How Music Rewires and Impacts the Human Body | Michael Spitzer

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. Chapter One. The History of Music. People often write books in response to reading other books, and when I read Yuval Harari's Sapiens, which blew my mind, I thought, well, hold on. Music is at least a million years older than the 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 that kind of moment of 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 the phonograph and prior to that we have no record of any sound. One of the problems with instruments is that the materials biodegrade, but looking as far back as we can, what doesn't degrade are lithic instruments made of rock, such as stalactites or the famous rock gongs in Tanzania. 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 a griffin vulture. But other than that, we have to wait until the invention of ceramics, over which people stretched high to create the first frame drums. But of course, skin and leather 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 lutes, 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 lutes, but again, strings biodegrade. So we have to work inferentially by mapping from what we do know and looking at, say, the prehistory of anatomy, of the evolving technology of tools, reverse engineering from linguistics to model language, and observing everyday life across the world in hunter-gatherer societies in different environments. It's as much about piecing together a number of disciplines. And here's an example of an inferential argument. About 1.5 million years ago, Homo ergaster, one of our hominin ancestors, invents what is called a bifacial axe. This is an axe with two symmetrical faces. Now, the capacity to create symmetry in an axe bespeaks two things, an ability to create 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 mental capacity is cross-modal. So the 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, given the evidence of a bifacial hand axe, Homo ergaster would be able to tap that axe in a symmetrical rhythm or using musical meter. When we talk about the origin of music, it's really about assembling elements of music which were synthesized much further down the road. And one of these elements was bipedalism, that what marks the first hominins apart from apes and our common ancestor was getting up on our feet. 4.4 million years ago, an Australopithecine called Ardi 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 hear footsteps as a pattern, and what patterns give you is a sense of time. You can predict what will happen next. And the idea of walking also gives humans a fascination with this metaphor that music moves. And if you think about it, music does not move. 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 symphony or a song, unfolds a journey. And this journey takes us from one point to another in our minds. It's an imaginary journey, a very long distant echo from the journey of our ancestors out of Africa. But walking is the first step of a whole cascade of evolutionary adaptations. And so many things evolve. Our cranial volume triples in size. We become a lot smarter. And with our increased brain size comes a capacity to control our fingers, to make links with the motor domains of our brain. We become more dexterous and ultimately more capable of crafting flutes and playing them. But standing up also gives us more space to breathe. And our larynx descends through our vocal tract. Our hyoid bone, which supports our tongue, evolves so we can articulate what we sing. As our vocal tract learned how to produce an infinitely greater variety of sounds, our capacity to make sounds exceeded their function. If you compare us with, say, the verved monkey, they can make four kinds of calls. And each call warns 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. One of the, I think, profound messages which I discovered in writing my book was that music is all about memory and history. When somebody, two million years ago, teaches their son how to nap a rock, their son remembers that. And tradition is, I call it, congealed muscle memory. Learning how to do something is a haptic, it's a meme, as Dawkins would say, it's mimetic. Not necessarily cognitive, your muscles learn how to do it. And then you get the bone flutes, and you have little parallel lines incised on the flute, which tell you where to place your fingers. Indeed, the five holes on those flutes tell you how to play it. That's also a memory. Most cultures across the planet see music as a way of explaining where their music came from. Here's an example. The Kaluli tribe of Papua New Guinea, they believe in their belief system that music comes from the moony bird, a kind of fruit dove, and they believe that the birds hovering above the forest canopy are 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 Eroica, which rehearses a memory of what it's like to live under Napoleon and fight a battle in 19th century France. So all music, 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. When we discovered the first bone flutes, some of the shards of the broken flutes were discovered in points of maximum resonance within the caves, suggesting a natural marriage, if you like, between music and sound and acoustics and architecture. And that also obtains, you know, in the West, there's no accident that a church is essentially a cave to worship a god, and the natural affinity between plainchant 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 rituals. Nobody wants to live in a cave. So these were dark and possibly dangerous places, full of mystery, portals to the divine, the lairs of savage beasts. And they would be reserved for special ceremonies or rituals, utilizing the astonishing resonance that the cave, the stone, affords to the flutes or the human voice or banging stalactites. Otherwise, people would create music around the hearth. The