\n<\/p>\n
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American\u2019s Science Quickly, I\u2019m Rachel Feltman. We\u2019re wrapping up our week of summer reruns with one of my absolute favorite Science Quickly episodes. Back in October, SciAm associate news editor Allison Parshall took us on a fascinating sonic journey through the evolution of song. What turns speech into music, and why did humans start singing in the first place? A couple of 2024 studies offered a few clues.<\/p>\n
Allison, thanks for coming back on the pod. Always a pleasure to have you.<\/p>\n
Allison Parshall: Thanks for having me.<\/p>\n
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n
Feltman: So I hear we\u2019re going to talk about music today.<\/p>\n
Parshall: We are going to talk about music, my favorite topic; I think your favorite topic, too\u2014I mean, I don\u2019t want to put words in your mouth.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, I\u2019m a fan, yeah.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess I would love to know if you have a favorite folk song.<\/p>\n
Feltman: That is a really tough question because I love, you know, folk music and all of its weird modern subgenres. But if I had to pick one that jumps out that I\u2019m like, \u201cI know this is genuinely at least a version of an old folk song and not, like, something Bob Dylan wrote,\u201d would be \u201cIn the Pines,\u201d which I probably love mostly because I grew up kind of in the pines, in the [New Jersey] Pine Barrens, so feels, you know, appropriate.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Will you sing it for me?<\/p>\n
Feltman: Oh, don\u2019t make me sing, don\u2019t make me sing. Okay, yes.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yay, okay! I\u2019m sat.<\/p>\n
Feltman (singing): \u201cIn the pines, in the pines, where the sun don\u2019t even shine \/ I\u2019d shiver the whole night through \/ My girl, my girl, don\u2019t lie to me \/ Tell me, \u2018Where did you sleep last night?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s it; that\u2019s the song.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Clapping, yay! Oh, that was lovely. Honestly, I didn\u2019t know if I expected you to sing it.<\/p>\n
Feltman: If you ask me to sing, I\u2019m gonna sing.<\/p>\n
Parshall: I\u2019m very happy. Well, I will not be singing my favorite folk song\u2014I don\u2019t even know if it qualifies as a folk song\u2014but my grandma used to sing us a lullaby, and that lullaby was \u201cThe Battle Hymn of the Republic,\u201d like, \u201cMine eyes have seen the glory,\u201d or whatever. Yeah, so I think that\u2019s my favorite one, but I don\u2019t know if it qualifies.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: \u201cHandwriting,\u201d by Frank Jonsson]<\/p>\n
Parshall: But I\u2019m definitely not the only person, like, asking this question; I\u2019m asking it to you for a reason. There\u2019s this group of musicologists from around the world that have been basically going around to each other and asking each other the same thing: \u201cCan you sing me a traditional song from your culture?\u201d<\/p>\n
And they\u2019re in search of the answer to this really fundamental question about music, which is: \u201cWhy do humans across the whole world, in every culture, sing?\u201d This is something that musicologists and evolutionary biologists have been asking for centuries, like, at least as far back as Darwin. And this year we had two cool new cross-cultural studies that have helped us get a little bit closer to an answer. And actually they\u2019ve really changed how I think about the way that we humans communicate with one another, so I\u2019m really happy to tell you about them.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, why do we sing? What theories are we working with?<\/p>\n
Parshall: Well, okay, so there\u2019s generally two schools of thought. One is that singing is kind of an evolutionary accident\u2014like, we evolved to speak, which is genuinely evolutionarily helpful, and then singing kind of just came along as a bonus.<\/p>\n
Feltman: That is a pretty sweet bonus.<\/p>\n
Parshall: I agree. It\u2019s like we get the vocal apparatus to do the speaking, and then the singing comes along. And the people who buy into this theory like to say that music is nothing more than, quote, \u201cauditory cheesecake,\u201d which is a turn of phrase that has long irked Patrick Savage. He\u2019s a comparative musicologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
Patrick Savage: It\u2019s just like a drug or a cheesecake: It\u2019s nice to have, but you don\u2019t really need it. It could vanish from existence, and no one would care, you know?<\/p>\n
So that kind of pisses off a lot of us who care deeply about music and think it has deep value. But it\u2019s kind of a challenge\u2014like, can we show that there are any real, consistent differences between music and language?<\/p>\n
