Did Music Prepare the Way for Speech?

In 1997 Steven Pinker gave the keynote address to a conference of cognitive psychologists who specialize in music perception. He caused an uproar by telling his audience that their subject was trivial and that their field was the least interesting one to study because music is merely a by-product, an evolutionary accident that rode in piggyback on the evolution of language. He went on:

Music is auditory cheesecake. It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate

As you can imagine, this idea provoked irritation amongst much of its audience, inspiring them to prove him wrong, very wrong. (For an example of a scholarly article that opens with a reaction to Pinker, click here.) One result of this speech has been a new, book-length refutation:

Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. (Dutton, 2006).

Music is the great counterexample to the argument that people cannot behave for mental (subjective) reasons.

The music industry is one of the largest in the United States, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Album sales alone bring in $30 billion a year, and this figure doesn’t even account for concert ticket sales, the thousands of bands playing Friday night at saloons all over North American, or the thirty billion songs that were downloaded free through peer-to-peer file sharing in 2005. Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs. (p. 7)

It is difficult to argue that sensations, not just a computational “reward center” [Pinker’s term], have nothing to do with this extraordinary behavior and much of Levitin’s book describes the interaction of physical stimuli (sound waves), the brain, and our subjective perception of what goes on.

But the chapter that is of particular interest to this blog is the final one, “The Music Instinct,” an allusion to Pinker’s book, The Language Instinct. In it Levitin rebuts Pinker’s position that music is evolutionary “cheesecake.”

He begins by quoting Darwin, “I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex” (p. 245) and asserting that Darwin believed that music preceded speech as a means of courtship.

My first reaction to this was to smile, as I imagined some Homo erectus youth serenading a local beauty, but Levitin piled up the data and wiped the grin off my face. Rock stars attract huge numbers of groupies (“and for the top rocks stars, such as Mick Jagger, physical appearance doesn’t seem to be an issue” p. 246). More persuasively, Levitin reminds readers that “In contemporary society, interest in music peaks during adolescence, further bolstering the sexual-selection aspects of music.” (p. 247) Certainly if I consider my attention to music when I was a horny teenager — listening to the top 40 hits on the radio every afternoon, buying singles, bopping along to the rhythms and melody, going to dances and rocking to the bands — and my more sophisticated but less involved attention to jazz, opera, etc. today, I have to admit that sexual presentation was a strong element in my peak musical years.

Levitin also appeals to common sense. A useless activity that can become a time-consuming, exhausting obsession should not become embedded in the species:

If music is a nonadaptive pleasure-seeking behavior … we would not expect it to last very long in evolutionary time. [Musicologist David] Huron [of Ohio State] writes, “Heroin users tend to neglect their health and are known to have high mortality rates. Furthermore, heroin users make poor partners; they tend to neglect their offspring.” Neglecting one’s health and the health of one’s children is a surefire way to reduce the probability of one’s genes being passed on to future generations. (p. 249)

Common sense is a dangerous line of argument because so much of science history recounts the triumph over a particular bit of common sense (the world is flat, the sun moves, time is absolute). On the other hand, we should not abandon common sense before a Magellan, Galileo, or Einstein comes along to correct us. Speculations such as Pinker’s that offer no evidence and that fly in the face of common sense can claim no special pride of place.

Levitin also argues that music also promotes a more general social bonding and cohesion, not just sexual bonding. He presents some interesting work suggesting a link between sociability and musicality (p. 253). While not conclusive, it is provocative and merits further investigation.

Most important from this blog’s perspective is the suggestion that, “Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.” (p. 254) The chief argument for this idea is that:

• Singing and instrumental activities might have helped our species to refine motor skills, paving the way for the development of the exquisitely fine muscle control required for vocal or signed speech.
• Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both signing and rhythmic movement. “This appears to be culturally universal.” (p. 256) It promotes an intimacy that speech alone does not.

Two features of music that the book does not mention, but which may be evident to readers of this blog include:

• developing listening skills. Even though we don’t listen as well as we should, we listen to one another much more closely than apes do. That could be more easily explained if music came first.
• tone of voice. Speech (unlike written language) is a two dimensional output. Along with the production of words and sentences, speech carries a tone of voice that can reinforce or contradict the words. Notably, we trust tone of voice to better express the truth of the situation. That could be because tone of voice is older than words.

These are speculations, of course, but they are not unreasonable and remind us that we should not simply take it as a given, as Pinker did, that speech is primary and music is a tag-along. Singing could indeed have come first.

Levitin puts the Pinker thesis on the defensive and slips in a real zinger (much proven by what has come before in this book) when he says:

The arguments against music as an adaptation consider music only as disembodied sound, and moreover, as performed by an expert class for an audience. But it is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity … And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized. (p. 251)

Levitin was probably wise not to have pushed his attack a bit harder. Even more than speech, the existence of music is an affront to those who want to remove joy, sensation, perception, and sociability from the list of primary human traits. This book makes it hard to defend the idea that logical propositions, computations, and isolation are what we are all about. But most of us know subjectivity’s importance anyway, so Leivitin’s strategy of taking the pursuit of happiness for granted is smart.

