The human mind did not invent music
Yanai Ofran
A lot of money is invested in music these days. Politicians, advertisers and musicians crowd the studios and look for the combination of sounds that will permeate the souls of the floating voices. It is doubtful whether jingles can bring about a political revolution, but it is clear that music has an amazing cognitive effect. How is it that a certain sequence of sounds can bring tears to the eyes of a person who hears it for the first time? What brain processes generate chirps that are able to turn a somber and apathetic mood into an uplifting one?
Two articles published last week in "Science" summarize a series of recent studies dealing with this fascinating puzzle. It seems that music is a distinctly human phenomenon. Humans take over the world of natural sounds and introduce regime and order into it. This arrangement makes it possible to create complicated sequences of sounds that express complex messages, which cannot be expressed in any other way. It is not surprising that philosophers and researchers compare music to another distinct human phenomenon - language.
But the new studies challenge this perception. In an article titled "Biology and Music" researcher Patricia Gray, along with several leading researchers in the field, presents a new thesis. Music, Gray writes, is a universal phenomenon shared by many species in the animal world.
The musical composition of birds or whales is based on the same principles that Beethoven and Brahms worked on (or at least some of them), and the basic musical distinctions of rats and starlings are also heard in concert halls.
Mark Tramo's article, which accompanies Gray's article, presents the information accumulated so far regarding the way the brain processes music. The ability to distinguish between scales, intervals and tones, he claims, also exists in the brains of animals.
Gray confirms her revolutionary claim in a series of studies from recent years, which have used the latest technologies in the field of sound and recording. According to Gray and her partners, it was not only outdated recording technologies that stood in the way of discovering nature's music, but also the fact that most scientists live in big cities - something that prevented them from hearing the voices. Whale song, they write, was only discovered in the middle of the century, but ancient seafaring tribes knew it well already thousands of years ago. The musical connections between elephants is a relatively new scientific discovery, but the Hutu and Tutsi have been incorporating elephant music into their songs and stories for hundreds of years.
And what, after all, did the new studies find in whale song? According to Gray, the whales sing in rhythms very similar to those preferred by musicians and human listeners, "although they can just as easily create sequences of sounds that lack any rhythm." The whale songs have a structure that reminds researchers of the principles of human music: presentation of a short theme, development of the theme, and finally a repetition of a modified version of the theme.
The vocal ability of an average whale would not embarrass Maria Callas. It spans seven octaves, yet they use musical intervals very similar to those accepted in Western music. Some studies even claim that the songs of the whales contain a repeated chorus, which is intended, as with humans, to facilitate the learning of complex songs.
The similarities that researchers find between birdsong and human music are even more numerous. Thus, for example, it turned out that a certain species of Gedrons curls in one of his poems in a scale remarkably similar to the opening of one of Chopin's etudes. One species of woodpeckers adheres to a chromatic scale, while the hermit thrush prefers a pentatonic scale.
Anthropological studies that Gray cites have revealed that the Cro-Magnon, and even Neanderthal man, used musical instruments. An analysis of these instruments again brings up similarities between the sounds they produced and modern music. Of course there are also cultural and local influences on the music. But these findings show, claims Gray, that there are natural principles that create "universal music".
It is possible that the existence of universal music explains the phenomenon Tramo refers to in his article: starlings and rats are able to clearly distinguish between dissonant music and harmonic music. Tramo tries to compare the physiological structure of the ear with the way the strings are arranged on a piano. The conclusion he draws from the comparison is that the structure of the ear has a decisive influence on the structure of any song or musical piece.
But Tramo also admits that the process of processing sounds in the brain is still an unsolved puzzle. From the fragments of information that the research was able to discover, it is difficult to formulate a clear picture that would explain the surprising findings of Gray and her colleagues. However, it is clear that the comparisons between human music and natural music require a deep understanding of music, zoology, physiology and mathematics. This is probably why the two articles emphasize that the continuation of the discussion of these unusual theses requires the creation of a special framework, in which musicians and scientists will try to find a common language.
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 11/1/2001{
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