Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (15 page)

It’s easy to see why three-year-old aggressive and streaking behaviors would prompt a well-timed response in others (especially parents). Another common category of human behavior that elicits a behavioral response in others, in fact one of the most common, is
expressive
behavior. Human expressions are
for
other humans to see or hear or smell, precisely in order to prompt them to modulate their behavior. Sometimes another person’s response may be a complex whole-body behavior (I give my wife my come-hither look, she responds by going thither), and sometimes the other person’s behavioral response may simply be an expression of emotion (I grimace and rub my newly minted bruise, and my son responds by smiling). If music is good at getting us to move, then, in this light, one suspects that music must usually sound not merely like movement that kicks (literally, in my son’s case) listeners into moving in response, but, more specifically, like human emotional or expressive behaviors.

Sound triggering movement. That’s starting to sound a bit like dance. To more fully understand dance, we must grasp one further thing:
contagious
behaviors—behavioral expressions that tend to spread. For example, if I smile, you may smile back; and if I scowl, you’ll likely scowl back. Even yawns are catching. And contagious behavior is not confined to the face. Nervous behavior can spread, and angry bodily stances are likely to be reciprocated. If you raise your hands high into the air, a typical toddler will also do so, at which point you have a clear tickle shot. Even complex whole-body behaviors are contagious, accounting for why, for example, people in a crowd often remain passive bystanders when someone is being attacked (other people’s inaction spreads), and how a group of people can become a riotous mob (other people’s violent behavior spreads). By the way, have you yawned yet?

Music, then, may elicit movement for the same reasons that a cartoon smiley face can elicit smiles in us: music can often sound like
contagious
expressive human behavior and movement, and trigger a similar expressive movement in us. Music may not be marching orders from our commander, but it can sometimes cue our emotional system so precisely that we feel almost compelled to march in lockstep with music’s fictional mover. And this is true whether we are adults or toddlers. When music is effective at getting us to mimic the movement
it
mimics, we call it dance music, be it a Strauss waltz or a Grateful Dead flail.

The music-sounds-like-movement theory can, then, explain why music provokes us to dance—the third of the four hurdles a theory of music must leap over. The fourth and final hurdle concerns the
structure
of music, and it will take the upcoming chapter and the Encore chapter to make the case that music has the signature structure of humans moving.

Don’t Roll Over, Beethoven

The case for my theory is strong, I believe, and I hope to convince you that music sounds like human movement. If I am correct, then, with the movement-meaning of music in hand, we will be in a position to create a new generation of “supermusic”: music deliberately designed to be even more aesthetically pleasing, by far, than previous generations of music. Music has historically been “trying” to shape itself like expressive human behaviors, in the sense that
that
was what was culturally selected for. But individual composers didn’t
know
what music was trying to be—composers didn’t know that music works best when tapping into our human-movement auditory mechanisms. Musical works have heretofore tended to be
sloppy
mimickers of human movement. With music decoded, however, we can tune it perfectly for our mental software, and blow our minds. You’re toast, Beethoven! I’ve unraveled your secrets!

No. Just kidding. I’m afraid that the music research I’m describing to you will do no such thing, even if every last claim I make is true. To see why the magic of Beethoven is not unraveled by my theory, consider photographic art. Some photographs have evocative power; they count as art. Some photographs, however, are just photographs, and not art. What exactly distinguishes the art from the “not” is a genuine mystery, and certainly beyond me. But there
is
something that is obviously true about art photographs: they are
photographs
. Although that’s obvious to us, imagine for a moment that four-dimensional aliens stumble upon a pile of human artifacts, and that in the pile are photographs. Being four-dimensional creatures, they have poor intuitions about what a three-dimensional world looks like from a particular viewpoint inside it. Consequently, our human photographs are difficult to distinguish from the many other human artifacts that are flat with stuff printed upon them, such as wallpaper, clothing, and money. If they are to realize that the photographs are, in fact, photographs—two-dimensional representations of our 3-D world—they are going to have to
discover
this.