Comments

[TLTB]

Its kind of silly debate that boils down to which is more evolutionarily useful (and therefore likely to have been the relevant evolutionary pressure).

But both are assuming a far more interesting conclusion: that the principles required for producing music are the same required for producing speech. If true, what does that tell us about the nature of language? the mind? There's a book I'd read.

[tim]

I've got the Levitin book and am reading it now, and recommend it - haven't got up to the last chapter though! In any case, Pinker's wrong. He talks about music in How The Mind Works, and I get the impression the reason he's so down on music is that he's trying to use music as an example - he's trying to make a point that cognition isn't entirely genetic and evolved, despite the rest of the contents of that book. Though, it's interesting that he's done so much work with Ray Jackendoff, who has a recent paper in Cognition about the evolution of music..

TLTB - there's an article by Eric Clarke in Contemporary Music Review from 1989 which goes into similarities and differences in music and language, and concludes that the comparison of the two from their surface features is a little misleading. There are many similarities but also many differences. Namely, in language there is a neat separation between syntax and semantics, whereas, in music, syntax is more or less semantics.

In terms of the data from cognitive neuroscience, it seems like if you scan a brain, music and language seem like they're done by , but if you look at lesions in neuropsychological patients, music can survive where language has disappeared, and vice versa (e.g., the work of Isabelle Peretz).

(disclaimer: music cognition is the topic of my PhD)

tim.

[Philip Dorrell]

You might be interested in an alternative view of the historical relationship between music and speech as described in my article "Melodic Language" at http://whatismusic.info/developments/MelodicLanguage.html.

My theory states that music had the same relationship to speech when it evolved as it does now (i.e. music is and was a super-stimulus for the perception of "musicality", but speech was never "musical"), but that the aspects of music which correlate with speech are a subset of the aspects of modern speech, because originally speech did not have the additional aspects.

In other words, music shows us some type of "fossil" of speech. For example, given the unimportance of vowel distinctions in music, this implies that vowel distinctions were not important in speech at the time when music evolved. Similarly, the difference between fricative and plosive consonants may have mattered (because each has analogues in percussion), but more subtle distinctions within those two groups appear to be musically unimportant. So the original language may have had one vowel and two consonants, as well as prosodic "melody" and "rhythm".

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THE BLOGGER RESPONDS

In his comment, Bill Benzon said, "We just spin the best tales we can." Got a defense against that?

[Bill Benzon]

When I originally proposed Beethoven's Anvil I hadn't intended to discuss musical origins. While the topic certainly interested me, I find thinking about biological adaptation to be very difficult. In this case the difficulty is compounded by the fact that we have no direct evidence of how those proto-humans behaved. We've got bones and pot shards and stone weapon points and campsites and a little of this and that, and no more. It's all guess work. And such guess work is inevitably guided by one's own bias in such things, and my bias was that music came before language. This bias has a respectable pedigree, but it's not the mainstream bias, which is reflected in Pinker's cheesecake witicism.

Well, my editor insisted that I write about origins, so I did. I like that chapter, think my argument is a good one -- good enough, for example, that Mithen picked it up in his book -- but it's a matter of skillfully rationalized bias, not objective thought. No one know how to frame an objective argument in this arena. Obtaining objectivity in such matters requires more than a good heart and a clean and inquistive mind. It requires specific methods. And we don't have them yet, not for drawing strong conclusions from the bits and pieces of evidence we have about early man.

So we just spin the best tales we can. I've written an essay review of Mithin's book in which I include my latest thinking on music origins:

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/05/wlbenzon.html

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THE BLOGGER RESPONDS

“Obtaining objectivity in such matters requires more than a good heart and a clean and inquistive mind. It requires specific methods.” Now that’s a fine, pithy phrase, and I recommend it to all visitors who keep their own little quotation databases or, if they are really old fashioned, in their commonplace books.

Yet philosophers before the rise of scientific methods were not always wasting their time. They sometimes found good questions that kicked people off their complacent duffs. Socrates knew nothing, but in asking questions he roiled society and his questions lived on. I don’t expect this blog to ever tell the story of how language arose, but I do hope that it can ask questions that make visitors uncomfortable with the intellectual status quo. In particular I think that questions about the origin of speech can force a spotlight on what a mystery humanity is. Science has cleared up so many ancient mysteries that we might think by now the basics of pretty much everything is understood. The rise of speech, however, required so many transformations that just listing them can inspire wonder.

[Children Anxiety Disorder]

hey not just the cheesecake tickles the palate, This is your brain on music too!!! great recommendation... you got a lot of concern about that and a lot of taste too...

[Affiliate Promotion]

“I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex”

great phrase...

[Regcure]

music in speech?
how could that happen.
let's see.

[Health]

I'd like to see the speech because music is the best thing in the world.

[Miroslav Miskovic]

Scientific-technological revolution and the historical consciousness.The way how the mankind developed through last 40 000 years,expressed in terms of semiotics.