Music and the Mind: Born to Jam or Learned to?
Music is a result of human biology. It is believed to have developed around the same time as language by anthropologists and musicologists alike. However, did humans evolve to create and enjoy music or is it solely cultural? Only recently has this been a point of controversy in the scientific community.
Between 0.52% and 4% (one source claims 1.5%) based on the last two sources and extra data) of people are affected by congenital amusia, or tone deafness experienced from birth. Around the same amount of music students exhibit the opposite, perfect or absolute pitch.
To name pitches we use western music theory, a system we use to understand music as well as a tool to compose it. But what even is music?
Music is vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony. While definition encapsulates what music is at its very simplest, it is not very specific. Melody and harmony do not mean much to the average music listener. To define a couple of terms: Melody is the leading voice of a piece that often has repeating themes, and harmony is the combination of notes played simultaneously to create chords. To communicate all this, usually there is sheet music (A.K.A.: a score, or chart) that composers use to communicate certain things to performers.
Music theory was developed to lay rules and give guidelines to music, but most importantly, to communicate music to performers. A little known fact to non-musicians is that there are dialects and separate standards for different kinds of music. For example, jazz music often has notation indicating what chord is being played each bar, or whenever there is a new chord. Classical does not do this unless it is written for a guitar or a piece meant to be improvised over. A more extreme example is that between western and eastern music. Indian music uses scales that do not exist in western music called raga (RAH-guh). While it does center around a set of pitches, each pitch in the scale is preceded by a set of notes before a singer lands on the desired pitch.
Music, like language, has dialects that would be unplayable to some who have grown to know one and not the other. You could even compare genres to accents. These parallels are no surprise, given that music and language comprehension develop alongside each other in childhood, and in the history of our evolution. An article by Nobuo Masataka suggests that a precursor to music was actually a version of a language, akin to a birdsong, as we had “vocal flexibility of other animals such as songbirds“.
Music comprehension is a byproduct of language comprehension.
Our ability to understand music is directly correlated with language, something humans evolved to have an affinity for, and the reason for civilization. Therefore predating society and furthermore, culture. Its reason for existence can not be something that was created after it.
Music can be used to communicate and there are entire systems created to communicate it, however it can exist without communicating at all. This is another distinction between a biological reason for music’s existence, rather than cultural: it can exist without culture. There is a group of people who can not appreciate music though, and it is not their fault.
Tone deafness affects only a small percent of the population. Simply put, it is the inability to match pitch. People affected by tone deafness can tell if a pitch is higher or lower, but can not match it themselves when using their voice or an instrument. They also have no problem with rhythm, as rhythm is a pattern in time, something our brain is always looking for – for a multitude of reasons beyond music.
A study done by Isabelle Peretz, Stèphanie Cummings and Marie-Pierre Dubè found that congenital amusia has a hereditary component. However “congenital” only accounts for those affected at birth. Like speech impediments, amusia can affect an adult who has experienced brain damage. The case on the other end of the spectrum is perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a pitch without having heard a reference note before it. Relative pitch is able to distinguish the intervals between notes, often exhibited by musicians through training. Although, it is about as rare to not be able to recognize pitch at all as it is to be able to have a perfect affinity for recognizing pitch as a music student (4%). Perfect pitch uses music theory to identify these pitches, and though music theory is a cultural phenomenon, identification using the system is like identifying an object using a word.
Peretz and her team discovered that their data allowed for “the mapping of genetic loci for congenital amusia”. This means that there is a chance that if someone was born without the ability to enjoy music, their next of kin may exhibit the same behaviors.
Chromesthesia, a form of perfect pitch in which colors are associated with pitch, and a form of synthesia, a perceptive disorder that causes the subject receiving sensory or cognitive stimuli to involuntarily experience another sensory or cognitive path as well. Synthesia is also hereditary.
