Moby Dick or Madonna, the music is the same!

AN ARTICLE by Josie Glausiuz in the August 2001 issue of the science magazine Discover asks the question``Does a mother's lullaby give an infant a better chance for survival?''Glausiuz talks about the research conducted by the psychologist Dr. Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto at Mississauga (itself a musical native Indian name) in Canada. Her study suggests that babies are``mesmerised''by the mother's lullaby, that lullabies sound much the same the world over, and that the mother's singing decreases stress hormones in her child's body. She also believes that human babies have an innate appreciation of music. How does she conclude so? She plays a little tune over and over - a sequence of notes arranged on the European major scale. The baby is indifferent at first, but when she hits an anomalous note, the one that does not belong in the scale, the baby looks up. Not that the baby is conditioned since birth (or even in the womb) to the Western scale; play an inherently musical, but non-familiar scale, the infant still picks out the wrong note. Trehaub thinks that there is a biological basis for the babies' abilities. Writing on this, Glausiuz asks``Music accompanies every human milestone, from baby-naming to marriage to memorials for the dead. It is found among every people on earth. Is it hard-wired into the brains or carried in our genes?"

The answer is not clear. There are no `music genes' identified in the human genome so far, and chances are there may not be any specific ones. Dr. Steven Pinker of M.I.T. feels that music is simply an``auditory cheese cake", a bonus that we got as an evolutionary advantage, piggy-backing on language. Drs. M. Vaneechoutte and John R.Skoyles argue the opposite, saying that musicality or singing capacity is the evolutionary origin of human language itself.

The ability to sing provided the physical apparatus and neural respirational control that is now used by speech. They contend that language emerged from the combination of (i) natural selection for increasingly better mental representation abilities during animal evolution, (ii) natural selection during recent human evolution for the human ability to sing, and (iii) finally memetic selection that reused these poorly evolved abilities to create language. In other words, music is the mother of language and speech.

Studying ancient skulls and estimated brain sizes, the anthropologists Leslie Aiello and Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University have suggested that the basis of language capacity appeared in Homo genus around 250,000 years ago, but that the general character of language, and its symbolic features evolved at a later (unspecified) date. But then did Homo erectus or early Neanderthals have language or music? Reconstruction of their anatomy has suggested that they might have had restricted forms of language ability. Their vocal tract was capable of producing only a limited range of vowel sounds. But the Neanderthal could have said: ``The kemplexete ef speech depends en the kensenents, net en the vewels, as can be seen from kemprehensenbelete ef thes sentense".

If Vaneechoutte and Skoyles are right about music being the mother of language and speech, we ask whether Homo erectus or early Neanderthals had music. The answer is a surprising yes, at least for the latter. A broken flute, made of animal bone, discovered in Slovenia, dating anywhere between 43,000 and 82,000 years ago suggests that Neanderthals had music, and used seven notes of the octave that is universal today among humans. A set of six well-preserved bone flutes from China, dating back up to 90,000 years ago, are still playable and use the same octave scale! It appears that while there may be over 6000 languages, musical scale around the world has the same seven notes - and goes back to pre-Neanderthal times.

We can dig deeper by studying the effect of music on areas of the human brain. Neurophysiological experiments suggest that humans recognise several``dimensions''of music - namely pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, key, timbre, loudness and so on. Most of these are registered in the right hemisphere of the brain, some of them in the left- but music goes deeper than that, to the limbic system, which controls our emotions. Emotions generated there produce a number of physiological and hormonal responses.

Is this why music with a quick tempo in a major key elicits a happy feeling? Is this why Uttarang pradhan ragas (such as Bahar or Vasantha, which emphasize the upper four notes of the octave) are sprightly while Poorvang pradhan ragas (Marwa, Bhairav or Gowla, which use the lower tetrachord more) are sombre and introspective? Or why a slow repetitive drone is common for lullabies world over? Or why we are moved by the voice of M S Subbulakshmi, and comforted by D K Pattammal or Hirabai Barodekar?

The limbic system is an ancient part of our brain, one that we share with much of the animal kingdom. This has made Dr. Patrica Gray, Head of the Biomusic Program at the US National Academy of Sciences, suggest that music came into this world long before humans did. Analysis of the music that whales make, and comparing it with our music, has led her to say this:``the fact that whale and human music have so much in common, even though our evolutionary paths have not crossed for 60 million years, suggests that music may predate humans. Rather than being the inventors of music, we are latecomers to the musical scene".

Yes, whales have music. They create tunes and do so using the same notes of the octave that we do, play with musical phrases (Taan patterns, mukdas or brigas) and themes out of several phrases before singing the next one. Whales can sing over a range of seven octaves, but they sing in key, spreading adjacent notes no further apart than a scale.

And they follow the ABA form, in which a theme is presented, elaborated on, and revisited in a slightly modified form. Does that not remind us of the Asthayi, Antara form of Hindustani singing or the Pallavi, Anupallavi style of Karnatak music? Moby Dick the whale, Madonna the pop singer or MS Subbulakshmi the queen of classical music, the music is the same! To listen to a short musical dialogue between an electric guitarist and two whales, go on the web to

www.physics.helsinki.fi/whale/ intersp/

D. Balasubramanian

L. V. Prasad Eye Institute

Hyderabad 500 034

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Science & Tech
Previous : Spin transistor
Next     : High-yielding short-duration bush cowpea