Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
Daniel Levitin: I think anybody who's ever been moved by music,
anybody who's ever had an emotional reaction, whether it was goosebumps
or tears or laughter or just a sense of joy, a sense of unity,
of oneness with the world from a piece of music,
anybody who's ever had this kind of emotional reaction,
I think you wouldn't be here if you hadn't have had that feeling
at least once in your life.
Anybody who's had that has probably wondered why.
Why is this happening?   Where does this come from?
I think to begin with we can look at the early origins of music,
and it's important to realize
that the way music is today isn't necessarily the way music was
across evolutionary time scales.
It doesn't do much good to look at music
of the last 15 years or the last 500 years.
We have to think about music as it was for thousands and thousands
or tens of thousands of years going back
to the beginning of our species.
Now, the available evidence that Pinker might be wrong comes
from a number of sources.
When Pinker says that language preceded music, there actually isn't
so much evidence for that; the weight is on the other side.
To begin with, Steven Mithen, in his excellent book
"The Singing Neanderthals" and many others have argued
that music characterized the communicative faculty
of the Neanderthals.
Neanderthals preceded us Homo sapiens,
and the way in which they communicated was largely
through musical gestures, alternations in pitch and time.
Alternations in pitch and time, that's about as good a definition
of music as I can think of.
The way the Neanderthals communicated was a language
that didn't have words or specific tokens, but had these kinds
of Prosodic trajectories that would communicate emotional things.
I think the closest thing I can imagine
to Neanderthal communication is the way the teachers and the adults
in Charlie Brown Peanuts cartoons used to talk, right?
So the kids would talk in regular language,
but whenever a teacher would talk,
it would sort of be [makes noise], right?
You had all of this musical quality,
and you really knew what was going on.
You knew whether they were asking a question or whether they were angry
or whether they were upset or happy or content,
all with this sort of pitch trajectory.
And that's what Neanderthal communication seemed to be like.
If you look at our nearest biological cousins, the chimpanzee,
the panhoo [spelled phonetically] to the chimpanzee, the primary way
in which chimpanzees communicate with one another is again
with variations in pitch and rhythm.
The panhoo doesn't have particular elements
that can be recombined the way we do with language.
It really is more musical than it is language like.
Some of the hallmarks of human language is this idea
that you can recombine elements.
You can create an infinity of different utterances,
different elements of the sentence stand
for certain things in the real world.
Language is referential.   It refers to specific things.
Chimpanzee communication is not like that.
It's more musical.   It's more holistic.
So what you'd have to believe if you wanted to say that language
in humans preceded music, is that Homo sapiens somehow forgot
about the music that Neanderthals and chimpanzees had.
They discovered language, spoken language,
and that at some point later rediscovered music.
That just doesn't seem very parsimonious.
Another piece of evidence comes
from neural studies, brain imaging studies.
We put people in a brain scanner and look at what parts
of the brain are activated when they listen to music or language,
and it's the more primitive parts of the brain: the cerebellum,
the brainstem, the ponds, that are selectively activated
to music and not to language.
This suggests that because these areas are older in our brain,
the areas we have in common with all mammals,
indeed with all vertebrates,
it suggests that because music is activating them,
music is phylogenetically older.
Also, consider the way that music actually was practiced
for tens of thousands of years.
Music in almost every case was music dance.
There was no separation between the two.
When people were making music, they were dancing.
Now, we sort of forget that many of us today in contemporary society
where we sit in rooms just like this where Bartok performed,
where Stravinsky and others performed, and we're supposed
to sit here with our hands folded quietly in our laps,
and we're not supposed to move, and we're not supposed to make a sound.
But this is evolutionary very foreign to our species.
For tens of thousands of years,
music and movement always went together, so much so that in most
of the world's languages today, the word for music and the word
for dance are the same word.
The languages themselves don't make a distinction
because there was never a time when any speaker of that language had
to refer to one without referring to the other.
So it's music dance in most of the world's cultures.
It's not in ours; we separate the two.
We even have, in modern dance, you can have dance without music,
and obviously, we have music without dance.
But that's a relatively new evolutionary finding
or happenstance.
So historically and linguistically they were intertwined.
And consider also the connection between music and movement is
so intimate that you can't make music without movement.
Any musical sound, and I'm talking on an acoustic or a physical level,
any musical sound requires some movement to get it started.
You have to bang on something or pluck something or strum or blow
through something or at least force air
through you're your own vocal column or bang
on your chest Bobby McFerrin style in order to get the molecules
in the atmosphere moving, and that's what sound is.
So music begins with movement, and the idea that music
and movement were intertwined really gives us a window
into how they may have functioned in evolutionary time scales.
For one thing, humans are the only mammalian species
that can synchronize our movement to sound,
synchronize movement to music.
Now, there is a cockatoo that Ani Patell [spelled phonetically].
You can see the video on YouTube.
It seems as though the cockatoo can synchronize its movement to music
about 20 percent of the time and for about 15 seconds at a time.
Ani, my colleague, is still trying to work out the statistics on this
as to whether that constitutes something different
from chance or not.
If it turns out that the cockatoo can't do it, we're the only species,
not just the only mammal.
But let's just say for now we're the only mammalian species
that can do it.   It's actually quite extraordinary.
Infants can do this.
Think about what's going on in the brain.
The sound comes in the ear, and somehow the motor system is able
to figure out how to move the body in order to synchronize
with this thing that's coming in through an entirely different sense.
It comes in through the sense of hearing,
it comes out through the motor system and it comes
out pretty well synchronized.
Elephants and chimpanzees'll bang on sticks
and they can even keep a steady tempo,
but they can't synchronize to one another.
Well, the kinds of large scale human cooperative undertakings,
buildings of cities, aqueducts, irrigation systems, buildings,
you know, even just agriculture, clearing an area for a village,
if you're a nomadic people and you're trying to set up an altar
to worship at and you have to move it,
all this kind of heavy lifting requires synchronization.
And that synchronization was always done to music.
If you're doing the one-two-heave-ho,
you all have to "ho" at the same time
or that big builder isn't going to move.
The work parties that we have heard of, you know, chain gangs and things
of our lifetime were all moving to music.
The ancient rowers trying to row
across the seas were rowing to music.
This is the connection between music and movement,
and it shows up even in neuro anatomy.
When we put people in the brain scanner, and we ask them
to lie perfectly still and listen to music, the part of their brain
that would be moving their bodies, the motor cortex, is active,
even if they're lying perfectly still.
It takes a great act of will to hold the body still
when there is music playing, and we see the neural evidence of this:
the motor cortex, the pre-motor cortex,
the supplementary motor areas,
the parts that would be doing this motor action planning are wildly
active when music is going.
Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.   Visit us at loc.gov.