Aaron asked: <!--aaronabz@hotmail.com

Music is perhaps one of the most influential things on people and society. I find it difficult to
understand how it works (i.e.: the source and evolution of it into what is today). My friend and have
been arguing about this question: What would define music's evolutionary pattern. We feel this could
define music today and its future through an answer to this question.

For example, I said music is sort of a ray that increases its width as it evolves.

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Coincidentally I've just written a paper on a related subject, so I'm kind of 'hot' with it. But your
question really requires a book-length response, you will therefore forgive me if I just mention a few
crucial facets and leave you to research what else may need to be discovered.

1. Like most advanced brain functions, the auditory cortex is connected to several major 'processing
sites'. Consider that we have to be able to recognise the direction from which a sound comes, to
distinguish if the sound might indicate danger, to decipher grunts, cries, squeals as well as words,
and of course to recognise some sounds as music. Now we should distinguish the last two items from
the rest, because they only make sense in a context of a mind-like intelligence.

2. This is obvious with words, for although some animals can be conditioned to 'understand' words,
they remain to them simply differentiated sounds, i.e. signals. It is vain to suppose an animal could
make anything of the phrase 'truth is beauty', because this sort of thing — the extraction of meaning
from sounds-as-words is a mind's prerogative.

3. Likewise with music: some animals respond to the incidence of harmonious sound frequencies, but
again it requires a mind to discriminate an intended communication, in short, to discern structure in
these strands.

4. Cognition (i.e. the transformation of signals into semantic packets), however, takes place
elsewhere than the auditory cortex: in the left hemisphere for words, in the right hemisphere for
music; the reason being (it is supposed) that words require analysis, music synthesis; and this
respectively happens to be the division of competence between the hemispheres.

5. Now here comes the really difficult part. Some time in the far distant history of hominids, the
genetic structure for all this was laid down. Language was simple then, probably just a few dozen
mostly monosyllabic words, while music might at first have been nothing more than the sing-song
type of aural gesturing which we still do now (when we ask a question, we raise our pitch; when we
protest, we descend a fifth; glee goes up a third etc etc). Occasionally drumming may have been
added. Simple beginnings, but from the start with appropriate 'cognitive linkages' which, as human
communications, would have been powerfully imprinted so that for all future time to come, the human
brain would be enabled to discriminate between molecular vibrations modulated by tongue and lips
(and later larynx) and those vibrations emanating still from vocal cords, but without or only little
modulations. (Let me note in passing how little has changed. An orchestra today still comprises in the
main instruments deputising for vocal cords and open cavities, namely strings, reeds and brass, while
the percussion also retains its authentic function. Probably therein you'll find one reason why
electronic music strikes us as 'unnatural').

6. From the foregoing you should have no difficulty in keeping the sensory and cognitive facets of
music each in their own place. Some sounds are inherently 'beautiful' because they caress the nerves
in the same way as a gentle stroke on the arm or a soft kiss; and in recent centuries the discovery of
chromatic harmony and the refinements in instrumental production have added a new dimension to
this indubitable pleasure. There is no real mystery here, as my comparison with a caress indicated;
the mechanical detail is relatively well-known and not very interesting philosophically (unless you
happen to be intrigued by physiology, as I confess I am).

7. The more important aspect of music is therefore (as you suggested) its tremendous influence on
mood, and through that agency, on our mental and even spiritual well-being (or ill-being!). Now a lot
of music, classical as well as popular, exerts mostly a visceral impact on our nerves, so this function
is rarely more sophisticated than other sensory and sensual transactions, and there is a problem
here. Because the mind is affected by its structural perception of these sounds as music, it reacts,
and if the music is cheap, aggressive, violent, vicious as a lot of it happens to be, stress results. So in
our world of incessantly piped and manipulated music, a great deal of social harm is done by the
indiscriminate pouring out of this stuff over the public media. Strangely enough, this goes hand in
hand with the peculiar fact that to many people, music is a surrogate religion, a surrogate narcotic
and so forth — indications of heavy dependence and craving, which suggests a universal perception
of some deep secret woven somehow into the fabric of music that demands endless repetition as a
means of getting closer to it. — Now you mentioned 'evolutionary pattern': although it is not thepath
to a complete answer, it will serve to illuminate significant aspects; and so I will latch onto this and
give you one reading of an evolutionary trail that has a pretty high degree of plausibility.

