The Musical Mind
If song has no purpose, why is it deep-wired in the brain?
It's possible, Trehub concedes, that by 6 months, babies have already heard enough lullabies and stray melodies to have cultivated an ear for music. Yet others have seen the same abilities in newborns, she notes, and the babies she has tested don't prefer music that is specifically Western--the kind they are most likely to have heard. Instead, they seem to respond most strongly to scales and intervals found even in unfamiliar, non-Occidental music.
Trehub speculates that we are born with a musical brain because music provides a special communication channel between parent and child. Lullabies are found in every culture, she points out, and so is parents' habit of speaking to babies in singsong, musical baby talk: "Music is a child-caring tool."
Or maybe, says Huron, music evolved because it provided a crucial social glue in humanity's evolutionary past. Campfire songs, hymns, and marches help unify groups today; tunes piped on Ice Age flutes may have given our Paleolithic ancestors the social cohesion they needed to hunt, forage, and do battle.
Many people trying to explain the musical brain favor a different idea, however: that even if music itself did not give our ancestors a survival advantage, it is closely tied to something that did, namely language. Some of the same mental faculties that let us appreciate Mozart also come into play in conversation, after all. "Much of the information that's transmitted during speech is transmitted by pitch and timing," two of the crucial elements of music, says neurologist Mark Tramo of Harvard University. Think of the little upturn at the end of a sentence that signals a question.
Double duty. Brain-imaging studies show that parts of the right brain that are sensitive to pitch in music play the same role in speech. And the left brain, sensitive to the split-second differences in timing that make, say, pa and ba sound different, is also busy when we listen to music. Work published by German researchers this spring shows that Broca's area, a patch of brain that analyzes language syntax, seems to do a similar job in music. Its activity spikes in response to inappropriate chords just as it does for a verbal incongruity.
Yet even if music shares some mental equipment with speech, it is much more than just an offshoot of the spoken word. Indeed, brain-imaging studies suggest that some neurological wiring is unique to music. Equally compelling evidence comes from Peretz's "amusic" patients. Even though music is beyond their ken, their ability to speak and understand seems unaffected. Indeed, says Zatorre, "they are completely intact in every way--one is a real estate developer, one is a nurse." The music has stopped for them, but they carry on.
And that brings back the deep strangeness of music, seemingly so central to our lives--and so irrelevant.
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