In his new book, Daniel Levitin makes the case that music spawned human culture.
Daniel Levitin dropped out of college in 1975 to join a rock band. He did it, he says, because it comforted the loneliness he felt being away from his home and friends that first year. He eventually returned to school and ended up with a Ph.D. in psychology, but not before he worked with some of the world’s most-notable rock artists as a session musician, commercial recording engineer, live sound engineer, and record producer—oh, and racking up 17 gold or platinum records along the way.
Now a researcher and professor of neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal, Levitin combines his passion for music and the mind by peering into people’s brains to understand how we perceive and process the information in music, and theorizing about the role it played in the evolution of human culture and civilization.
“Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans, at the way that music and people co-evolved,” he writes in his most-recent book, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (Dutton).
Levitin bases his argument on the fact that both our bodies and brains adapted from proto-humans over time. While pressures in the environment likely forced physical changes, he says music and art had a heavy hand in cognitive adaptations that allowed social groups to form and civilized behavior to evolve.
Only recently in human history has music become a profession. For the better part of history, music throughout the world has been practiced communally, with all members participating. As such, music is a core element of our species identity, Levitin writes,“ an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.”
The comfort the author sought in music as a young man is but one of the psychological traits that song evokes, according to Levitin. Along with the others—friendship, joy, knowledge, religion, and love—these song types equipped the musician with survival advantages and thereby shaped human nature over the past half-a-million years or so.
Each of the six song types played distinct roles in human evolution, perhaps because our species is the least instinctive of all. With fewer behaviors hardwired into our DNA, we rely more on culture and experience for an adaptive edge.
Of course, perceiving songs and the content they transmit first requires developing the physical equipment necessary to send and hear them. These senses make use of complex systems of muscle and bone, as well as finely tuned neural circuits in the human brain. Levitin elaborated on those aspects of the musical brain in his first book, This Is Your Brain on Music, and in “Six Songs” draws solid lines between the physical acts of making and listening to music and its social and cultural consequences.
Hearing is the logical best sense to bear the responsibility because sound transmits in the dark, around corners, and through visual obstacles, and can be located in space.
“Through a process of co-evolution of brains and music, through the structures throughout our cortex and neocortex, from our brain stem to the prefrontal cortex, from the limbic system to the cerebellum, music uniquely insinuates itself into our heads,” Levitin writes.
Friendship songs—Levitin names a number of modern rock and country tunes—encourage cooperation and synchronization to accomplish tasks, such as work, defense or going to war, and hunting. They also ease tensions that could threaten group cohesion.
Songs of joy are meant to comfort and soothe. They accompany dance and help people get through the work day. Levitin calls the lullaby the classic comfort song, but he says blues tunes, which allow the downtrodden to commiserate with one another, may have become the ultimate comfort song in Western society.
“Sad people are so often made to feel better by sad music,” he says.
The author pays special attention to music and the development of such universal social aspects as religion, ritual and belief. Song is inextricably embedded in religious activities across all cultures, he notes, and probably enabled the uniquely human ability to reflect upon and ponder the great existential questions.
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