This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

In a sense, schemas are everything. They frame our understanding; they’re the system into which we place the elements and interpretations of an aesthetic object. Schemas inform our cognitive models and expectations.

Simplicity and complexity relate to familiarity, and familiarity is just another word for a schema.

Some games, such as Go, Axiom, or Zendo are sufficiently complicated or opaque to the novice that many people give up before getting very far: The structure presents a steep learning curve, and the novice can’t be sure that the time invested will be worth it.

Structural processing is one source of difficulty in appreciating a new piece of music. Not understanding symphonic form, or the sonata form, or the AABA structure of a jazz standard, is the music-listening equivalent of driving on a highway with no road signs:

Our music listening creates schemas for musical genres and forms, even when we are only listening passively, and not attempting to analyze the music.

The study of the evolutionary origins of music has a distinguished history, dating back to Darwin himself, who believed that it developed through natural selection as part of human or paleohuman mating rituals.

“Music is auditory cheesecake,” he said dismissively. “It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate.”

“As far as biological cause and effect are concerned,” Pinker wrote in The Language Instinct (and paraphrased in the talk he gave to us), “music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.”

Darwin believed that music preceded speech as a means of courtship, equating music with the peacock’s tail.

First, anyone who could sing and dance was advertising to potential mates his stamina and overall good health, physical and mental. Second, anyone who had become expert or accomplished in music and dance was advertising that he had enough food and sturdy enough shelter that he could afford to waste valuable time on developing a purely unnecessary skill.

We can say, conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music.

One striking find is that in every society of which we’re aware, music and dance are inseparable.

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

We’ve found mirror neurons in Broca’s area, a part of the brain intimately involved in speaking, and in learning to speak.