Why are we so responsive to MUSIC?

Seems to me you're using conscious in two different ways. Conscious thinking and non-thinking conscious. It's a problem everybody has with definitions, yet they are a necessary evil. The best way around it is to focus on what it is we're exploring, which is the function of music as ritual. I choose to say music is a ritual behavior that inhibits consciousness and I've cited an academic study to support it. If you'd rather say it inhibits normal thinking, that's fine; it's the essence that matters more than the semantics.

BTW, 'beaver away' is a new idiom for this Yank.

 

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I don't buy the idea that music IS ritual behavior... Music can be used in ritual behavior, but this is a very small aspect of how music is used by some people.

Are you a musician?

 

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Can you define the difference between these? Seems to me you're assuming something.

I'm not sure you understand what the article is saying, again because it seems you're assuming something., which might be that thinking means "in words you use when you speak". Can you cite the part of the article where the authors claim rituals "inhibit conscious thought"?

I used the example of reading and playing music, in terms of solving a problem, to demonstrate that thinking needn't follow that somewhat restricted definition. I asked you if, when you solve problems do you do so by thinking up a monologue, or can you solve problems by "thinking' in some other way? I used the term "abstracting", do you know what that means?

Or are you convinced there is only one way to think, in words and sentences? So if you aren't doing that, then you're using "non-thinking conscious" as you put it?

 

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Me neither, gmilam. The use of music in rituals or customs is another thing.

If anything music is a poem, a sculpture or a canvas, and the listener gives it its true life, in the form of interpretation. It opens space and fills it with images, thoughts and feelings. It's art, not ritual.

 

The original practice of music, dance/movement, art, and mythology was ritual in tribes. Obviously, things have changed tremendously, but I maintain that, despite how music, dance and art are done these days, we are pretty much the same creatures we were tens of thousands of years ago, only with much better toys. The emotional reward we get from these activities is the same as it was in tribal times, but the context is different. I don't believe the meaning is different. I call these rituals because that's how they started. We don't consider them or treat them as such most of the time today. It only matters if we ask why we are responsive to music, dance, art, and mythology; why they continue to elicit emotional responses when they are non-utilitarian and 'seemingly' don't contribute to evolutionary success. If we regard them as the original religious behaviors, it helps answer that question.

 

Which article are we talking about? I've cited a few.

 

The first bolded part of your quote appears to be something you've assumed about the article. Can you find the part written by the authors that supports your assumption?
The second bolded part looks like another assumption.

If by "aspects of consciousness" you mean "intrusive thoughts", I was claiming that engaging in a particular ritualised behaviour--practising the piano or any other instrument--has this effect. Furthermore, it's one of the reasons I do it. I assume other musicians notice the same effect (but what do I know?).

I didn't claim that music is ritual, I claimed that practising is ritual. There's more to it than learning how to play something on an instrument, although obviously practice is important. There is also I suppose, the satisfaction of being able to entertain others.

 

It appears to me that what any people discribe as "ritual" in primitive tribes is nothing more than people getting together to sing some songs and catch a buzz. I think the modern eqivalent is more likely to be found in the corner pub than in the corner church.

Anyway, I think you have it backwards. We don't respond to music becasue it was used in rituals, music was used in rituals because we respond to it.

 

That's too broadly sweeping for me to accept.

Hmmm. Presumably the oldest musical instrument is the human voice or perhaps the stomp or hand clap. An archer's bow on a resonator would suffice. Sticks, stones, mallets, logs, blocks, drums, rattles, gourds, cane pipes, ocarinas, thumb pianos, the berimbau, the didgeridoo, etc. -- basically anything that resonates -- would suffice. And all of these are in use today.

Noting of course that some people still live in primitive cultures.

I doubt it. I suspect the first music came by discovery of sounds in nature, curiosity and imitation. This would more closely comport with the way budding musicians in the modern context take interest.

No I doubt that completely. We are wired for sound, and that's completely a contribution to, and result of, evolutionary success. It's the basis of language and spatial perception in general.

Here's an anecdote you might like, to further my point. When Tchaikovsky was small he was given a music box as a gift. Sometime later his mother found him in his room crying. When asked if he didn't like the gift, he said, "No, I'm crying because when I turned it off, the music kept playing in my mind. I'm crying because it's so beautiful." (I may have mangled the story somewhat in the retelling.) In short, the tribal/ritual/religion scenario doesn't account for creative talent, the savant, the blank slate of the child prodigy. Trace this from Mozart to Miles Davis to your favorite musician today, and it boils down to creative power.

