I try to stay up on evolutionary psychology, and read various books about the evolutionary functions of music 10-15 years ago when a few of those come out. Your idea seems to be a novel (and good) account. I annually attend HBES, etc.
As usual, Plato was the first to point out the power of music to change culture - and everything else. Quote from The Republic, Book IV:
The regulations which we are prescribing, my good Adeimantus, are not, as might be supposed, a number of great principles, but trifles all, if care be taken, as the saying is, of the one great thing,—a thing, however, which I would rather call, not great, but sufficient for our purpose.
What may that be? he asked.
Education, I said, and nurture: If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the proverb says.
That will be the best way of settling them.
Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating force like a wheel. For good nurture and education implant good constitutions, and these good constitutions taking root in a good education improve more and more, and this improvement affects the breed in man as in other animals.
Very possibly, he said.
Then to sum up: This is the point to which, above all, the attention of our rulers should be directed,—that music and gymnastic be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost to maintain them intact. And when any one says that mankind most regard:
‘The newest song which the singers have,’
...they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him;—he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
Robin's idea seems more likely if you remember that before the 1960s, songs were /community/ experiences.
There was a change in the 1920s when phonographs and radio made it possible to hear recorded or broadcast music at home. But there was a bigger change in the emotional content of songs in the 1960s. Stereo headphones for listening to music were first sold to consumers in the 1950s, and it was in the 1960s that the falling cost of record players and radios, and of private bedrooms, made it not uncommon for a person--usually a teenager--to have one in his room, where he could listen to a song by himself.
Both the nature and function of songs changed radically at that point. I don't know if headphones and private rooms were the cause, but the time was definitely the 1960s. In the 1950s, as far as I know, there were religious songs, patriotic songs, party songs, dance music, silly songs, love songs, sentimental songs, and sad songs about lost loves and the blues; and that pretty much covered music's emotional range. Music changed more between 1962 (the Everly Brothers, Elvis, Frank Sinatra) and 1967 (the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Who, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones), than it has changed in the 6 decades since.
AFAIK there was nothing before 1964 like "Paint it Black", "Behind Blue Eyes", "People are Strange", "The End", or even "Eleanor Rigby". I don't just mean in America; I mean pretty much all Western musical history between 400 BCE (when the last great Greek tragedies were written) and 1964. (I might except some poems by brooding and individualistic Germanics, like Beowulf and Egil's Saga, which were probably set to music). There've been songs of mourning forever, but not songs of suicidal ideation or nihilistic despair.
Musical poets like Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, and David Bowie did something similar around that time, bringing deeper modernist themes like alienation, cultural fragmentation, introspection, liminality, and resignation into popular music. Again, I don't think there was anything like the ambivalence between revulsion and compassion in "A Poem on the Underground Wall" or "Famous Blue Raincoat" before the 1960s.
The only songs before the 1960s I can think of that expressed emotions you couldn't express in public were the popular bawdy songs of the high Middle Ages and Renaissance; and there was a class of professional bawds who sang those songs so respectable people didn't have to.
This meshes well with Robin's idea that songs taught people what emotions were acceptable to express in public. But today's music doesn't mesh with that as well. Perhaps the availability of songs expressing unacceptable emotions made it more common to express, or even to feel, unacceptable emotions. We also have more cross-cultural music, which could encourage people to express emotions unacceptable in their culture. The only example I can think of is rap, but it's a striking one.
I definitely think there is something to be said here, but the claim "teens naturally prefer “cool” songs, wherein singers seem fully committed to their strength-showing emotions, and are not hesitant or embarrassed about those emotions" seems off.
Maybe this is just being from the emo generation, but the most "teenage" of music consumption for me is "sitting alone in your room listening to say, the Smiths or My Chemical Romance, and realizing that no-one in the world understands you except for this band". So think very teenage, but also complex, vulnerable and uncomfortable emotional content.
