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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
The Bodley Head
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ISBN 9781407073682
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Designing the Molecular World:
Chemistry at the Frontier
Made to Measure:
New Materials for the 21st Century
H2O:
A Biography of Water
The Self-made Tapestry:
Pattern Formation in Nature
Bright Earth:
The Invention of Colour
Stories of the Invisible:
A Guided Tour of Molecules
The Ingredients:
A Guided Tour of the Elements
Critical Mass:
How One Thing Leads to Another
Elegant Solutions:
Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry
The Devil’s Doctor:
Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
Nature’s Patterns:
A Tapestry in Three Parts
Universe of Stone:
Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind
The Sun and Moon Corrupted
The Music Instinct:
How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Confectionery for the mind?
3. Music is not a luxury
4. The atoms of sound
5. The tonal hierarchy
6. The makings of melody
7. In perfect harmony?
8. Once more with feeling
9. Ineffable emotions
10. Why music matters
Author’s Note
To listen to musical examples and podcasts please visit: www.bodleyhead.co.uk/musicinstinct
Introduction
You couldn’t fit much on a long-playing record in 1977, but there was no room for a more extensive record collection – the main mission of the spacecraft was to photograph and study the planets, not to serve as an interstellar mobile music library. All the same, offering extraterrestrials only this tantalising glimpse of Bach’s masterwork seems almost an act of cruelty. On the other hand, one scientist feared that including Bach’s entire oeuvre might come across as an act of cosmic boasting.
Recipients of the Voyager golden record will also be able to listen to the music of Mozart, Stravinsky and Beethoven, as well as Indonesian gamelan, songs of Solomon Islanders and Navajo Native Americans, and, delightfully, Blind Willie Johnson performing ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground.’
What are we thinking of, sending music to the stars? Why should we assume that intelligent lifeforms that may have no human attributes, perhaps not even a sense of hearing, could comprehend what happens if – following the pictorial instructions included with the disks – you spin the Voyager golden records and put the needle in the groove?
That question is, in a sense, what The Music Instinct is all about. Why is the succession of sounds that we call music comprehensible? What do we mean when we say that we do (or don’t) ‘understand’ it? Why does it seem to us to have meaning, as well as aesthetic and emotional content? And can we assume, as the Voyager scientists have done implicitly, that these aspects of music are communicable to others outside our own culture, or even our own species? Is music universal?
A glib argument for the universality of music would say that it is at root mathematical, as Pythagoras proposed in the sixth century BC, so that any advanced civilization could ‘decode’ it from the vibrations excited in a stylus. But that is far too simplistic. Music is not a natural phenomenon but a human construct. Despite claims to the contrary, no other species is known to create or respond to music as such. Music is ubiquitous in human culture. We know of societies without writing, and even without visual art – but none, it seems, lacks some form of music.
But, in contrast to language, there is no generally agreed reason why that should be so. The evidence suggests music is an inevitable product of intelligence coupled to hearing, but if so, we lack an explanation for why this is.
It is deeply puzzling why these complex mixtures of acoustic frequencies and amplitudes make any sense to us, let alone why they move us to joy and tears. But little by little, that is becoming a less mysterious question. When we listen to music, even casually, our brains are working awfully hard, performing clever feats of filtering, ordering and prediction, automatically and unconsciously. No, music is not simply a kind of mathematics. It is the most remarkable blend of art and science, logic and emotion, physics and psychology, known to us. In The Music Instinct I explore what we do and don’t know about how music works its magic.
Confectionery for the mind?
‘Music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties’, claimed cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in his 1997 book How the Mind Works. He went on:
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. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.
These claims provoked predictable outrage. Imagine it, comparing Bach’s B minor Mass to the Ecstasy pills of club culture! And by suggesting that music could