By the way, if you were to limit the discussion to the origins of Western music - musicology, music theory and composition and music literature, then you could trace the first written forms to Gregorian chant, which is a product of the Catholic Church. So that gives you a more realistic link to religion that you may be seeking. From chant, which was originally done in unison, there evolved early polyphony, and by the time we get to Bach, whose massive works were almost entirely sacred music - an elaborate system is in place that predicts the formulas (such as chord progressions) that arose in blues (from gospel/church influences) to jazz to rock until the pop forms of today. A parallel trend ran from Gaelic/Celtic influences in Appalachia into American folk music through the coffee house genre to the minimalist and avant garde singer-songwriter forms of today. The "toys" you mention begin with the likes of Edison, Marconi, Theremin, Stockhausen, Moog and Les Paul, whose devices not only helped the rock movement to run away into sub-genres, but which also gave rise to jazz fusion and electronic influences in modern classical music, better known to casual listeners by the phenomenal scores that accompany great films.

But even from our earliest roots in Gregorian chant, the influence of Eastern music through the Crusades, and the encounters with the Arabs, Turks, Persians and Moors -- and the Roman conquests of outlying tribes, such as in Britain -- all of these influences convey cultural exchange which necessarily defies the proprietary sense of a homogenous tribal ritual or religion. The same could be said for Greeks in the Golden Era with the lyre, as an accompaniment to poetry, or Hindic tabla in love songs, or the Persian ud in its connection to the romantic prose such as Omar Khayyám.

Along with the rise of the Gregorian chant from these exotic sources our culture saw a parallel phenomenon in the rise of secular music among courtiers, bards, trouvères and troubadors who employed variants of the ud in the forms of mandolins and lutes, and the bowed ancestors of violin, the rebec and Byzantine lira, the shawm, which may have Oriental roots, the tambourine which could be as English as it might be Indian, and the fipple flutes, esp. the tin whistle and recorder, which was probably a Celtic import through Galicia. Bear in mind that after Marco Polo, and whether on account on the expeditions of the Crusades, or in spite of 700 years of tensions between Christians and Ottomans, travel and cultural exchange brought more than spices and silk. It brought artistic exchange, and the exotic instruments and language of Eastern music.

That's just a broad overview. But already you see in the Western tradition alone a panoply of musical expression that seems to run away from the confines of ritual or religion. It seems to have a life of its own, one that's very basic to the core of humanity, that incorporates an innate sense of pure art.

If I were to ask you, why do we respond to art in general, isn't it simply because we are inherently artistic by nature? Undoubtedly true talent is a rare gift. But even the most primitive people who adorn themselves in baubles and color already have this innate sense of beauty. For the same reason a primitive person may wear a string of shells, the car next to you in traffic may rattle your windows at a traffic light, or you will groove out or find solace in your own chosen genre.

Beauty alone is a good enough reason to love music, and the appreciation for beauty is about as fundamental a human quality as it gets, even older than tribalism, ritual and religion.

 

In post#58 I cited definitions from 2 leading neuroscientists who describe extended consciousness and higher-order consciousness as pertaining to self-awareness. Included in this is MY claim that our so-called rationality and ability to make choices based on vast memory stores is part of this type of consciousness. An aspect of this consciousness is our ever-present internal dialog constantly reporting to us what is happening, which often results in instrusive thoughts. That's what I mean when I refer to consciousness.

Yes, I make the claim that “the ‘swamping’ of working memory which permits the temporary suppression of intrusive thoughts” is an example of ritual inhibiting consciousness. Yes, the authors of that paper do not claim this as I pointed out at the end of that post. Here's more evidence, however. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist and author of several books about religion and belief, says, "No matter what specific methods any given tradition of mysticism might employ, the purpose of these methods is almost always the same: to silence the conscious mind and free the mind's awareness from the limiting grip of the ego." ("Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief" Ballentine Books. 2001, p. 117) Newberg's use of the word mysticism is based on his study of the brain scans of Catholic nuns praying or Buddhists meditating. I make the claim, or assumption if you prefer, that praying and meditating are ritual acts. I believe the evidence speaks for itself.