The linguistic similarities, developmental habits and hereditary nature of music’s relationship with the mind show clearly that music can not only exist without the influence of culture, but predates it. While it can be argued that its practice today and by this generation categorized music as merely a piece of culture that captures events and trends in our time, the deep roots it has in our minds are there from birth.
References
Masataka, N. (2007). Music, evolution and language. Developmental Science, 10(1), 35–39.
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Counterintuitive Fall 2022 
You wander through three paragraphs of speculation to land on a personalized and quite ambiguous definition of music only to abandon it as if it didn’t matter in the first place, in order to embark on a discussion of pitch.
You say music is sound having rhythm, melody or harmony.
By that definition a ticking clock is making music along with the crashing of waves and, if we attend to it, the sound of traffic passing on the highway.
What that has to do with digital sounds, I don’t know.
Then you discount the actual music animals make by arbitrarily defining music a second time as a uniquely human practice.
You’ve refined your original “rhythm, melody, harmony” to mean “deliberate combinations of sounds produced by humans, not to communicate (except to evoke, I suppose, emotions) but for entertainment.”
Music is a human art form that uses rhythm, melody and/or harmony.
That took awhile. Why did we spend that time? It could be your first sentence.
You take a new tack.
There is a group of people who can not appreciate this art though, and it is not their fault. They’re tone deaf, congenitally or because of a brain injury.
Of course, they’re not rhythm deaf, so they might still have an awareness of some of the values of a composition. Also, their inability to REPRODUCE notes that match those presented (the classic definition of tone deaf) does not necessarily mean they don’t HEAR differences in pitch in others, nor that they would fail to recognize musicians who were failing to harmonize well. Or does it? I’d love to know. Is that part of the definition?
Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a pitch without having heard a reference note before it.
—This we understand because we know notes are “named” by letters in western musical tradition. You mean a singer, say, could sing an A on command.
—Oh. I see. You go on to describe just that.
—Our understanding of relative pitch follows.
—What we don’t know, but it intrigues us, and you don’t help us yet, is what it means to “not be able to recognize pitch at all,” which sounds as if you mean, two random notes played on any instrument would not sound at all different.
Are there such people? You should write a paper about them. Start that project in your first paragraph!
Vagueness again. “The inability to enjoy music” is not identical, surely, with the inability to reproduce notes. Which are you saying? Amusiacs hear an entire symphony as rhythm only? Is note-blindness akin to color-blindness? Blind to one aspect of a composition but not to all?
New topic. We appreciate (recognize, categorize, distinguish) music through cultural training. Then something about chord progressions and speech patterns.
“Music is a result of human biology and a side effect of language comprehension.” A fascinating claim not remotely demonstrated by your 1000 words.
I’m intrigued by many of the possible hypotheses you gesture toward here, Silly, but disappointed that you don’t develop any of them.
Provisionally graded. This post is always eligible for a Regrade following substantial Revision, but time is running out.
About tone deafness:
Tone deaf people do not realize they are singing the melodies in the wrong. They can perceive changes in pitch, but are unable to match them. While searching for the answer to how tone deaf people perceive pitch, I stumbled upon a Quora post to which a tone deaf person responded. Their tone deafness was caused by a bone growing wrong. Her voice travelled through her own head differently than her voice sounded through air. Our bodies our built so that this is not a problem. I didn’t even know that was something that could happen. Another contributing factor to the production of wrong pitches is bad pitch memory.
You’ve made changes, but you’re not engaging in a feedback conversation. I hope grades are not important to you.
—I’m going to break your first paragraph wherever a new main idea is introduced.
Music is believed to have developed around the same time as language by anthropologists and musicologists alike. But did humans evolve to create and enjoy music or is it solely cultural? Only recently has this been a point of controversy in the scientific community.
There are about 4 percent of people who are affected by congenital amusia, or tone deafness experienced from birth (Peretz, Cummings, Dubè, 2007). Around the same amount of music students exhibit the opposite, perfect or absolute pitch. It is an affinity for identifying pitches (Witynski).
