How music rewires and impacts the human body | Michael Spitzer: Full Interview

I'm Michael Spitzer. I'm professor of  music at the University of Liverpool in   the United Kingdom. I've written  a book called The Musical Human:   A History of Life on Earth. The Past, Present,  and Future of Music with Michael Spitzer. Part one, the history of music. How did you approach the history of music?   People often write books in response to   reading other books. And when I read Yuval Harari  Sapiens, which blew my mind, I thought, well,   hold on. Music is at least a million years older  than Sapiens. And most books about music do the   usual thing of which composer wrote what piece  at what time. And I wanted to get away from that   and see the bigger picture. We're in a kind  of moment of um thinking of the global of   the universal and music is absolutely universal.   It also transcends sapiens because animals have   music. Birds and whales and other creatures and  ultimately the musical human is a musical animal.    It's almost inconceivable to write a prehistory  of music because Edison invents a phongraph in   1777 and prior to that we have no record of any  sound. One of the problems with instruments is   that the materials biodegrade. Um but looking  as far back as we can what doesn't degrade   um are lithic instruments made of rocks such as  stallctites or the famous rock gongs in Tanzania.    Now the absolute landmark are the bone flutes  discovered in the South German caves about 40,000   years old and they were constructed from the bones  of Griffin vulture. But other than that we have to   wait until um the invention of ceramics um on  over which people stretched high to create the   first frame drums. But of course skin and leather  um biodegrades and we have no evidence for exactly   when these were made and even more so for  strings. So the first string instruments harps and   loots were created after the invention of farming  once people farmed cows and created strings from   twisting the guts of animals. So we create  harps and loots but again um strings biodegrade.    So we have to work inferentially by mapping  from what we do know and looking at say um the   prehistory of anatomy of the evolving technology  of tools reverse engineering from linguistics to   model language and observing uh everyday life in  across the world in huntergatherer societies in   different environments. It's um as much about  piecing together a number of disciplines. And   here is here's an example of an inferential  argument. About 1. 5 million years ago, Homo Air,   one of our homalin an ancestors, invents what  is called a bfacial axe. This is an axe with two   symmetrical faces. Now, the capacity  to create symmetry in an axe besp speaks   um two things. um an ability to create um a  beautiful form, a symmetry and an enjoyment   of form for aesthetic reasons. We can also borrow  from psychology to create an inference that you   can map from the domain of tools to the domain of  sound because um mental capacity is crossodal. So   the uh ability to create symmetry is also found  in sound and we call symmetrical sound meter or   regular rhythm. So it's a fair argument that uh  given the evidence of a bfacial handax homoagast   that would have been able to tap that axe in  a symmetrical rhythm or using musical meter. How does bipedalism inform human music?   When we talk about the origin of music,   um it's really um about assembling elements  of music which were synthesized much further   down the road. And one of these  elements was bipedalism that what marks   um the first hominins apart from um apes and our  common ancestor was getting up on our feet. 4. 4   Four million years ago, an oralopythesine called  Adi stood on her legs and walked. And ever since   then, the rhythm of walking has stamped human  music. But much more than that, that pun intended,   that the first steps put us on the path to  forging links between the brain and muscular   exertion and sound. And the hominins learn to to  hear footsteps as a pattern. And what patterns   give you is a sense of time. You can predict what  will happen next. And um the idea of walking um   also gives humans a fascination with this metaphor  that music moves. And if you think about it, music   does not move. Uh music is just sounds or tones  floating through the air. But we imagine that one   note moves to the other. And most of music be it a  a symphony or a or or a song um unfolds   a journey and this journey takes us uh from one  point to another in a in our minds. It's an   imaginary journey um a very long distant echo from  uh the journey of our ancestors out of Africa.    But um walking is the first step of a whole  uh cascade of evolutionary adaptations and   so many things evolve. Our cranial um uh volume  triples in size. We become a lot smarter and with   um our increased brain size comes a capacity  to control our fingers to make links with um   the motor domains of our brain. they become more  dextrous and ultimately more capable of crafting   flutes and playing them. But standing up also  um uh gives us more space to breathe and our   um larynx descends through our vocal tracts.   our hyoid bone which um supports our tongue   evolves so we can articulate what we sing as  our um vocal tract um learned how to produce   um an infinitely greater variety of sounds. Um our  capacity to make sounds exceeded their function.    If you compare us with say the vervid monkey, they  can make four kinds of calls and each call um uh   warns um other monkeys of a particular kind of  prey. But when you can produce a thousand kinds of   sounds, there's an excess of sounds. And this is  where music starts to become a possibility where   you're playing with sound. You're enjoying sound  for sound's sake, no longer having a function.    