hearth is a point of stability, where you have the fire. Fire and the fixed quality of fire is a symbol for the fixed quality of a musical ritual. And the circularity of the hearth is that rituals tended to repeat in a cycle, because they were performed often after ritual events like the hunt or the eating of the meat that you obtain through the hunt. And there would be no necessarily distinction between 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 have different words for 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 hunter-gatherer peoples across different environments, from deserts to savannahs to rainforests to the polar snowcaps, they share a core. And that survival of a core bespeaks 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 Inuit of North America, what they share is 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 Karaburi Samurai in Australia, he saw that the Aboriginal peoples imitated the dance of kiwis and kangaroos. And if you look at the way that Inuit imitate the sound of a seal cub in their songs to lure the cub to be trapped and to be hunted, it's similar looking at the Native Americans and imitate the call of a buffalo cub. So in each context, modern hunter-gatherers are imitating the calls of animals. But not just that, the way they think of themselves is entangled also with the landscape. We have the very famous songlines that Bruce Chatwin observed in the way that 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 shamanistic spirit journey, where, led by the shaman, music 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 the different environments, the sand of Australia is very different from the snow 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 the inference that Inuits navigate trails in their mind, and much less footsteps through the snow. And you begin to imagine a web of culture superseding the web of footsteps or the web of trails in the landscape. Snow is also much more inimical to human survival than sand. And the Inuit have to learn to live with each other within closed spaces of igloos. So music's function is really about anger or conflict management. 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. And you see that in the lyrics of Inuit songs. It's fostering a playful sociability and diffusing potential for conflict. 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 under-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 hunter-gatherer peoples across the whole world, from the Inuit in North America, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Pygmies in Africa. And they share a nomadic way of life. And if you're essentially journeying through a landscape, what you don't do is carry heavy instruments. Music has to be portable, ideally just a voice, or if not, a very light flute or a small percussive instrument. We also see in music of the moment is that music tends to be very playful, avoiding repetition. So the idea of a piece or a work, which can 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. 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. And you invent the work, the repeatable work, and the structure of the work 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 routes into the town. You create heavy instruments like bells and gongs, but also very delicate ones like harps and lutes, which can 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 handmaiden, to serve the power, the power of the prince or the church. And musicians become professionalised and their job is to create music to be listened to for people with leisure. And this is the origin of what we call 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, requires money, and oftentimes it's the aristocrats or the upper middle class who had 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 in the fields. For instance, the cotton hollows we have in the 19th century were performed on the water. And we think of examples of sea shanties. The quality of the song reflects the activity. So on a boat you're closely confined and when you're hauling the anchor, the rhythm of hauling, 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 wailing contour. And indeed, many people argue that blues in jazz originates from the sadness, the grief of wailing, which happens naturally in a cotton hollow where you'll be wailing, literally bewailing your state of life. And similar comparisons could be made with fulling cloth, where the rhythm of creating or weaving, you hear that in these rotations of the wheel. And spinning songs are memories of the origin of spinning songs when you were actually creating the cloth. Most music was performed, as we say, whistle as you work. Also, it was performed in a participatory way. So there was no 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. As soon as civilisation invents writing, it invents musical notation. The Babylonians and the Sumerians invent the first musical notation. And the first example of that is the Hurrian hymn number 6, 1400 BC, which nobody can unfortunately decipher. The first decipherable complete piece of music is the Sekelos 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. A thousand years ago, in 1020, 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 monks singing at the furthest outpost of the empire of Christendom, say Hadrian's Wall in the northern extreme of England, literally sang from the same hymn 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 Cortes invades Mexico in 1519, he takes notation with him. He takes manuscripts of Spanish polyphony written down as staff notation, and he teaches the Aztecs how to sing Spanish counterpoint. And what is astonishing is that 10 years after Cortes decimates the Indians in 1519, by 1530, you have Aztec musicians singing Spanish polyphony in Mexico Cathedral. So music notation becomes the sharp end of the stick of globalisation and the domination of the