8. Have you ever been caught alone in an abandoned building or a forest on a pitch black night?
Have you noticed how suddenly your sense of hearing becomes super-acute, how it enables you to
navigate by locating objects and obstacles by the slightest sound, from the echo of your breathing to
the cracking of a dried leaf, things you would never notice in the ordinary course of living? Well,
among the hominids I mentioned earlier, this would have been a common, indispensable faculty. And
of course, you would bring all your fears, your fright and apprehension, your determination and
courage, to bear on the situation, and you would soon learn to distinguish the swoop of an owl's
wings from the sniff of a wolf. You might like to elaborate such a scene, or many of them, in your
imagination in order to appreciate how rapidly and kaleidoscopically your mood would change in the
course of just a few minutes as you fight your way to freedom and safety. Now many, indeed
innumerably many, of these subtle distinctions among sounds would have become (through cognitive
linking and then genetic transmission) embedded in our species profile as a permanent resource of
aural analysis, enabling us to recognise instantaneously the structural features of these molecular
vibrations, as well as their significant mood associations: and now the crucial element in this theory is
that these aural images, being a permanent repertoire, can be stimulated 'by proxy', by evocation and
imitation, as similarly you can be inspired to feelings of terror, pity, love, excitement by just watching a
movie. The avenue to this type of evocation of aural percepts is, of course, music.

9. So the 'deep secret' I spoke of is the hidden store of millennia of evolutionary travails and
experiences of ancient hominids in their ascent to full humanness. Over the course of hominids
evolution, these experiences would have amassed a considerable staple of functional sonic stimuli (I
call them 'experience percepts'), and because they reflect each of them something utterly basic and
fundamental to what it means to be a human being,the mood associations they evoke and stimulate
when we play or listen to music are often of the type that strikes a very deep chord in us. But you can
also see from this, I think, that ignorant manipulation is apt to have disastrous consequences. We
have become very sophisticated since then; and societal living today has alienated us so much from
the world of nature that we hardly recognise the difference any more between what is 'natural' and
what is artificial. We have lost touch with the impact musical sounds have on our psyche, and are
therefore unable to distinguish good from bad, good from evil, unless we spent years on it in a private
endeavour to get back to these roots. This is a very recent phenomenon. For instance, if you read the
poems of Tyrtaeus, you may be startled to find that he castigates the Spartan youths for tuning their
instruments in (say) the lydian instead of the aeolian mode, recognising that one of these is extremely
detrimental to their martial spirit. This is absolutely indiscernible to us today; it is a sensitivity long
gone. But that power is still there, because it is power of the mind.We today just don't make enough
of an effort any more to kept that flame truly alive.

If you wish to pursue some of these thoughts on your own, I can recommend a good book to start on:
Music, Brain and Ecstasyby Robert Jourdain. The author is a musician with scientific training. Not
much philosophy to be found in his pages; but another sorry chapter in our general delinquence in
respect of music is that very few philosophers have written knowledgeably enough on music to qualify
as real philosophy. A notable exception is Susanne Langer, whose books Philosophy in a New Key
and Form and Feelingcontain important chapters on music. Finally there is a book by Donald Merlin,
Origins of the Modern Mind,which is not concerned with music at all, but enables you to study some
of the evolutionary factors relevant to the mind in considerable depth. But to read this with profit,
especially if music is your priority, you need to do a lot of independent thinking while the author talks
to you, so this is perhaps a book to keep on the reserve list for when you have reached a relatively
advanced stage in your studies.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney