Is music the universal language?

Laura-Lee Balkwill asks of a neurologist, a psychologist and an anthropologist, in a most wonderful All in the Mind podcast (30'):

Is music the universal language?

One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

An excerpt from the podcast transcript that summarises the interests of each speaker:

Laura-Lee Balkwill [interviewer]: So why is music interesting – that's a complex question with a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to.

Catherine Falk [ethnomusicologist]: Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own specific, very culturally specific ways.

Laura-Lee Balkwill [psychologist] : I find music interesting because of its power to evoke emotion, to express emotion, to make people feel. And that's how I got into studying music and emotion to begin with because I wanted to explore how that worked and whether that worked the same across cultures.

Ani Patel [neurologist]: And it presents science with opportunity to study the relationship between brain function and complex cognition, which is one of the big topics in neuroscience today: how does brain circuitry give rise to the mental experiences that we have of the world? And music is a wonderful domain to explore that because of its complexity and its reducibility, I would say.

A summary of some other points that fascinated me:

• Cathy Falk: archeological evidence of Neanderthal dwellings suggests music may pre-date language;
• Ani Patel: alternatively, we may not have evolved a capacity for making music so much as creatively adapted other cognitive mechanisms such as those responsible for language;
• Ani Patel: "modern neuro-imaging has shown us that both sides of the brain are very much involved in processing music. Language as well – but language does have a strong left hemisphere bias whereas music seems to draw on both sides of the brain – and does importantly, integrate different aspects of brain function in [...] waves of integration as opposed to simple processing chains";
• Laura-Lee Balkwill: Some aspects of music, such as certain fundamental characteristics' evocation of particular emotional responses, seem to be universal;
• Patel & Falk: whereas many others are culturally-specific;
• Ani Patel: "Some very deep and evolutionarily ancient reward centres of the brain [are] activated by [...] music. And these are areas that are typically activated by biologically significant behaviour such as eating, or reproducing or so on, and yet they [are] activated by this abstract acoustic stimulus with no obvious survival value";
• Cathy Falk: "Music is not an universal language any more than language itself is an universal language. I don't understand Swahili; it is a language. People construct the syntax of music very much in tandem with the way they construct themselves socially in their own very culturally specific ways."

I very much recommend listening to the podcast itself, which is interspersed with some great audio illustrations of diverse musics.

Music taps into our richest, deepest selves: our emotions, our language skills, our imagination, our universal humanity and the culturally-contextualised aspects of our identity. To understand music (and, in many ways, we are only just beginning to) really would be to go a long way to understanding what it is to be human.

Transparent machines

Robots are learning about emotional cues:

Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists.

Feelix Growing is a research project involving six countries, and 25 roboticists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists.

Co-ordinator Dr Lola Canamero said the aim was to build robots that "learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner".

The 2.3m euros scheme will last for three years.

"The human emotional world is very complex but we respond to simple cues, things we don't notice or we don't pay attention to, such as how someone moves," said Dr Canamero, who is based at the University of Hertfordshire.

[continues...]

Given that machines are not conscious and do not have a soul (whatever the heck that is—I feel I know ; ), could we restate the key aim of this and indeed all technology projects as "making technology more transparent to human perceptions of identity"?

The machine has no awareness or volition, as we humans understand these attributes. It serves as a mirror and/or amplifying conduit (according to context) for our own awareness and volition.

And the more transparently and subtly the machine reflects and/or amplifies us humans, the better it can enhance, rather than alienate and crush, our humanity (which, like Shakespeare's notion of beauty, after all has no more strength than a flower).

Ironic, then, that in order to achieve such transparency, the machine must emulate human characteristics, encouraging us to project onto it the very consciousness and personality it can never have.

A hall of mirrors indeed.