And aside from the neurochemical story, there is a more psychological or behavioral explanation for why we find sad music consoling. When people feel sad or suffer from clinical depression, they often feel alone, cut off from other people. They feel as though no one understands them. Happy music can be especially irritating because it makes them feel even
more
alone, less understood. I now know that my boss at Sambo’s, Victor, was probably suffering from clinical depression, and took out his sense of powerlessness on those who were weaker then he. The upbeat, happy song of Tony Orlando and Dawn was enough to make him snap in this condition. When we are sad and hear a sad song, we typically find it comforting. “Basically, there are now
two
of you at the edge of the cliff,” says Cambridge University music professor Ian Cross. “This person understands me. This person knows what I feel like.” That connection—even to a stranger—helps the process of recovery, for so much of getting better seems to rely on feeling understood—one of the reasons why talk therapy is so successful in cases of depression. In addition, the depressed person reasons, this person who went through what I went through lived through it; he recovered and can now talk about it. Moreover, the singer turned that experience into a beautiful work of art.
The blues may be the ultimate comfort song in Western society during the last hundred years. The “blues” technically refers to a type of chord progression, in its simplest form what musicians call I-IV-V7 (pronounced “one, four, five-seven”) and the many variations and reharmonizations of this basic progression, typically done in twelve- or sixteen-bar phrases (hence the term “twelve-bar-blues”). The lyrical content to this chord progression can be anything, from the Beach Boys praising the beauty of their local beaches and babes (“California Girls”), Chuck Berry paying homage to an especially skillful guitarist (“Johnny B. Goode”), or Steely Dan exploring Eastern enlightenment through the Buddha (“Bodhisattva”). But the prototypical lyric is about someone who has had hard luck, been done wrong by life and circumstance, and this is what makes the songs comforting—the idea described above that sad people are so often made to feel better by sad music.
“Going Down Slow” written by St. Louis Jimmy Oden (and performed by Howlin’ Wolf, the Animals, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and Jeff Beck with Tom Jones, among many others) is one of the thousands and thousands of amazing blues songs that have been a cultural legacy of black America throughout the twentieth century and beyond. It is the song of a dying man, looking back on his life, asking for his mother to come to his deathbed. It is heart-wrenching and bittersweet. The Jeff Beck version is one of the most powerful blues performances I’ve ever heard. Tom Jones trades in his normal sexy, confident swagger and inhabits the role of the luckless and life-scarred vagabond, his voice all but unrecognizable, dripping with despair and misery. Beck—widely regarded as among the top five guitar players alive today—plays what may be one of the most powerfully emotional electric guitar solos ever recorded. I played this last week for Sandy Pearlman, producer of Blue Öyster Cult and the Clash. Sitting in my car as we sped down the Trans-Canada Highway, he closed his eyes and smiled with every new note that Beck played. After the first vocal line, as Beck began to play his “call-and-response” guitar fills, Pearlman beamed and said, “Now
there
is a guy who understands
everything
about the cognitive neuroscience of emotion and music! He
knows
just what to play to put goose bumps on the hair that is standing up on the back of my neck!”
A sad song brings us through stages of feeling understood, feeling less alone in the world, hopeful that if someone else recovered so will we, and we feel ultimately inspired that the sad experience led to something aesthetically pleasing. For people who were currently sad at the Waldport Lodge that night, Étienne showed them hope. For those who were over their sadness, Étienne reminded them of how far they had come, having successfully traded despair for at least a temporary peace until the next sad episode might appear.
CHAPTER 5
Knowledge or “I Need to Know”
I
came to academia late—I didn’t even get my B.A. until I was well into my thirties—but I had known Ian Cross’s name many years before we first met, principally from two important books he co-edited on musical structure and from articles on the cognitive representations of musical form. The field of music cognition is relatively small; there are probably only two hundred and fifty people in the world who would consider it their specialty. Contrast this with a field like neuroscience, which draws 30,000 attendees to its annual conference in the United States alone. Most university psychology and music departments don’t have
anyone
doing music cognition, and those that do rarely have more than one. This makes the annual meetings of the three main societies (the North American, the European, and the Pan-Asian) a big deal—it is an opportunity for people in the field to meet and learn about the latest findings, to resolve scientific controversies, and to schmooze.