To name pitches we use western music theory, a system we use to understand music as well as a tool to compose it. But what even is music?
That’s three paragraphs, not one.
And we don’t use parenthetical citation tags in this class, as I have noted many times.
I took another pass over the essay. Maybe I should have properly documented what I changed, but here’s what I can remember:
-Chopped the intro as suggested
-Explained the Wurlitzer incident and its relevance
– Cut down the “Music is a uniquely human practice” paragraph
-Explained amusia and how affected people perceive melodies.
-Took out the parenthetical citations and embedded them
-Deleted the “Western music theory” paragraph, but it will be back and make sense when it is
For now I am putting this on pause but will come back to it after finishing the Rebuttal. Currently my goal is to rewrite the end of the essay and tie everything together and explain their relevance.
The Webster definition is incredibly broad, defining it as “vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony”. This definition is tricky. Non-musical sounds – such as ambience, talking, noise and all sorts of samples – are used in musical recordings and even live performances. Is it their involvement in music that makes them “musical”? For example the sound of the Wurlitzer leg falling in the song Skymall by Vulfpeck. Regardless, music is created by humans.
—Why mention the Webster definition at all if only to dispute it? Mechanical sounds not produced by humans would be musical by Webster’s definition. The sound of the Wurlitzer leg is conceivably a purely mechanical accident. What makes you say the ARE musical? And then say they’re not, since they’re not “created by humans.”
Originally I used a different definition and that was the opening line of the paragraph. It will be changed.
For Skymall, the recording was released onto musical platforms after being mixed, a process that takes hours, sometimes weeks. There was also the option to re-record the song. Its involvement in the final product is, though originally accidental, intentional because it is the recording they mixed, mastered and decided to publish, therefore created by humans.
Recording and mixing are often something people forget about the music they listen to. That’s the goal.
Music is a uniquely human practice. It can be used to communicate and there are entire systems created to communicate it, however it can exist without communicating at all. Music’s ambiguous and often intentionally interpretable nature makes it less of a medium to tell someone something, but a medium experienced to invoke an emotion. Still, since music can exist without communicating anything at all, it remains art and not just communication. There is a group of people who can not appreciate this art though, and it is not their fault.
—Could be reduced to a single sentence.
This paragraph was destroyed and put back together at least 3 times. I think I fixed it. Once I have gone through all of the comments and amended my paper I will post the updated version.
Tone deafness affects only a small percent of the population. A study done by Isabelle Peretz, Stèphanie Cummings and Marie-Pierre Dubè discover that congenital amusia has a hereditary component and that musical time is not affected by it. However “congenital” only accounts for those affected at birth. Like speech impediments, amusia can affect an adult who has experienced brain damage. The case on the other end of the spectrum is perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a pitch without having heard a reference not before it. Relative pitch is able to identify pitches relative to others. For example, someone played a note on a piano, say a G, someone with perfect pitch would be able to name that note just by hearing it. Someone with relative pitch would have to hear a reference note and know its name before identifying another. Relative pitch is fairly common and exhibited by most musicians, but to have perfect pitch is rare. In fact, it is just as rare to not be able to recognize pitch at all, as it is to be able to have a perfect affinity for recognizing pitch as a music student. Perfect pitch uses western music theory to identify these pitches, a cultural phenomenon.
Peretez and her team discovered that their data allowed for “the mapping of genetic loci for congenital amusia”. This means that there is a chance that if someone was born without the ability to enjoy music, their next of kin may exhibit the same behaviors.
—These three paragraphs belong to an essay quite different from the essay your first paragraphs promised.
What is the argument value of distinguishing music from music theory—one biological and the other not—in your essay?
My conclusion changed since writing this essay. Originally I said it was both biological and cultural, but I can prove that biology is the reason for existing in the first place. The essay needs to be almost entirely rewritten unfortunately.
Thanks for responding, Silly. I look forward to anything you offer because I trust in your thoughtfulness and intelligence.