How come we're hard-wired for music?

1. Survival of the harmonious
Mounting evidence suggests that human beings are hard-wired to appreciate music. What researchers want to know now is why our distant ancestors evolved music in the first place.
By Drake Bennett

IF YOU HAVE SPENT any time near a radio during the past couple months, you've probably heard a song called “Crazy," an oddball R&B ballad about insanity. The track is the result of the collaboration between a singer who goes by the name Cee-Lo and a producer who goes by the name Danger Mouse, and it is absurdly catchy. With Labor Day upon us, it seems safe to call it the song of the summer.

Of course, crooning along or tapping our feet to its loping bass line, it may not occur to most of us to ask why “Crazy"-or any song for that matter-can so easily insinuate itself into our consciousness. It just sounds good, the way our favorite foods taste good.

But a growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to ask exactly that question. Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians' brains and found that the “chills" that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex.

As evidence mounts that we're somehow hard-wired to be musical, some thinkers are turning their attention to the next logical question: How did that come to be? And as the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes in his just-published book, “This is Your Brain on Music," “To ask a question about a basic, omnipresent human ability is to implicitly ask questions about evolution."

The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archeologists 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.

The evolutionary benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier. It has become one of the great puzzles in the field of evolutionary psychology, a controversial discipline dedicated to determining the adaptive roots of aspects of modern behavior, from child-rearing to religion.

Some evolutionary psychologists suggest that music originated as a way for males to impress and attract females. Others see its roots in the relationship between mother and child. In a third hypothesis, music was a social adhesive, helping to forge common identity in early human communities.

And a few leading evolutionary psychologists argue that music has no adaptive purpose at all, but simply manages, as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has written, to “tickle the sensitive spots" in areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. In his 1997 book “How the Mind Works," Pinker dubbed music “auditory cheesecake," a phrase that in the years since has served as a challenge to the musicologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists who believe otherwise.

The first thinker to try to find a place for music in the Darwinian order was Charles Darwin. In his 1871 book “The Descent of Man," he argued, “musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex." Darwin's model was bird song. In many bird species, males sing to impress females. Depending on the species, females will tend toward the males with the broadest repertoire or the most complex or unique songs.

The foremost defender of that model today is Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico. Miller argues that in prehistoric communities, singing and dancing might have worked-as they do today in some Native American cultures-as proxies for hunting and warfare. The ability to come up with imaginative melodies and rhythms would connote intelligence and creativity, and the long, arduous dances would be proof of one's endurance-the sort of traits that a choosy female would like to see in her offspring.

Even today, Miller argues, music retains some of its old procreative roots. Looking at 6,000 recent jazz, rock, and classical albums, Miller found that 90 percent were produced by men, and that those male musicians tended to reach their peak musical production around age 30, which he notes, is also the peak of male sexual activity.

Miller points in particular to the example of Jimi Hendrix. Miller has written that, despite dying at 27, Hendrix 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." To Miller, it was Hendrix's status as a music-maker rather than his fame or charisma that gave him this sexual allure.

Levitin sees some merit in the sexual selection model, but he cautions against seeking support for it in contemporary music. It's important to keep in mind, he argues, that “we're not talking about someone on the subway listening to an iPod or even someone in a concert hall listening to Mahler." The environment in which music would have evolved would have been much more participatory. Even today, he argues, the Western idea of the concert, which separates performer from audience and music from movement, is an anomaly. In many of the world's languages, Levitin points out, “there's one word for music and dance."

Others who study the issue are more skeptical. David Huron, a musicologist at Ohio State University, argues that the Darwin model would lead one to expect a differential in musical abilities between the sexes. Typically, he points out, sexual selection leads to “dimorphism," a divergence in traits between male and female. “It's only the peacock, not the peahen, that has the plumage," he notes.

“There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more sophisticated than women in terms of the ability to serenade someone from beneath a balcony," he says. Steven Mithen, an archeologist at England's Reading University, agrees. In his book “The Singing Neanderthals," published last spring, he writes that the male dominance that Miller sees in the modern recording industry is hardly proof of a difference in innate ability or proclivity. Sexism would explain it just as well.

Indeed, if an alternate explanation is correct, it is women who were the original music-makers. One of the most universal musical forms is the lullaby. “Mothers everywhere soothe infants by using their voice," says Sandra Trehub, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, “There isn't a culture in which that doesn't happen."

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 a few thinkers, Trehub included, to speculate that music may have evolved as a baby-calming tool in hunter-gatherer societies. Unlike other primate species, human babies can't simply cling to their mothers' backs, and singing may have been a way for mothers to maintain contact with their children when they had to put them down to do other tasks.