Parshall: Savage took this challenge very seriously because, if you couldn\u2019t tell, he belongs to the other school of thought about music\u2019s origins: that singing served some sort of evolutionary purpose in its own right, that it wasn\u2019t just a bonus. And if that were true, if music weren\u2019t just a by-product of language but played, like, an actual role in how we evolved, you\u2019d expect to see similarities across human societies in what singing is and how it functions in a way that is different from speech.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, that makes sense and also sounds like an extremely massive research project.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: \u201cNone of My Business,\u201d by Arthur Benson]<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, I don\u2019t envy them the job of having to go around and try to perfectly represent the globe, but they made a solid attempt. They got to work recruiting colleagues to submit samples of them singing a traditional tune of their choice. And through what I can only describe as a truly heroic act of coordination\u2014I can only imagine the e-mail threads\u2014he and a small team of collaborators received data from 75 total participants from 55 language backgrounds and all six populated continents.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Wow.<\/p>\n
Parshall: So each participant submitted four recordings: one of them singing the traditional tune, another one where they play it on an instrument, another one where they speak the lyrics and another one where they speak naturally\u2014just basically giving a natural language sample of them describing the song that they picked. And Savage himself picked the tune that you might recognize called \u201cScarborough Fair.\u201d Let me play that for you.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: Patrick Savage sings \u201cScarborough Fair\u201d]<\/p>\n
Feltman: It\u2019s a classic choice\u2014can\u2019t knock it.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, and I\u2019m not immune to a little \u201cScarborough Fair.\u201d There were also more upbeat tunes that some of the English-speaking contributors submitted.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: Tecumseh Fitch sings \u201cRovin\u2019 Gambler\u201d]<\/p>\n
Parshall: It makes me want to slap my knee and, like, play a fiddle. But that one was from Tecumseh Fitch. He\u2019s an American biologist currently at the University of Vienna.<\/p>\n
And this next one that I picked to show you comes from Marin Naruse of the Amami Islands off southern Japan. She\u2019s actually a professional singer and cultural ambassador for the region.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: Marin Naruse sings \u201cAsabanabushi\u201d]<\/p>\n
Parshall: That vocal-flipping technique I just thought was so cool. And I was also totally taken by this next one from Neddiel Elcie Mu\u00f1oz Millalonco. She\u2019s an Indigenous researcher and traditional singer from Chilo\u00e9 Island in Chile, and here she is singing a traditional Huilliche song.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: Neddiel Elcie Mu\u00f1oz Millalonco sings \u201c\u00d1aumen pu llauken\u201d (\u201cJoy for the Gifts\u201d)]<\/p>\n
Parshall: So that\u2019s just a little taste of what this data is like. There\u2019s way more where that came from, and it\u2019s all publicly available too, so you can check it out yourself. But the researchers after this, when they got the samples, got to work analyzing it. So hats off to Yuto Ozaki of Keio University in Japan. He\u2019s the lead author of the study, and to hear Pat Savage tell it, he spent, like, months just processing these audio files full time.<\/p>\n
So by comparing the singing samples to the speech samples and then comparing those differences with each other, the researchers found that songs tended to be different than speech in a few key ways: they were slower, they were higher-pitched, and they had more stable pitches than speech.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: \u201cThe Farmhouse,\u201d by Silver Maple]<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, I guess that makes sense.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, like, if you think about the way that maybe a lot of us think about the differences between singing and speech\u2014which, again, we can\u2019t fully trust because there\u2019s so many different ways to sing and speak around the world\u2014but it generally takes more time to sing a lyric than to speak it because we\u2019re lingering on each note for longer. And because we\u2019re lingering that means we\u2019re able to settle on specific pitches, like, instead of\u2014where I\u2019m speaking, I have this kind of low rumble that settles for less time on any specific pitch. I could also go dooo, and that is, for the most part, like, one specific pitch. It\u2019s less upsy and downsy. And then, also, we generally sing with higher pitches than we speak.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, why is that?<\/p>\n
Parshall: Maybe because when we speak we\u2019re kind of in this narrow, comfortable window toward the bottom of our vocal range. Like, right now, the way I\u2019m speaking, I could go a little bit lower, but I couldn\u2019t go very much lower, whereas if I\u2019m singing, I can go, like, octaves higher, probably, than the way I\u2019m speaking right now.<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s partly just the way that we\u2019re built, but singing opens up that upper range to us\u2014like, you know, the mi mi mi mi mi mi mi of it all. So these differences where we\u2019re hearing, you know, slower speeds, higher pitches, those are all interesting, but they feel kind of intuitive, and I didn\u2019t have a great way to understand what they were telling me kind of as a whole until I learned about this next study that I\u2019m going to tell you about.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Ooh, so what did they find?<\/p>\n