Luckily for them, one alien scientist who has been snooping around these artifacts has an idea. “What if,” he hypothesizes, “some of the flat pieces of paper with visual marks are photographs? Not of our 4-D world, but of their human 3-D world?” In an effort to test this idea, he works out what the signature properties of photographs of 3-D worlds would be, such as horizons, vanishing points, projective geometry, field of focus, partial occlusion, and so on. Then he searches among the human artifacts for pieces of paper or fabric having these properties. He can now easily conclude that wallpaper, clothing, and money are not photographs. And when he finds some of our human photographs, he’ll be able to establish that they
are
photographs, and convince his colleagues. This alien’s research would amount to a big step forward for those aliens interested in understanding our world and how we perceive it. A certain class of flat artifacts is meaningful in a way they had not realized, and now they can begin to look at our photographs in this new light, and see our 3-D world represented in them.

The theory of music I am defending here is akin to the alien’s theory that some of those flat artifacts are views of 3-D scenes. To us, photographs are obviously of 3-D scenes; but to the aliens this is not at all obvious. And, similarly, to our auditory system, music quite obviously is about human action; but to our conscious selves this is not in the least obvious (our conscious selves are aliens to music’s deeper meaning).

To see why this book cannot answer what is
good
music, consider what this alien scientist’s discovery about photographs would
not
have revealed. Unbeknownst to the alien, some of the photographs are considered by us humans to be genuine instances of art, and the rest of the photographs are simply photographs. This alien’s technique for distinguishing photographs from nonphotographs is no use at all for distinguishing the artful photographs from the mere photographs. Humanity’s greatest pieces of photographic art and the most haphazard kitsch would all be in the same bag, labeled “views of a 3-D world.” By analogy, the most expressive human movement sounds and the most run-of-the-mill human movement sounds are all treated the same by the ideas I describe in this book; they are all in the same bag, labeled “human movement sounds.” Although it is expressive human movements that probably drive the structure of music, I have enough on my hands just trying to make the beginnings of a case that music sounds like human movement. Just as it is easier for the four-dimensional alien to provide evidence for photograph-ness than to provide evidence for artsy-photograph-ness, it is much easier for me to provide evidence that music is human-movement-ish than to provide evidence that it is expressive-human-movement-ish. Photographic art is views of 3-D scenes, but views of 3-D scenes need not be photographic art. Similarly, music is made of the sounds of humans moving, but the sounds of humans moving need not be—and usually are not—music.

Relax, Beethoven—no need to roll over. If the music-sounds-like-movement theory is correct, then it is best viewed as a cipher key for decoding music. It gives our conscious, scientific selves the ability to translate the sounds of music back into the movements of humans (something our own lower-level auditory areas already
know
how to do). But knowing how to
read
the underlying movement meaning of music does not mean one knows how to write music. Just as I can read great literature but cannot create it, a successful music-is-movement theory will allow us to read the meaning of music but not to compose it. Creating good music requires knowing which human movements are most expressive, and making music sound like that. But a theory of expressive human movements is far harder to formulate than a theory of human movements generally. All I can hope to muster is a general theory of the sounds of human movements, and so the theory will be, at best, a decoder ring, not a magical composer of great music.

But a decoder ring may nevertheless be a big step forward for composers. Composers have thus far managed to create great music—great auditory stories of human movements, in our theory’s eyes—without explicitly understanding what music means. With a better understanding of the decoder ring, composers can consciously employ it in the creative process. Similarly, the four-dimensional alien has much better odds of mimicking artistic photography once he has figured out what photographs actually look like. Until then, the alien’s attempts at artistic photography wouldn’t even look like photography. (“Is this photographic art?” the alien asks, holding up a plaid pattern.) The aliens must know what basic visual elements characterize photography before they can take it to the next level, start to guess which arrangements of those elements are superior, and try their own tentacles at art photography. You can’t have expressive photography without photography, and you can’t have expressive human movement sounds without human movement sounds. The theory of music I’m arguing for, then, does not explain what makes great music. But the theory would nevertheless be a big step forward for this. Like the alien’s basic discovery, it will enable us to pose hypotheses about why some music is great—by referring to the expressive movements and behaviors it depicts.

