Darwin argued that music evolved mainly by sexual selection through mate choice—and that we’re uncomfortable acknowledging that fact. (more) My students … don’t talk about music very eagerly. In class I can get a conversation going about God with no problem. And students love talking about alcohol and its effects on the human mind and spirit, theirs in particular. A conversation about sex is easy to start and quickly goes way further than I’d imagine — and sometimes further than I want. … [Yet] when I ask what role music plays in their lives or why they listen to what they do, there is silence. (
Interesting article. Found this as a Google search result for "music listener biases", something I've been interested in for a while.
The part about signaling allegiance to leaders' or groups' norms is very much in line with what I've been considering. I think people "try" to like certain songs or types of music, while not giving others a chance...out of desired identity, wanting to align with a certain group or individual, etc. More often than not, the actual musical content is a very small sliver of what is considered when "deciding" whether to "like" something or not. I think what goes on under the hood is often clannish and sometimes ugly in both fans and musicians, of anything from chamber, to jazz, to pop, to the most obscure underground niche genres. Some relationship to mating rituals, almost always an acute awareness of "who else" is listening to the genre or artist.
The fact that differences in skill exist doesn't imply that there's evolutionary pressue. Given that meme's like music can change a lot faster than our genetics it's perhaps more worthwhile to ask:"Why did music evolve in a way to be able to control mood in group sizes of 150."
For some reason, folks (probably like many of your students, Robin) who are comfortable discussing or even criticizing many of society's sacred cows (religion, morality, patriotism, etc.) tend to hold MUSIC as their own most sacred cow.
To put it another way: show me a staunch atheist, and I'll show you someone who is obsessed with their own music collection.
Am I stereotyping the typical Bonnaroo festival attendee? Yes... but why do these ideas always negatively correlate (music: traditional values)? Music as a signal of subculture membership?
Point is not to throw grenades from my own philosophical camp but to ask: why? Has anyone observed something similar?
As a songwriter I have come to the conclusion that the musical sense, the awareness of melody and rhythm is more fundamental to humans than language. When you ask if music evolved to share stories you are getting the chain backwards. Our use of language is an adaptation of our ability to make music. The inherent musicality of language is pretty strong evidence of that. If not for a basic sense of rhythm and melody we would not be able to form sentences, much less tell stories. It is this ancient primitive source of musical sense which makes it so hard to explain and verbalize. I can hum a soft sweet tune and everyone will feel calm, i can even sing disturbing lyrics over it and no one will notice.
The ability of the brain to remember a song, to string together phrases into meaning, is the foundation of language. If you stop and listen to your thinking for a while you may notice there is always an audio track running in the background. Sometimes it is more noticeable (particularly when it gets some annoying ear worm playing), but it is always there, keeping rhythm in the mind. This seems so obvious to me as a layman interested in music and the mind, I'm surprised more research hasn't gone towards this phenomenon.
The reason this English professor's students wouldn't talk to him about music is probably generational. They know pretty much that tastes in popular music are pretty much confined to specific age groups. If they told this teacher, "Oh yeah, I just love Arcade Fire", first he'd snort and say "Who the hell is that? In my day, we listened to ... " And it would be pretty tedious pretty fast. Intergenerational discussion of music is impossible.
I'm not sure it's so important to most of your claims, but I do not buy the claim that words are important to music.
People who like and are good with words care about lyrics a lot more than normal people; and there is serious selection bias in who writes about music. I'm not just talking about the English prof you cite, but also RH and really everyone commenting on this blog.
I do agree that if music and stories are good for propaganda that combining them is even better.
Your colleague Daniel Klein wrote about this in The People's Romance:
When we think of the action of the primitive band, the family, or the organization, we think of the whole acting as an integrated entity. We may fail to consider that the posited entity consists of constitutive elements or members. We may neglect to think about how each member experiences his membership in the entity and achieves with the other members the consonance in action that permits us to say that the entity acts in this or that way. Georg Simmel comments on perhaps the most manifest exhibition of the human social organism: It is interesting to observe how the prevalence of the socializing impulse in primitive peoples affects various institutions, such as the dance. It has been noted quite generally that the dances of primitive races exhibit a remarkable uniformity in arrangement and rhythm. The dancing group feels and acts like a uniform organism; the dance forces and accustoms a number of individuals, who are usually driven to and fro without rime or reason by vacillating conditions and needs of life, to be guided by a common impulse and a single common motive. ([1904] 1957, 546)
I don't know. Maybe the classroom is not the place.you can find plenty of discussion on the internet. but it is mostly about on the same level as Bevis and Butthead. It is either cool or it sucks. Yet Wagner's Tristan and Isolde was condemned as immoral,too emotional,corrupting, but how is that better than saying it sucks? There are many interesting things to discuss. No time now but maybe later
Even in groups of size 150, some people are better at music than others. And of course mood is important - the question is why we are built so that music controls our mood.
Leonard Bernstein was once asked "What good is music? What's it for?" He had an answer and I still think it's a pretty good one:
"Music is the best tool we have for exploring the geography of the psyche."
In some ways, that's a bit abstract, but it's an abstract phenomenon we're talking about. Music can certainly be attached to all of the mentioned attributes and used---and certainly we all know people who only seem to appreciate it for one or two of those uses---but none of them explain its longevity, its persistence across cultures, or (I think most importantly) its continual modification, recomplication, and reinvention.
Music is the one form we have that persistently refuses to be sublimated to predetermined social uses. It cuts through the filters we put in place to block the impact of other forms of communication. When you take the time to really listen, it does things in your head nothing else does. In some ways, this is like a narcotic effect. In other ways, it is similar to what we might call enlightenment or revelation in effect. It seems to me that it works levers and pushes buttons that are otherwise left unused or suppressed. My inclination is to compare this to the effects of deep reading, only it happens Now, in situ, and seems global.
