates Geissmann has studied fall into the exclusive club of monogamous mammals (only 3 percent or so of all mammals tend to have one mate at a time). Whereas singing may originally have evolved in order to attract a mate or to help defend resources, Geissmann muses that duet singing in primates might have arisen along with monogamy. He imagines that a mate might have found it beneficial to repeatedly interrupt a partner's ongoing "song bout" with little phrases of his (or her) own to let potential home wreckers know that the partner was already taken. As more complex duetting evolved, singing might have strengthened pair bonds. At least in siamang gibbons, new mates have to learn the fine coordination between his part and hers.