Science
A new study of audience members’ physical response to a concert supports the theory that music has played a pivotal role in human evolution. By Amalyah Hart.
Music studies could unlock our evolutionary history
In September 2020, 132 volunteers attended three classical performances over three nights at a concert hall in Berlin.
When the lights dimmed and the string quintet – performing a combination of Beethoven, Brett Dean and Brahms – began to play, extraordinary things started to happen.
As the music swelled, the hearts of the concertgoers began to beat in time. All around the room people’s skin prickled with sweat at the same rate.
These physiological signals were picked up by gloves equipped with sensors and strain-sensitive belts looped around the chest.
Cameras fixed to the ceiling registered that audience members were making subtle, unconscious movements in time with one another – a delicate, intuitive choreography.
“People in a classical concert are not supposed to move,” says Wolfgang Tschacher, a psychologist at the University of Bern, Switzerland. “They’re not aware of moving at all.”
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the nexus of nerves in the human body that controls involuntary functions such as heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing.
Based on a well-informed hunch, the concert’s organisers – a team of scientists that includes Tschacher – were looking for some or all of these essential functions to synchronise among the audience members.
The results of the study, published late last year, confirmed that hunch. What was happening in this concert hall in Berlin was an entirely natural – albeit mysterious – feature of our intensely social species.
When humans listen to music together, their bodies seem to synchronise right down to the viscera. Tschacher says this kind of physiological synchrony isn’t limited to music: it appears in all sorts of contexts, from a parade of soldiers to the private rooms of a psychotherapist.
Music can trigger a pulse of dopamine that boosts wellbeing. Research suggests music can improve memory and mood in patients living with Alzheimer’s, and can enhance concentration and endurance, though its effects vary from person to person.
Of course, music is inherently emotive. Major and minor tones can induce positive and negative feelings, respectively. Certain songs can trigger specific emotions such as love, anger or fear, which are often linked to powerful bodily sensations – chills that dance across the skin or a sudden rush of tears.
This link between mind and body is what prompted the scientists behind the 2020 study to attach complicated monitoring devices to willing concertgoers. Tschacher, who favours Leonard Cohen and Portuguese fado, calls it “embodied cognition” – the idea that what goes on in your mind is indelibly connected to what’s happening in your body.
In fact, among the many and varied theories of consciousness, some people believe having a body – being able to understand yourself as an object in the physical world – is a prerequisite for consciousness. That may be a comforting thought for those who live in fear of an AI apocalypse.
If music causes human bodies to synchronise and this synchrony can promote feelings of warmth and closeness, it’s plausible music may have evolved to bind groups of people together. It’s a useful adaptation for a species whose survival has often hinged on cooperation.
But scientists’ best guesses about how and why music evolved are still just that – guesses.
Here’s what has been established: 40,000 years ago in the Swabian Alps of modern-day Germany, as Europe lay in the frigid grip of the last great Ice Age, someone lifted a bone from the wing of a dead swan and pierced it with three small holes, fashioning what archaeologists think was an early type of flute.
About this time, similar instruments were being carved from bones and tusks all around Eurasia.
The Geißenklösterle flute, which was excavated last century, is among those earliest unequivocal signs of music in Homo sapiens. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – music may well go back much further than that.
Skull reconstructions of our hominin ancestors suggest Homo erectus, who lived between 100,000 and two million years ago, may have been able to produce sounds with varied pitch and to control them.
By the time Homo heidelbergensis, our common ancestor with Neanderthals, emerged about 600,000 years ago, it seems likely they had the capacity to sing – though whether they actually did is unknowable.
Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in England and author of the book The Singing Neanderthals, suspects music is even more ancient and he has a stirring theory about how and when it evolved.
Mithen thinks that when our earliest hominin ancestors lived on the savanna landscapes of East Africa as long as four million years ago, they may have been bonded by song well before they could speak.
“We know that music is deeply embedded in our DNA, and it can only have got there through a long evolutionary past,” he says. “We know, by the size of the brain, the shape of the vocal tract and so on, that [these early hominin] vocal abilities are very unlikely to have involved language.”
The most famous proponent of the idea that music predates language is the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin – though he thought early musical abilities were selected as a function of sexual preference rather than group cohesion.
Mithen thinks vocalising together, a kind of proto-singing, may have bolstered crucial bonds among early hominins to help them survive serious threats. Early hominins had to live in large social groups, foraging for food, evading dangerous predators and navigating the ravages of disease, famine and disaster.
“Knowing who to trust and who not to trust, building those social bonds, was really important,” Mithen says.
Not everyone agrees music has been central to human evolution. In 1997, psychologist Steven Pinker famously referred to it as nothing more than “auditory cheesecake ”, meaning its evolution was as accidental as dessert, a psychological trick designed to stoke human pleasure circuits rather than perform any essential evolutionary function.
But Mithen has since built upon his central tenet. He co-wrote a 2020 paper with a group of psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists arguing music developed through gene-culture coevolution, a process in which cultural behaviours become so important to a group’s connectedness – and therefore its survival – that populations carrying genes that enable or enhance those behaviours thrive and pass on those genes.
In this sense, the stirring enjoyment of music could be considered a gift from our deep evolutionary past – an opportunity to connect, prised from the maw of natural selection.
The binding power of music, Mithen believes, is its ability to communicate not only information, but also emotion. “That’s the immense delight of music over language … it’s far more powerful,” he says. “It’s difficult to fake music, whereas you can fake what you say.”
After the music faded, the audience members filing out of the concert hall in Berlin in 2020 were asked to complete a final questionnaire. They were asked to describe, as best they could, intangibles such as how immersed they felt and whether a particular piece moved them, inspired them, made them melancholy or happy.
Based on these reports, the researchers were able to identify a link between feeling moved by a piece and those hallmarks of bodily synchrony – in particular, heart rate. In other words, the stronger the concertgoers’ emotions about a piece, the closer their hearts began to beat in time.
A wealth of research has shown physiological synchrony is heightened when people feel empathy or closeness, or when they have an intensely emotional experience. But Tschacher says bodies can also synchronise during arguments, which suggests synchrony is about not only positive feeling but feeling in general.
How long ago music truly began is still anyone’s guess, but the data gleaned in Berlin shows its rich history is deeply embedded in who we are now, in body and mind.
“When we hear it, we synchronise with it, because that’s what we’ve been doing throughout our past,” says Mithen. “It’s this amazing legacy in the modern-day world.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 17, 2024 as "Harmony of the spheres".
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