In graduate school I completed some new work on absolute pitch, and I presented it at the European conference one year to get feedback on it before sending it out for publication. Research scientists are famously intolerant of logical arguments or experimental designs that are flawed, or young researchers who make claims that are not fully supported by the data. This is trial by fire for a student, but there is no better training. Attendees may shoot your work full of holes, but in the end if you are able to plug up the holes, the paper becomes stronger. As my doctoral advisor, Mike Posner, counseled me, it’s better to know
before
the paper is published if there are any flaws; printing retractions is embarrassing and career-stopping.
On the first morning of the conference I came down for breakfast and sat at a large round Formica table with some other students whom I had met on the bus ride in—two of them were Ian’s students. They were a friendly bunch, curious to know about my background and about the paper I was going to give, what graduate school was like in America, if I had ever met a Hollywood actor (of
course
! America is crawling with them!), what bands I liked to listen to. Ian came in later, wearing a sharply pressed suit, and, to my surprise, sat down at the table with us students. I had assumed that meals at the conference would be similar to my family’s Thanksgiving dinners, where there were separate tables for the adults and the children. (And where, no matter how old I became, I still was relegated to the children’s table because my parents’ generation were still filling up the adult table. Last Thanksgiving several of us second-generation family members teetered uncomfortably on half-sized, low chairs at a correspondingly low table—the same chairs we’ve been sitting in for forty years.)
Ian introduced himself to everyone and struck up conversations with us all. He had himself done some work on absolute pitch and so was looking forward to my talk, he said. How often do professors go out of their way to get to know students like this? (Not often!) My first impression of Ian was of his generosity, and his indifference to social rank. We had another thing besides absolute pitch research in common: Ian was a guitarist, and although he played classical guitar and I played blues, we both had spent our lives listening to each other’s favorite music and understood it. That night after dinner, some of the attendees took turns taking the stage to play music for the group. Ian insisted that I borrow his classical guitar to play something for everyone, and so I sang and played a song I had just taught myself that month, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy.” Mine was the only nonclassical contribution to the evening, but everyone seemed to be having a good time. To this day, I still run into people from that conference who remember me as “that guy who played Stevie Ray Vaughan.” I’ve known Ian fifteen years now and he continues to astonish me with his clarity of thought, his scholarship, and his insights into music cognition. Over the past ten years, Ian has written a number of papers on the evolutionary origins of music, and they have become influential in the field.
We were both invited to deliver addresses at the International Music Meets Medicine conference hosted by the Gyllenberg Foundation in Espoo, just outside of Helsinki, in summer 2007. The days were long, with twenty-one hours of sunlight. I had never been that far north before, and Ian and I both noticed how different the color spectrum of the sun appeared—everything seemed a bit more yellow to us. We walked around the conference center taking in the new-to-us vegetation. The trees looked similar to trees we knew from our respective childhood homes, Scotland and California, but we noticed subtle differences in bark patterns, in the color of leaves, and—on the conifers—needles. We speculated about whether these were different species of trees than the ones we grew up with, or simply genetic variations that had adapted to fluctuations in the amount of sunlight they would be exposed to, varying seasonally from two to twenty-two hours a day. The fauna were also different—as we sat at a picnic table and talked about musical origins, our conversation paused frequently when we heard an unfamiliar bird, which prompted a spontaneous joint effort to try to see it and identify it.
We were also distracted by the calls of frogs in the pond next to our picnic table, and eventually were able to see some small, smooth-skinned brown ones that were unlike any we had seen in our own countries. The frogs and toads that Ian and I knew from childhood croaked together in a kind of amphibious symphonic
tutti
. The Finnish frogs—or at least those in our pond in Espoo—used what biologists call
antiphonal calling.