This decoder ring will, then, be helpful to composers, but it cannot substitute for the expressive antennae composers use to create musical art. For choreographers and movie composers, this decoder ring is potentially much more important. Choreographers and movie composers are deeply concerned with the mapping of music to movement (the principal domain of choreography) or from movement to music (the principal domain of movie composers), and so a decoder ring that translates one to the other is a potential holy grail. In reality, though, it’s not as simple as that. A given piece of music probably does not determine
particular
dance moves (although your auditory system may pick out just one movement)—a good choreographer needs an artistic head to pick the most appropriately expressive movement of the many possible movements consistent with the music. And for any given movie visual, a good film composer will have to use his or her artistic talents to find an appropriately expressive theme for the scene. Any music–movement decoding devices made possible by this book won’t put choreographers or movie composers out of work, but such a decoder may serve as an especially useful tool for these disciplines, providing new, biologically justified constraints on what makes a good music-movement match.

So, what
is
great music? I don’t know. My only claim is that it tends to be written in the language of human movement. Music is movement. But it is not the case that movement is music. Just as most stories are not interesting, most possible movement sounds are not pleasing. What good composers know in their bones is which movement sounds are expressive, and which sequences of movement sounds tell an evocative story. But they also know even deeper in their bones which sounds sound like humans moving, and
that
is what we’ll be discussing next, in the upcoming chapter and in the Encore.

[
1
] Researchers in this tradition include Alf Gabrielsson, Patrick Shove, Bruno H. Repp, Neil P. McAngus Todd, Henkjan Honing, Jacob Feldman, and Eric F. Clarke (see his
Ways of Listening
).

Chapter 4

Musical Movement

Serious Music

This dictionary of musical themes, by Harold Barlow and Sam Morgenstern, supplies an aid which students of music have long needed . . . We should now have something in musical literature to parallel Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations
. Whenever a musical theme haunted us, but refused to identify itself no matter how much we scraped our memory, all we should have to do would be to look up the tune in Barlow and Morgenstern, where those ingenious dictionary-makers would assemble some ten thousand musical themes, with a notation-index or theme-finder, to locate the name of the composition from which the haunting fragment came, and the name of the composer.

– John Erskine, 1948, in the preface to Barlow and Morgenstern’s
A Dictionary of Musical Themes
.

In the 1940s it must have been laborious to construct a dictionary of musical themes, but that’s what Barlow and Morgenstern went ahead and did. It is unclear whether anyone ever actually used it to identify the tunes that were haunting them, and, at any rate, it is obsolete today, given that our iPhones can tell us the name and composer of a song if you merely let it listen to a few bars. The iPhone software is called “Shazam,” a great advance over locutions such as, “Hey, can you Barlow-and-Morgenstern this song for me?” Now, in defense of Barlow and Morgenstern, Shazam does not recognize much classical music, which makes me the life of the party when someone’s Shazam comes up empty-handed in the attempt to identify what the pianist is playing, and I pull out my 642-page Barlow and Morgenstern and tell them it is Chopin’s Concerto No. 1 in E minor. And, I add, it is the third theme occurring within the second movement . . . because that’s how I roll.

The other great use I have found for Barlow and Morgenstern’s dictionary is as a test bed for the movement theory of music. Each of its 10,000 themes nicely encapsulates the fundamental part of a tune—no chords, no harmony, no flourishes. Most themes have around one to two dozen notes, and so, in movement terms, they correspond to short bouts of behavior. (Figure 18 shows three examples of themes from Barlow and Morgenstern.) There are at least two good reasons for concentrating my efforts on this data set.

Figure 18
. Example themes from the Barlow & Morgenstern dictionary.
Top
: A theme from Bach’s Partita, No. 1 in B minor.
Middle
: A theme from Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7 in D.
Bottom
: A theme from Sibelius’s Quartet Op. 56 “Voces Intimae.”

