Subject: the origin of music?
From: Lindsay Manning (l_mannin@alcor.concordia.ca)
Date: Tue Jan 09 2001 - 13:25:33 EST
Thought this article may spark some interesting commentary...
L
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lindsay manning
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~l_mannin
redwood city, california
Sonata for Humans, Birds and Humpback Whales
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/09/science/09MUSI.html
January 9, 2001
By NATALIE ANGIER
When humanity's ancestors discovered, a million years or so ago, the
exquisite pleasure of a hot meal by the fire, they might very well
have set the mood with a little night music a shimmering cadenza
played on a slender bone flute, perhaps, or a hymn to the spirits
belted out a cappella.
As researchers conclude in the current issue of the journal
Science, the love of music, that unslakable, unshakable,
indescribable desire to sing and rejoice, rattle and roll, is not
only a universal feature of the human species, found in every
society known to anthropology, but is also deeply embedded in
multiple structures of the human brain, and is far more ancient
than previously suspected.
In fact, what could be called the "music instinct" long antedates
the human race, and may be as widespread in nature as is a taste
for bright colors, musky perfumes and flamboyant courtship
displays.
In twin articles that discuss the flourishing field of
biomusicology the study of the biological basis for the creation
and appreciation of music researchers present various strings of
evidence to show that music-making is at once a primal human
enterprise, and an art form with virtuoso performers throughout the
animal kingdom.
The researchers discuss recent discoveries in France and Slovenia
of musical instruments dating back to 53,000 years ago more than
twice the age of the famed Lascaux cave paintings or the palm-size
"Venus" figurines. The instruments are flutes carved of animal
bone, and are so sophisticated in their design as to suggest that
humans had already been fashioning musical instruments for hundreds
of thousands of years. And when Jelle Atema of the Marine Biology
Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., an author on one of the new
reports and an accomplished flutist who studied with the renowned
Jean- Pierre Rampal, reconstructed his own versions of the archaic
flutes from bits of ancient bone and gave them a blow, he and his
collaborators were impressed by their sweetness and versatility.
"What you immediately hear when he plays these flutes is the
beauty of their sound," said Patricia M. Gray, the lead author on
the first of the two Science articles. "They make pure and rather
haunting sounds in very specific scales.
"It didn't have to be this way," she added. "They could have
sounded like duck calls." Dr. Gray, a professional keyboardist, is
the artistic director of the National Musical Arts, the
ensemble-in-residence at the National Academy of Sciences, and the
head of the academy's Biomusic program, a group of scientists and
musicians who, according to their mission statement, "explore the
role of music in all living things."
The new reports also emphasize that humans hold no copyright on
sonic brilliance, and that a number of nonhuman animals produce
what can rightly be called music, rather than random drills, trills
and cacophony. Recent in-depth analyses of the songs sung by birds
and humpback whales show that, even when their vocal apparatus
would allow them to do otherwise, the animals converge on the same
acoustic and aesthetic choices and abide by the same laws of song
composition as those preferred by human musicians, and human ears,
everywhere.
For example, male humpback whales, who spend six months of each
year doing little else but singing, use rhythms similar to those
found in human music, and musical phrases of similar length a few
seconds. Whales are capable of vocalizing over a range of at least
seven octaves, yet they tend to proceed through a song in stepwise
lilting musical intervals, rather than careering madly from octave
to octave; in other words, they sing in key. They mix percussive
and pure tones in a ratio consonant with that heard in much Western
symphonic music. They also follow a favorite device of human
songsters, the so- called A-B-A form, in which a theme is stated,
then elaborated on, and then returned to in slightly modified form.
Perhaps most impressive, humpback songs contain refrains that
rhyme. "This suggests that whales use rhyme in the same way we do:
as a mnemonic device to help them remember complex material," the
researchers write. "It's very easy to play along with pure,
unedited whale songs," said Dr. Gray, who has written movements for
saxophone, piano and whale. "They're absolutely comprehensible to
us."
Birds, too, compose songs with the same notes, rhythmic
variations, harmonic patterns and pitch relationships as those
found in human compositions. The hermit thrush, for example,
considered one of the lushest of avian vocalists, sings in the so-
called pentatonic scale, in which the octaves are divided into five
notes. "This is a very recognizable and very pleasant scale that is
found across many human cultures," Dr. Gray said. "The pentatonic
scale is the scale on which the prehistoric flutes are built, and
it's also the basis for a lot of rock 'n' roll music today." Birds
of a feather, it seems, rock together.
The California marsh wren may sing as many as 120 themes in a
given jam session, with each theme matched by its immediate
neighbor in what is known among musicians as the call-response
pattern. Some birds even use instruments: the palm cockatoo of
Northern Australia selects a hollow log of a preferred resonance,
and then breaks off a twig to use as a drumstick.
"Music is far, far older than our species," said Roger Payne,
president of the Ocean Alliance in Lincoln, Mass., and a co-author
on one of the papers. "It is tens of millions of years old, and the
fact that animals as wildly divergent as whales, humans and birds
come out with similar laws for what they compose suggests to me
that there are a finite number of musical sounds that will
entertain the vertebrate brain."
Neuroscientists have just begun getting a handle on how the brain
perceives and appreciates music, and the results are as yet
confusing and somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Dr. Isabelle
Peretz of the University of Montreal and her colleagues have
studied patients with lesions in the auditory cortex that impair
only their ability to recognize music, while leaving unscathed
their power to understand speech, environmental sounds and other
acoustic information.
Dr. Peretz's results suggest that the brain has something
specifically designed to process music, although the precise
location or nature of such a do-re-mi keeper remains unknown.
On the other hand, Dr. Mark Jude Tramo, a neuroscientist at
Harvard Medical School, argues in the second Science paper that
neuroimaging studies of people performing or listening to music
have failed to find a "music center" in the brain devoted strictly
to music cognition.
All of the neural structures that participate in the musical
experience, he argues, are players in other forms of cognition,
auditory and otherwise. For example, Dr. Tramo says, a region
called the left planum temporale, which is critical for perfect
pitch, is also involved in language processing. And though the
right hemisphere of the brain traditionally has been considered the
"music hemisphere," recent neuroimaging studies from his and other
laboratories reveal a more subtle interplay between the left and
right halves of the brain in the course of a musical experience.
The left hemisphere seems particularly important for so-called
"fast acoustic" processing, which would tell a listener whether,
say, a note was being bowed on a violin or plucked on a guitar. The
right hemisphere takes over in "slow acoustic" processing,
appreciating the notes following that initial "attack." At which
point, if all goes well, the brain cedes control to the body, and
the party begins.
The New York Times on the Web
http://www.nytimes.com
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