This, we read later in a field guide, is to maximize the chance that a female frog will be able to find her favored male. Frogs choose their mates largely on the basis of sound. A female frog can be swept off her legs by just the sound of a suitably enticing male frog call played over a loudspeaker, even trying to mate with a stuffed replica of a male. The reason that most frogs synchronize their calls is that it makes it more difficult for predators to locate them; the antiphonal calling in Espoo must have developed as a competitive advantage in mate attraction for those males who employed it, somewhat at their own increased risk of being eaten by predators.
Ian began our conversation on musical origins by considering what the requirements might be for
any
system of animal or human communication. “Clearly,” he said, “the survival prospects of individuals and groups are enhanced by a capacity to communicate certain information about states of affairs in the physical world, and in the social world that concerns the organism. Even more so by the ability to organize action in response to those states of affairs,” actions such as running, hiding, fighting, cooperating, and sharing.
“Of course,” I interjected, “as David Huron would say, survival is only enhanced by sorting out fact from fiction, meaning that the organism requires the ability to detect liars, manipulators, and exaggerators.” This is exactly the argument that Huron and others have made for the value of music over language. This is a bold and controversial notion that is gaining favor among researchers. What you want for a communication medium is one in which honesty can be readily detected, what ethologists call an
honest signal
. For a number of reasons, it appears that it is more difficult to fake sincerity in music than in spoken language. Perhaps this is simply because music and brains co-evolved precisely to preserve this property, perhaps because music by its nature is less concerned with facts and more concerned with feelings (and perhaps feelings are harder to fake than supposed facts are). Music’s direct and preferential influence on emotional centers of the brain and on neurochemical levels supports this view.
Ian continued that the ideal communication system would allow individuals to communicate knowledge about current conditions such as the availability and locations of resources, to make possible their sharing; perceptions of dangers would need to be identified and appropriate actions coordinated; finally social relationships would need to be articulated and sustained. Why is music necessary and even better than language for such tasks? I think it is because music, especially rhythmic, patterned music of the kind we typically associate with songs, provides a more powerful mnemonic force for encoding knowledge, vital and shared information that entire societies need to know, teachings that are handed down by parents to their children and that children can easily memorize. I believe that this is such a fundamentally important
function
of music that it may even have been the root of the first song (notwithstanding Sting’s and Rodney Crowell’s Chapter 3 lobbying for joy songs as the primeval musical form).
Imagine an early ancestor of ours, maybe a hundred thousand years ago, standing above a river where there is a gathering of crocodiles. Another early human is near them, and our ancestor hears one of the crocs make a certain noise before chasing and then devouring the nearby human. Our ancestor has learned that this noise is the signal that the croc is about to attack. Due to a random, unexplained mutation, his frontal lobe is a bit larger than anyone else’s. He has a greater than normal capacity to reason and to communicate; in particular, he has a perspective-taking ability, albeit a rudimentary one, an ability to imagine what other people are thinking. He realizes that this knowledge that he has is not knowledge that his children have. They are precious to him. He wants to warn them.
He runs home and (like all other humans at that time) has no language, but he feels it necessary to communicate to his children the danger he just witnessed. He doesn’t want to bring them to the scene; too dangerous—they could become dessert. He needs to communicate the danger symbolically. He imitates a croc. He gestures, wiggles on the ground, uses his body to make the motions of a croc. He brings his arms and hands together to mimic the jaws opening and closing, then makes the noise. This type of symbolic gesture may be practiced for thousands of years until a further refinement is introduced, precipitated by an even more enlarged frontal lobe. The young children don’t necessarily pay attention to this vital message; they are playing, babbling, making noises, laughing, moving, wiggling. The father incorporates their behaviors into his in order to attract their attention. He laughs, moves, makes funny noises. He surrounds the important message about the crocodile and the crocodile’s noise with an attention-getting dance, accompanied by pitched and rhythmic vocalizations. The first song is born, and it is born to simultaneously educate, grab the attention of, and entertain children. Today children are remarkably attuned to the music around them; they rock and sway to music in their environment, and within their first two years develop their own preferences for music. They are also attuned to the music within them, genetically encoded, entering a period of musical babbling often even before their linguistic babbling begins.