First, the dictionary possesses a
lot
of themes—10,000 of them. This is crucial for our purposes because we’re studying messy music, not clean physics. One can often get good estimates of physical regularities from a small number of measurements, but even though (according to the music-is-movement theory) music’s structure has the signature of the physical regularities of human movement, music is one giant leap away from physics. Music is the product of cultural selection among billions of people, thousands of years, and hundreds of cultures, and so we can only expect to see a blurry signature of human movement inside any given piece or genre of music. On top of that, we have the wayward ways of composers, who are often bent on marching to their own drum and
not
fitting any pattern they might notice in the works of others. Music thus is inherently even messier than speech, and that’s why we need a lot of tunes for our data. With enough tunes, we’ll be able to see the moving humans through the fog.

The
Dictionary of Musical Themes
is also perfect for our purposes here because it is a dictionary of
classical
music. “What’s so great about classical music?” you might ask. Nothing, is the answer. Or, at least, there is nothing about the category of classical music that makes it more worthy of study than other categories of music. But it is nevertheless perfect for our purposes, and for an “evolutionary” reason. We are interested in analyzing not just any old tune someone can dream up, but the tunes that actually get selected. We want our data set to have the “melodic animals” that have fared well in the ecology of minds they inhabit. Classical music is great for this because it has existed as a category of music for several centuries. The classical music that survives to be played today is just a tiny fraction of all the compositions written over the centuries, with most composers long dead—and even longer obscure.

Ultimately, the theory developed here will have to be tested on the broad spectrum of music styles found across humankind, but, for the reasons I just mentioned, Western classical music is a natural place to begin. And who is going to be motivated to analyze broad swaths of music for signs of human movement if their curiosity is not at least piqued by the success of the theory on a data set closer to home? As it happens, for many of the analyses carried out in the following chapters, we did also analyze a database of approximately 10,000 Finnish folk songs. The results were always qualitatively the same, and I won’t discuss them much here. At any rate, Finnish folk are universally agreed to be a strange and taciturn people, and they are (if just barely) in the West, so they don’t really broaden the range of our musical data.

With the Barlow and Morgenstern app installed in our toolkit, and with good Finyards slandered without reason, we are ready to embark on a quest for the signature of expressive human movers in music.

In this chapter we will successively take on rhythm, pitch, and loudness. As we will see, when we humans move, we have our own signature rhythm, pitch modulations, and loudness fluctuations. I will introduce these fingerprints of human movement, and provide evidence that music has the same fingerprints. I have at this point accumulated more evidence than can be reasonably included in this chapter, and so I have added an “Encore” chapter at the end of the book that takes up many other converging lines of evidence for human movement hidden inside music.

Drum Core

When most people think about the auditory features peculiar to music, they are likely to focus on melody, and in particular upon the melodic contours, or the pattern of pitch rises and falls. Perhaps this bias toward melody is because the most salient visible feature of written music is that the notes go up and down on the staff. Or maybe it is because our fingers go up and down our instruments, pressing different buttons for different pitches; or because much of the difficulty in playing an instrument is learning to move quickly from pitch to pitch. Whatever the reason, the pitch modulations of the melody get a perceived prominence in music. This is an eternal thorn in the side of percussionists, often charged with not
really
playing an instrument, and of rappers, dismissed as not
really
being musicians.

But in reality, the chief feature of music is not the pitch contours of melody at all, but rhythm and beat, which concern the timing, emphasis, and duration of the notes. Whereas nearly all music has a rhythm and a beat, music can get by without melodic pitch modulations. I just came back from a street fair, for example, where I heard a rock band, an acoustic guitarist, and a drum group. All three had a rhythm and beat, but only two of the three had a melody. The drum group had no melody, but its rhythm and beat made it music—the best music at the fair, in fact.

The rhythm-and-beat property is the hard nugget at the core of music. And the diamond at the very center of that nugget is the beat, all by itself. Let’s begin our examination of musical structure, then, with the beat.

We humans make a variety of beatlike sounds, including heartbeats, sexual gyrations, breathing, and certain vocalizations like laughing and sobbing. But one of the most salient beatlike sounds we make is when we walk, and our feet hit the ground over and over again in a regular repeating pattern.
Hit-ring, hit-ring, hit-ring
, or
boom, boom, boom.
Such beatlike gaits resounding from a mover are among the most important sound patterns in our lives, because they are the centerpiece of the auditory signature of a human in our vicinity, maybe a potential lover, murderer, or mailman. This is why the beat is so fundamental to music: natural human movement has a beat, and so music must have a beat. That is, from the music-is-movement theory’s point of view, a beat must be as integral to music as footstep sounds are to human movement. And because most actions we carry out have regularly repeating footsteps, most music will have a beat.