Perhaps the most widely touted explanation, though, is that music arose as a way for groups of early humans to create a sense of community. Among other things, this might explain why music-whether it's singing hymns, school fight songs, or simply “Happy Birthday"-is so often a social experience. The model is neither love song nor lullaby but anthem.

In “The Singing Neanderthal," Mithen argues that communal music-making does two things. By demanding coordination and basic harmony, it works as a sort of rehearsal for the teamwork required for more high-stakes endeavors like hunting and communal defense. And the mere act of singing and moving in time together helps forge a sense of group identity. As evidence he points to the complex musical rituals of the South African Venda people, but also to the US Army, which sees chanting while marching in unison as a vital part of creating esprit de corps.

There is suggestive research linking music and sociability. Daniel Levitin, for instance, points to the difference between two mental disorders, Williams syndrome and autism. People with Williams are mentally retarded, but at the same time, as Levitin puts it, “highly social, highly verbal, and highly musical." Autism, on the other hand, while it also often causes mental impairment, tends to make people both less social and less musical.

To Steven Pinker, though, none of this adds up to a convincing case for music's evolutionary purpose. Pinker is not shy about seeing the traces of evolution in modern man-in “How the Mind Works" he devoted a chapter to arguing that emotions were adaptations-but he stands by his “auditory cheesecake" description.

“They're completely bogus explanations, because they assume what they set out to prove: that hearing plinking sounds brings the group together, or that music relieves tension," he says. “But they don't explain why. They assume as big a mystery as they solve." Music may well be innate, he argues, but that could just as easily mean it evolved as a useless byproduct of language, which he sees as an actual adaptation.

And Pinker isn't the only skeptic. Back in April, as part of an experiment led by Levitin to compare the physiological response of performers and listeners, Boston Pops maestro Keith Lockhart conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra while he, a few musicians, and a portion of the audience were wired with monitors that tracked their heart rate, muscle tension, respiration, and other bodily signals of emotion.

Yet though Lockhart was happy to make himself Levitin's guinea pig, he confesses to be ultimately uninterested in the origins of music.

“It's enough for me to know that music does have a distinct emotional reaction in almost everybody that no other art form can boast of," he says. “I've never particularly wanted to know why that happens."

(Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com .
©Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company)


2. The New Tastemakers -- by JEFF LEEDS

OAKLAND, Calif. -- SETH FORD-YOUNG is a professional bass player who performs up to five nights a week with local jazz and rock bands and occasionally lends his talents to recording sessions for artists like Tom Waits . But these days he has an unusual second gig.

As a senior music analyst at Pandora Media, he spends roughly 25 hours a week wearing headphones in an office suite here, listening to songs by artists like Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Slim and dicing them into data points. Is the singer’s voice gravelly or silky? Is the scope of the song modest or epic? Does the electric guitar sound clean or distorted?

As he listens, in a room not far from an elevated stage with drums, guitars and amps for employee jam sessions, Mr. Ford-Young fills out a scorecard on which he can rate hundreds of traits in each song on a five-point scale. Bit by bit, Pandora’s music analysts have built a massive archive of data, cataloging the minute characteristics of more than 500,000 songs, from alt-country to bossa nova to metal to gospel, for what is known as the Music Genome Project.

At pandora.com visitors are invited to enter the name of their favorite artist or song and to get in return a stream of music with similar “DNA,” in effect a private Internet radio station microtailored to each user’s tastes. Since the service made its debut last November, more than three million people have signed up.

But they are tuning in to more than a musicologist’s online toy: services like Pandora have become the latest example of how technology is shaking up the hierarchy of tastemakers across popular culture. In music the shift began when unauthorized file-sharing networks like the original Napster allowed fans to snatch up the songs they wanted, instantly and free.

But the field is also full of new guideposts: music blogs and review sites like the hipster darling Pitchfork have gained influence without major corporate backing. And customizable Internet radio services like Pandora, Last.fm, Yahoo’s Launchcast and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody are pointing users to music far beyond the playlists that confine most FM radio broadcasts.

All told, music consumers are increasingly turning away from the traditional gatekeepers and looking instead to one another — to fellow fans, even those they’ve never met — to guide their choices. Before long, wireless Internet connections will let them chatter not only on desktops, but in cars and coffee shops, too. And radio conglomerates and MTV, used to being the most influential voices around, are beginning to wonder how to keep themselves heard.