I welcome any evidence or scientific articles that elucidate or contradict this.

 

Wow. You might want to run that by any anthropologist you happen by on the street. You wouldn't have any actual knowledge to back that up, would you?

Yes, you are correct. And that is the topic of this thread. Why is that?

Aqueous Id, that was an impressive review of the cultural evolution of music. I'm guessing you have some background in ethnomusicology. However, we need to review your position on biological evolution.

If we believe humans came to be who we are through evolution, we want to be able to show a causal relationship between our behaviors and how they contribute to evolutionary success. It's easy to account for food gathering, hunting, and sex. It's not so easy for rituals, music, and art in general. To say we are inherently artistic by nature tells us nothing about why we have an innate sense of beauty. The claim has been made in a previous post (not by me) that chimps respond to music, and we know if given paints and paintbrush, they will apply them to paper. That is a far cry from them doing this in the wild for which there is absolutely no evidence of anything close. So what changed between humans and our last common ancestor, perhaps 7 million years ago? Some claim our religious and artistic nature is an accidental byproduct of other cognitive functions (Dawkins, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer), but then they would deny art and religion evolved. If, as you seem to say, these features evolved, it isn't adequate to simply say they just happened and it's just our nature. I suggest a way to think about them that offers that link, but it requires changing the way we think about religion, ritual, and art. That won't work for everybody. Oh well.

Suggested reading: The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Dutton

 

I would amend the last sentence to read: ". . .the purpose of these methods is . . . to silence the 'inner voice' of the conscious mind . . . ".

When I practise on my keyboard, my "conscious mind" (whatever it is) certainly isn't silent. Thoughts occur, but in a rather vague fashion. Mostly about "correcting" myself, whether to try replaying a particular part, etc.

But I don't need to form thoughts in the usual way, it's more a kind of reference to something that I know is already "formed", because of the repetitive nature of this particular ritual.
I'm aware that I decide to repeat something, and the rational part goes: "I should try that bit again", or somesuch, but I don't actually think in those words, if you see what I mean. If it "sounds better" I don't have to think that either. Because my conscious mind can hear it.

I contend that part of learning to play music involves this abstraction of thought, and if you aren't used to it, it's hard at first. It partly explains why beginners have trouble learning, apart from learning how to coordinate their movements--they also need to learn how to "turn off" the thinking process, or rather abstract it, in their own fashion.

 

? Relevance? Nobody has said any different. My point is that neglecting atheistic religions - pretending they don't exist, even, however minor or restricted these days - leads to serious confusion.

Supernatural creatures are not necessarily - or even usually - gods.

As for atheistic religions, they have indeed taken hits from the comparatively powerful theistic ones - an interesting topic for another thread - but we still have some Buddhism, some Taoism, some Shinto, various animisms and shamanisms, whatever you want to call the Navajo tradition, and so forth. A large fraction of the human population, and by reasonable inference considerably larger in the past.

It's not so easy to account for the enjoyment, planning, refinement, anticipation, etc, of food gathering, hunting, or sex.

As far as music, one possibility: Community bond. The underlying reason for the dual meaning of the word "band".

The situation is: when the demand hits, when the emergency looms, it's too late to form a band, a group that is bonded. So we need something that works in advance of necessity. Ideally it should be cheap, as well, and harmless, and readily portable, and deep or resonant with the fundamental circuitry of the motivating brain. It should have been available long ago - precede language, even toolmaking.

The hominids that failed to come up with something like that are no longer with us. Darwin.

 

Most people focus on god(s) as an indication of what religion is, but that's a secondary consequence. Yes, some religions have god(s), some have animistic entities-supernatural creatures-that are like god(s) maybe, and some like Buddhists perhaps don't have either. But belief in god(s) or belief in religious doctrine is hardly the basis for understanding those beliefs. See Barrett, JL, & Keil, FC, 1996, ‘Anthropomorphism and God concepts...' for how people's religious beliefs vary depending on context. People's beliefs are based on conditioning and cognitive biases. Atheists have beliefs and cognitive biases, too, and are just as likely to project anthropomorphic causation to imagined external entities as non-atheists. They just don't call them god(s), but the transference of causation remains. See Daniel Wegner's work for all people's inability to ascertain true causation in general.