And at this point, I think that human music steps  away from animal vocalization or animal calls. How does music function as a keeper of history? One of the uh I think uh profound messages which  I discovered in writing my book was that music is   all about memory and history. when somebody um  two million years ago teaches their son how to nap   a rock, their son remembers that. And tradition  is I call it um congealed muscle memory.    Um learning how to do something is a haptic.   It's a meme as Dawkins would say. It's mimemetic,   not necessarily um cognitive. Your muscles learn  how to do it. And then you get the bone flutes   and you have little parallel lines insized on the  flute which tell you where to place your fingers.    Indeed, the five holes on those flutes tell you  what how to play it. That's also a memory. Um,   most cultures across the planet um  uh see music as a way of explaining   um where their music came from. Here's an  example. Um the Kuli tribe of New Guinea,   Papua New Guinea, they believe in their belief  system that music comes from the mooney bird,   a kind of fruit dove. And they believe that  the birds hovering above the forest canopy   are literally their ancestors speaking to  them. And in imitating the call of the dove,   they're participating in the great circle of  life. They're singing back their ancestors songs.    And that is recorded history in the west. An  example of that is a Beethoven symphony like   the heroica which rehearses the memory of  what it's like to live under Napoleon and   fight a battle in 19th century France. So all  music uh be it in the west or across the planet   or going back millions of years ago is very  intimately connected to memory and to history. In what environments did early musical  performances exist? When we discovered   the first bone flute, some of the shards of  the broken flutes were discovered in points   of maximum resonance within the caves, suggesting  a natural um marriage, if you like, between music   and sound and acoustics and architecture. And  that also obtains um you know in the west it's   no accident that a church is essentially a cave  to worship a god and the natural affinity between   plain chant singing in church and the acoustics  the resonance of that. So music goes together with   architecture in the caves. It's very likely that  they were reserved for um rituals. Nobody wants   to live in a cave. Um, so these were dark and and  and um possibly dangerous places full of mystery,   portals to the divine, the layers of of  savage beasts and uh they would be reserved   for special ceremonies or rituals um utilizing  the astonishing resonance that the cave uh the   stone affords to the flutes or the human voice  or banging stallctites. Um otherwise people   would uh create music around a hearth. The hearth  is a point of stability where you have the fire.    Fire and the fixed quality of fire is a symbol  for a musical ritual. And the   circularity of the hearth is that rituals tended  to um repeat in a cycle. um because they were   um performed often after uh ritual events like  the hunt or the um the uh the eating of the   meat that you that's that you obtain through  the hunt and um there would be no necessarily   distinction between uh singing and physical motion  or dancing. So in the west we have this word music   and only the west has a single word to cover the  plurality of things which go on in music. Most   cultures um have different words for uh song for  instrumental sound for dancing for telling   stories to music and all these things were tangled  together into a single ceremony. Now the caveat is   that of course we cannot go back in time a million  years. Everything we say has huge scare quotes   on it. But that said, it's very striking that  looking at the spread of huntergatherer peoples   across different environments from deserts to  savylvanas to rainforests to the polar snow caps,   they share a core and that survival of a core  bespeak something essential. So it's more than a   high-end parable. So if you compare say peoples as  different as the aboriginal peoples of Australia   with the um Inuit of North America, what they  share is um an entanglement of humanity with   animals. In some ways, the purpose of music is to  tell us an origin story of where we came from. And   we came from animals. And so much of their songs  imitates the calls of animals or the dancing   of animals. Darwin himself when he observes the  um karaby summer in Australia, he saw that the   um Aboriginal peoples imitated the dance of  kiwis and um kangaroos. Um, and if you look at the   way that Inuit imitate the sound of a um, seal cub  in their songs to lure the cub to be trapped and   to be and to and to be hunted. It's similar  looking at the Native Americans and imitate the   call of a buffalo cub. So in each context, um,  modern hunter gatherers are imitating the calls of   animals. But not just that, the way they think of  themselves as entangled also with the landscape.    Um we have the very famous song lines that Bruce  Chatwin observed in the way that um the Aboriginal   peoples of Australia as they journey through  or sail through the desert, they tag each feature   of the landscape with a song and they navigate  the landscape in terms of song and they view   music as a sort of um shamanistic uh spirit  journey where led by the shaman Um, music is a   it gives you wings. It enables you to fly through  layers of the cosmos and ultimately to what they   call the dreamland of their ancestors. If you  compare um the different environments that the   sand of Australia is very different from the snow  of um of North America and in a certain sense we   can extrapolate back to the conditions obtaining  40,000 years ago in the ice age. The thing about   snow compared to sand, it leaves no footprints. It  leaves no traces. It's very hard to navigate snow.    