Really good post. I am a "serious amateur" songwriter, have written about 300 over the past 20 years. I find that original music comes to me when I am open to it, and then once I have the sort of musical basis for a song (chord progression, rhythm, and melody as well as the assembled structural song parts such as verse-chorus relationships), the lyrics will also come to me, but only if there is some powerfully emotional reason to complete a song—love, longing, wonderment, heartbreak, and loss chief among those reasons.
I also now understand that a song by someone else that moves me or speaks to me on a powerfully emotional level is certainly a song written by someone who was compelled to write it for their own very personal reasons. You often will find that a well-known song has a fascinating back-story, something the writer experienced that was of great personal significance.
My best songs come from the strongest need (or compulsion) to say something that cannot otherwise be said.
True, although sometimes in the general rather than in the particular. Like when I write a song about magnificent love and wonderment inspired by a particular person, but the person is not identified—not because I am ashamed, but because it is a private thing. I play those songs with bandmates and in public settings, and I guess the emotional meaning is clear, but the identity of the subject remains hidden.
One LLM (Claude 3.7) suggested to me that "Music may have evolved partly as a technology for emotional regulation and communication, allowing groups to synchronize emotional states", and points to Daniel Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain On Music" and other sources that discuss this idea. Here are some other prompts you might like to try or modify with your favorite LLM:
[prompt] I've heard, anecdotally, that some people feel no emotional or aesthetic response to music, while others feel a very strong one, while most fall somewhere in the middle. Has this been studied academically, perhaps in psychology? Does it fall on a normal distribution? Is there a term for people at the extremities of this distribution?
[response: Claude talks about Musical anhedonics and Hyperhedonic responders]
[prompt] I've heard that music might be something like cheesecake, in the sense that it is a recent innovation of our species that stimulates old features of our nervous system that our ancestors evolved in a non-musical environment, but that respond in a strong way. Is there a technical name for this hypothesis?
[response: Claude talks about Steven Pinker's book "How the Mind Works."]
[prompt] I can imagine that our ancestors evolved an ability to recognize and reproduce rhythms because this would be useful for coordinated motions like walking and for recognizing other animals, or for evaluating the fitness of a mate via their ability to dance (such dancing is comparable to a peacock's tail). It's also plausible that our auditory system evolved to perceive as "related" any pair of frequencies whose ratio is a fraction involving small integers, because such frequencies are often harmonics produced by a single source, and this can partially explain our perception of musical harmony and consonance. Is this correct? Are there other related ideas proposed by scientists?
Unchecked emotion can certainly be problematic when it interferes with decision making that benefits from care, logic, patience, etc. But people have learned the wrong lesson from this. The solution is not to learn how to suppress emotion but how to channel it with purpose. Music is a fantastically effective channeling tool.
Freud's "fort-da" is relevant here. His basic claim is that we repeat traumatic events to gain mastery of them. I might listen to a popular music song regarding a break up to repeat the stages of the emotions and therefore feel a sense of power over controlling and regulating it.
Interesting post. I find the final sentence opaque though. Eg what ‘changes to songs’?
Also, re: ‘ Teens are also the people most into “cool”, i.e. showing exaggeratedly strong control over emotions. And so teens naturally prefer “cool” songs, wherein singers seem fully committed to their strength-showing emotions, and are not hesitant or embarrassed about those emotions.’
There seems a contradiction here. Surely ‘cool’ involves showing little emotion, whereas songs often show lots of emotion. And various (admittedly not mainstream) genres involve extreme emotions, eg death metal and similar
I suspect you have a different meaning of "cool". "Cool" as in a recent trend which the speaker approves of is maybe not what you mean.
I don't think that music that is more popular with teenagers than adults is more "under control" than other music. Of course all music needs a degree of control, but how do you measure it and show that teenager's music is different?