And music is not merely expected to have a regularly repeating beat, but to have a
human
steplike beat. Consider the following three
prima facie
similarities between musical beat and footsteps. First, note that the rate of musical beats tends to be around one to two beats per second, consistent with human footstep rates. Second, also like human footsteps, the beat need not be metronome-like in its regularity; rather, the beat can have irregularities and still be heard as a beat, because our auditory footstep-recognition mechanisms don’t expect perfectly metronome-like human movers. In fact, musical performers are known to sometimes purposely
add
irregularities to the beat’s timing, with the idea that it sounds better. And a third initial similarity between footsteps and musical beats is that when people go from moving to not moving, the rate of their footsteps slows down, consistent with the tendency toward a slowing of the beat (
ritardando
) at the end of pieces of music (a topic of study by researchers such as Henkjan Honing, Jacob Feldman, and others over the years). Not all objects stop in this fashion: recall from Chapter 2, on solid-object physical events, that a dropped ball bounces with ever
greater
frequency as it comes to a stop. If musical beat were trying to mimic simple solid-object sounds instead of human movers, then musical endings would undergo
accelerando
rather than
ritardando
. But that’s not how humans slow down, and it’s not how music slows down.

In addition to beats being footsteplike in their rate, regularity, and deceleration, beats are footsteplike in the way they are
danced
to. Remember those babies shaking their stinky bottoms that we discussed in the previous chapter’s section titled “Motionally Moving”? They dance, indeed, but one might suspect that they aren’t very good at it. After all, these are babies who can barely walk. But baby dancers are better than you may have realized. While they’re missing out on the moves that make
me
a sensation at office parties, they get a lot right. To illustrate how good babies are at dancing, consider one fundamental thing you do
not
have to tell them: dance
to
the beat. Babies gyrate so that their body weight tends to be lower to the ground on, and only on, every beat. They somehow “realize” that to dance means not merely to be time-locked to the music, but to give special footstep status to the beat. Babies don’t, for example, bounce to every other beat, nor do they bounce twice per beat. And dancing to the beat is something we adults do without ever realizing that there are other possibilities. MCs never yell, “Three steps to the beat!” or “Step in between the beat!” or “Step on the sixteenth note just after the beat, and then again on the subsequent thirty-second note!” Instead, MCs shout out what every toddler implicitly knows: “Dance
to
the beat!” The very fact that we step to the beat, rather than stepping in the many other time-locked ways we could, is itself a fundamental observation about the relationship between movement and music, one that is difficult to notice because of the almost tautological ring to the phrase, “Step to the beat.” Why we tend to step to the beat should now be obvious, given our earlier discussion about the footsteplike meaning of the beat, and (in the previous chapter) about dance music sounding like contagious expressive human behaviors. We step to the beat because our brain thinks we are matching the gait of a human mover in our midst.

Recall the drum group at the festival I mentioned near the start of this section. There is something I didn’t mention: there
was
no group. More exactly, there was a tent exhibition with a large variety of percussion instruments, and the players were children and adults who, upon seeing and hearing the drums, joined in the spontaneous jam sessions. These random passersby were able to, and wanted to, make rhythms matching those around them. Watching this spectacle, it almost seems as if we humans are born to drum. But is it so surprising that we’re able to drum to the beat if our actions are the origins of the very notion of the beat?

Before discussing further similarities between beats and footsteps, we need to ask about all the notes occurring in music that are
not
on the beat. Beat may be fundamental to music, but I doubt I’d be bothering to write this—or you to read it—if music were always a simple, boring, one-note-per-beat affair. It is the total pattern of on-beat and off-beat notes that determines a piece of music’s rhythm, and we must address the question: if on-beat notes are footsteps, then what human-movement-related sounds might the off-beat notes sound like?