Robin Dunbar
The Human Story
A new History of Mankind's Evolution
faber and faber 2004
Trip the Light Fantastic
There seems to be something very fundamental (in a literal sense) about music and song. We rise to it emotionally in a way we seldom rise to mere words. Composers since time immemorial have recognised that they can stir our emotions by the way they order the sequences of toned sounds, producing now a sense of joy, now despair, or exciting us with the rhythms that set the feet a-tapping. There have inevitably been arguments as to whether this emotional manipulation is culture-specific or not. Do up-turns in tone make all humans joyful and downturns make us all despair? Do major keys raise our hopes and minor keys dash them? Does fast music make us feel excited and roused, and slow music make us feel languorous? Or are these simply associations we have learned from the last dozen or so centuries of western music?
I am less interested in the answer to this question than in the fact that composers can manipulate our emotions at all, irrespective of the origins of the particular code they may use to do it. It seems to be a remarkable universal of human nature that we respond emotionally to music in this way, and that we are especially prone to do so when we do it in groups. Communal singing, as almost all religions have long recognised, seems to have a particularly strong emotional hold on us.
Why should music do this to us and what role has it played in the story of human evolution?
The answer to the first question is still shrouded in mystery. But it seems that some musical tones do trigger off deep responses somewhere in the brain. Aside from the more obvious activity to be expected in the auditory cortex where all sounds are processed, the main responses are in the right hemisphere and in regions in the evolutionarily more ancient limbic system.* Since that is the opposite side of the brain to where language has its main centres (the leit hemisphere), it seems plausible to infer that music and language have had separate evolutionary histories. Indeed, the deeply emotional stirrings generated by music suggest to me that music has very ancient origins, long predating the evolution of language, and this perhaps gives us a clue as to how we might answer the second question on music's role in our evolutionary history.
The answer, I think, lies in the fact that something similar to non-human primate contact calling must have bridged the gap between the first rise in group size above the conventional nonhuman primate limit (about 60-70 individuals) and the rise of true language (once group size had exceeded around 120). Given what we know both about primate contact calls and their r~ use in choruses and about music, it seems increasingly likely to me that it was singing that filled this gap.
Singing is a form of vocal activity that lends itself to multitasking and the double use of time. We still do it. From the unique women's wanlling songs of the Outer Hebrides to seamen's shanties, and from the marching songs of armies to football fans singing on soccer terraces, singing rouses emotions and binds members of the group while they are engaged in some other activity that prevents more intimate forms of contact. Of course, singing also helps while away the time and makes a hard task more bearable. But ask yourself: how does it achieve this? It is surely not jost by keeping the mind busy while the hands haul on the ropes! My guess is that it's because communal singing triggers the release of endorphins and it is these that make the work seem lighter.
That endorphins might in fact be involved has been known for some time. In one experiment, subjects listened to tapes of music, and indicated when they felt a thrill of excitement at a particular passage. The pattern of thrills was quite consistent from one day to the next for any individual subject, even though, as we might have expected, people varied enormously in terms of which particolar passages triggered these thrill episodes. However, if subjects were given an injection of naloxone (the same antidote to endorphins that blocks monkeys' satisfaction responses to grooming) between successive auditions, they failed to show such marked thrills on the following audition as they had on the previous control exposure. Those who had an injection that contained nothing but saline fluid exhibited no differences between successive auditions. This is strong circumstantial evidence that endorphins are involved.
Why and how singing has this effect is as yet a complete mystery. Very little work has been done in this area to date. Nonetheless, the prima facie case for this hypothesis is very strong. And it feels right. Of particular significance here is the fact that we can indoce these emotional effects by music alone without the need for any words. Wordless songs and the pure tonalities of musical instruments produce the same effects as the most rousing lyrics. Gregorian plainsong of the Catholic monastic tradition provides a particularly obvious example of this. It is the sonnds of harmonious chant that we find so compelling, not the words - especially given the fact that most of it is in ancient Latin and not understood. In fact, so important is the sound and so unimportant are the words themselves that during the early polyphonic period of European music (around the twelfth to thirteenth centuries) composers often did not bother to pay too much attention to how they used the lyrics provided by poems or a text from the Bible. It was by no means uncommon for the lyric to end mid-sentence - sometimes, even halfway through a word! - if that suited the music better.
