Music As A Record of Human History
The role of music in evolution, and why we are the only species with specialized musical abilities
Pick a song that you liked in middle school. Yes, the one you played over and over again on your iPod touch (or Walkman if that’s when you’re from). Try to remember what it was like listening to that embarrassing song from Hannah Montana you sang when you were in your bathroom while taking selfies? Or that Linkin Park tune that was the soundtrack to the latest Transformers movie starring a then, less irascible Shia LaBeouf?
I’m sure you can vividly remember what that song sounded like, but that’s not all you remember right? You remember what that whole year was like. Your memory of the song brings back a whole other set of random memories — who you had a crush on, how you made a fool of yourself in history class, that ugly sweater your grandma knitted you for Christmas that was a few sizes too small.
You keep listening, and you trail off. It’s been three minutes into the song, and you have no idea how you got to thinking about your obsession with the Backstreet Boys, but something about it seems comfortable. The nostalgia is reassuring, albeit a little woeful in its romanticism.
Neuroscientists call this the reminiscence bump, where an increased recollection of events occur during adolescence and the onset of adulthood [1]. At this point in development, the brain is constantly reconstructing neural pathways, and so associations with the music you hear at the time you were 14–24 years old has an especially marked jump in memories that stay with you your entire life. This strong positive association also exists for film and other forms entertainment.
So that song you liked when you were 14? You probably still like it now.
Studies have shown that music is strongly associated with memory, personality and nostalgia [2]. While an auditory stimulus can trigger both negative and positive responses, there are clear correlations between a person’s responses to the music itself and the memory that the music triggers [3]. So if you associate a particular song with a time when you felt elated, the song is also likely to make you feel elated now and even ten years from now.
Your Brain on Music
That being said, there are some caveats to this association. The same piece of music is also likely to change its meaning over time. Different people react differently to the same piece of music, and the same individual may respond differently to the same piece over time. Factors like mood, preference, personality type and familiarity can play a major role in your response to music. The whole process is quite complex, and we still don’t know for sure how the neural architecture of these responses are created.
When it comes to listening to music, auditory perception is a very complex process that involves several regions of the brain working together. The hippocampus and frontal cortex is strongly associated with memories and is constantly receiving inputs every second. While music perception is handled largely by the auditory cortex, the reward functions or “chill” sensation is due to stimulation of the amygdala.
The motor be cortex, responsible for foot tapping, or “riding the groove” helps us dance to a funky rhythm and enjoy techno parties. The visual cortex helps us appreciate concerts that are flashy and music videos that tap into dopamine rushes triggered by the presence of transients (distinct markers of loudness in a song).
There’s a whole lot of research on this and I can go on, but the point is — listening to music is a very complex phenomenon and it’s something only humans have been able to do very recently.
I like to think of our mind as cypher that encrypts and decrypts multiple memories and emotions into a sequence of patterns. Every time you try to sing or think of a song, your mind taps into that encoding and makes sure that those emotions and memories are invoked in a particular sequence.
We know that this association exists in human brains, but how do we test for it in animals, and more specifically, our evolutionary relatives, primates?
There are some theorists that have tried to find the “perfect chord progression” that results in a reward function stimulation in the brain, i.e. makes us feel good. Vuust’s Inverted U association between syncopation, body-movement and pleasure is up for debate, but it seems as though, like in most psychological studies, there is a sweet spot for finding a reward function based on an auditory stimulus [5].
Rhythm perception is a good indicator of being able to test for musicality. In fact, Fitch et. al highlight four main principles of musicality that a species must posses — song, drumming, social synchronization and dance [10]. So far, none of our evolutionary cousins have demonstrated all four capacities of musicality. While apes have systems of social synchronization, they can’t drum, sing and dance in synchrony the way we do[11].
So we can’t really trace a direct evolutionary link as to why only we make music, but maybe we can look at genetic variations within our own population and see if there are genetic factors that contribute to musicality [12].
It turns out that having Absolute Pitch has high genetic correlation, but is more likely to develop as a result of early music training. Genetic regions like the AVPR1A has been tested as a candidate gene for music [6], and correlations between the gene for speech (FOXP2) have shown some, if not weak, evidence for musicality as having developed as a by product of speech [7]. Twin studies and genome wide studies have shown that there are genetic contributors to musicality.
What is exciting about this is that we can tell all of this information just by looking at individual variations within our own human populations. Extreme cases such as Amusia (tone-deafness) and arhythmia have been the subject of thorough study for this very reason [13].
But the point is, all the evidence for evolutionary functionality in music is still quite weak.
My idea is that the reason we have developed this hyper-functional ability to make and appreciate music is to preserve human history. Much like ‘The Song of Ice and Fire ’ is a preservation of the story of the living in Westeros from the HBO show, Game of Thrones, the reason we have music in society is to make a mark in history and leave it as an edict for generations to come.
Musical traditions in japan like the ‘Esashi Oiwake’ didn’t have written transcription systems till very recently. Stories of rural folklore were passed down orally. Religions like Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism all have preserved their traditions orally and were memorized using song.
