My pet theory is that music is so universal because it hijacks two systems in the human brain that are necessary for survival.
First, humans are a social species and use language to communicate. Babies learn language by observing and emulating their parents. So it makes sense that humans evolved a rewards pathway that makes it pleasurable to listen to sounds.
Second, the brain is basically a pattern matching and prediction machine. Music is full of patterns, e.g., rhythm and harmonics.
That's why music is so popular -- because it allows the brain to do something which it is very good at and which it also finds pleasurable.
My pet theory (which complements yours) is that it was, before the invention of writing, part of the mnemonic techniques used to perpetuate vital information. Other worthy mentions are story-telling/acting, poetry (rhyme and meter) and painting.
Being innately predisposed to like these disciplines makes one more likely to practice them, become good at them, and help propagate useful info undamaged, thus rising the group's survival abilities.
They were vital for so long (compared to the few millennia since we invented writing) that we still have the taste baked in, even though writing, then the press then computers and photographs took over those roles.
Rhymes and meter are the CRC32 check of prehistory.
I was hoping to add an original thought to this thread, but you nailed 80% of my point. The remaining 20% is that music allows "chunking"[1] complex knowledge into a single song that's easy to remember.
It doesn't handicap them today. I think it would have handicapped them 4000 years ago.
There is actual evidence for my theory BTW. Aboriginal folks in Australia had a tradition of using songs to describe itineraries.
Antique poetry and the bits of oral traditions that survived until today were using heavily structured verses (like the dactylic hexameter). A notable exception is the old testament, whose first parts were transmitted orally before being written down, and which is structured in verses of unknown structure (or unstructured, except for the psalms).
Modern poetry has gradually lost that strong structure. The prevalence of musical anhedonia and amusia may very well have risen in recent times as a result of the loss of utility of music.
Possibly, but it'd be a fairly minor handicap. Remember that people who don't enjoy music have no problem learning music or instruments, and plenty do. There's no obvious way it would result in your death.
We tend to make the mistake of assuming any seeming oddities of the human must somehow be due to evolution. But when we see the same in the rest of the body we often make the opposite assumption and assume it's a vestigial trait, or a coincidence.
My point is that taste in music is vestigial since the invention of writing. Before that it was a selective advantage.
Even if amusia (of which musical anhedonia is a subtype) was prevalent at the time, culture transmission operates at the group level. The mere existance of amusia with such a low prevalence doesn't invalidate my point.
And thank goodness. I have musical anhedonia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia), which basically means that music does nothing for me. I function just fine in today's society, where music is merely entertainment. I probably would've been screwed if I had been born thousands of years ago.
Are people really pleasured by optical illusions, or are they interested by them? I think that most people understand that their brains are struggling to comprehend them, and that is why they are interesting.
Regardless, I don't think there's much evidence (if any) for the idea that the enjoyment of music is the result of a defect in our auditory system.
I would argue that magic eye books and optical illusions are different things. An optical illusion exploits our brains "shortcut" mechanisms, which could be considered taking advantage of a weakness, whilst a magic eye utilises our pattern matching ability, which could be considered as bolstering a strength.
Not sure I've explained myself as well as I could, but hopefully I have.
Every optical illusion is some good aspect of vision failing in a limited case. Evolution is presumably selecting for the good aspect, and not the occasional hallucination it produces.
Even after the invention of writing, music and art is still a vital medium through which to perpetuate vital information. Not all ideas can be distilled easily into words.
My pet theory is that a musical capacity provides a pleasure/reward for the imitation of intentional motor activity. I believe this enjoyment of rhythmic entrainment predated language by roughly a million years and launched cultural transmission of skill knowledge in prehumans.
Humans are (largely) the only animals with cultural transmission of skills. Making stone tools or cutting trees or scraping hides or making fire would have involved much rhythmic motor activity.
