CHAPTER 9
WHAT IS IT that makes us uniquely human? What sets us apart from other species? There may be many answers to this question but a good possible answer is our love of music. Humans all over the world love it, across all communities and ethnic groups. And yet we’re not really sure what it does for us as a species. When scientists consider music all kinds of questions come into their heads. You might wonder: why can’t they just listen to the music and enjoy it? Well, they can’t. At least not all the time. This is the curse and the joy of being a scientist. We’re always overthinking. And remember, everyone is a scientist; everyone wants to know about things and is curious.
So let’s get back to the topic in hand (or ear) – can listening to music bring benefits? Why do some sounds suggest happiness (for example, Handel’s Water Music) while others invoke sadness (for example, Albinoni’s Adagio)? Why is a major key happy and a minor key sad? And is Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap correct when he says that D minor is the saddest chord of all? Whatever the reason, the musician in me wants to blame it on the boogie …
Given how ubiquitous music is in our daily lives you might be surprised to hear that science has yet to come up with a convincing explanation of what it’s all about. Archaeologists tell us that our species has been enjoying it for a long time. The oldest agreed-upon musical instrument is a flute made from a mammoth bone dating to somewhere between 30,000 and 37,000 years ago1, so music is clearly deep-seated in our psyche. The particular mammoth who gave his bone is long extinct, as are all his family and friends. But it seems that our ancestors loved the sound made by that punctured bone when someone blew into it.
ONE OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS – A 35,000-YEAR-OLD FLUTE MADE FROM A SWAN’S WING BONE.
We have clear explanations for other pastimes. We play sport because it involves skills (such as throwing, hitting and moving in coordination in a group) that were crucial for our ancestors when they went on hunting expeditions or defended their tribe against other humans. We enjoy novels and films because they allow us to learn about the interpersonal dynamics crucial to our survival as a social species. But the enjoyment of music? This doesn’t seem to help us do anything – or does it?
And then it becomes even stranger. We respond to music at an emotional level, and in some ways music is all about emotion. We don’t need to think through our response. But deep in our subconscious mind things are afoot. The notes of a chord sound good together only if their frequencies obey a strict mathematical relationship to each other. And the unfolding of a melody must obey its own law, revealing to the listener a gradually emerging pattern, which is occasionally broken. It seems to be the break in the pattern – that change or surprise – that we find especially enjoyable.
IN THAILAND THERE IS AN ELEPHANT ORCHESTRA WHO CAN PLAY SONGS. THEY ENJOY IT MORE WHEN THE INSTRUMENTS ARE IN TUNE.
Psychologists have come up with a few ideas as to why we enjoy music. One is that music survives as a relic of a time before spoken language. Perhaps our ancestors made noises to each other across the valley to express sadness or joy or anger or loneliness. Music might therefore survive as a souvenir of an intermediary stage between hoots and chirps of animals and the full complexity of modern human language. And this is consistent with animals enjoying music, as all pet owners know. This phenomenon seems to depend on the frequency of the sounds. Labradors have vocal ranges similar to a human’s and can make all kinds of noises that sound like singing. They take pleasure in music and will relax in response to classical music but become agitated in response to heavy metal2. (Don’t we all?) Cats, superior beings that they are, don’t respond much to music3. That is unless you play it at a frequency in their vocal range. Then they love it. I wonder what preferences cats have in music? Pussy Riot?
In Thailand there is even an orchestra of trained elephants. They learn to play in different keys and appear to enjoy it more when the instruments are in tune. Unsurprisingly, the instruments are adapted for heavy use. Recently in New York, a human orchestra played music that the elephants had composed. The audience were asked to guess the composer. To the elephant keeper’s delight, several said it was John Cage.
Clearly humans can survive without an appreciation of music. We know this from studying those who have no understanding of music at all. About one person in 25 suffers from a condition called amusia, which in spite of its name is not amusing at all4. The effects of this range from tone-deafness to a total inability to find any pleasure in music. Some people are born with amusia5 and some acquire it from a head injury or listening to too much Garth Brooks. However, people with this condition do not seem to suffer unduly or be at a disadvantage: 4 per cent of people are tone deaf; some of these also have amusia.
Those with tone deafness are unable to perceive pitch, by which is meant the highness or lowness of a sound6. If a violinist plays a note on a violin most people are hard pressed to tell you what that note is. That is until another note is played, and you can then tell if the first note is higher or lower than the second note. This helps you identify the note. Tone-deaf people can’t do this – they can’t tell a high note from a low note. Tone deafness seems to be strongly hereditary (in that it is likely to be governed by specific gene variants inherited from parents), since both twins in a set of identical twins have been shown to have it.
