In the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, there is a case study about a student called J., who was thought to have been cheating in class because she gave answers that were word-for-word quotes from her textbook. As it turned out, she didn’t cheat, J. has a specific type of photographic memory where she can remember anything as long as she puts it to music. She proved to her teacher that she didn’t cheat by singing entire portions of his lectures from memory. J. has a unique gift, but to some extent, we all use the power of music in this way. As Sacks (2007) explains, “setting words to music, especially in preliterate cultures, has played a huge role in relation to the oral traditions of poetry, storytelling, liturgy, and prayer.” (p. 238) As far as we know, humans are the only animals who encode words, skills, or sequences into melody and meter. The ability to store and recall large amounts of information may be why we are a species of music makers and listeners. (2007)
The observation of the effect of sound on the brain, from the perspective of the listener, is the focus of a field of science known as psychoacoustics. It has helped us to understand why certain sounds will alert our reptilian brain to enlist in a fight or flight response, and why Pavlov’s dogs salivated when they heard a bell ring. (Polar Talks, 2017)
Why do humans have a unique ability to enjoy music? What purpose has it served for our mental fitness, evolution, culture, and health? How might we relate to sound and music as we continue to evolve? Here I’ll look at a few relevant pieces of information I found while researching the topic of psychoacoustics, which expanded into broader research about the neuroscience of performing and experiencing music, and why music might be important to our species in general.
Memory and performance
The topic of memory is a common theme in the study of music and the brain. People who have had accidents resulting in amnesia or other severe memory damage are often still able to enjoy music. In some cases, they will actually develop a new appreciation for music. (Sacks, 2007)
In a different case study by Sacks (2007), a patient named Clive, who had been a professional musician and conductor before having a life-altering illness, lost his ability to create new memories and could barely function without the help of others. He was mentally lost, but his musical abilities were still fully intact. His wife Deborah described his experience with music in this way:
“The momentum of the music carried Clive from bar to bar. Within the structure of the piece, he was held, as if the staves were tramlines and there was only one way to go. He knew exactly where he was because in every phrase there is context implied, by rhythm, key, and melody.” (Sacks, 2007)
As soon as the music ended and Clive stoped performing he was lost again, but while he was playing, he seemed normal. The combination of sound and the act of performing seem to be the necessary components for Clive’s relief. He can be an amnesiac but also remember how to play music because there are two different types of memory that exist. Episodic memory, is a conscious memory of events, while procedural memory is an unconscious memory for procedures. Procedural memory involves subcortical structures like the Basel Ganglia and cerebellum, there are many connections between those and the cerebral cortex. This type of memory is left in tact in amnesiacs. (Sacks, 2007) Sacks (2007) said:
“It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present.” (p. 212)
Repetition and rehearsal, as well as timing and sequence, are essential in procedural memory. Rodolpho Linas, a neuroscientist at New York University uses the term fixed action patterns to describe such procedural memories, which may even be present even before birth. Linas is especially interested in the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus, and the motor nuclei beneath the cortex. He postulates that the cortex and the thalamus underly consciousness, while the motor nuclei, especially the basal ganglia, are crucial to the production of action patterns for things like walking, shaving, and playing the violin. When looking at creativity from the standpoint of the brain, we find that creativity has nothing to do with reason. (Sacks, 2007)
Perception and recall
While practicing and performing clearly creates a deep connection within a musician’s brain, the experience of hearing music also actively stimulates us in purposeful ways. In a study by the Stanford University School of Medicine, it was determined that anticipation is at the heart of the musical experience. Mitzi Baker (2007) explains in her write up of the study that even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece and forming predictions about what will come next. Music’s underlying pulse typically gives the listener an idea of when something will come next, but what will occur next is often harder to predict.
