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.

Shaping the evolution of human language

BBC News reports:

Researchers in the US say they have firm evidence that apes communicate using gestures - shedding light on the development of human language.

The team analysed the way bonobos and chimpanzees used hand and limb gestures to make themselves understood. The scientists found the apes used gestures more flexibly than the way they used facial and vocal expressions. They say the findings support the theory that human language developed through the use of hand gestures.

These research findings would seem to chime nicely with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's ideas about overlapping cognitive processes for visual and auditory gestalts forming one basis of the evolution of human language. My speculation (which may very well not be original): having learned to gesture, did our distant ancestors take inspiration from the shapes both of the objects around them and of their own gestures to form the sonic shapes of their first, rudimentary words?

Musical anatomy

WARNING: off-topic silliness follows. ; )

Sight reading with a piano pupil through a duet reduction of Haydn's Symphony No. 2 in D major yesterday, I was reminded of an experience I had as a callow seventeen year-old in my Music A Level Analysis class (I was studying on the Preparatory Course in Music at Dartington College of Arts in Devon; wow, I just realised that was half a lifetime ago!).

Our Analysis teacher, Dave (I forget his surname, which is probably fortunate), is fresh out of university and evidently keen to impress the class with his knowhow and enthusiasm. As we reach, in a group analysis, the point in the first movement of the symphony where Haydn modulates rather dramatically and loudly to A major, Dave melodramatically expostulates, in his vowel-softened Newcastle accent:

"Can't you just feel the massive A-ness?!"

The image Dave had just unintentionally conjured in our minds seems to hang in the air for a moment.

A deranged laughter bursts across the room, uncontrollable and side-splitting. We are falling off our chairs. Poor Dave flushes beetroot red.

Then some wag pipes up:

"It's a good job there's no key of P!"