“The tools for programming are in the hands of consumers,” said Courtney Holt, executive vice president for digital music at MTV Networks’ Music and Logo Group, who formerly ran the new-media department for Interscope Records. “Right now it almost feels like a fanzine culture, but it’s going to turn into mainstream culture. The consumer is looking for it.”

If Pandora and other customizable services take off (and so far that’s a big if), they could shift the balance of power not just in how music is consumed, but in how it is made. “You now have music fans that are completely enabled as editorial voices,” said Michael Nash, senior vice president for digital strategy and business development at Warner Music Group, one of the four major music conglomerates. “You can’t fool those people. You can’t put out an album with one good single on it. Those days are over.”

But if fans become their own gatekeepers, the emerging question is what sort they will be. Will they use services like Pandora to refine their choices so narrowly that they close themselves off to new surprises? Or will they use the services to seek out mass shared experiences in an increasingly atomized music world?

THE idea behind a recommendation engine is essentially to create an online version of a knowledgeable retail salesman, someone to help consumers navigate the dizzyingly vast digital marketplace. The most familiar form uses so-called collaborative filtering, software that makes recommendations based on the buying patterns of like-minded consumers. Think of the “customers who bought items like this also bought ...” function on Amazon.com .

Pandora’s innovation is to focus on the formal elements of songs, rather than their popular appeal. Say your favorite song is Aretha Franklin’s recording of “Respect.” Pandora will make you a personalized soundtrack that could include Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” and Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” (Why? Click twice and learn that Pandora thinks the Gladys Knight tune resembles “Respect” because it includes “classic soul qualities, blues influences, acoustic rhythm piano, call and answer vocal harmony and extensive vamping.”)

It may not take 21st-century technology to deduce a link between Ms. Franklin and Ms. Knight. But the more you tell Pandora about your tastes, the more creative it can get.

For some devotees the core of the experience is being led in directions they did not know they wanted to go. Tara Smith, 43, is a fan of the relaxed rock of Jack Johnson and Jimmy Buffett. After she started toying with Pandora about a month ago, she learned her taste was more diverse than she knew.

“I would never really listen to a country music radio station,” said Ms. Smith, who runs a rescue-equipment sales business with her husband in Santa Barbara, Calif. “But because Jimmy Buffett’s music has kind of a country bent, it’s just played Tim McGraw and Randy Travis. It really goes into some serious country, and I’m surprised I like it as much as I do.”

Mrs. Smith said she no longer listened to old-style terrestrial radio, not least because she prefers the Internet’s “nonpartisan approach to finding good music.”

“Myself, I’ve always been of the ilk that it’s much better to take the broader approach and use my own judgment on what I like and what I don’t like,” she said. “I’d much rather have five strangers rather than one expert” — like a professional radio programmer — “because you get a much better variety.”

Even Mr. Ford-Young, the jazz bassist who is one of Pandora’s more than 40 music analysts, has discovered some new favorites, like the indie-rock band the Shins. The appeal of the service’s computer-generated stations is that “popularity has nothing to do with it,” he said. “A song that hasn’t ever gotten played on terrestrial radio is going to get played as soon as a No. 1 hit song.”

And unlike the stuff that comes across terrestrial radio, Pandora’s suggestions are just that: users get to rate new songs with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” so if they don’t like what they’re hearing, they won’t hear it again. That has a big effect.

“It’s interactive so you feel like it’s more yours,” said Michael Dory, 26, who until recently worked as a public relations executive in the technology industry and is now entering graduate school in New York. “If a faceless corporation is telling me I should like this music, even if it’s the best band in the world, I’ll probably be skeptical.”

Mr. Dory said he shared suggestions of new bands with his friends via instant messaging and by sharing Web links. But Pandora and similar services, he said, are “creating this atmosphere like you’re talking to the clerk at your favorite record shop.”

That is exactly the role envisioned by Tim Westergren, who was a founder of Pandora, originally known as Savage Beast, in 1999. The first step was creating the genome, as he calls the musical database, and licensing it to Best Buy and America Online. It wasn’t until last year that the company decided to offer a radio service aimed squarely at fans themselves. Now the site is adding about 15,000 new songs a month to the database.

Mr. Westergren, a former rock keyboardist and film composer, says he is particularly proud of the obscure artists in Pandora’s library. “I don’t have any bone to pick with the hits, but I think what’s missing,” he said, referring to the music market, “is that a huge wealth of artists never get a crack at it. In any given year there are maybe 100 records that really do big sales. I think there’s room for 10,000 artists” to reach a broader audience.