Some of our greatest historical texts like the Iliad, the Odyssey and Beowulf were all passed down in the form of song and till date remain our only reliable glimpse into what life was like back then.
Since songs are easier to remember than prose, music’s function is served by preserving information in the form of patterns. In one sense, it’s a sort of encoding that our brain puts words and emotions into. Patients that have speaking disorder have shown significant improvement in communication by memorizing phrases as song segments and melodies, thereby rerouting the normal mechanism for speech.
Fields of study such as musicology study even broader, qualitative themes of human history. Researchers like Alan Lomax have been able to study human history through songs and have made questionable but probing associations between music and social structure [8]. There is strong evidence that says that cultures that involve group singing follow a more egalitarian social structures and cultures with solo singers with high pitched voices and complex melodies tend to be more top-down in their hierarchy.
Folk music really is the heart of human history, as it speaks of the struggles of a particular people with a collective identity. Folk music serves as proof of their existence as an ethnic group, a race, a nation. National anthems are quite often based on historical events to remind future generations of a time when a nation was created, it’s struggle and glory. This may not galvanize people into action about doing anything radical, but it does give the individual a sense of belonging to a larger group of people.
With the invention of the digital record, it’s become even easier to archive information through music. Moreover, databases now allow you to have extensive access to lyrics, metadata, critiques and analysis of that music. Streaming services like Spotify can now tell whether you are more likely to buy certain products based on your listening history. They have, and continue to do research on what our musical tastes can tell about us.
They can do this, simply because there is now so much data on the subject that they can do that. In fact there is now a whole community of researchers doing this kind of work in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and there’s a society for it that’s funded by companies like Spotify, Deezer, Google and Pandora called ISMIR. An increasing number of researchers are looking at what we can tell from the audio itself (not the metadata) of a song. They want to see if there are patterns in the internal structure of songs, and if those patterns can tell us something about the people who made it.
What is interesting is that musicologists have found that our cultural evolution of music accurately tracks the genetic and biological evolution of human beings over time, and by looking at similarities in music, we can look at a cultural footprint that humans have left while migrating from one place to another [9].
There’s still so much we don’t know, but much more that we can tell just from looking at the music we make. We define decades by the music that was written during that time. We use music to give ourselves a collective identity. It helps us relax, it gets us riled up, it helps us attract, it makes us repel but moreover music makes us who we are.
So go back to that song you liked from middle school and listen to it one more time - because that’s probably the most accurate gateway to the history of your life.
References
[1] Morris B. Holbrook, Robert M. Schindler, Some Exploratory Findings on the Development of Musical Tastes, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 16, Issue 1, June 1989, Pages 119–124, https://doi.org/10.1086/209200
[2] F. S. Barrett, K. J. Grimm, R. W. Robins, T. Wildschut, C. Sedikides, and P. Janata, “Music-evoked nostalgia: Affect, memory, and personality.,” Emotion, vol. 10, no. 3. American Psychological Association, Janata, Petr: Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA, US, 95618, pjanata@ucdavis.edu, pp. 390–403, 2010.
[3] T. Jenkins, “Culture — Why does music evoke memories?,” BBC, 21-Oct-2014. [Online]. Available: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140417-why-does-music-evoke-memories. [Accessed: 06-Jun-2019].
[4] M. A. G. Witek, E. F. Clarke, M. Wallentin, M. L. Kringelbach, and P. Vuust, “Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music,” PLoS One, vol. 9, no. 4, p. e94446, Apr. 2014.
[5] Vuust, P. , Dietz, M. J., Witek, M. and Kringelbach, M. L. (2018), Now you hear it: a predictive coding model for understanding rhythmic incongruity. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., 1423: 19-29. doi:10.1111/nyas.13622
[6] L. Ukkola-Vuoti, J. Oikkonen, P. Onkamo, K. Karma, P. Raijas, and I. Järvelä, “Association of the arginine vasopressin receptor 1A (AVPR1A) haplotypes with listening to music,” J. Hum. Genet., vol. 56, p. 324, Feb. 2011.
[7] C. Kanduri, T. Kuusi, M. Ahvenainen, A. K. Philips, H. Lähdesmäki, and I. Järvelä, “The effect of music performance on the transcriptome of professional musicians,” Sci. Rep., vol. 5, p. 9506, Mar. 2015.
[8] P. E. Savage, “Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project: A comprehensive review,” Music Sci., vol. 1, p. 2059204318786084, Jan. 2018.
[9] P. E. Savage, “Cultural evolution of music,” Palgrave Commun., vol. 5, no. 1, p. 16, 2019.
[10] Fitch W. Tecumseh, Four principles of bio-musicology, 370 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0091
[11] H. Honing, “On the biological basis of musicality,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1423, no. 1, pp. 51–56, 2018.
[12] B. Gingras, H. Honing, I. Peretz, L. J. Trainor, and S. E. Fisher, “Defining the Biological Bases of Individual Differences in Musicality,” The Origins of Musicality, 2018.
[13] I. Peretz, A. S. Champod, and K. Hyde (2003), Varieties of Musical Disorders. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999: 58–75. doi:10.1196/annals.1284.006
