| This article explores the possible ways and routes that have brought music into being such a universal and important aspect of our lives. While I don’t agree with the Darwinian explanations, I find it interesting to note the universal recognition of how important music is to our lives and the attempt to discover its development from beginning to present day.
Scripture presents musicians to us in the early record of man close to creation, and I personally believe we were created with a desire to express ourselves in music. It can be a form of worship of our Creator as well as pure enjoyment and recreation. As our Creator presented us with many ways of interacting with and enjoying His creation around us, so I believe He gave us music. Many aspects of the body He created for us enable us to present and enjoy music for many of the reasons noted in the article below as well as others. Not all of this article is credible by my standards, but I present it in its entirety for your consideration trusting your discernment to pick out the cherries and spit out the pits! I hope it gives you something to think about.
Mounting evidence suggests that human beings are hard-wired to appreciate music. What researchers want to know now is why our distant ancestors evolved music in the first place. By Drake Bennett | September 3, 2006 IF YOU HAVE SPENT any time near a radio during the past couple months, you’ve probably heard a song called “Crazy,” an oddball R&B ballad about insanity. The track is the result of the collaboration between a singer who goes by the name Cee-Lo and a producer who goes by the name Danger Mouse, and it is absurdly catchy. With Labor Day upon us, it seems safe to call it the song of the summer. Of course, crooning along or tapping our feet to its loping bass line, it may not occur to most of us to ask why “Crazy”-or any song for that matter-can so easily insinuate itself into our consciousness. It just sounds good, the way our favorite foods taste good. But a growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to ask exactly that question. Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians’ brains and found that the “chills” that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex. As evidence mounts that we’re somehow hard-wired to be musical, some thinkers are turning their attention to the next logical question: How did that come to be? And as the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes in his just-published book, “This is Your Brain on Music,” “To ask a question about a basic, omnipresent human ability is to implicitly ask questions about evolution.” The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC, and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute-does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it’s unclear what purpose it serves. The evolutionary benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier. It has become one of the great puzzles in the field of evolutionary psychology, a controversial discipline dedicated to determining the adaptive roots of aspects of modern behavior, from child-rearing to religion. Some evolutionary psychologists suggest that music originated as a way for males to impress and attract females. Others see its roots in the relationship between mother and child. In a third hypothesis, music was a social adhesive, helping to forge common identity in early human communities. And a few leading evolutionary psychologists argue that music has no adaptive purpose at all, but simply manages, as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has written, to “tickle the sensitive spots” in areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. In his 1997 book “How the Mind Works,” Pinker dubbed music “auditory cheesecake,” a phrase that in the years since has served as a challenge to the musicologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists who believe otherwise. The first thinker to try to find a place for music in the Darwinian order was Charles Darwin. In his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” he argued, “musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.” Darwin’s model was bird song. In many bird species, males sing to impress females. Depending on the species, females will tend toward the males with the broadest repertoire or the most complex or unique songs. The foremost defender of that model today is Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico. Miller argues that in prehistoric communities, singing and dancing might have worked-as they do today in some Native American cultures-as proxies for hunting and warfare. The ability to come up with imaginative melodies and rhythms would connote intelligence and creativity, and the long, arduous dances would be proof of one’s endurance-the sort of traits that a choosy female would like to see in her offspring. Even today, Miller argues, music retains some of its old procreative roots. Looking at 6,000 recent jazz, rock, and classical albums, Miller found that 90 percent were produced by men, and that those male musicians tended to reach their peak musical production around age 30, which he notes, is also the peak of male sexual activity. Miller points in particular to the example of Jimi Hendrix. Miller has written that, despite dying at 27, Hendrix had “sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more.” To Miller, it was Hendrix’s status as a music-maker rather than his fame or charisma that gave him this sexual allure. Levitin sees some merit in the sexual selection model, but he cautions against seeking support for it in contemporary music. It’s important to keep in mind, he argues, that “we’re not talking about someone on the subway listening to an iPod or even someone in a concert hall listening to Mahler.” The environment in which music would have evolved would have been much more participatory. Even today, he argues, the Western idea of the concert, which separates performer from audience and music from movement, is an anomaly. In many of the world’s languages, Levitin points out, “there’s one word for music and dance.” Others who study the issue are more skeptical. David Huron, a musicologist at Ohio State University, argues that the Darwin model would lead one to expect a differential in musical abilities between the sexes. Typically, he points out, sexual selection leads to “dimorphism,” a divergence in traits between male and female. “It’s only the peacock, not the peahen, that has the plumage,” he notes. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more sophisticated than women in terms of the ability to serenade someone from beneath a balcony,” he says. Steven Mithen, an archeologist at England’s Reading University, agrees. In his book “The Singing Neanderthals,” published last spring, he writes that the male dominance that Miller sees in the modern recording industry is hardly proof of a difference in innate ability or proclivity. Sexism would explain it just as well. Indeed, if an alternate explanation is correct, it is women who were the original music-makers. One of the most universal musical forms is the lullaby. “Mothers everywhere soothe infants by using their voice,” says Sandra Trehub, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, “There isn’t a culture in which that doesn’t happen.” Trehub has done research showing that mothers tend almost automatically to make their speech more musical when they talk to their babies, even more so in experiments when they are not allowed to touch them. This has led a few thinkers, Trehub included, to speculate that music may have evolved as a baby-calming tool in hunter-gatherer societies. Unlike other primate species, human babies can’t simply cling to their mothers’ backs, and singing may have been a way for mothers to maintain contact with their children when they had to put them down to do other tasks. Perhaps the most widely touted explanation, though, is that music arose as a way for groups of early humans to create a sense of community. Among other things, this might explain why music-whether it’s singing hymns, school fight songs, or simply “Happy Birthday”-is so often a social experience. The model is neither love song nor lullaby but anthem. In “The Singing Neanderthal,” Mithen argues that communal music-making does two things. By demanding coordination and basic harmony, it works as a sort of rehearsal for the teamwork required for more high-stakes endeavors like hunting and communal defense. And the mere act of singing and moving in time together helps forge a sense of group identity. As evidence he points to the complex musical rituals of the South African Venda people, but also to the US Army, which sees chanting while marching in unison as a vital part of creating esprit de corps. There is suggestive research linking music and sociability. Daniel Levitin, for instance, points to the difference between two mental disorders, Williams syndrome and autism. People with Williams are mentally retarded, but at the same time, as Levitin puts it, “highly social, highly verbal, and highly musical.” Autism, on the other hand, while it also often causes mental impairment, tends to make people both less social and less musical. To Steven Pinker, though, none of this adds up to a convincing case for music’s evolutionary purpose. Pinker is not shy about seeing the traces of evolution in modern man-in “How the Mind Works” he devoted a chapter to arguing that emotions were adaptations-but he stands by his “auditory cheesecake” description. “They’re completely bogus explanations, because they assume what they set out to prove: that hearing plinking sounds brings the group together, or that music relieves tension,” he says. “But they don’t explain why. They assume as big a mystery as they solve.” Music may well be innate, he argues, but that could just as easily mean it evolved as a useless byproduct of language, which he sees as an actual adaptation. And Pinker isn’t the only skeptic. Back in April, as part of an experiment led by Levitin to compare the physiological response of performers and listeners, Boston Pops maestro Keith Lockhart conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra while he, a few musicians, and a portion of the audience were wired with monitors that tracked their heart rate, muscle tension, respiration, and other bodily signals of emotion. Yet though Lockhart was happy to make himself Levitin’s guinea pig, he confesses to be ultimately uninterested in the origins of music. “It’s enough for me to know that music does have a distinct emotional reaction in almost everybody that no other art form can boast of,” he says. “I’ve never particularly wanted to know why that happens.” Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com. |
Tag: Effects on babies
Music Therapy in Action
Tiny preemies get a boost from live music therapy
Note: One of my readers, Abigail, sent this article to me and it very much reflects the experiences I have had while playing the harp at the bedside. Very good information. Thanks for your interest. If anyone else of my readers has an article to share, send it in – Thanks and Blessings – Steve
By LINDSEY TANNER – The Associated Press
CHICAGO — May 16, 2013
As the guitarist strums and softly sings a lullaby in Spanish, tiny Augustin Morales stops squirming in his hospital crib and closes his eyes.