And so you can extrapolate from that and make  and make the um the inference that um Inuit   um navigate trails in their mind and much less  um footsteps through the snow. and you   begin to imagine a web of culture um superseding  the web of footsteps or the web of trails in the   landscape. Snow is al also much more enimical  to human survival than sand. Um and uh the   inuit have to learn to live with each other with  enclosed spaces of eagloos. So music's function   is really about um anger or conflict management.   Um, you can't afford to have a fight if you're   dependent upon one another in a small space in  the middle of a polar ice gap. Which is why so   much of Inuit music is full of laughter and jokes.   Uh, and you see that in the lyrics of Inuit songs.    It's fostering um a playful sociability  and diffusing potential for conflict. How did the evolution of society affect music? If you're looking at the broad picture, the  wide-angle lens picture of the evolution of   sapiens, then the epochs are hunter gatherer,  sedentary or farming community and then the   founding of cities and city states. And each of  these epochs is associated with mentalities. So   hunter gatherers tended to be nomadic and we can  see that in examples of huntergatherer peoples   across the whole world from the Inuit in North  America, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia,   the pygmies in Africa. Um and they share um  a nomadic uh way of life and if you're essentially   journeying through a landscape, what you don't  do is carry heavy instruments. Uh music has to   be portable. ideally just a voice or if not  the a very light flute or a small percussive   instrument. We also see um in music of the  moment um is that music tends to be very   playful avoiding repetition. So the idea of a of  a piece or a work which could be repeated   was a very modern notion. And if you look at the  music that is played by the Cameroon pygmies,   every time they play a piece, it sounds  different. It's very much music of the   moment. Now, what changes when you invent  farming and agriculture? You settle down   and your whole mindset becomes fixed on the  circle of the seasons, the circle of life. And

music has roots. It digs down. And there's music  composed for every frame of the circle of life,   the cycle of the seasons. Um, and you invent  the work, the repeated repeatable work. And the   structure of the world becomes as cyclical as  life itself. You invent the circle in music.    Invent musical rituals. And once music migrates  from the farm to the town, certain changes happen.    instruments can become heavy because you start  to set quite permanent roots into the town. Um,   you create heavy instruments like bells and  gongs, but also very delicate ones like harps   and dutes which will be damaged over a journey.   And music's function now also changes with the   growth of social hierarchy. The job of music is to  be a handmaidaden to serve the power, the power of   the prince or the church. And musicians become  professionalized and their job is to um create   music to be listened to for people with leisure.   And this is the origin of what we call concerts. What were the first concerts? We have to get away from the modern notion that  music was performed in what we call concerts.    To have a concert requires leisure, um requires  money. And often times it's the aristocrats or the   um the the upper middle class who had the  the time to sit back and enjoy music performed   for them. For most people over millions of years,  that didn't happen. So the rule is that most music   was performed functionally um in the fields  for instance the cotton hollows we have in   the 19th century or performed um on the water  and we think of examples of sea shanties. The   quality of the song reflects the activity. So  um on a boat you're closely confined and when   you're hauling the anchor the rhythm of hauling  um blow the man down a sea shanty necessarily   imitates the rhythm of work. If you compare  that with a cotton hollow you're no longer on   a ship you're in a wide open space. You have to  raise your voice to connect to somebody quite far   away and you get a sort of whaling contour.   And indeed um many people u argue that blues   in jazz originates from the sadness the grief of  wailing which happens naturally in a cotton hole   where you'll be wailing literally bewailing your  state of life and similar um comparisons could be   made um with fulling cloth where the rhythm of  creating or weaving you hear that in these   uh rotations of the wheel and spinning songs  uh are memories of the origin of spinning songs   uh when you were actually creating the cloth.   Most music was performed as we say whistle as   as you work. Also, it was performed in  a participatory way. So, there was no   um distinction between those who create the  music and those who listen to it. It was the   same people. The idea that we have a composer and  we have a listener is a purely modern invention. When does music notation begin? As soon as civilization invents writing, it  invents musical notation. The Babylonians   and the Samrians invent the first musical  notation. And the first example of that is   the Hurian hymn number six,400 BC, which nobody  can unfortunately decipher. The first decipherable   uh complete piece of music is the seculos song  dated 200 AD and found in modern day Turkey or   Anatolia. But the west in many ways splits  apart from the continental mainstream when   it invents staff notation which is writing music  in five lines. Um a thousand years ago in 20020   an Italian monk called Guido invents staff  notation and life was never again the same   for western music. Why is that so important?   