Life in Silico

Music, like language, appears to be a human universal. I wonder if there’s even one culture in which music doesn’t play a role, or even a single individual who doesn’t like any kind of music at all. And while different cultures may evolve different kinds of music, they are all essentially recognizable as music to any human being. But while everybody can appreciate music, not everybody can make it, and fewer still are really good at it. But even those geniuses who were made immortal by their music had no idea what music actually is.

This may sound strange, but really it is a question which should be a benchmark for cognitive studies, like memory, language, morality, intelligence and consciousness itself. Do you know how they work? Thought so.

Back to music - why should a sequence of sound and silence conforming to some seemingly arbitrary set of rules by itself evoke emotion in a way no other auditory experience (well, save speech) can? What’s so magical about 440 Hz? Something in our heads is tuned for music, just like something is tuned for language and walking upright. But why?

Before we resort to blissful ignorance, it should be pointed out that no one knows what science doesn’t know, and neither did I, until I made a few searches. I have not covered even a tiny fraction of literature on the subject, but so far it appears that there is some serious research and attempts at an answer, but no ultimate theory of music that would make you rich (an ultimate theory would be predictive to the point of having a music composition algorithm).

On the evolutionary front, asking a biologist led me to a paper, which proposes sexual selection as the mechanism behind the evolution of music (this is not a new approach - Darwin himself suggested this). It sounds only partially plausible (at least to me), and as the author notes himself, empirical data on the subject is very scarce.

On the cognitive front, there is the question of how music is received in the brain, and what mechanisms facilitated it in the first place for natural selection to act upon. I now have two books in my wishlist on this subject - This is Your Brain on Music and What is Music?: Solving a Scientific Mystery. It is the second book I find most interesting, for it offers a (nearly) comprehensive theory of music, on which I will let the author himself elaborate.

So no, you won’t get an actual answer from me, at least not yet. I reported only the preliminary findings of a few hours’ worth of search. But we live in interesting times indeed, when such questions can and are being taken seriously. I wonder what the answer is.