This is therapy in a newborn intensive care unit, and research suggests that music may help those born way too soon adapt to life outside the womb.
Some tiny preemies are too small and fragile to be held and comforted by human touch, and many are often fussy and show other signs of stress. Other common complications include immature lungs, eye disease, problems with sucking, and sleeping and alertness difficulties.
Recent studies and anecdotal reports suggest the vibrations and soothing rhythms of music, especially performed live in the hospital, might benefit preemies and other sick babies.
Many insurers won’t pay for music therapy because of doubts that it results in any lasting medical improvement. Some doctors say the music works best at relieving babies’ stress and helping parents bond with infants too sick to go home.
But amid beeping monitors, IV poles and plastic breathing tubes in infants’ rooms at Chicago’s Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, music therapist Elizabeth Klinger provides a soothing contrast that even the tiniest babies seem to notice
“What music therapy can uniquely provide is that passive listening experience that just encourages relaxation for the patient, encourages participation by the family,” Klinger said after a recent session in Augustin’s hospital room.
The baby’s parents, Lucy Morales and Alejandro Moran, stood at the crib and whispered lovingly to their son as Klinger played traditional lullabies, singing in Spanish and English.
“The music relaxes him, it makes him feel more calm” and helps him sleep better too, Lucy Morales said. “Sometimes it makes us cry.”
Some families request rock music or other high-tempo songs, but Klinger always slows the beat to make it easier on tender ears.
“A lot of times families become afraid of interacting with their children because they are so sick and so frail, and music provides them something that they can still do,” Klinger said, who works full time as a music therapist but her services are provided for free.
Music therapists say live performances in hospitals are better than recorded music because patients can feel the music vibrations and also benefit from seeing the musicians.
More than two dozen U.S. hospitals offer music therapy in their newborn intensive care units and its popularity is growing, said Joanne Loewy, a music therapist who directs a music and medicine program at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.
Preemies’ music therapy was even featured on a recent episode of the hit TV show “American Idol,” when show finalist Kree Harrison watched a therapist working with a tiny baby at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
“Music is such a huge part of our lives and to do something like this, make it a sort of healing process, is a cool thing,” Harrison said on the April 25 episode.
Dr. Natalia Henner, a newborn specialist at Lurie hospital, said studies in nursing journals show music therapy for preemies “does help with promoting growth. And there’s some good literature … saying that the time to discharge is a little bit shorter in babies who’ve been exposed to more music therapy.”
She said it “definitely facilitates bonding” between parents of preemies and other babies too sick to go home.
Loewy led a study published last month in the journal Pediatrics, involving 11 U.S. hospitals. Therapists in the study played special small drums to mimic womb sounds and timed the rhythm to match the infants’ heartbeats. The music appeared to slow the infants’ heartbeats, calm their breathing, and improve sucking and sleeping, Loewy said.
Soozie Cotter-Schaufele, a music therapist at Advocate Children’s Hospital-Park Ridge near Chicago, says soothing rhythmic sounds of music can mimic womb sounds and provide a comforting environment for preemies. She sings and plays a small harp or guitar, and says the sounds help calm tiny babies while they’re undergoing painful medical procedures.
Cotter-Schaufele said she recently heard from a woman whose daughter was born prematurely at her hospital six years ago. She had played the 1960s folk song “Today” for the infant.
The mother reported her daughter “‘still loves that song,” She said ‘She didn’t learn that song from me, she learned it from you,'” Cotter-Schaufele said.
Calming Harp 