Daniel Levitin
This Is Your Brain On Music
This Is Your Brain On Music is the sort of non-fiction book that doesn’t really make an argument, but is more a collection of interesting observations. In this case, that doesn’t make it any less of a book. Levitin has basically compiled the state of the art in cognitive studies of music from papers published in the field, and turned them into a bestselling piece of popular science writing. It’s the good kind of popular science writing that explains the content of the papers without leaving out the science, and provides a complete bibliography in the appendix for further reading. And the two-sentence summaries of the published research are such that you (or at least I) want to look them up and read them. Rather than letting the research speak for itself, Levitin threads it together by abstracting away from the data to make generalizations of the sort that you can make in popular science writing, but not in an academic journal. Sometimes those generalizations seem insightful; other times they seem to over-extend. But they are nearly always provocative.
One example: Levitin observes that most of us don’t mind not being expert at our hobbies. When we go out to play a game of basketball with our friends, we aren’t bothered that we aren’t NBA superstars. We shoot some hoops, maybe we’re competitive or maybe we aren’t, and we go home. But most of us are embarrassed to make music or sing in public, because we think we aren’t good at it. Not being good at basketball doesn’t embarrass us; singing badly does. Levitin makes the observation, which I think is astute in itself. He offers what seems on the surface to be a plausibly social explanation — we’re encultured into it. Levitin claims that particularly in pre-technological cultures, music and dance aren’t something reserved for experts; they are things in which everyone participates.
It does sound plausible, but it also undermines much of what he’s doing in the rest of the book, which is to show the biological and neurological basis for music creation and appreciation. If that’s his line, I’d like to have seen him follow through on it. I can see a couple of openings:
- Levitin makes the case that music has an evolutionary origin. Birds sing to communicate, to establish territory, or to find a mate. Male birds with a wider vocabulary of songs are more successful at mating than those with a smaller vocabulary. Clearly consistency has to be a factor: a mating song has to sound like a mating song every time. If it were mixed up with a song to warn of predators, it would be counter-productive. As such, we could convincingly argue that singing with accuracy, reproducibility, and consistency confers a reproductive and survival advantage, and that having a good ear for hearing the songs does likewise, at least for birds. If human music is analogous to bird song (and it’s not at all obvious to me that it would be, but Levitin makes the case for it), then it would follow that we are genetically and biologically predisposed to want to sing well, and to shun those who sing badly. Which is to say that our embarrassment is not strictly or even primarily cultural, but has a strong selection component. Of course, I don’t actually believe that, but it would be more consistent with the rest of Levitin’s argument than the somewhat weaker “It’s cultural” claim.
- The other possible line that I see (and the one that I find more plausible, despite not really being mutually exclusive with the evolutionary explanation) is more developmental. An observation: almost no children are concerned about the quality of their public singing or dancing, unless seriously pressured by an adult. It’s not until pre-adolescence that we become mortified to sing in public. Certainly that’s partly just cultural, but more importantly, it’s when we cross the developmental threshold out of childhood that we become truly self-aware. Embarrassment requires self-awareness; it requires that we realize that we’ve done something different, that there’s a norm and that we’re outside of it. So what of those pre-technological cultures where there seems to be no taboo about singing? It’s not that they’re childlike; it’s that their music-making is (if I may generalize) tribal. It’s not about individuals, but about subsuming the individual to the collective. Church singing does exactly the same. Most of the congregation enjoy singing in unison, but most would abhor being a soloist. If we can bring the tribal element of music back into everyday life, we can resurrect the the group serotonin high that lets us overcome our individualistic embarrassment.
So: shanty singing. Old-time music. Frenzied social dancing. We’re wired for it, and I dislike solo music for a good reason. I’m contributing to the collective survival of our social species.
You’re welcome.