In this study, researchers observed participants who were listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, while their brain activity was observed using an fMRI machine. The study focused on what happens in the brain when music transitions from one movement to another. In these transitional sections where the music speeds up, slows down, pauses briefly, or changes its melodic qualities, multiple regions of the participant’s brains were activated in a specific sequence, after which, their short term memory was updated. When participants heard a mismatch between what they expected to hear and what they actually heard, their brains were still activated in the same way, but they partitioned the unexpected sound within distinct boundaries. “The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music," said Jonathan Berger, an associate professor of music and a musician who is co-author of the study. “Music engages the brain over a period of time and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention”. (Baker, 2007)
Beyond just listening to music, brain imaging studies carried out by cognitive neuroscientist Robert Zatorre, have determined that imagining music activates the auditory complex of the brain almost as strongly as listening to or performing it. (Sacks, 2007) Psychologist Michael Posner has done studies with similar findings. He suggests that remembering may simply be the process of recruiting the same group of neurons we used during perception to help us form a mental image during recollection. (Levitin, 2007) The examples listed so far have all been about how music affects people intellectually, but there is an equal and separate emotional impact as well. There have been cases of people who lose their emotional connection to music due to brain injuries and, conversely, cases of people with a condition called amusia, where they lack the ability to make structural judgments about music but are often still able to enjoy music and judge it in an emotional way. (Sacks, 2007)
Daniel Levitin (2007) points out in his book ‘This is Your Brain on Music’, that “in evolutionary history, emotions were closely associated with motivation. Emotions for our ancient hominid ancestors were a neurochemical state that served to motivate us to act. Generally for survival purposes.” (p. 182)
Evolution
A peacock’s tail may give more insight as to why humans have evolved to have such a deep and complex relationship to sound and music. In his book ‘The Ape that Understood the Universe’ Steve Stewart-Williams (2007) states that genetic adaptations may be more about reproduction than survival. A peacock’s tail, which found only in males and has no clear value for survival is oversized, colorful, and actually increases the animal’s chances of death by advertising its whereabouts to predators. Darwin explains this by proposing that the tail is a reproductive organ, not a survival organ. It functions to attract females. A peacock with a tail which is larger and more colorful, with a more eye-catching pattern, will tend to be the peahen’s preference.
Evolutionary psychologist Jefferey Miller equates a peacock’s tail to the human qualities of intelligence and humor, along with art, music, and various other cultural displays. All are considered to be hard to fake indicators of fitness. It’s important to note that there is a major difference between the peacock’s tail and music, even though they may serve similar evolutionary purposes. If you think of the tail in relation to musical ability, there is an implication that only a musician can use their skills to woo a potential mate. While this does happen, there is also an aspect of music where two people who had no hand in creating the music might be attracted to each other because of the mutual appreciation for a particular musical artist or style. This would be as if two peacocks were attracted to each other because they both admired the tail of a third, uninvolved peacock. (Stewart-Williams, 2007)
Culture
Stewart-Williams (2007) suggests that the peahen’s mind and sexual preferences are shaping the body of male peacocks. Whether this is accurate and whether it actually relates to music and creativity in a human context is open for debate, but it does raise interesting questions about the purpose of art and creativity in general from a scientific perspective.
People have sung and danced together in nearly every culture throughout history. For most people music is powerful, whether music creators or music fans. From my research it seemed clear that scientists have been able to get small isolated glimpses into how music works in our brains, but the overarching “why?” may be too complex for us to fully understand. My own speculation is that music’s power is in the fact that it bridges gaps between the intellectual mind, emotions, sexes, societies, and time, and it would take a field of science that incorporated all of these areas of focus, with an in-depth wholistic approach, to begin to define the role music plays in any culture. The appeal may be in our lack of truly understanding why we like it.
As music evolves over time, trends come and go. Some rules that are foundational to music theory last longer, but musical tastes morph and evolve along with humanity. Music creators combine notes into an organized, organic structure of their choosing, then it is up to those who listen to it to decide whether it affects them in a positive way or not.
The healing power of sound
As rich as our musical history is in terms of evolution and culture, our experience of music begins with the simple act of sound waves vibrating stereocilia hairs in our ears. As the hairs move back and forth, neurotransmitters are triggered to travel to auditory nerves, at which point the sound has essentially been converted from analog waves outside of our bodies to digital information inside of our brains. (Psychoacoustics, 2019) This act of transferring the external force of sound into internalized data combines with all of our evolutionary and cultural influences to craft our individual and shared auditory experiences.
In addition to our experience of sound through music, there are direct applications for our health and well being. About 2,500 years ago Pythagoras was teaching his students how certain musical chords and melodies would produce positive responses in their health. (Polar Talks, 2017) Sound vibrations can enter the body through ears or through the skin and some modern-day scientists like Lee Bartel are experimenting with stimulating cells directly with sound to reduce the impact of some common health problems. (Music Medicine, 2017) There have also been great results in using music to improve the lives of Alzheimer’s patients as was showcased in a documentary called ‘Alive Inside’.
In a section about the importance of sharing positive experiences from the notes for this Psychology class, there is a thought that resonates with the topic of sound and music. David Duemler (2019) said “When people are engaged in a conversation their brain activity and their behavior can synchronize. Singing or dancing as part of a group embodies such synchrony as well.“ (p. 46) Throughout the course of human history, music has been the medium of an ongoing conversation, with or without words, involving our conscious and unconscious minds. In my research for this project, I had hoped to pick the sound-related topic of psychoacoustics, find the main points of focus within that field, and highlight some interesting ways that sound impacts our brains. To some extent I was able to do that, but my main takeaway was that as soon as you begin to try and understand how our brains relate to sound, music becomes a factor and the topic grows exponentially with multiple expanding and mind boggling areas of study. There’s no doubt that music evolves along with humanity, but there may also be human evolution that is taking place right now under the influence of our music.