Music is at least a million years older than language, yet we still see it solely through the lens of entertainment. Professor Michael Spitzer argues it’s something closer to a biological system, one that was shaping the human body long before we had words for what we were feeling.
Why does a chord you’ve never heard before make you want to cry? Why do babies respond to rhythm before they’ve heard a single song? Why does the same part of your brain that processes mortal danger also process musical beauty? The answers reach back 4 million years, and forward into a future where music may be prescribed like medicine.
About the speaker: Michael Spitzer is the author of The Musical Human and professor of music at the University of Liverpool, where he leads the department’s work on classical music. A music theorist and musicologist, he is an authority on Beethoven, with interests in aesthetics and critical theory, cognitive metaphor, and music and affect. He organized the International Conferences on Music and Emotion and the International Conference on Analyzing Popular Music and currently chairs the editorial board of Music Analysis Journal.
Timestamps
00:00:16 Chapter 1: The history of music
00:18:00 How civilization changed music
00:24:52 Chapter 2: The universality of music
00:37:00 How the west thinks about music all wrong
00:42:37 Chapter 3: Your brain on music
00:45:45 Why music gives you goosebumps
00:52:46 Chapter 4: The future of music
Prefer to listen to our interviews on Spotify? Explore our episodes here:
Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Michael Spitzer. I’m professor of music at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. I’ve written a book called The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth.
Chapter 1: The history of music
People often write books in response to reading other books, and when I read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, which blew my mind, I thought, “Well, hold on. Music is at least a million years older than the sapiens.” Most books about music do the usual thing of which composer wrote what piece at what time, and I wanted to get away from that and see the bigger picture. We’re in that kind of moment of thinking of the global of the universal. And music is absolutely universal. It also transcends sapiens because animals have music, birds, whales and other creatures. And ultimately, the musical human is a musical animal.
It’s almost inconceivable to write a prehistory of music because Edison invents a phonograph and prior to that, we have no record of any sound. One of the problems with instruments is that the materials biodegrade. But looking as far back as we can, what doesn’t degrade are lithic instruments made of rocks, such as stalactites or the famous Rock Gongs in Tanzania. The absolute landmark are the bone flutes discovered in the South German caves, about 40,000 years old, and they were constructed from the bones of griffon vulture.
But other than that, we have to wait until the invention of ceramics on over which people stretched hide to create the first frame drums. But of course, skin and leather biodegrades, and we have no evidence for exactly when these were made. And even more so for strings. So the first string instruments, harps and lutes, were created after the invention of farming. Once people farmed cows and created strings from twisting the guts of animals, so we create harps and lutes, but again, strings biodegrade. So we have to work inferentially by mapping from what we do know and looking at, say, the history of anatomy, of the evolving technology of tools, reverse engineering from linguistics to model language, and observing everyday life across the world in hunter-gatherer societies in different environments. It’s as much about piecing together a number of disciplines.
And here is an example of an inferential argument. About 1.5 million years ago, Homo Ergaster, one of our hominid ancestors, invents what is called a bi-facial axe. This is an axe with two symmetrical faces. Now, the capacity to create symmetry in an axe bespeaks two things: an ability to create a beautiful form, a symmetry, and an enjoyment of form for aesthetic reasons.
We can also borrow from psychology to create an inference that you can map from the domain of tools to the domain of sound, because mental capacity is cross-modal. So the ability to create symmetry is also found in sound. And we call symmetrical sound meter or regular rhythm. So it’s a fair argument that given the evidence of a bi-facial hand axe, Homo Agasta would have been able to tap that axe in a symmetrical rhythm or using musical meter.
When we talk about the origin of music, it’s really about assembling elements of music, which were synthesized much further down the road. And one of these elements was bipedalism, that what marks the first hominids apart from apes, and our common ancestor, was getting up on our feet. 4.4 million years ago, an Australopithecine called Ardi, and ever since then, the rhythm of walking has stamped human music. But much more than that, that pun intended, that the first steps put us on the path to forging links between the brain, and muscular exertion and sound. And the hominids learn to hear footsteps as a pattern, and what patterns give you is a sense of time.
You can predict what will happen next. And the idea of walking also gives humans their fascination with this metaphor that music moves. And if you think about it, music does not move. Music is just sounds or tones floating through the air. But we imagine that one note moves to the other. And most of music, be it a symphony or a song, unfolds a journey. And this journey takes us from one point to another in our minds.
Click here to continue reading the video transcript.
Related Video
How to safeguard your mind in the age of junk information
Yuval Noah Harari sees one glaring problem at the heart of our quest for an AI-led world: The incompatibility of humans and the always-on information cycles. Harari cautions that organic beings trying to force themselves into these 24/7 inorganic cycles will eventually fail, and bring about their own destruction. His solution? Clear delineation of inorganic information, and a strict diet for your consumption.