Yes, that's the most common explanation for music as well as religion. The problem I have with this is why humans needed this additional, evolutionarily expensive behavior for social cohesion when thousands of other chordate species have elaborate mechanisms for social cohesion and don't need anything close to music or religion. When we talk about bird or whale song, we're talking about very specific communication devices, which is nothing like elaborate, complex music and is well beyond basic communication.

 

Can you explain why you think music is evolutionarily "expensive"? That appears to contradict the principle that evolution produces "survival mechanisms" which are fit for their purpose, i.e. "good enough", but not "better than required".

Can you explain how music is "beyond" basic communication, first of all explaining what you mean by "basic communication"? Do you think music is a kind of language, or does it transcend what we usually mean by "a language"?

What about mathematics, is that a kind of language? Would you say our search for "good" theories is a function of some drive to find symmetry and explain patterns, and this is because our brains have evolved that way? Mathematics certainly goes well beyond "basic" understanding.
Then, why have our brains evolved to do this? Would you say that scientific theories are an "expensive" adaptation, although they're obvious survival mechanisms, viz technology?

 

On the one hand, humans are unique in the complexity and size of their social groups. No other vertebrate animal constructs socially cohesive groups of even a tenth the size and flexibility and and complexity and duration of a human tribe.

On the other we have whale songs, canid pack howling, sparrow flock choruses, etc. Music is their way. It's not "additional", in this view - it's our way.

And third, I have trouble imagining anything else that would work as well, for the original musical hominids. It has to be continually available (we breed all year round, etc), portable (pre-agricultural nomadic), cheap, transferable among scattered subgroups, and capable of bonding complex minds.

There's also the obvious attribute: that's how it works now, for all human beings. and has for as long as we can trace.

 

Since you ignored the kooky video associated with the work of Robin Sylvan, who you cited, I'll add my two cents.

Steven Pinker feels that music is merely an auditory cheesecake/an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language and Henkjan Honing seems to agree. However, Oliver Sacks imagines music and language as co-developing. Nevertheless, Dr. Patel’s research seems to support the auditory cheesecake hypothesis, but he also found that other areas of the brain handle rhythm and tone. Therefore, it looks like music developed with other parts of the brain that evolved for other functions. And why wouldn’t it? After all, they once assumed that the senses delivered separate pieces of information… and now, they no longer believe that the senses work independently. The eyes and ears work together, and they've even discovered that sound plays a large part in taste, as well. Even loud sounds have a special effect on the sacculus, which can trigger a huge pleasure rush, and make you feel like you’re free falling. At over 90 decibels, the crowds really get carried away.

Human Senses-Hearing

The only theory that I could find that was consistent with the universal link between music and religion was this one…and it sucks.

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Prenatal and infant conditioning, the mother schema, and the origins of music and religion

 

Our best understanding is that animal vocalizations are for indicating dominance, territory, sexual interest/availability or in the case of some species like monkeys, may actually indicate specific information such as type of predator: raptor overhead vs. feline below. In any case, to call these sounds music is anthropomorphic. They are not for aesthetic pleasures like music is to humans. Comparing animal communication to music because we might call them both languages conflates reality. Similarly, math is a type of language as well but because we can call all these languages does not mean they are equivalent or on par with each other.

Biologists use this terminology to describe behaviors that apparently don't contribute directly to evolutionary fitness--enhancing survival and reproductive success. Steve Brown is an academic who studies the neuroscience of art (neuroarts.org). In his paper Biomusicology and the three biological paradoxes about music, Brown writes, "[Darwin] addressed what he saw as the fundamental biological paradox about music: music has many costs for the individual but no obvious survival benefits. 'As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits in life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed,' stated Darwin in a famous passage. The kinds of costs that evolutionists talk about are not those involved in purchasing concert tickets or CD players but rather the investment in time and energy required to produce music. In tribal cultures, rituals involving music and dance can last for several days on end. Spending this amount of time and energy singing and dancing does nothing to help you find food or fight off predators. If anything, it does exactly the opposite: it consumes great amounts of resources and announces your presence to potential predators." Dawkins says it only slightly differently: “Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates waste. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance.” (God Delusion 2006 p. 190) That's what I mean by music is evolutionarily expensive.

 

Really? Elephants, wildebeest, musk oxen, bison, and many other species have socially cohesive groups that are far larger than any human tribe. The complexity of predator hunting species--wolves and other canines, lions, orcas--requires sophisticated cooperation. I'm flummoxed.