All I Hear Is Music: An Evening with Daniel Levitin

(Photo by Kenneth Burns.)

Being the proprietor of a live music podcast, it was pretty much a no-brainer that I'd go hear Daniel Levitin speak last night at Borders Books on the west side. His appearance was part of the Wisconsin Book Festival and he was in town to promote his latest book, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.

Prof. Levitin dropped out of college and pursued a career as a musician. When that petered out, he became a record producer and sound engineer. After a long career in the music business, he bailed and returned to college to finally get his degree. He did so and never stopped. Today he is the James McGill Professor of Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience, and Music at McGill University.

The event started at 7 with an introduction by Sara Guyer, the Interim Director of The Center for Humanities. Levitin's appearance was the opening salvo of the Center's "What Is Human?" project. When Levitin himself finally took to the podium, he began by explaining how his work fits into the "What is Human?" theme. He would approach the topic from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective.

Levitin began his talk proper by bringing up the topic of pets. If memory serves, he has or had a dog and he said that he sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a conversation with it. His conclusion was that they'd end up chatting about food and sex and nothing else.

Proceeding with the notion of what it means to be human, he posited that the cognitive capacity of us homo sapiens can be thought of as a continuum before singling out a trio of points along it. The first locus was self-consciousness which, he noted, was exclusive to primates. Several thousand years ago evolution endowed our pre-frontal cortices with this trait. By way of example, Levitin said that we are aware of ourselves, that we think, and that we think about our own thoughts. He maintained that art, including music, and science derive from a desire (drive?) to communicate our internal states of mind to others.

Before I get too far in, let me stop here and make two points:

1) If this sounds dry to you, it wasn't. Prof. Levitin was very affable and he littered his talk with examples. He'd be explaining an element of human cognition and then he'd say something like, "There was the time when I was producing a record by Santana" or "I was at Joni Mitchell's house one day…" His talk was full of such asides.

2) At one point early on, he made some comments about Natural Selection having chosen the ability to make and appreciate music. The way he phrased it sent a flag up for me and I'm willing to put it down to the fact that he was speaking to a lay audience. Still, I am forced to wonder if he believes and has any evidence that the cognitive capacity for music was directly chosen or if there's a chance that the human love of music was a by-product of another bit of our cognition that was directly chosen by Natural Selection. I shall definitely read his books to find out more about this.

OK, back to the talk. The second element of cognition that he noted was representation, which he labeled the core of art. This is our proclivity to conceive of and use symbols as part of the process of conveying our thoughts to one another. He defined art (or quoted someone else) as being that which allows you to see things in a different way.

The last bit was our ability to combine & recombine things. As an example, he said that Western music has 12 notes but musicians are constantly using those notes in different ways to create fresh, new music. Levitin admitted to loving the music of Bob Dylan and Neil Young here and said that he is always amazed at how they are able to come up with great new songs with an arsenal of only three chords.

After this introduction, he gave us a brief story of his life. He was told one day while at a session for Whitney Houston's first album, "The day you don't get goosebumps in the studio is the day you should quit your job." When he left the music business, he went to college to find out why music causes piloerection. Before opening the floor to questions, he remarked that his book is about why we have music and about what role it could have played for our ancestors. Lastly, he said that the title does not refer to six specific songs but rather to six types of songs.

About 12 people got in questions before Prof. Levitin signed copies of his book. One person asked about whale song. Levitin remarked that songs can vary and that whales can do things like change pitch but that our aquatic cousins are only able to convey limited messages. The next questioner asked if there was any evidence that Neanderthals had music. Levitin said that they probably did – in the form of a pseudo-musical language which, he speculated, was comprised of semi-melodic grunts which he demonstrated to our collective amusement.

Another audience member noted how radio formats are becoming ever more tailored to individual tastes and wondered how music/personal identity is encoded in the structure of our brains. It was explained to us that, in general, our taste in music gets fixed in the years of 12-18. As he said this, I heard people say something in agreement and I saw a couple folks in the front row nod their heads. Levitin continued his explanation by saying that, up until the age of 12 or thereabouts, our brains are constantly making new neural connections. After that, it begins the process of pruning them until roughly 18 when things are more or less set.

I've heard this before and always find it odd that it wasn't the case for me. I got into a lot of different music well into my 20s and I like to think that I am still able to appreciate new bands and genres. Perhaps it's just a problem in defining what "taste in music" is. Let's say you grew up listening to rock music. At age 30 you find that you really love zydeco. Now, it is the case that your brain didn't get hard-wired in the sense we're talking about here or is there not really a large gap between the two genres as far as the parts of your brain that process music are concerned? There's a lot of similarity between rock and zydeco whereas the difference between rock and Javanese gamelan is much greater.

And I'd like to know what gets hard-wired. Is it a preference for melody over rhythm? Or perhaps you become enamored of certain timbres. I shall have to find out if Levitin addresses this in his writings.

Local author and radio personality Stu Levitan was in attendance and he asked if there was a connection between the music that people like and the kind of people they are. Prof. Levitin said that this was an area he was going to start studying so keep an eye out for his next book.

The final audience member didn't really ask a question but rather made an observation which piggy-backed on a previous question. Earlier someone said that scientists postulate that our brains changed when humans went from oral cultures to written cultures – will our brains change again as we find ourselves constantly in the presence of music, increasingly so as iPod equipped individuals?

Levitin remarked that people have been surrounded by music throughout our history. It's just that we are much less participatory today. We listen to stereos and MP3 players and go to concert halls instead of performing with friends and family. This last bit seems to have stirred the observation of the last audience member to get the floor when she noted that we listen a lot but we don't sing or make music much these days. Families don't sit in a circle to make music and sing together as was the case for our grandparents. Levitin agreed and noted that there was a big difference between making and consuming music. This spurred an impromptu bit of audience participation in the form of a sing-along to Pete Seeger's "If I Had a Hammer".

Although the communal singing closed out the talk and my time at Borders, I want to end on a slightly different note. In her introduction, Prof. Guyer noted that some people feel that to analyze art is render oneself unable to appreciate it. Levitin brought this up as well and quoted Wordsworth: "Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:/We murder to dissect". It's like a meta-question: does Levitin's line of inquiry ruin his ability to appreciate music on its own terms? (He answered in the negative.)

Let's say you hear a song – I'll choose "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins – for the first time. You have no idea who Phil Collins is. How is what happens in your brain during this first listen different than listening to it knowing who Collins is, knowing the song was written in 1980 as his marriage was falling apart, and knowing the technical setup in the studio which produced things like the guitar distortion, the drum sound, etc.? How about if you hear the song for the first time and know Collins was in Genesis but hate Genesis? Will different synapses in your brain light up because you know the song was done by Collins outside of the group? Does having context for the creation alter how your brain reacts to it?

Personally, I'm one of those people who likes to know about the music I listen to. When was it written? Under what circumstances? Is that a real Mellotron I hear or a new-fangled simulacrum?

How about you?