These observations allow us to make sense of the kinds of phenomena we see in contexts like Pentecostal church services. Here, the musicians, choir and minister create an increasingly intense and rousing musical torrent that gradually draws the congregation, one by one, into the flow of the excitement until everyone is waving their arms, jigging their bodies, and bursting into 'Amens!' and 'Hallelujahs!' at appropriate moments. Some even appear to get carried away into trance-like states. So compelling is the music, that it is difficult even for sceptical non-believers to resist joining in - just as it is diffficult to sit still while listening to an Irish jug band playing reels and jigs in a pub.
My guess is that very early on, song became wrapped up with dance. We seem to respond with especial enthusiasm to the rhythmicity of dance, and dance is of course widely used in the rituals of both traditional societies (think of the trance dances of the !Kung San bushmen) and advanced religions (think of the way the priests danced before the Ark of the Covenant in the Judaism of King David's time, and still do, more than two and a half millennia later, in the swaying dance of the dabtara or deacons in the Ethiopian Coptic Chorch). Indeed, dance has been exploited very specifically to indoce states of euphoria and trance among the 'whirling dervish' sect of Sufi Islam: in this case, the dancers spin round in unison - an impression that is exaggerated by the long white over-garments they wear - until they collapse into a trance-like state.
Are these trance states some kind of self-induced opioid high? Is this why we so enjoy dancing, a phenomenon that probably ranks, along with smiling and laughter, as one of the most futile of all human universals? Were dance and singing, and perhaps the rhythmic clapping of hands that so often accompanies both of these, an early supplement to physical grooming that allowed Homo erectus to enlarge its groups beyond the limit imposed by the immediate time constraints on grooming?
Music-making using instruments was presomably a much later invention, one that occurred long after the rise of singing and perhaps even tens of thousands of years after the appearance of speech and trne language. The vast array of musical instruments with which we are now familiar is, of course, of very recent origin. Examples of stringed and brass instruments, as well as drums, do not appear in the archaeological record much before a few thousand years BC. However, simple wind instruments of the flute or recorder type have a much more ancient history. One beautiful example carved from deer bone was found in the accumulated debris of a Cro-Magnon occupation site in a cave floor in France dating from some 30-40,000 years ago. As it survives, this instrument has four holes on the front and two on the reverse, and was clearly designed to play a pentatonic scale (which it still does quite admirably). Another flute, made out of cave bear bone, was fonnd at a Neanderthal site in modern Slovenia dated to 30000 years ago. Reconstructions made from original materials (real cave bear bones) play well and a competent flautist can coax out of these instruments almost the full range of sonnds that can be produced from a modern recorder. Making these instruments using contemporary tools is a laborious business, so our prehistoric ancestors must have viewed the effort especially worthwhile.
We clearly differ from our ape and monkey cousins in our use of language. However, many of the core features of language, and the associated non-verbal components that make conversation possible, bear important similarities to the kinds of social communication we find in other primates. That we use language to exchange complex technical information is undoubtedly important, but it seems likely that this was a relatively recent development. Speech and language evolved to enable us to bond social groups that were getting too large to bond by conventional primate social grooming. We seem still to use it mainly for these purposes. Moreover, in order to enable language to do this job effectively, we have to draw heavily on some non-verbal features (laughter and music) that take us straight back into the chemical processes that underpin grooming. However, with laughter and music, we are at last beginning to find elements which, if not uniquely human, do at least find expression among hurnans with a frequency and intensity that are perhaps unique.
Language and music raise for us another important feature of human nature, namely the whole complex business of culture. If culture can be said to be the hallmark of humanity, then language might be said to be its handmaiden. But what is this thing called culture? And are we the only species that can lay daim to it?
Robin Dunbar
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