Staff notation was a tool of church control and   through writing chants down the church could  ensure literally that um monks singing at the   furthest outpost of the empire of Christendom  say Hadrien's wall in the northern extreme of   England literally sang from the same hem sheet  you can control what people were doing across the   entirety of the empire and then once The empire  expands beyond the Mediterranean basin and Cortez   invades Mexico in 1519. He takes notation with  him. He takes manuscripts of Spanish polifany   written down in staff notation and he teaches  them the Aztecs how to sing Spanish counterpoint.    And what is astonishing is that 10 years  after Cortez um decimates the Indians in   1519 by 1530 you have Aztec musicians singing  Spanish polifany in Mexico cathedral. So music   notation becomes the um the sharp end of the stick  of globalization and the domination of the planet. What are the consequences of music notation?    Now, there are various consequences to staff  notation. Many of them um are frankly bad.    By pinning notes down to a page, almost like  capturing a butterfly, you're taking a note away   from the voice. You're making it very precise.   If you look at the way most people speak or sing,   the pitch slides, it fluctuates. It doesn't stay  still. Notation freezes a note. it becomes rather   cold and mechanical. It also freezes music as an  object, which is actually quite counterintuitive.    Music isn't an object. It's an activity. It's  a thing you do like dancing or jogging. But   once you turn it into an object, um you create a  division between the composer of the object and   those who merely mechanically reproduce it,  the performer. and tradition becomes frozen

into a museum an imaginary museum of musical  works and if you compare that to what's done   um say in the karnatic tradition or the  Hindustani tradition of India music there   is an organic and evolving oral tradition  which is handed down from guru to disciple   where a disciple doesn't mechanically reproduce  a work uh they creatively improvise around the   idea of the work. Part two, the universality  of music. How is music fractal in nature? One of the surprises is that music is fractal  in its nature. It's as fractal as a universe,   which is to say that um a galaxy  has the same shape as a brain cell.    Um the universe exhibits self similarity at rising  orders of magnitude just as music does. Music is   the art of repetition. You have notes in a bar.   You have bars repeated in a phrase. You have   phrases in a section in the work and so on  add infin item. And this is extraordinary because   this music draws this capacity from the nature of  sound or noise itself. If you take a spectrograph   um of noise which is a way of um representing  noise through waveforms the waveforms exhibit self   similarity however um much you focus it. So if you  blow up a detail of the waveform it looks the same   in the same way as a um a coastline or a cloud is  fractal. So the noise of nature, the sound of the   wind softening through the grass or the ripples  of water, we enjoy this sound. Um it's pleasant,   it's fractal. And music has the same uh um  structure as nature as natural noise in this   respect. And this makes music really perfectly  natural. And it's a much more interesting way of   regarding the relationship between music and the  cosmos and the rather old-fashioned myth of the   um harmony of the spheres or universal harmony.   Um so the ancients, the Greeks and the Chinese   and the Sumerianss believe that um  music mirrors the cosmos because it represents   the same harmonic proportions which you see  in the intervals. So fifths and octaves and   fourths the acoustic um ratios are natural in that  respect. So Capernicus thought that the planets   um orbited in musical proportions. That's the  oldfashioned view of um music's universality.    I think um the fractal theory is much more  interesting and it plugs in much more dramatically   into the latest findings in astronomy  and in the analysis of musical structure is music inherently human once you widen the lens as widely as possible  and see the big picture of where sapion music   comes from the cosmic joke. The irony is that  humans aren't very musical at all compared to how   naturally musical birds and whales are. And we  know this because we evolved along the ape line   and apes compared to birds are not musical.   How can I say that birds have vocal learning?    They can creatively learn new songs. Apes can't  do that. they are confined to the cause they're   born with. Insects can uh pulse together in in  rhythm. They have a sense of rhythm. Some birds   rhythm and apes don't have that.   So it's very odd that humans evolve from apes   who not are not musical but humans evolved  music again from the ground up from scratch.    So humans are the great synthesizers. I think  it's a reason why although human music is   innate and universal, it's also learned.   