MRI scanning can find out which part of the brain is active in a particular scenario. When we listen to music, a part of the brain called the arcuate fasciculus lights up. This means that this part of the brain burns more glucose (for energy) when you’re listening to music. It is a set of nerves that relays information from one part of the brain to another. In tone-deaf people these bundles of nerves are much smaller, with one particular branch of the arcuate fasciculus missing. It may be that this is the part of the brain that is needed to tell notes apart based on pitch.
Then there are the people who have perfect pitch. One in 10,000 people in the US have this: they can sing in the right key without hearing any reference note. The rest of us have relative pitch – we can sing a note relative to another note. The part of the brain required for perfect pitch is not known.
The overarching proposal as to what music is for is that it brings us together as a community. If you have amusia, you may therefore not be at a particular disadvantage, so long as as you keep socialising in other ways, say by attending a sporting event. But for the rest of us, music turns a crowd into a community. It’s no accident that soldiers once marched off into battle behind drummers and pipers, or that an entire stadium’s worth of fans will belt out ‘The Fields of Athenry’. Nothing can match the power of music in spreading an emotion across a crowd of people and binding them together. This might be the real purpose of music. It’s easy to understand how such a trait would be selected for and become widespread, as it is our capacity for social activity that makes us the successful species we are.
We all know that going to a concert or music festival is a much more intense emotional and physical experience than simply listening at home. The sensing of rhythm is a key part of music, and this occurs partly through our sense of touch, as we pick up the vibrations. This can be especially vivid at a loud gig. In the communal environment of the concert hall, we don’t just enjoy the music. We are swept away by it into something greater than ourselves, something ineffable. We get carried along in a great ocean of collective feeling.
Another theory has it that music helps us handle cognitive dissonance7. This is a feeling of unease that occurs when we hear two pieces of contradictory information. An experiment was carried out to test whether music is able to soothe the feeling of cognitive dissonance. And guess what? It did. The experiment involved a group of four-year-olds (a heroic experiment if ever there was one) being asked to rate a group of toys from favourite to least favourite. Having chosen their favourite toy, they were then told to only play with their second-favourite toy. (Imagine the consternation, and the adult in charge saying ‘Do what you’re told. Why? Because I say so.’)
WHEN WE LISTEN TO MUSIC, A PART OF OUR BRAIN CALLED THE ARCUATE FASCICULUS BECOMES MORE ACTIVE. IN TONE-DEAF PEOPLE, ONE BRANCH OF THIS BRAIN REGION IS MISSING.
Before the experiment the children didn’t mind playing with their second-favourite toy, but then they were told that although the toy wasn’t their favourite, they must keep playing with this second toy. This created the dissonance. Eventually though, the children lost interest in the second-favourite toy. They resolved the dissonance by agreeing with the adult telling them they didn’t like that toy. However, things played out differently if there was music playing. The children learnt to handle the dissonance, and kept playing with the toy. Who thinks up these kinds of experiments? Psychologists, that’s who.
In a somewhat similar study8, the psychologists this time picked on 15-year-olds. They were asked to read through a multiple-choice test and to rate the questions based on difficulty, without actually doing the test. They then did the test, and the psychologists noticed that the students answered the difficult questions more quickly. This was because the students didn’t want to spend too much time in a dissonant state – trying to choose the correct answer for a difficult question. However, when the students did the test with Mozart playing in the background, the students spent longer on the tricky questions, and were more likely to get them right. Perhaps music should be played in exam halls during the Leaving Cert to help the students.
One of the great puzzles of music is this: If you are sitting in a concert hall listening to music, and the orchestra plays a minor chord, why do you associate that with sadness? There is no obvious reason for this, and yet it’s universal. Scientists have found that there is something similar about major and minor keys and the properties of happy and sad speech, respectively9. Sound spectra (the profile of different frequencies) were collected from Western classical music and Finnish folk songs, the thought being that their musical genres would be quite different. What was found was that the spectra in a major key resembled excited speech, while the spectra in a minor key resembled subdued speech. Perhaps excited speech and major chords mean ‘Attack!’, while subdued speech and minor chords mean it’s time to go back to your cave to rest and recuperate.
WHY DO WE FIND SOME NOTE COMBINATIONS DISSONANT? RECENT STUDIES SUGGEST THAT THIS IS MAINLY CULTURAL.
This does seem to be a truly universal phenomenon. Westerners who listened to Kyrgyzstani, Hindustani and Navajo music were able to judge fairly accurately happy music and sad music, even though keys and rhythms and chord changes were different from Western music10. These relatively crude indicators of emotion therefore work across cultural boundaries. There are exceptions to the major/happy and minor/sad rule, however. Spanish music can be played in a minor key but appear happy. The same is true of Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’.
Separately, dissonance is an unpleasant sound for most people. This is not to be confused with cognitive dissonance, as discussed above. Play two notes that are three steps away on a musical scale – say a C and an F-sharp – and it will sound dissonant. This was known as the ‘devil’s interval’, and was used in medieval times to denote (so to speak) fear or evil. Good examples are the theme tune of The Simpsons or the intro to ‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix.