I view music as a particular technology for inducing emotions. But there are other ways to induce emotions, such as watching movies (e.g. horror movies vs comedy), reading fiction, or taking drugs. In my view, people have preferences toward certain emotions at certain times and take actions to induce them. The preference is determined by something like a "general mood," a mood that seeks to be reinforced. OTOH, your theory assumes people _already have_ certain emotions and only look for a (socially acceptable) way to vent them "out". I think this view assumes too much of the old "hydraulic" model of emotions https://academic.oup.com/book/10759/chapter-abstract/158860590?redirectedFrom=fulltext
It may not be original, but I've never heard it before. Great observation about something common, yet often unexamined. Might some of these principles also apply to other kinds of art?
I have suggested a more general thesis that narrative fiction has been awful for humanity because our learning systems cannot distinguish emotional fiction, vicarious experience, from reality. We learn from our emotions whether we know better or not.
I think this is implicit in Plato's assumption that people will imitate whatever they read about in poetry, and also implicit in the similar Marxist complaint against literature, from Bertolt Brecht to Lennard Davis, that it seduces people into the "false and destructive bourgeois belief" that they can change their own lives for the better.
These ideas might be symptoms but I’m suggesting a more blameless, biochemically salient reason why so many people seem to feel ever-more deeply about things they have never really experienced. This result tracks the progress of fiction as a pastime since the printing press and more so, the democratization of storytelling since penny novellas.
Earlier this month, I tried out the Apple Vision Pro VR goggles, which have 23 million pixels about an inch away from your eyes. They are, with respect to vision, like being there. Just shockingly realistic. I think VR fiction will quickly become more-popular, among those who can afford it, than all other forms of fiction; and if it gets the AI right, it will be about as addictive as heroin.
I try to stay up on evolutionary psychology, and read various books about the evolutionary functions of music 10-15 years ago when a few of those come out. Your idea seems to be a novel (and good) account. I annually attend HBES, etc.
As usual, Plato was the first to point out the power of music to change culture - and everything else. Quote from The Republic, Book IV:
The regulations which we are prescribing, my good Adeimantus, are not, as might be supposed, a number of great principles, but trifles all, if care be taken, as the saying is, of the one great thing,—a thing, however, which I would rather call, not great, but sufficient for our purpose.
What may that be? he asked.
Education, I said, and nurture: If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the proverb says.
That will be the best way of settling them.
Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating force like a wheel. For good nurture and education implant good constitutions, and these good constitutions taking root in a good education improve more and more, and this improvement affects the breed in man as in other animals.
Very possibly, he said.
Then to sum up: This is the point to which, above all, the attention of our rulers should be directed,—that music and gymnastic be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost to maintain them intact. And when any one says that mankind most regard:
‘The newest song which the singers have,’
...they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him;—he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
Robin's idea seems more likely if you remember that before the 1960s, songs were /community/ experiences.
There was a change in the 1920s when phonographs and radio made it possible to hear recorded or broadcast music at home. But there was a bigger change in the emotional content of songs in the 1960s. Stereo headphones for listening to music were first sold to consumers in the 1950s, and it was in the 1960s that the falling cost of record players and radios, and of private bedrooms, made it not uncommon for a person--usually a teenager--to have one in his room, where he could listen to a song by himself.
Both the nature and function of songs changed radically at that point. I don't know if headphones and private rooms were the cause, but the time was definitely the 1960s. In the 1950s, as far as I know, there were religious songs, patriotic songs, party songs, dance music, silly songs, love songs, sentimental songs, and sad songs about lost loves and the blues; and that pretty much covered music's emotional range. Music changed more between 1962 (the Everly Brothers, Elvis, Frank Sinatra) and 1967 (the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Who, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones), than it has changed in the 6 decades since.
AFAIK there was nothing before 1964 like "Paint it Black", "Behind Blue Eyes", "People are Strange", "The End", or even "Eleanor Rigby". I don't just mean in America; I mean pretty much all Western musical history between 400 BCE (when the last great Greek tragedies were written) and 1964. (I might except some poems by brooding and individualistic Germanics, like Beowulf and Egil's Saga, which were probably set to music). There've been songs of mourning forever, but not songs of suicidal ideation or nihilistic despair.
