The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (7 page)

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Authors: Daniel J. Levitin

BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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They are singing at the tops of their lung capacity, laughing, and a transformation has come over them. This is
their song.
 
 
 
Two different scenarios, far removed in time and place. Music, or at least the rhythmic aspects of it, binds the first group together in fear. A seventies song with a distorted electric guitar binds the second group together in defiance. They are two very different types of bonding, but both with an important survival component. Both are bonds of cooperation.
The surprise, predawn attack was a gruesome innovation in prehistoric warfare. The attackers would wait until their opponents were in deep sleep and attack just an hour before dawn, sometimes in complete silence and sometimes with a fanfare of menacing instruments, creating as much noise and mayhem as they could to terrify their victims. By attacking at that hour, they had the element of surprise. By bringing their own torches, they controlled the source of light. By the time the sun came up, they could survey the destruction and collect the spoils.
This is a study of evolution and natural selection in situ. Those bands of early humans who were unable to develop a strategy for fending off such attacks were killed; their genes did not endure in the population. But a few clever humans did develop countertactics—no doubt as a direct consequence of the increased size of their prefrontal cortex, conferred as an advantage by random mutation. These countertactics may well have involved staying awake at night and singing as a way to broadcast, “We’re awake, and we’re here.”
Consider the Mekranoti people of the Brazilian Amazon. They are a small group of hunter-gatherers, indigenous to southern Pará, who have had relatively little contact with modern humans and thus are living their lives in ways that, anthropologists believe, have probably changed very little over the last several thousand years. One of the most remarkable things about the Mekranoti is the amount of time they spend singing—women sing for one or two hours every day and men sing for two hours or more each night. Given their subsistence lifestyle, this represents an enormous investment of time that might be more productively spent gathering food or sleeping. As David Huron writes:
The men sing every night starting typically around 4:30 in the morning. When singing, the Mekranoti men . . . swing their arms vigorously. The men endeavor to sing in their deepest bass voices, and heavily accent the first beats of a pervasive quadruple meter with glottal stops that make their stomachs convulse in rhythm. Anthropologist Dennis Werner (1984) describes their singing as a “masculine roar.” When gathering in the middle of the night, the men are obviously sleepy, and some men will linger in their lean-tos well after the singing has started. These malingerers are often taunted with shouted insults.
Werner reports that “Hounding the men still in their lean-tos [is] one of the favorite diversions of the singers. ‘Get out of bed! The Kreen Akrore Indians have already attacked and you’re still sleeping,’ they [shout] as loudly as they [can]. . . . Sometimes the harassment [is] personal as the singers [yell] out insults at specific men who rarely [show] up.” . . .
Like most native societies, the greatest danger facing the Mekranoti Indians is the possibility of being attacked by another human group. The best strategic time to attack is in the very early morning while people are asleep. Recall the insult shouted at men who continued to sleep in their lean-tos: “Get out of bed! The Kreen Akrore Indians have already attacked and you’re still sleeping.”
The implication is obvious. It appears that the nightly singing by the men constitutes a defensive vigil. The singing maintains arousal levels and keeps the men awake.
 