Recent work has shown that we most likely learn to prefer harmonious music over dissonant music, rather than this preference being something we are born with. To Western ears, the difference between consonance and dissonance is clear – and we prefer consonance. This was previously thought to be innate. If you express the frequencies of two consonant notes played simultaneously, the result is a ratio. An octave interval has a ratio of 2:1, a fifth (say, a C and a G) has a ratio of 3:2. Dissonant notes can’t be expressed in this way. And initially scientists were of the view that perhaps the brain prefers frequencies that can be expressed as those kinds of ratios.
But then they studied the Tsimané (pronounced ‘chee-mah-nay’), who live in remote villages in the Amazon11. They have had little exposure to Western music and, to the scientists’ surprise, aren’t disturbed by dissonance. The Tsimané can tell the difference between consonance and dissonance, but they don’t value one over the other. This study is seen as important because, up until that point, as is often the case in psychology, the main types of people who are studied are WEIRD (which stands for those from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic nations), and therefore not necessarily representative of the human race.
The Tsimané live in villages with no electricity or tap water, and only meet Westerners when they make rare visits to nearby towns. Sixty-four villagers were studied and asked to rate the pleasantness of music. Unlike US citizens, or indeed Native Americans living in La Paz and rural Bolivia, the Tsimané didn’t rate consonant sounds over dissonant ones. There is evidence for a similar phenomenon in other cultures. Balinese musicians will mistune their instruments and no one is concerned. Croatian singers will sing the same melody but one semitone apart, which to Western ears sounds dissonant.
So the preference of consonant over dissonant sounds would appear to be cultural. But why does consonant music have those perfect ratios? One theory is that the Greeks, who loved ratios and mathematical precision, began making music with those ratios and it caught on – although quite how they would have figured out the ratios is not known. Perhaps all Western music is descended from Ancient Greece, the original Greece, The Musical. They began making music that way (if the theory is correct) and we’ve been doing it that way ever since. We’re unlikely to stop now.
When do we learn about this? When do we learn to prefer consonance over dissonance, or associate a major key with happiness? Well, the evidence is that this kicks in in the womb, when the foetus is five to six months old. So play that funky music to the foetus in the womb and the baby will come out all funked up.
Whatever the function of music might be, study after study has shown its health benefits. More than 400 studies have been done (perhaps scientists like listening to the music as part of each study), and the overwhelming conclusion is that listening to music is good for your immune system and lowers levels of the stress hormone cortisol to a greater extent than anti-anxiety drugs. It has been shown that music boosts the production of an antibody called IgA, which is present in the secretions of our inner tissues – in the gut and in the mouth for instance12. IgA maintains the health of these tissues. Music also increases the number of NK cells – a cell type very important for handling viruses and killing tumours13 (among other things – see Chapter 8). Evidence suggests that combining music therapy with standard care also can be useful for addressing depression.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, music has also been shown to promote social cohesion. If you are in a group of people and you are all listening to background music, your heart rate will synchronise with those of others in the group. This is thought to promote feelings of affection through the bonding hormone oxytocin, which is elevated when you listen to music in a group. It further appears that singing in a choir is especially good for us. In the US alone, 28.5 million people are in a total of 250,000 choirs. That’s an awful lot of Hallelujah choruses.
Several studies have shown that choral singing brings huge benefits, including physical and physiological benefits (specifically respiratory health), cognitive stimulation and improved mental health14. When nursing home residents take part in a singing session once a month they have less anxiety and depression. The act of singing has been shown to release the ‘happy hormones’: endorphins. Singing in front of a crowd has an even stronger effect. It builds confidence and has been shown to have long-lasting effects. Singing in public is likely to affect the brain differently from singing on your own in the shower. This has even been shown with birds. When male songbirds sing for females, their brains’ pleasure centres register, but only in the presence of a female.
So singing is at its best when you don’t do it on your own. Another reason for the beneficial effects singing in a choir brings is that if you are in a choir you have to concentrate on the music and technique. This means that you won’t be worrying about the usual stressful things such as relationships, finances or work. As a result choral singers have what is called a ‘stress-free zone’. They will also be learning new songs, harmonies and tempos, and all that learning has a wonderfully beneficial effect on the brain, and might fend off depression, especially in older people. Learning to play a musical instrument can have a similarly positive effect. Not only is it a distraction, but it also involves motor skills, coordination and timing skills. All of these are manna to the hungry brain.
Music can have more practical applications. Studies have shown that having music in the background actually improves learning. In one study people learning a foreign language with background music were able to learn 8.7 per cent more words in a set time, compared to those not listening to music15. This is similar to the so-called Mozart effect, where listening to Mozart has been shown to improve performance in spatial reasoning tests.