And there's also a reason why humans have   always been haunted by a nostalgia for bird  songs. We hear birds in the trees and this   gives us a sense of inadequacy because bird  song is natural and human music is not. Um,   what humans brought to the table is that we're  the great synthesizers. We put together the   rhythms of insects, the melody of birds, the  gestal ciiality of apes. We also reflect   the fractal structure of the cosmos. But what  we brought to it was the very human um drives   of emotions and indeed the finite quality of  human life that the fact that we die I think   um haunts us and the idea of the limit is one  of the horizons or boundary conditions of human   music. So whilst the elements of music might still  be there in the future once humans are gone. So uh   fractal structure and the hierarchical quality  of music of musical structure without human   emotions or the finitude of the human lifespan  it wouldn't be what I call music what does all human music have in common so when NASA sent the golden record aboard  Voyager 40 years ago um This suggested an a   very interesting thought experiment because NASA  stocked the record with diverse examples of human   music. For instance, a Bark Vandenberg  conerto, Chuck Bber's Johnny be good,   Pan Pipes from the Solomon Islands, Court music,  Galan from Java. If we imagine aliens openness   in a billion years, will they be able to um  extrapolate some common denominator, something   uh fundamentally human from this assortment  of earth music? And this begs the question,   what do they have in common? Now, I think what  they do have in common, even for an alien,   is that um sapiens are flatlanders. We inhabit  a very narrow band of perceptual space. We can't   hear as low as whales. We can't hear as high as  bats. Our songs aren't as long as whale songs,   which can be 23 hours long. They aren't as fast  as a pipist bat song, which can be as short as   um a single wing beat. What they will see though  is a lot of commonality um between sapiens music   and animal music. Both are hierarchical as  to say that we repeat at rising levels as do   birds and whales and that might strike aliens as  interesting and they might say well actually this   is not so different from animal music. Um but  they will recognize saprians for perhaps having   um this uh walking meter which goes back to as  fellow epithesines four million years ago that   we have a rhythm of walking whereas whales  a much more fluid rhythm   of floating through their own medium just as  bird song is as jerky as the motions of a of   a of a bird. So each species, bird, whale, and  sapiens is um reflects the kind of motion that   their bodies pursue in their environments.   I think that'll be apparent to aliens. Is music universal across cultures? So the question of is music a universal language  is an interesting one because on the surface every   culture in the world though it um values music  has different kinds of scales and harmonies but   um you can say that there is a music instinct  that we're all born for a capacity for music   expressed through an ability which is innate  to uh recogn recognize rhythm to beat in time   to rhythm to recognize melody to recall a melody.   So this universality then changes that the second   that culture gets its hooks into a child,  it actually matters um whether you bounce   your baby in rhythms of two or three beats.   It'll determine the kind of rhythm the baby   will grow up to enjoy. It matters to the baby  the kind of melodies you sing to the child. Um,   babies born in the west prefer certain kind of  tuning system to those born in say Indonesia.    Another aspect of this universality is that  we all share a vocabulary of basic emotions   um sadness, happiness, anger, fear and so on. And  um you could you could say that this   goes to the structure of the human brain which is  layered. So the cultural specificity of the brain   is due to the neoortex the most evolved the most  advanced part which um is occupied with learning   patterns and experiences. The deeper you dive  into the human brain the more universal one's   propensity for music and for emotion goes. If you  start with the brain stem, our oldest layer, this   is what the simplest organisms have. Brain stems  flinch to reflexes in sound. So shocks and loud   bangs will trigger the brain stem reflex. The next  layer up, the basal ganglia, responds to pleasure,   whether a sound is pleasant or unpleasant.   This is a reptilian brain. The mamalian brain,   the um amygdala is where emotions happen. Sadness,  happiness, anger, fear. And the most modern layer   of the neoortex is the point where you process  patterns and the complexities of music. So,   as a rule, the deeper you dive into  the brain, the more universal music is. Does music migrate between cultures? So one of the interesting facts about Sapiens that  everywhere Sapiens travels in the world he takes   music with them. So when um Cortez goes to South  America to Mexico he brings Spanish counterpoint   when the English go to North America they bring  Puritan hemtunes. When the Victorian mission   of Christians go to Africa, they again being  Christian hemtunes, which is why most African   national anthems sound like Christian hemtunes.   Going back to the Silk Road, everywhere that   people take um their caravans laden with spices  or with food, they bring instruments like   like loots or violins. They also bring melodies.   And if you watch what happens to the violin and   the loot which were invented in central Asia, they  travel to China, they travel to Japan, they travel   to India, they travel to the Middle East, they  eventually travel to Germany and Spain and through   there into central Europe. Everywhere the loot  goes, it will change its name. If you look at um