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Interesting article. Found this as a Google search result for "music listener biases", something I've been interested in for a while.
The part about signaling allegiance to leaders' or groups' norms is very much in line with what I've been considering. I think people "try" to like certain songs or types of music, while not giving others a chance...out of desired identity, wanting to align with a certain group or individual, etc. More often than not, the actual musical content is a very small sliver of what is considered when "deciding" whether to "like" something or not. I think what goes on under the hood is often clannish and sometimes ugly in both fans and musicians, of anything from chamber, to jazz, to pop, to the most obscure underground niche genres. Some relationship to mating rituals, almost always an acute awareness of "who else" is listening to the genre or artist.
The fact that differences in skill exist doesn't imply that there's evolutionary pressue. Given that meme's like music can change a lot faster than our genetics it's perhaps more worthwhile to ask:"Why did music evolve in a way to be able to control mood in group sizes of 150."
I'll throw another idea out there: Music drowns out ambient noise.
They should.
For some reason, folks (probably like many of your students, Robin) who are comfortable discussing or even criticizing many of society's sacred cows (religion, morality, patriotism, etc.) tend to hold MUSIC as their own most sacred cow.
To put it another way: show me a staunch atheist, and I'll show you someone who is obsessed with their own music collection.
Am I stereotyping the typical Bonnaroo festival attendee? Yes... but why do these ideas always negatively correlate (music: traditional values)? Music as a signal of subculture membership?
Point is not to throw grenades from my own philosophical camp but to ask: why? Has anyone observed something similar?
As a songwriter I have come to the conclusion that the musical sense, the awareness of melody and rhythm is more fundamental to humans than language. When you ask if music evolved to share stories you are getting the chain backwards. Our use of language is an adaptation of our ability to make music. The inherent musicality of language is pretty strong evidence of that. If not for a basic sense of rhythm and melody we would not be able to form sentences, much less tell stories. It is this ancient primitive source of musical sense which makes it so hard to explain and verbalize. I can hum a soft sweet tune and everyone will feel calm, i can even sing disturbing lyrics over it and no one will notice.
The ability of the brain to remember a song, to string together phrases into meaning, is the foundation of language. If you stop and listen to your thinking for a while you may notice there is always an audio track running in the background. Sometimes it is more noticeable (particularly when it gets some annoying ear worm playing), but it is always there, keeping rhythm in the mind. This seems so obvious to me as a layman interested in music and the mind, I'm surprised more research hasn't gone towards this phenomenon.
Says a non-bird who is unable to perceive the rich complexity of a birdsong.
The reason this English professor's students wouldn't talk to him about music is probably generational. They know pretty much that tastes in popular music are pretty much confined to specific age groups. If they told this teacher, "Oh yeah, I just love Arcade Fire", first he'd snort and say "Who the hell is that? In my day, we listened to ... " And it would be pretty tedious pretty fast. Intergenerational discussion of music is impossible.
That reminds me of a more recent book, William H. McNeill's Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.
I'm not sure it's so important to most of your claims, but I do not buy the claim that words are important to music.
People who like and are good with words care about lyrics a lot more than normal people; and there is serious selection bias in who writes about music. I'm not just talking about the English prof you cite, but also RH and really everyone commenting on this blog.
I do agree that if music and stories are good for propaganda that combining them is even better.
Your colleague Daniel Klein wrote about this in The People's Romance:
When we think of the action of the primitive band, the family, or the organization, we think of the whole acting as an integrated entity. We may fail to consider that the posited entity consists of constitutive elements or members. We may neglect to think about how each member experiences his membership in the entity and achieves with the other members the consonance in action that permits us to say that the entity acts in this or that way. Georg Simmel comments on perhaps the most manifest exhibition of the human social organism: It is interesting to observe how the prevalence of the socializing impulse in primitive peoples affects various institutions, such as the dance. It has been noted quite generally that the dances of primitive races exhibit a remarkable uniformity in arrangement and rhythm. The dancing group feels and acts like a uniform organism; the dance forces and accustoms a number of individuals, who are usually driven to and fro without rime or reason by vacillating conditions and needs of life, to be guided by a common impulse and a single common motive. ([1904] 1957, 546)
I don't know. Maybe the classroom is not the place.you can find plenty of discussion on the internet. but it is mostly about on the same level as Bevis and Butthead. It is either cool or it sucks. Yet Wagner's Tristan and Isolde was condemned as immoral,too emotional,corrupting, but how is that better than saying it sucks? There are many interesting things to discuss. No time now but maybe later
Even in groups of size 150, some people are better at music than others. And of course mood is important - the question is why we are built so that music controls our mood.
The question is *why* music can seduce, bond, and soothe.
Leonard Bernstein was once asked "What good is music? What's it for?" He had an answer and I still think it's a pretty good one:
"Music is the best tool we have for exploring the geography of the psyche."
In some ways, that's a bit abstract, but it's an abstract phenomenon we're talking about. Music can certainly be attached to all of the mentioned attributes and used---and certainly we all know people who only seem to appreciate it for one or two of those uses---but none of them explain its longevity, its persistence across cultures, or (I think most importantly) its continual modification, recomplication, and reinvention.
Music is the one form we have that persistently refuses to be sublimated to predetermined social uses. It cuts through the filters we put in place to block the impact of other forms of communication. When you take the time to really listen, it does things in your head nothing else does. In some ways, this is like a narcotic effect. In other ways, it is similar to what we might call enlightenment or revelation in effect. It seems to me that it works levers and pushes buttons that are otherwise left unused or suppressed. My inclination is to compare this to the effects of deep reading, only it happens Now, in situ, and seems global.
Just my opinion.