Aural origins
Now and again something I’m listening to would tantalize my ears and I would take a mental break from whatever I am doing to just absorb what I am hearing. While listening to Digitally Imported’s Trance channel streamed over the internet, Matt Darey’s March 2005 Special Radio Mix was playing and the introduction song was Jessica Jacobs’ “I know your gone” (lyrics at the end of the article).
Being a software engineer, understandably much of my time at work is spent behind some computer in which it involves very little physical human interaction. While programming, I replace the hum of the air conditioners and the randomness of people talking to each other in an open plan office with music served to me by the same machines I am manipulating. I have become quite a fan of the trance and chillout genres in its various forms as of late not only for background music at work, but at home as well. Despite the short shelf-life of electronic music, I really appreciate its complexity, dynamics and potential. Some of my rock-only friends often present me with the same arguments that I made before opening my ears to other forms of music. Although comments like it is repetitive, all you hear is “boom boom” with some synthesized whistle and “you need to be drunk or on drugs to actually enjoy it” might have been true a few years back, electronic music has become rather sophisticated especially when compared to the likes of modern hip-hop that has monotonously invaded most of our radio stations. You’ll surely still have a cacophony of songs and even sub-genres with the same traits that electronic music was criticized for in its nascent years, but all genres have their bad apples. I maintain that listening to music remains a personal journey. Each of us responds to music differently.
Yet I am always amazed by the effects that music has on humans. It can evoke a distinct emotional reaction in almost everybody that no other art form can boast of. We turn to it for solace or inspiration, to sooth or energize us. We listen to music when we pick up the pieces of our suddenly shattered hearts or while celebrating joyful moments with those we hold dear. Whatever the occasion, there will always be an appropriate soundtrack. With warm instruments, harmonious strings, heartfelt lyrics and rhythmic beats sometimes it feels like the frequency of our souls are being tweaked. Music has influenced man, and vice versa, since the dawn of civilization. But that begs the question, how did that come to be?
Many neuroscientist and psychologists are baffled by this question as evidence mounts that we are hard-wired to be musical. The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archaeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC, and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute-does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it’s unclear what purpose it serves.
Some suggest that music, through evolution, originated as a way for a guy to charm a girl and impress the fairer sex. Charles Darwin himself was the first to try in finda place for music in the Darwinian evolutionary scale. Using birdsong as his model he argued that “musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.” Depending on the species, females will tend toward the males with the broadest repertoire or the most complex or unique songs. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico and defender of this theory, points out that Jimmy Hendrix who, despite dying at 27, had “sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more.”
Skeptics of this theory argue that the birdsong model would lead one to expect differences in musical abilities between genders. Sexual selection leads to dimorphism, a divergence in traits between male and female and there is very little evidence that men are more sophisticated than women in terms of serenading abilities.
The lullaby is one of the most universal forms of music. Sung by mothers everywhere to sooth their children by using there voice, according to Sandra Trehub, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, “There isn’t a culture in which that doesn’t happen.” An alternative explanation to the birdsong model, some argue that this implies that woman were actually responsible for the roots of music. Trehub has done research showing that mothers tend almost automatically to make their speech more musical when they talk to their babies, even more so in experiments when they are not allowed to touch them. This has led some to speculate that music may have evolved as a baby-calming tool in hunter-gatherer societies.
Another theory is that it serves as a social adhesive, bringing communities together and helping to forge a common identity. This might explain, among other things, why music is considered a social experience- why people sing a country anthem or happy birthday together. Why people meet at a specific venue to listen to and dance to popular music. I mean as fun as it is to dance alone to music in my lounge, most prefer a venue to do that where people can meet in a social environment.
In “The Singing Neanderthal,” a book written by archeologist Steven Mithen, the author argues the mere act of singing and moving in time together helps forge a sense of group identity. That it is a form of group practice in terms of coordination and teamwork for the community. He uses our very own Venda people as an example of using complex musical rituals to build communal strength. The tshikona, for instance is a dance in which each participant has a pipe made out of a special type of bamboo growing only in few places around Sibasa and Thohoyandou. Each of the participants has one note to play, which has to be played in turn, in such a way as to build a melody. The tshikona is a royal dance played at various occasions for funerals, wedding or religious ceremonies. It can be considered as the Venda ‘national music / dance’, which is particular to Venda in South Africa.
To Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, music simply manages to “tickle the sensitive spots” in areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. Pinker dubbed music “auditory cheesecake” in his book “How the Mind Works.” He argues that music may well be innate, but that could just as easily mean it evolved as a useless by-product of language. Pinker believes that theories like those mentioned are bogus and assume as big a mystery as they try to solve. None of the theories explain exactly why music actually brings people together or relieves tension.
To me each theory has its merits, but it is an interesting debate indeed. It is amusing to see any art form dissected by science’s Cartesian scalpel and in doing so the point is missed completely. Art being a child of the imagination, I can’t help but wonder if music doesn’t have greater meaning or purpose than we can actually manage to conceive.
I know you’re gone
I know you’re leaving me
behind your dreams
behind your prayers
What do you think?
What do you want?
What do you love?I hear your sighs
I hear your heartbeat
Pound me on my back
I’m on my own now
What do I see?
What do I feel?
What do I love?– Jessica Jacobs
Further listening:
Digitally Imported - European Trance
Digitally Imported - Ambient Psy Chillout
Further reading:
Noteworthy
Survival of the harmonious [big source]
Venda: Music and Dance
Jessica Jacobs – I know you’re gone
MySpace :: Matt Darey
Digitally Imported Homepage