Lisbon in 1520, 10% of the population of Lisbon  was African and the Africans brought African   dances such as Shakons and Sarabans which will  eventually find their way into Johan Sebastian's   Bark's dance music. So there's even an African  cargo in a German composers Barack compositions.    Once um music or just like cricket is enculturated  by another people it becomes naturalized and I   mean who is to say that um once the Aztec Indians  have absorbed the Spanish counterpoint it's   no longer um Indian it becomes Indianized in a  similar way to um and even more dramatically that   Japan has a tradition where every New Year's  Eve they perform Beethoven's nine symphony   And in Japanese eyes, this may sound incredible.   Beethoven is a Japanese composer. Why is that?    Beethoven, but also Mozart and Schubert resonates  with a Japanese sensibility for etiquette or for   formal formality and a respect for tradition.   So what Japan is getting from Beethoven isn't   necessarily the same thing that we're getting  from Beethoven. So Beethven's nine symphony which   for us is very individualistic for Japanese  culture is expressing the opposite ethos of   um uh social togetherness and an extinction  of the ego. It's a much more zen quality. What is the difference between western and  eastern music? A major difference between   the west and shall we say the east is that the  west has a problem with nature or sonic nature   being the sound of the trees or the wind and we  conceptually distinguish notes from sounds. If   you look at an image of Confucious the great  Chinese sage is typically portrayed playing   um a zither called a chin in Chinese. It's a  flat harp. Uh, and Confucious plays this under   an apricot tree. And there was a tradition of  viewing the very delicate sounds of the zither   of the chin as melding into the sounds of the wind  and the bamboo and the grass and the water. There   was no distinction between music and nature.   It's more natural, you could say. And the west   is by the same token rather unnatural. And this  goes right back as far as you'd like to go. So   um one of the great monuments of Chinese  civilization are the marquee ye of Zen   bells discovered in 1978. Who was the marquee of  Zen? He was a warlord who died in 433 BC. And his   tomb contained an extraordinary thing 65 bronze  bells. And what these bales show is that more   than 2,000 years ago, Chinese acoustic science was  infinitely superior to western acoustics. The kind   of acoustic partials that a bell generates are  so complex it can't be captured arithmetically.    Which is why we don't have bells in western music.   We exile bells to church towers. Only the Chinese   worked out how to play bells. They understood  sound. understood sorority and this sensibility   for natural sound it permeates all of Chinese  and Japanese music and the west has lost that.    Western music was one of many civilizations and if  anything it was on the back foot compared to the   more advanced musical cultures happening in China,  in India, in the Middle East and then what happens   next um through globalization is the takeover of  the planet because of music notation that what   goes round comes round and what we see now is  that the west is being colonized by two tidal   waves flowing across the Pacific. Pacific and the  Atlantic oceans. Um, African music um, jazz and   rock has become the lingua franker of western  music in America and Europe. In a similar way,   the most popular band in the world is BTS,  K-pop. And the West is re-educated about sound. What misconceptions do westerners  have about music? We in the west   have tended to have a misconception that  history of music is a history of works or   compositions and a history of composers,  people who wrote these works. This tends   to reduce music into an object into  an exhibit in an imaginary museum.    It also um overvalues the role of a composer  compared to most people who are innately musical.    So in some ways you need to take music away from  the musicians and give it back to the people. The   the west has a misconception that music is  in the hands of geniuses who receive their   inspiration from a divine authority. And then  when God dies as it were in the 19th century,

they turn the composer themselves into a  divine figure with divine authority. This   authority extends to every note uh enshrined in  the score. And this limits the role of a performer   into simply reproducing what the great Bach or the  great Beethoven in their divine wisdom legislates.    But actually because of that we can have a pretty  good idea of exactly how a Beethan Sonata would   have sounded in 1800. Such was the authority  of this divine figure. But the more you get   away from the authority of the composer when you  drift eastwards or southwards in world history,   the less you can be sure about what the uh  composer would have wanted a few centuries ago. Part three, the brain on music. What  effect does music have on our brains? What makes human music so distinctive  is our link between sound and motion,   which is due to the connections in the human  brain, between the motor regions controlling   our motion and the regions controlling  hearing and sound, the auditory   um cortex. Uh birds as a rule don't have that link  with the possible exception of sulfaced cockatos.    Um so as long as you want to go back there  is this link between uh rhythm and motion. Um if   you uh rock a baby to a particular rhythm that  baby will come to like that particular rhythm. We   also love to imitate rhythm and that's due to the  existence of mirror neurons in our brains. Uh so   when the brain sees uh an action a physical action  in somebody else um you don't have to move to   uh experience that motion in your brain because  the mirror neurons are responding sympathetically.    We've always had um an instinctive uh faculty to  imitate um we call him mimmesis and uh we see that   in all walks of life. Um yawns are contagious. If  I see you yawning, I yawn back. But also emotions   are contagious. If you're sad, I instinctively  uh cleave to your sadness. I mirror it. I I   emote with you. And that's the same with music.   When I feel sad, uh when I hear a sad song,   um my body, my mirror neurons are are  instinctively sympathizing, are mimicking,   are mirroring the um the human sadness encoded  in that sad song. Another you know vivid example   of emotional contagion um which is related to um  our mirror neurons uh vibrating sympathetically