People often say things like "This culture doesn't have a word for that color, how strange is that?", but isn't it stranger that basically every culture has so many similarities, like words for the same very abstract things like love, marriage, colors, emotions and so on? Especially if you look at the typical persons of societies instead of the upper classes. I believe many greatly underestimate how much our culture is rooted in our genes, I see no other reason why human societies has so much in common.
We might all have a word that gets translated as “marriage”, but the concept attached to that word is not universal. It’s not even the same concept between all people within a single nation and who share a single language and are subject to a legal definition of the word regardless of how well it matches their own personal definition.
I suspect that the parts of our culture that are rooted in language are things most of us don’t even have words for, because they come too naturally for us to need to talk about.
“Mama” and “papa” are interesting words, because some variation on those, with the same meaning, exist in almost every language. Does this mean every language borrowed them from some common ancestor?
No, not quite. It's just that newborn children make babbling sounds that resemble speech, with a very limited range of “consonsants”, and humans are such narcissists that they assume those babblings refer to them, the parents :)
> and humans are such narcissists that they assume those babblings refer to them, the parents :)
Or mama, papa, appa, amma, etc are the easiest words for infants/toddlers to pronounce and hence we used these word for children to call attention to the two most important people for their survival?
Is it narcissism or the fact that infants/toddlers cannot even pronounce most vowels/consonants other than a, m, b/p?
am i the only one who wishes mobile wikipedia were the standard default layout? i tend to put ".m." in those links now. big fonts, straight forward structure, clear spacing. it is so much better ah :)
I see a lot of people using m, but to me the point of Wikipedia is not just a base article, but also its history (recentness, number of editors/edits) and talk page, as well as the consistent sidebars, which expresses the common attributes of that type of information. The hotkeys don't even work on the mobile site. So I get really peeved when people use m links, and don't get me started about the heinous Wikiwand; Wikipedia loses a lot of its value if people consider it a read-only thing (and yes, casual people can edit successfully, still).
I use the Redirector Firefox extension for that (and only that). WP's desktop view isn't bad (compared to typical cluttered sites), but their mobile view is fantastic.
Which makes sense, as English doesn't have a word to delineate between Familial Love and Romantic Love. This is more a fault in English than it is a quirk of Tamil.
funny how coincidental this comment is! i was thinking about the expression "welcome" today. as in: you are welcome here, welcome home, etc. how ubiquitous that expression is and how there are many languages i know of that have some equivalent of that expression.
i have no background in linguistics but my thought was that since our ancestors moved from place to place. when they move to a new inhabited place, people there needed that word to let them know that their (long) journey has reached a stopping point, they can rest now, or stay, etc.
I prefer to insist on commonalities. We are all human, the same race living on the same planet, with minor variations in customs that add salt to life.
I took a music class in university in which the entire focus of the class is that music is NOT universal.
This was a while back so details I remember are sparse.. but he had tons of examples from around the world where what we might consider "happy" or "sad" was entirely different in many cultures.
Granted, it's probably still more true than not to say "for the most part music is universal", I don't think it holds as a simple factual statement.
I think this study refers more to the ways music is used in societies throughout our species -- e.g., songs for grieving, praying, marriage, love, etc. -- moreso than the specifics of the structure of the music in and of itself. The statement "music is universal" does not mean "all music shares the same mapping between tones and emotions," but instead simply that the use of music has similar functions throughout the globe.
Well, seems to me that music is universal the way language is universal. The idea and basic patterns are pretty much the same, but details vary quite a bit.
My theory is that this is due to the natural series of harmonics — sound tells you a ton about any physical object that emits it — so any oranism that lives in a sound transmitting medium profits from interpreting it and dividing it into different emotional responses. This is why a deep bass hit can feel dangerous, or exciting while a scraping metal sound can feel plainly wrong, because there is no harmony at all and this isn’t how anything is meant to sound at all.
So depending on what is dangerous or useful to a species it should develop different preferences.