He sees the thumbs-up-or-thumbs-down voting as a concession to human subjectivity, an exception to the algorithms on which the genome is primarily based. But that human element — along with the chance for users of some music services to publicize their own taste, by posting their playlists for other fans to see — may be the most powerful part of the new technology.

It’s the same story across the spectrum of these new Internet services. At iTunes, Apple’s digital music store, fans have posted more than 898,000 individual playlists. And eMusic, a service specializing in independent-label releases, identifies users’ “neighbors”— people who have downloaded tracks from the same artists — and allows them to view a list of everything their neighbors have been listening to.

Pandora has its own take on the trend, allowing fans to create stations and then e-mail them to a friend; other sharing features are in development. As a tool for discovery, it seems to show promise: Mr. Westergren said that 10 percent of the time people tune in to a Pandora station, they end up clicking through to buy a song or album from iTunes or Amazon. That’s a much better rate than standard online retailers can claim.

Pandora receives a commission on such sales, and charges for advertising on its Web site. But so far it has not been enough to turn a profit.

These are still early days for digital music over all: digital singles are selling briskly, but more than 94 percent of the recording industry’s album sales still involve pieces of plastic, not megabytes. And that leads to a central problem for makers of recommendation and sharing tools: unless consumers become more active and embrace them, these services may exist as the limited province of music geeks.

The heaviest buyers of music — fans who spend more than $100 a year on new recordings — compose 10 percent of all music consumers but account for more than 40 percent of the industry’s CD sales, according to the NPD Group, a research company in Port Washington, N.Y. Most of the audience is far less engaged, and may be less inclined to rummage for recommendations.

Still, Gartner Inc., a media analysis company, predicted in a report last year that by 2010, 25 percent of online music retail transactions will be driven by applications that allow fans to compare their tastes and by recommendation engines tracking their preferences.

Mike McGuire, a Gartner analyst and co-author of the report, said the emergence of the empowered fan represented “the slow death of programmed content.” He added, “Unless and until the D.J.’s and programmers can start realizing that, they’re going to find themselves inexorably pulled further and further apart from their audiences.”

They’ve started realizing. In Seattle for example the modern-rock station KNDD has offered visitors to its Web site the chance to submit a list of 10 songs. A few of the lists are selected and played on a weekend segment. As a result of these suggestions, says Lazlo, the program director, at least two bands, Band of Horses and the Long Winters, have been added to the station’s regular rotation.

“It’s about listening to someone else’s thoughts on music, and having the input and ability to then share your thoughts on music,” he said.

Clear Channel, the nation’s biggest radio conglomerate, seized on the trend early with a feature called “MyPod.” WKQI, a Clear Channel pop station in Detroit, plays listener-submitted playlists every day. WEND, a rock station in Charlotte, N.C., airs a “MyPod Lunch” feature, in which a listener, chosen on the basis of four favorite songs, records a segment “taking over” the station. “There’s an image value, in terms of the listener involvement,” said Tom Owens, Clear Channel’s executive vice president for content.

The customizable online radio networks of the current crop are still far too small to be direct competitors, but Mr. Owens acknowledges that they “have the potential to change the game to some degree.” As for listeners, he said, “If you don’t continually challenge them in some way, and provide some degree of unexpectedness, inevitably it’s going to lead to an erosion.”

IN the next phase of the battle over who determines what’s hot, combat is about to cross from the desktop to the street.

New generations of wireless Internet-connected devices will vault the Web’s customized radio services into places where broadcast radio is still dominant: in cars for example. “All of a sudden the competition for your ear there changes dramatically,” Mr. Westergren said. “The FM station then has to compete with a personalized service that you’ve crafted for yourself. That’s a watershed moment.”

Personalized recommendation services like MyStrands are already building a presence on hand-held mobile devices. Microsoft plans to make fan recommendations a key feature in the device it is designing in hopes of unseating Apple Computer’s iPod. According to regulatory filings, its as-yet-unreleased Zune portable music player will enable fans to play D.J., letting users stream music to others with devices nearby.

MyStrands, based in Corvallis, Ore., plans to allow fans to influence the music played at nightclubs equipped with its new application. The system, currently being tested at a handful of outlets like DoHwa, a Korean restaurant in the West Village, lets patrons send a text message to a screen, identifying their favorite artist. The screen displays album artwork from the selected artist and the name of the fan who entered it. As conversational icebreakers go, most bars have seen a lot worse.

“Instead of trying to personalize a stream of music to one person, what we’re trying to do is create a sequence of music that a group of people can be liking,” said Francisco Martin, MyStrands’ chief executive. Then, turning philosophical, he added: “The human being is very social. Music is not only for yourself. What people really want is to share their tastes.”