The Mekranoti are just one of many examples of people singing to ward off predators or attacking neighbors. It can be seen as the opposite side, a complementary behavior, of the aggressor’s use of music. Native Americans often sang and danced in preparation for launching an attack, as did the prehistoric aggressors in the fictional scenario #I above. The emotional and neurochemical excitement that resulted from this preparatory singing gave them the mettle and stamina to carry out their attacks. What may have begun as an unconscious, uncontrolled act—rushing their victims with singing and drumbeating in a vocal-motor frenzy—could have become a strategy as the victors saw firsthand the effect their actions had on those they were attacking. Although war dances risk warning an enemy of an impending attack, as Huron notes, the arousal and synchronizing benefits for the attackers may compensate for the loss of surprise. Combined with the sheer intimidation of witnessing such a spectacle, humans who sang, danced, and marched may have enjoyed a strong advantage on the battlefield. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germans feared no one more than the Scots—the bagpipes and drums were disturbing in their sheer loudness, and add to that the visual spectacle, the fearlessness of rank after rank of men wearing skirts. The Romans also feared the Scots in part because of their music—this fear culminated in Hadrian’s Wall. Like the Maori in New Zealand with their tattooed faces, open mouths, and outstretched tongues, music becomes a way of shouting at an intimidating a foe, a tactic already well known during Old Testament times, the beginning of recorded history: “Raise the war cry, you nations, and be shattered!” (Isaiah 8:9).
In our own time we have seen the power of such intimidation. Film footage of the marching Nazi army is terrifying to most people (even without knowing that they are Nazis). The synchronous, precise movements of the army suggest a level of discipline and instruction that is beyond the ken of our normal experience. Subconsciously, we realize that if they have mastered such precision in an activity as apparently useless as marching, how much more skilled they might be at the business of killing—hundreds or thousands of soldiers united in synchronous movements, choreographed for death and destruction. That is intimidation, and one of the reasons why patriotic parades often feature infantry marching down the main street of a town. Similarly, the sound of the Mekranoti collectively joined in a loud, middle-of-the-night song, signifies more than the fact that they are awake and vigilant—it indicates strong emotional bonds, coordinated effort among the singers-cum-fighters.
The physiology of singing, as opposed to simply speaking, allows the group to maintain loud voices for a longer period of time because singing uses different throat and diaphragm muscles than speaking. Through singing, especially in harmony, the Mekranoti can give the impression that their numbers are even greater than they actually are. The vocal synchrony further conveys that they are not simply acting as independent entities; its demands also indicate that they are aware and sensitive to the physical and mental states of each member of the group—an awareness that could create a formidable military defense if called to fight.
The primates that we
Homo sapiens
are descended from are manifestly social species. But there are unpleasant by-products of being intensely social and interested in the comings and goings of others: strong rivalries, jealousies, challenges to dominance hierarchies, competition for food, and sexual selection competition for those mates that are perceived to be the most desirable (remember high school?). These social tensions are the primary reason that nonhuman primates are rarely known to travel in groups larger than a few dozen—the social order simply cannot be maintained in larger assemblies.
But larger living groups, if they can be formed and maintained, confer several significant advantages. First, larger groups are likely to be more successful at repelling outside invaders. In a hunter-gatherer society, in which foodstuffs are often difficult to find and secure, the risks of any individual coming home empty-handed are diluted through the actions of many dozens or hundreds of hunter-gatherers; with cooperation, a given individual may come home empty-handed today, but full-armed tomorrow—in either case, the supplies are shared.
The genetic diversity of larger living groups (and the great range in choice of mates) provides a clear evolutionary advantage in that the population will be more resistant to disease and generally more flexible in responding to environmental change. These advantages apply as much to insects and bacteria as to people—but insects so far as I know don’t make music, so I’ll set them aside. (Bee and ant cities do display a complex social order and flexible roles for the members, but this is not the result of any form of consciousness like our own. Insects do display synchronous, rhythmic behavior which may be musiclike, but it is not really music.)
Humans certainly have overcome the sociobiological limitation on group size found in other primates, establishing living groups in the hundreds (at first, as the size of current hunter-gatherer societies attests), then tens of thousands, and now millions. The United States has nine cities with populations above one million, and China has fifty cities with populations above two million. Imperial Rome had a population of one million around 100 C.E. and ancient Athens a population of about half a million. The Old Testament (Exodus 12:37) refers to six hundred thousand men leaving Egypt during the Exodus (according to Josephus and other historians, dated at around 1500 B.C.E. plus or minus 150 years), and rabbinic teaching estimates the total number of the group that fled across the desert to be above one million. Human living groups in the hundreds of thousands have therefore been around for at least 3,500 years, and groups in the single-digit thousands must be much older.
How did we humans manage to relieve the social tensions that were necessary for the creation first of larger living groups—numbering in the hundreds—and ultimately of society and civilization?
I believe that
synchronous, coordinated song and movement
were what created the strongest bonds between early humans, or protohumans, and these allowed for the formation of larger living groups, and eventually of society as we know it. Throughout our evolutionary history, music and dance typically co-occurred. Rhythm in music provides the input to the human perceptual system that allows for the prediction and synchronization of different individuals’ behaviors. Sound has advantages over vision—it transmits in the dark, travels around corners, can reach people who are visually obscured by trees or caves. Music, as a highly structured form of sound communication, enabled the synchronization of movement even when group members couldn’t see each other. It allowed for distinctive vocal messages that could be transmitted across territories; for that matter, distinctive whistles and calls could have functioned much as the “secret clubhouse knock ” allows identification of people we can’t see. Once hit upon, these behaviors would quickly spread, since groups that didn’t employ them would be at a competitive disadvantage. As Vernon Reid of the rock group Living Colour said, “In Africa, music is not an art form as much as it is a means of communication.” Singing together releases oxytocin, a neurochemical now known to be involved in establishing bonds of trust between people.
In laboratory studies (both in my lab and the laboratory of Ian Cross at Cambridge) two individuals who are asked to synchronize their finger tapping on a desk synchronize more closely than when asked to synchronize with a metronome. This may seem counterintuitive, because the metronome is far steadier in its beat and therefore more predictable. But the studies show that humans accommodate one another’s performance, a situation of co-adaptation. They
interact
with one another, but not with the metronome, leading to a greater drive to coordinate. The evolutionary root of this behavior may well be in the coordination of movement, in general, because that serves to facilitate social interactions. If we’re walking together and communicating partly through vocalizations, partly through gesture, the interaction is greatly improved if our steps are aligned, if we’ve synchronized our gait—without it, one person’s head is always bobbing in and out of the other’s visual frame.
The wartime and hunting aspects are only part of the story. Synchronized movement also made collective tasks much easier to undertake, from hauling heavy objects to building structures to sowing seeds with human-driven plows. And when early humans were engaged in such heavy, manual tasks, looking at others in order to attain motor synchrony would not have always been an option. An aural signal for the synchronization—a repetitive, auditory call with accent structure indicating when certain key movements were to occur—would have made it possible to accomplish a great many physical tasks
as a collective
that would have been impossible individually. Historian William McNeill (author of
The Rise of the West
) highlights the importance of synchronized movement in manual labor:
Without rhythmical coordination of the muscular effort required to haul and pry heavy stones into place, the pyramids of Egypt and many other famous monuments could not have been built.
 
Rowing crews on ships, in tight quarters,
had
to synchronize their movements to avoid injury. The same is true on the battlefield, as Sun Tzu wrote in
The Art of War
(fifth century B.C.E.); weapons used at close range could easily harm one’s own countrymen if movements were not properly coordinated. And I believe that the muscular coordination was facilitated, prompted, and motivated by song. Songs that were essentially ones of friendship, of social bonding. Where would civilization be without them? William McNeill continues:
Crops in Sumer depended on irrigation; large-scale irrigation required the construction and maintenance of canals and regulation of how the water was distributed to the fields. . . . To make such feats possible, the scale of human society had to expand far beyond older limits. Villages with no more than a few hundred inhabitants no longer sufficed. And the rich harvests that could be garnered from suitably irrigated alluvial flood plains made it possible to feed the necessary numbers and even to reserve additional labor and materials for the construction of monumental temples in a dozen or more interconnected cities. Cooperation and coordination of effort according to plan were needed to achieve these goals.
 

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