Harmonic sounds (or approximately harmonic) are strong evidence that something evolved or was designed specifically for making sound. If you have an oscillator where the oscillation is constrained to one axis, e.g. an ideal string, reed, or column of air, it has only one degree of freedom. The state of the oscillator is fully described by its current position. It has no memory, so when driven in a steady state its behavior is identical every cycle. Even if its motion is non-linear, this will only cause anharmonic motion, not inharmonic, which is harmonic in the musical sense. The overtones must be integer multiples of the fundamental, because otherwise there would be different behavior on different cycles, which contradicts the single degree of freedom assumption.
But most natural objects have multiple degrees of freedom. If you hit a rock, stick, bone, etc. its oscillation is not constrained to a single axis. You can have multiple different unrelated frequencies. It's unlikely that all the prominent frequencies will be integer multiples of the fundamental by chance. To get harmonic sounds from a oscillator with multiple degrees of freedom takes skilled shaping of that object, e.g. tuning a bell by carefully shaving off metal at the right places.
Harmonic sounds are evidence of living creatures, and living creatures are potentially dangerous. Therefore it's not surprising that we're good at detecting them.
Consiciousness. I know its in vouge to pretend animals are all reasoning creatures, but alas the world is, thankfully, not disney. Our ability to relate 'Now', with our perception of stimulus moments ago, is how we percieve music. This is mostly absent in animals, or has a vastly different temporal range. Even pure tones are just cycles per second.
That said, if you ignore the meter, most animals seem to react to various harmonic and aharmonic sounds. Dogs howling, birds whistling, etc. The timings seem quite specific to the creature, and their adapted envirnment.
Not really. Western music is driven by harmonic progression, which is largely absent in most other cultures. The lack of "chord changes" is why its so easy to discern western vs eastern music.
Harmonic progression is a staple of Western classical and pop styles, but most folk music is diatonic (confined to a single scale), not least because of the limitations of wind instruments. Diatonic music and harmony has seen a major resurgence with the advent of electronic dance music, which subordinates harmonic progression to rhythmic and timbral development so as to stay 'in the groove' by maintaining a particular musical mood.
My reading of the Wikipedia is that equal temperament didn't originate in China (though it may have slightly predated the occurrance in the west). Rather, it was a synchronicity -- it occurred at the same time in the west (1584 and 1585), like Leibniz and Newton coinventing calculus independently or Darwin and Wallace inventing survival of the fittest.
I think the word "tonality" is used liberally in this article. They didn't seem to be referencing any specific style of harmony, but rather the general act of using distinct tones to create music.
They found common functions for music around the world: love songs, lullabies, dance music and.... Sound healing? Wow, that's an interesting perspective.
Their methods were great, in showing that the functional intent of music could be reliably determined by people around the world.
Music is strikingly tonal, cross culturally. There are different scales, but tonality is universal (across cultures, although cultures can have non tonal songs), likely due to the biological-physical nature of harmony.
Yeah, I'm skeptical of that paper and it is extremely difficult to disprove, because access to that population is so restricted.
The way I'd test it would be presenting a set of 2 tones and giving them control over a third. like 200hz +300hz and then letting them move a slider between 325-425hz. Where do they find the resulting sound most pleasant and where most unpleasant?
The sensation of dissonance is so strong and visceral, it is extremely hard to believe it has no universality to it.
Oh, thanks for linking in the original article. It has excellent illustrations and unfortunately the DOI link in the Newsweek article is non-functional.
I wish that press coverage of science could at least post a proper academic reference at the end.
First, humans are a social species and use language to communicate. Babies learn language by observing and emulating their parents. So it makes sense that humans evolved a rewards pathway that makes it pleasurable to listen to sounds.
Second, the brain is basically a pattern matching and prediction machine. Music is full of patterns, e.g., rhythm and harmonics.
That's why music is so popular -- because it allows the brain to do something which it is very good at and which it also finds pleasurable.