to the perception of somebody else moving. I once  attended a concert uh with my uh infant toddler   and there were a thousand toddlers all jumping  up and down instinctively to the sound of the   orchestra playing the Lone Ranger. Now they had  never heard the lone mage before. It's the William   T by Rousini, but they had an instinctive response  to that rhythm. And we're we're born   for that. And even when you uh do an experiment  um on babies who aren't sitting on their parents'   knees, so you could perhaps argue that these the  parents who are prompting their children to jump   up and down, they do the same thing. So it's  it's within the baby, not within the adults. Why do we get the chills when listening to music? There's an extreme reaction to music which has  been called the chills or fo sublime. There are   moments in music which are so intense and they're  often triggered by um breakthrough moments of   loudness or extremity. Um they're different for  every person. Um it's interesting because you have   the same parts of the brain which respond to that  as response to fear which is why the chills give   you goosebumps or pyro erection. The hairs on your  skin literally stand on end like when you're   getting goosebumps but you enjoy this fear and  this is very strange. One of the definitions of   uh musical uh aesthetics is that you learn  to take the danger out of extreme experience.    And we have a similar experience when we go on a  fairground ride or when we're watching a volcanic   eruption from the safety of an observation  platform. It's almost as if music is is   violence without the danger or the natural  infin the natural sublime without the danger. Are there any connections  between evolution and music?    Darwin was the first to observe that emotion had  an adaptive role in the field that animals and   and people they experience emotions in relation to  to goals which help them survive. So happiness is   um when you achieve a goal, anger is when the goal  is blocked. Um sadness is when uh you lose a   loved one. Fear is the most uh archetypal emotion.   Uh when you're exposed to a threat from a snake,   you have an instinctive uh response to either  uh freeze or to fight or to flee. And music   is full of similar responses. Music is made of  patterns and uh patterns can either be allowed   to run their course or they can be frustrated  through shocks. And when we hear a shock in music,   it can be a bang or the interruption of a pattern.   Um that engages the same uh faculties in our brain   as danger out in the field. Of course, nobody  dies in music. This is only a derived uh effect   of that. But this is why we think that music  is able to express emotion in a very visceral way.    uh and emotions are also processed at different  levels of the brain. Starting with the brain stem   which flinches to shocks and then the uh reptile  brain the uh basal ganglia responds to pleasure   or displeasure. The mamalian amygdala responds  to emotions, happiness, sadness and the neoortex   processes emotions through pattern. So when you're  listening to music, it's a kind of mental time   travel. You really are when you're um absorbed  in a work, you're traveling back through layer   upon layer of your brain almost biologically,  which is why I call music a sort of umbilical   cord back to mother nature. It's mental time  travel. How does creating music rewire our brain?    The astonishing fact is musical training rewires  the brain. Now most of us are rightrained. Uh if   we train a musician they become leftrain. They  hear uh music through the same uh temporal lobe   which processes language which um makes  sense because complex music is as complex   as language. And there are so many skills which  fall out of the discipline of learning to play an   instrument. You learn discipline. You learn  how to practice, how to organize your time.    You learn how to work together in a team. To  play in orchestra is team building. You learn   how to pay attention. You learn how to focus on  sounds. These are all highly transferable skills. What benefits can music have on mental health?   Appreciating music purely as a form of relaxation   or entertainment does a massive disservice to all  the things that music helps you with. Um, let's   list them. Music can bring people together. Um,  the biggest draw to mental health is loneliness.    You don't have to actively make music with  somebody else. just to listen to music plugs you   into a social network because every note of music  is social is formed of social conventions. Music   um lowers stress by reducing cortisol. It gives  you pleasure and makes you happy by flooding the   brain with neurotransmitters like dopamine.   Music is an excellent way of tagging memories   of remembering the past. Um, music is a fantastic  way of expressing your deepest emotions and your   identity which can't be captured by language.   Why is that? Because music is far too precise   for words to capture what's going on. And there's  a reason why teenagers um you know imprint their   taste in music with um with songs they learn at  that time because music has always come to define   identity of who you are. Um all these  things um you know increase your mental   health and ultimately um music becomes  a mode of mindfulness of contemplation.    It's not purely relaxing because there's too  much going on when you're listening. And the word

