Music.

Sometimes I come across a piece of information, or an article, or a documentary that attempts to delve deeply into a subject of great mystery which to me seems not to be such a mystery. The most recent of these is the nature of music, how did it come into being and why is it so prevalent, and why does it mean so much to us. There was a documentary that went into this subject, it seemed to be interviewing all the right people, with brain scans and genius musicians, and evolutionary biologists and so on. However, at the end of it there seemed to be largely the same amount of mystery as at the beginning. So here is my explanation of what music is, how it developed and why it means so much to people.

Music is the combination of rhythm and tone. A single tone with the simplest rhythm is the simplest music. beep beep beep beep is music. Music is a universal in all cultures showing that at least the components of music in humanity are genetically rather than culturally based. To illustrate what that means marriage is universal in all cultures, which doesn't mean a marriage ceremony is genetically based, just that male/female long-term relationships are genetically based. Human beings pair off because of their biology. Human beings understand music and react to it because of their biology.

So, lets take rhythm first. Why is there a human reaction to rhythm. The documentary focused pretty much exclusively on how people and animals react to a rhythmic sound. They found out that some parrots have rhythm in this way but most animals do not. My thought on hearing this is that pretty much all animals have rhythm, just not connected to hearing. Any animal that uses legs to walk or wins to fly or a tail to swim or a heart to beat must have the capacity to regularly perform an action, what I feel is the basis of rhythm. A dog must have the capacity to move legs in a regular time pattern in order to walk across the ground. Imagine a dog that had random time intervals attributed to the movement of its legs, it would fall over. The movement of a body to a regular time period is inherent in almost all animals. This is the origin of rhythm. It turns out that when human beings hear rhythm a very primitive portion of the brain connected to some of the most basic physical actions is activated, which suits this hypothesis very closely.

Parrotdancing

The next portion is tone. A human being listening to an unfamiliar mammal vocalizing for the first time in certain situations will be able to understand some of the meaning of that vocalizing. When we hear a wolf whimper when trying to beg for food from a higher ranked pack mate we understand what this means at a fundamental level. We know what babies who cannot speak mean through various vocalizations. These vocalizations have commonality across species. There is something in our make-up that can distinguish aggression and pain in animals even at the same volume, even if we have not met those animals before. This is due to tone (as a simplified concept). In our genetic make-up is a set of basic emotions or communications based on tone. Everyone in the world laughs, and the noises have the same meaning, even rats laugh. Tone communicates emotion at an instinctive level throughout mammals at the least. The documentary discovered that throughout different cultures the emotional content of music was the same. A guy in the Amazon rain forest identifies which classical pieces are happy, sad, angry and so on, just as a European does. The depth to which the connection between tonal arrangements (chords) and changes (melodies) is beneath culture, it is biological in nature.

Tone

So we have rhythm being a fundamental and primitive part of animals in the world. We have tone being a biologically fundamental part of emotional communication. The next part is simply the human brain putting different parts of the brain together, which is the most striking characteristic of humanity. It is actually how most new ideas are produced and is basic to the concept of thinking.

A human being walks with a rhythm. He hears the sound of his feet hitting the ground. He tries doing the same thing by clapping his hands. He tries doing clapping when one foot lands rather than the other. he notices that when he claps his hands he and other people walk to that rhythm. He speeds it up and people walk faster, become more active, make more noise. He slows it down and people slow down, become more calm.

People naturally make noises to communicate emotion, they try to cheer people up, or calm them down. While clapping their hands people make happy noises. These become regulated by the beat. The rhythm slows down and people experiment with different noises. People remember these experiments, build on them, make them into ritual.

Music is everywhere because the three components that make music possible, rhythm, emotional reaction to tone, and the brain capacity to make new connections between experiences and parts of the brain are within everyone. Music moves you so completely because it connects several parts of your brain that are deeply fundamental to who you are. The rhythm is the feel of your own body in action. The melody is the primal sense of emotion deeper even than language. The combination results in you feeling an emotion directly within your body.