planet. Now there are various consequences to staff notation. Many of them are frankly bad. By pinning notes down to a page, almost like capturing a butterfly, you're taking a note away from the voice, 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, you create a division between the composer of the object and those who a performer. And tradition becomes frozen into a museum, an imaginary museum of musical works. And if you compare that to what's done, say, in the Carnatic 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, they creatively improvise around the idea of the work. One of the surprises is that music is fractal in its nature. It's as fractal as a universe, which is to say that a galaxy has the same shape as a brain cell. The universe exhibits self-similarity at rising orders of magnitude, just as music does. Music is the art of repetition. You have notes on a bar. You have bars repeated in a phrase. You have phrases in a section, a section in a work, and so on ad infinitum. And this is extraordinary because music draws its capacity from the nature of sound or noise itself. If you take a spectrograph of noise, which is a way of representing noise through waveforms, the waveforms exhibit self-similarity however much you focus it. So if you blow up a detail of the waveform, it looks the same, in the same way as 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. It's pleasant. It's fractal. And music has the same 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 harmony of the spheres or universal harmony. So the ancients, the Greeks and the Chinese and the Sumerians believed that 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 ratios are natural in that respect. So Copernicus thought that the planets orbited in musical proportions. That's the old-fashioned view of music's universality. I think 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. Once you widen the lens as widely as possible and you see the big picture of where Sapien 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 Insects can pulse together in rhythm. They have a sense of rhythm. Some birds have a sense of rhythm and apes don't have that. So it's very odd that humans evolved from apes who 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 it'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. What humans brought to the table is that we're the great synthesizers. We've put together the rhythms of insects, the melody of birds, the gestural sociality of apes. We also reflect the fractal structure of the cosmos. But what we brought to it was the very human drives of emotions and indeed the finite quality of human life. The fact that we die, I think, haunts us and the idea of a 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 fractal structure and the hierarchical quality of musical structure, without human emotions or the finitude of the human lifespan, it wouldn't be what I call music. So when NASA sent a golden record aboard Voyager 40 years ago, this suggested a very interesting thought experiment because NASA stocked the record with diverse examples of human music. For instance, a Bach Vandenberg Concerto, Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, panpipes from the Solomon Islands, court music, gamelan from Java. If we imagine aliens opened this in a billion years, will they be able to extrapolate some common denominator, something fundamentally human in this assortment of earth music? This begs the question, what do they have in common? I think what they do have in common, even for an alien, is that 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 Pipistrelle bat song, which can be as short as a single wingbeat. What they will see, though, is a lot of commonality 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 isn't so different from animal music. But they will recognise sapiens for perhaps having this walking metre, which goes back to astralopithecines four million years ago, that we have a rhythm of walking, whereas whales have a much more fluid rhythm of floating through their own medium, just as birdsong is as jerky as the motions of a bird. So each species, bird, whale and sapiens, reflects the kind of motion that their bodies pursue in their environments. I think that'll be apparent to aliens. So the question of, is music a universal language is an interesting one, because on the surface, every culture in the world, though it values music, has different kinds of scales and harmonies. But 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 recognise rhythm, to beat in time to rhythm, to recognise melody, to recall a melody. This universality then changes the second that culture gets its hooks into a child. It actually matters 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. Babies born in the West prefer certain tuning systems to those born in, say, Indonesia. Another aspect of this universality is that we all share a vocabulary of basic emotions. Sadness, happiness, anger, fear and so on. 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 neocortex, the most evolved, the most advanced part, which 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 brainstem, our oldest layer, this is what the simplest organisms have, brainstems flinch to reflexes in sound, so shocks and loud bangs will trigger the brainstem reflex. The next layer up, the basal ganglia, responds to pleasure, whether a sound is pleasant or unpleasant. This is a reptilian brain. The mammalian brain, the amygdala, is where emotions happen. Sadness happens, there's anger, fear. The most modern layer, the neocortex, 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. So one of the interesting facts about sapiens is that everywhere sapiens travels in the world, he takes music with them. So when Cortes goes to South America, to Mexico, he brings Spanish counterpoint. When the English go to North America, they bring Puritan hymn tunes. When the Victorian missionary Christians go to Africa, they again bring Christian hymn tunes, which is why most African national anthems sound like Christian hymn tunes. Going back to the Silk Road, everywhere people take their caravans laden with spices or with food, they bring instruments like lutes or violins. They also bring melodies. And if you watch what happens to the violin and the lute, 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 lute goes, it will change its name. If you look at Lisbon in 1520, 10% of the population of Lisbon was African. And the Africans brought African dancers such as Chacons and Sarabands, which will eventually find their way into Johann Sebastian Bach's dance music. So there's even an African cargo in a German composer's Baroque compositions. Because once music, or just like cricket, is enculturated by another people, it becomes naturalised. And who is to say that once the Aztec Indians have absorbed the Spanish counterpoint, it's no longer Indian. It becomes Indianised. In a similar way to, and even more dramatically, that Japan has a tradition where every New Year's Eve they perform Beethoven's Ninth 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 formality and respect for tradition. So what Japan is getting from Beethoven isn't necessarily the same thing that we're getting from Beethoven. So Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which for us is very individualistic, for Japanese culture is expressing the opposite ethos of social togetherness and an extinction of the ego. It's a much more Zen quality. The 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 Confucius, a great Chinese sage, he's typically portrayed playing a zither called a Qin in Chinese. It's a flat part, and Confucius plays this under an apricot tree. And there was a tradition of viewing the very delicate sounds of the zither, of the Qin, as melding into the sounds of the wind and the bamboo and the grass and the water. There's 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 one of the great monuments of Chinese civilization are the Marquis Yi of Zen bells, discovered in 1978. Who was the Marquis Yi of Zen? He was a warlord who died in 433 BC, and his tomb contained an extraordinary thing, 65 bronze bells. And what these bells 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 sonority. 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, through globalization, is the takeover of the planet because of music notation. What goes around comes around, and what we see now is that the West is being colonized by two tidal waves flowing across the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans. African music, jazz and rock, has become the lingua franca 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. 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 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 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 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. Actually, because of that, we can have a pretty good idea of exactly how a Beethoven 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 composer would have wanted a few centuries ago. 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 cortex. Birds, as a rule, don't have that link, with the possible exception of self-accrested cockatoos. So as long as you want to go back, there is this link between rhythm and motion. If you 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. So when the brain sees an action, a physical action in somebody else, you don't have to move to experience that motion in your brain, because the mirror neurons are responding sympathetically. We've always had an instinctive faculty to imitate. We call it mimesis. And we see that in all walks of life. Yawns are contagious. If I see you yawning, I yawn back. But also emotions are contagious. If you're sad, I instinctively cleave to your sadness. I mirror it. I emote with you. And that's the same with music. When I feel sad, when I hear a sad song, my body, my mirror neurons are instinctively sympathizing, I'm mimicking, I'm mirroring the human sadness encoded in that sad song. Another vivid example of emotional contagion, which is related to our mirror neurons vibrating sympathetically to the perception of somebody else moving. I once attended a concert with my 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 Ranger before. It's the William Tell Overture by Rossini. But they had an instinctive response to that rhythm. And we're born for that. And even when you do an experiment on babies who aren't sitting on their parents' knees, so you could perhaps argue that it's the parents who are prompting their children to jump up and down, they do the same thing. So it's within the baby, not within the adult. There's an extreme reaction to music, which has been called the chills or frisson, or the sublime. There are moments in music which are so intense, and they're often triggered by breakthrough moments of loudness or extremity. They're different for every person. 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 pyloerection. 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 musical aesthetics is that you learn to take the danger out of extreme experience. I mean, we have a similar experience when we go on a fairground ride or when we're watching a volcanic eruption and the safety of an observation platform. It's almost as if music is violence without the danger, or the natural sublime without the danger. Darwin was the first to observe that emotion had an adaptive role in the field, that animals and people, they experience emotions in relation to goals which help them survive. So happiness is when you achieve a goal. Anger is when the goal is blocked. Sadness is when you lose a loved one. Fear is the most archetypal emotion. When you're exposed to a threat from a snake, you have instinctive response to either freeze or to fight or to flee. And music is full of similar responses. Music is made of patterns, and 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. That engages the same faculties in our brain as danger out in the field. Of course, nobody dies in music. This is only a derived effect of that. But this is why we think that music is able to express emotion in a very visceral way. And emotions are also processed at different levels of the brain, starting with the brainstem, which flinches to shocks. And then the reptile brain, the basal ganglia, responds to pleasure or displeasure. The mammalian amygdala responds to emotions, happiness, sadness. And the neocortex processes emotions through pattern. So when you're listening to music, it's a kind of mental time travel. When you're absorbed in a work, you're travelling 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. The astonishing fact is musical training rewires the brain. Most of us are right-brained. If we train a musician, they become left-brained. They hear music through the same temporal lobe, which processes language, which 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 organise your time. You learn how to work together in a team. To play in an orchestra is team building. You learn how to pay attention. You learn how to focus on sounds. These are all highly transferable skills. Appreciating music purely as a form of relaxation or entertainment does a massive disservice to all the things that music helps you with. Let's list them. Music can bring people together. 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. It's formed of social conventions. Music lowers stress by reducing cortisol. It gives you pleasure, makes you happy by flooding the brain with neurotransmitters like dopamine. Music is an excellent way of tagging memories, remembering the past. 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 imprint their taste in music with songs they learn at that time, because music has always come to define identity of who you are. All these things increase your mental health. And ultimately, 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 gives a sense of passivity, whereas to listen is a very active and creative activity. Music, of course, can also harm the brain. It can be militarized, as we know from examples of Guantanamo Bay, when the army plays certain kinds of music to inmates. As a rule, any 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, 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, Alzheimer's patients don't do well listening to Baroque music. It's too repetitive for them. And certain conditions respond better to softer music or to music with greater variety. If you're suffering from depression, then you don't want to hear a kind of music which reinforces that condition. So 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. It's a possibility that with this incredible ubiquity and accessibility of music through the internet, that eventually all our musics will become homogenized into a single thing, into a grey homogeneous object. I don't think that will happen for one very important reason. Every artist wants to be distinctive. There's a competitive 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 sub-genres. 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. 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 accessible as running water. We're drowning in music. The future of music, how can you predict it? I think one of my caveats is that given that we've had music for at least a million years, it would be foolish to be pessimistic about its future. We might worry about the next decade, the next century, but this is only a pinprick in the great scale of things. But I would forecast two main developments. One is that music will become ever more instrumentalized or to have a function. I could almost imagine somebody prescribing you and injecting you with exactly the right kind of sound to treat a condition, depression or some other kind of emotional disorder. 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. COVID has served to accelerate a cultural change and we see that in the extraordinary role of the internet as a way of taking music away from musicians and giving it to normal people. So through 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 side of that is a physical connectivity with technology. You 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, typically K-pop, which has almost evolved out of the interaction between consumers and digital culture. We shouldn't forget that technology is not sinister, that all our musical instruments are our tools. The original bone flute was a piece of technology. It serves to extend human capacity. It extends the voice or the fingers. So Watson Beat, which is a computer program which allows musicians to create new post-sonic possibilities, that's no different really to any other musical instrument which extends our, in this case, imagination. But once the instrument or the machine has 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 given us. So I see that relationship between humans and machines becoming ever more integrated and ever more imaginative in the future. And I would like to add one rather bold prediction is that in the future, music may not be just about sound. It may involve tastes and colours and our bodies and frequencies currently not available to our quite narrow spectrum of hearing. We'll be able to amplify, to extend our hearing range. I think it's fair to say that just as, you know, what Stockhausen or Beyonce is achieving today would have been completely out of the ken, out of the comprehension of a Mozart or a Beethoven a few centuries ago. We can't even begin to imagine the possibilities awaiting us in the future. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think members community where you get access to videos early, ad free.