relaxation uh gives a sense of passivity whereas  to listen is a very active and creative activity. Can music have a negative effect on the brain? Music of course can also harm the brain. It can be  militarized as we know from examples of Guantanamo   Bay when um the army plays certain kinds of music  to inmates. Um as a rule any um sound you dislike   can harm you. So I may be into metal but you might  not be. So if I play metal very loudly that will   increase your stress levels. And similarly uh much  as we know about the health benefits of music,   you have to be extremely cautious in how  you prescribe it clinically. So for instance   um Alzheimer's patients don't do well listening to  Barack music. Um it's too repetitive for them and   certain conditions respond better to uh softer  music or to uh music with greater variety.    Um if you're suffering from depression, then  you don't want to hear a kind of music which   reinforces that condition. So um it's fine  to argue for music to be a prescribed drug,   but you have to educate the doctors  in the kinds of music to prescribe. Part four, the future of music.   Will music ever become homogenized? It's a possibility that with this incredible  ubiquity and accessibility of music through the   internet that eventually uh all our musics will  become homogenized into a single thing into a   gray homogeneous object. I don't think that  will happen for one very important reason. Um   every artist wants to be distinctive. there's  a competitive um drive which forces people to   always turn their back on fashion and create  something new. That's always been the way. A   second reason is that with the proliferation  of genres, there are thousands and thousands   of genres and subg genres. Uh music has always  been an extraordinary tool to express human   identity. And as long as people have an  identity and are different, they will create   music to reflect their personality. So I think  there's no danger of music becoming homogenized. What might the future of music look like? If you were born in Beethoven's time, you'd  be lucky if you heard a symphony twice in your   lifetime. Whereas today, it's as uh accessible as  running water. We're drowning in music. The future   of music. Um, how can you predict it? Um, I think  one of my um caveats is that given that we've had   music for at least a million years, it would be  foolish to be uh pessimistic about its future that   we might worry about the next decade, the next  century, but this is only a pin prick, you know,   in the great scale of things. But I would forecast  two main um developments. one is that music will   become ever more instrumentalized or to have a  a function. Um I could almost imagine somebody   uh um prescribing you and injecting you with um  uh the exactly the right kind of sound to treat   a condition depression or some other kind  of emotional disorder. Um it'll be bespoke   as bespoke as anything else in life would be.   My other prediction would be an ever greater   integration with technology. Now we see that  already accelerated under COVID. Co has served   to accelerate a cultural change and we see  that in the extraordinary role of the internet   um as a way of taking music away from musicians  and giving it to normal people. So through   um various digital stages and platforms we can  both create music in our homes and to share it   and we're regaining the participatory condition  of music which was the norm thousands of years   ago where we all had an equal stake in creating  and enjoying music. The other um side of that is   a physical uh connectivity with technology don't  necessarily have to have an implant because you're   holding an iPhone in your hand. You're already  a symbiote. The symbiotic relationship between   yourself and the music you're consuming. uh  typically K-pop which is almost evolved out of the   interaction between consumers and um and digital  culture. We shouldn't forget that technology is   not sinister that all musical instruments are  are tools. The original bone flute was a piece of   technology. It serves to extend human capacity.   Uh it extends the voice or the fingers. Um,   so Watson Beat, which is a computer program  which allows musicians to create new posonic   possibilities, that's no different really to any  other musical instrument which extends our in this   case imagination. But once the uh instrument or  the machine has uh thrown up these possibilities,   it's the role of the human subject to make  decisions to pass, to edit, to select,   to shape all the things that the computer has has  given us. So I see that relationship between   humans and machines becoming ever more integrated,  ever more um imaginative in the future. And I   would like to add one rather bold prediction is  that um in the future music may not be just about   sound. It may involve um tastes and colors and  our bodies and frequencies currently not available   to our quite narrow spectrum of hearing um will  be able to amplify to extend our hearing range.    I think it's fair to say that just as you know uh  what Thousen or Beyonce is achieving today would   have been completely out of the ken out of the  comprehension of a motorcycle or a betto a few   centuries ago. We can't even begin to imagine  the possibilities awaiting us in the future.    To learn even more from the world's biggest  thinkers, get Big Think Plus for your business.