On the more negative side, music has been used as torture. A Canadian police force on Prince Edward Island is threatening drink-drivers with the music of Nickelback. Police in the town of Kensington have told these drink-drivers that, as well as a large fine, criminal charge and a year’s driving suspension, they will also be subjected to the latest Nickelback album as punishment. In Rockdale near Sydney, the music of Barry Manilow has been used to stop teenagers loitering outside shops. A US judge recently sentenced antisocial young adults who were playing music too loud from their cars to music immersion, the music being the theme tune from Barney & Friends and, yet again, Barry Manilow. There is also a device called Teen Away, which generates high-frequency noises that people over about the age of 30 can’t hear. Whether it actually works is another matter. However, teens are also known to use this different perception of frequencies to their advantage – they can use a ring tone that their parents can’t hear.
Teen Away is somewhat similar to ultrasonic devices which send out powerful sounds beyond the human ear’s range to repel insects. This works especially well with crickets. It also works with rats but only for a short time, as they soon get accustomed to the new frequency. And what about cows? Not so much to repel them (pesky cows hanging around shopping malls …) but to get them to produce more milk. A detailed study has shown that playing them soothing music increases milk yield by 3 per cent.
PLAYING MOZART IN THE BACKGROUND HAS BEEN SHOWN TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE.
Music has actually also been used systematically as a weapon. Merchant ships will play Britney Spears music very loudly if under attack by Somali pirates. This method was proposed by Steven Jones, of the Security Association for the Maritime Industry. He is on record as saying ‘I’d imagine using Justin Bieber would be against the Geneva Convention.’ The former leader of Panama, Manuel Noriega, eventually surrendered from hiding in the house of the Papal Nuncio in Panama City when the opera-loving general was subjected to deafening heavy metal music. And during the war in Iraq, US troops fitted powerful speakers to their military vehicles and played loud heavy metal at the enemy. This might be somewhat akin to Scottish bagpipers in World War I, who were known by the Germans as ‘The Screaming Ladies’ given their kilts and loud bagpipes.
Studies have also shown that as we get older, we are more likely to be irritated by music, and less likely to become huge fans of certain types of music, as we did when we were teenagers. Part of the reason for this is that as we get older our hearing range becomes much shorter. We are less able to hear higher frequencies. Sadly, the decline begins at age eight. One study has examined people over 40 and people under 4016. Those over 40 were less able to detect subtle differences in tone and rhythm. Their perception of the difference between consonance and dissonance also lessens. The peak age of music perception is between 17 and 22, which is perhaps why the music we hear at that age stays with us for ever as our firm favourite. This is why Baby Boomers can’t get over the music of the 1960s, while Generation Xers are trapped in punk and ska.
Finally, a bone of contention in surgical circles has arisen regarding surgeons playing music in the operating theatre. As long as a hundred years ago, the US surgeon Evan Kane, who was from Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to the esteemed American Association for Medicine Journal, describing the ‘beneficial effects of the phonograph in the operating room’. We’ve come a long way from the phonograph, and surgeons are now more likely to play tracks off Spotify on their iPhones. Kane felt that the music was good for calming the patient. One wonders if it also calmed him when he became the first person to take his own appendix out, which he did in 1920. The question as to whether music in the theatre is a good or bad thing can divide teams. ‘I will not operate with that Ed Sheeran playing in the background,’ says the angry old surgeon.
A SCOTTISH BAGPIPER (OR ‘LADY FROM HELL’) LEADS TROOPS INTO BATTLE IN WORLD WAR I.
One obvious benefit is to the patient. Music and healing have in fact been intertwined from antiquity. Six thousand years ago, booking a harp player to entertain everyone was seen as payment for medical services. The Greeks made Apollo their god of healing and music. Music has been shown to be better at calming the patient than a sedative. These benefits even extend to patients having ventilation in an intensive care unit17.
And what about the effect of music on the surgeon and the nursing staff? As many as 72 per cent of operations are done with music playing, and 80 per cent of staff report beneficial effects, from team-building to reducing anxiety and, most compellingly, improving the performance of the surgeon18. Some studies have shown that music helps the surgeon focus on the task in hand, aiding task completion while lowering muscle fatigue. However, there are detractors who worry that the music is a distraction, and this does seem to be the case with trainees. It also increases what one study called ‘general irritation’, which can’t be a good thing in the operating theatre.
The question then becomes what music to play in the operating room. How about ‘Getting Better’ by The Beatles? Perhaps ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by the Bee Gees, or ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd. Songs to avoid would be ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ by Queen, or ‘Let It Bleed’ by the Rolling Stones.
MUSIC TO CUT BY: WHICH SONGS WORK BEST IN THE OPERATING THEATRE?