Musical poets like Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, and David Bowie did something similar around that time, bringing deeper modernist themes like alienation, cultural fragmentation, introspection, liminality, and resignation into popular music. Again, I don't think there was anything like the ambivalence between revulsion and compassion in "A Poem on the Underground Wall" or "Famous Blue Raincoat" before the 1960s.
The only songs before the 1960s I can think of that expressed emotions you couldn't express in public were the popular bawdy songs of the high Middle Ages and Renaissance; and there was a class of professional bawds who sang those songs so respectable people didn't have to.
This meshes well with Robin's idea that songs taught people what emotions were acceptable to express in public. But today's music doesn't mesh with that as well. Perhaps the availability of songs expressing unacceptable emotions made it more common to express, or even to feel, unacceptable emotions. We also have more cross-cultural music, which could encourage people to express emotions unacceptable in their culture. The only example I can think of is rap, but it's a striking one.
I definitely think there is something to be said here, but the claim "teens naturally prefer “cool” songs, wherein singers seem fully committed to their strength-showing emotions, and are not hesitant or embarrassed about those emotions" seems off.
Maybe this is just being from the emo generation, but the most "teenage" of music consumption for me is "sitting alone in your room listening to say, the Smiths or My Chemical Romance, and realizing that no-one in the world understands you except for this band". So think very teenage, but also complex, vulnerable and uncomfortable emotional content.
Really good post. I am a "serious amateur" songwriter, have written about 300 over the past 20 years. I find that original music comes to me when I am open to it, and then once I have the sort of musical basis for a song (chord progression, rhythm, and melody as well as the assembled structural song parts such as verse-chorus relationships), the lyrics will also come to me, but only if there is some powerfully emotional reason to complete a song—love, longing, wonderment, heartbreak, and loss chief among those reasons.
I also now understand that a song by someone else that moves me or speaks to me on a powerfully emotional level is certainly a song written by someone who was compelled to write it for their own very personal reasons. You often will find that a well-known song has a fascinating back-story, something the writer experienced that was of great personal significance.
My best songs come from the strongest need (or compulsion) to say something that cannot otherwise be said.
The feelings that you feel compelled to express in song are also ones that you don't feel very ashamed of. That in fact you can see others endorsing.
True, although sometimes in the general rather than in the particular. Like when I write a song about magnificent love and wonderment inspired by a particular person, but the person is not identified—not because I am ashamed, but because it is a private thing. I play those songs with bandmates and in public settings, and I guess the emotional meaning is clear, but the identity of the subject remains hidden.
One LLM (Claude 3.7) suggested to me that "Music may have evolved partly as a technology for emotional regulation and communication, allowing groups to synchronize emotional states", and points to Daniel Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain On Music" and other sources that discuss this idea. Here are some other prompts you might like to try or modify with your favorite LLM:
[prompt] I've heard, anecdotally, that some people feel no emotional or aesthetic response to music, while others feel a very strong one, while most fall somewhere in the middle. Has this been studied academically, perhaps in psychology? Does it fall on a normal distribution? Is there a term for people at the extremities of this distribution?
[response: Claude talks about Musical anhedonics and Hyperhedonic responders]
[prompt] I've heard that music might be something like cheesecake, in the sense that it is a recent innovation of our species that stimulates old features of our nervous system that our ancestors evolved in a non-musical environment, but that respond in a strong way. Is there a technical name for this hypothesis?
[response: Claude talks about Steven Pinker's book "How the Mind Works."]
[prompt] I can imagine that our ancestors evolved an ability to recognize and reproduce rhythms because this would be useful for coordinated motions like walking and for recognizing other animals, or for evaluating the fitness of a mate via their ability to dance (such dancing is comparable to a peacock's tail). It's also plausible that our auditory system evolved to perceive as "related" any pair of frequencies whose ratio is a fraction involving small integers, because such frequencies are often harmonics produced by a single source, and this can partially explain our perception of musical harmony and consonance. Is this correct? Are there other related ideas proposed by scientists?
[response: Claude talks about many other ideas]
Unchecked emotion can certainly be problematic when it interferes with decision making that benefits from care, logic, patience, etc. But people have learned the wrong lesson from this. The solution is not to learn how to suppress emotion but how to channel it with purpose. Music is a fantastically effective channeling tool.
Ted Gioia writes that there are cycles in music and some eras are "cool" and some are "hot". https://www.honest-broker.com/p/are-there-alternating-cycles-of-hot He thinks we are in a transition period now.
His subversive history of music and secret musicology https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/Music-Subversive-History-Ted-Gioia/dp/1541644360&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwjLsN2Shu6MAxUdCRAIHS5SGvcQFnoECAUQAw&usg=AOvVaw2khc_pLvXO6TOjJFp4bxFk
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/music-to-raise-the-dead-the-secret
are replete with examples of music teaching us what to feel, think, and do and how to express these things. Interesting stuff.
Freud's "fort-da" is relevant here. His basic claim is that we repeat traumatic events to gain mastery of them. I might listen to a popular music song regarding a break up to repeat the stages of the emotions and therefore feel a sense of power over controlling and regulating it.
Interesting post. I find the final sentence opaque though. Eg what ‘changes to songs’?
Also, re: ‘ Teens are also the people most into “cool”, i.e. showing exaggeratedly strong control over emotions. And so teens naturally prefer “cool” songs, wherein singers seem fully committed to their strength-showing emotions, and are not hesitant or embarrassed about those emotions.’
There seems a contradiction here. Surely ‘cool’ involves showing little emotion, whereas songs often show lots of emotion. And various (admittedly not mainstream) genres involve extreme emotions, eg death metal and similar
It is not emotions that are the problem, but out of control emotions. "cool" songs have their emotions under control.
I suspect you have a different meaning of "cool". "Cool" as in a recent trend which the speaker approves of is maybe not what you mean.
I don't think that music that is more popular with teenagers than adults is more "under control" than other music. Of course all music needs a degree of control, but how do you measure it and show that teenager's music is different?
Quick google turned up this article, which may overlap with Robin's idea. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275576549_Music_as_emotional_regulation_throughout_adulthood
Alas it doesn't seem to say much.
I view music as a particular technology for inducing emotions. But there are other ways to induce emotions, such as watching movies (e.g. horror movies vs comedy), reading fiction, or taking drugs. In my view, people have preferences toward certain emotions at certain times and take actions to induce them. The preference is determined by something like a "general mood," a mood that seeks to be reinforced. OTOH, your theory assumes people _already have_ certain emotions and only look for a (socially acceptable) way to vent them "out". I think this view assumes too much of the old "hydraulic" model of emotions https://academic.oup.com/book/10759/chapter-abstract/158860590?redirectedFrom=fulltext
The feelings that people want to induce co evolve with the pool of songs that validate those feelings.
It may not be original, but I've never heard it before. Great observation about something common, yet often unexamined. Might some of these principles also apply to other kinds of art?
I have suggested a more general thesis that narrative fiction has been awful for humanity because our learning systems cannot distinguish emotional fiction, vicarious experience, from reality. We learn from our emotions whether we know better or not.
https://substack.com/@cynicology/note/c-108255243
I think this is implicit in Plato's assumption that people will imitate whatever they read about in poetry, and also implicit in the similar Marxist complaint against literature, from Bertolt Brecht to Lennard Davis, that it seduces people into the "false and destructive bourgeois belief" that they can change their own lives for the better.
These ideas might be symptoms but I’m suggesting a more blameless, biochemically salient reason why so many people seem to feel ever-more deeply about things they have never really experienced. This result tracks the progress of fiction as a pastime since the printing press and more so, the democratization of storytelling since penny novellas.
Earlier this month, I tried out the Apple Vision Pro VR goggles, which have 23 million pixels about an inch away from your eyes. They are, with respect to vision, like being there. Just shockingly realistic. I think VR fiction will quickly become more-popular, among those who can afford it, than all other forms of fiction; and if it gets the AI right, it will be about as addictive as heroin.
What song gets you in your feels, Robin?