Parshall: So this one actually had more of a neuroscience focus, whereas the other one was a little bit more anthropological. This one was conducted by Robert Zatorre of McGill University in Montr\u00e9al and his colleagues. His team has been asking basically the same question as Savage\u2019s team but in a different way. So that\u2019s: Can we find commonalities in how cultures around the world speak versus how they sing?<\/p>\n
Robert Zatorre: Do they have some kind of basic mechanism that all humans share? Or is it rather that they\u2019re purely cultural sort of artifacts\u2014each culture has a way of speaking and a way of producing music, and there\u2019s really nothing in common between them? As a neuroscientist, what interests me in particular is whether there are brain mechanisms in common.<\/p>\n
Parshall: And Zatorre wasn\u2019t going into this from scratch. His own research and research of others had shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain might be involved differently in speaking versus singing.<\/p>\n
Zatorre: An oversimplified version would be to say that speech depends on mechanisms in the left hemisphere of the brain, and music depends more on mechanisms in the right hemisphere of the brain. But I say that\u2019s oversimplified because it wouldn\u2019t really be correct to say that.<\/p>\n
Parshall: So what is correct, though, according to Zatorre, is that there are certain acoustic qualities common in speech that are parsed on the left side of our brain and other acoustic qualities common in singing that are parsed on the right side.<\/p>\n
Feltman: So pretty much all I know about left versus right brain is all the debunked stuff about being, like, left-brained or right-brained as a personality type. So could you unpack the actual neuroscience here a little bit?<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, the whole, like, \u201cOh, I\u2019m left-brained. Oh, I\u2019m right-brained,\u201d that\u2019s mostly been debunked. But it\u2019s true that parts of the two sides of the brain do specialize in totally different things sometimes, and here\u2019s what that means for processing sound.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: \u201cLet There Be Rain,\u201d by Silver Maple]<\/p>\n
Parshall: Speech contains a lot of time-based, or temporal, information, meaning that the signal of what you hear, even as I\u2019m talking now, is changing from, like, millisecond to millisecond and, importantly, that those changes are meaningful. Like, each letter or phoneme that I\u2019m pronouncing goes by super quickly, but if I swapped one for the other\u2014like said \u201cbat\u201d instead of \u201ccat\u201d\u2014that would totally change the meaning, and that happens super quick. So those tiny time frames really matter when we\u2019re talking about speech, and that kind of quick-changing information is processed more on the left side of the brain.<\/p>\n
Singing, on the other hand, contains a lot of spectral information, which is processed more on the right side of the brain. So when I say \u201cspectral,\u201d I\u2019m referring to the spectrum of sound waves from super low pitch to, like, super high. Those aren\u2019t at all encompassing of the spectrum.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, that was the whole spectrum of sound.<\/p>\n
Parshall: I can go way lower than\u2014yeah, it goes way lower than what you think you\u2019re hearing and way higher than what you think you\u2019re hearing. But that information of that spectrum, it kind of contains the \u201ccolor,\u201d or the timbre, that allows you to distinguish between, for example, a saxophone and a clarinet or even, you know, your voice and my voice if you were listening.<\/p>\n
You can really hear this difference in some audio samples that Zatorre sent over from his studies. So basically, for one of these studies, they hired a soprano to sing some melodies and then used computer algorithms to mess with the quality of her voice.<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s the original audio.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: Audio of singing from a study by Zatorre and his colleagues: \u201cI think she has a soft and lovely voice.\u201d]<\/p>\n
Parshall: Then they digitally altered the recordings to degrade that temporal, or timing, information. That\u2019s kind of like the musical equivalent of slurring your speech or the audio equivalent of making an image blurry. They basically make all of those time cues that are so important for speech blur into each other.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: Same audio from the study with temporal degradation]<\/p>\n
Feltman: Ooh, freaky.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, it\u2019s, like, delightfully alien, I would say. You\u2019ll notice that you actually can\u2019t hear the lyrics, but you can still kind of hear the melody, right? You could probably distinguish it from another melody, and that\u2019s not the case when you do something different and instead of the temporal information, you degrade the spectral information\u2014that\u2019s the sound\u2019s color.<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s what it sounds like when they take out all that spectral information.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: Same audio from the study with spectral degradation]<\/p>\n
Feltman: Whoa.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, like, the only thing I can compare it to are, like, the Daleks from Doctor Who.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Totally, yeah.<\/p>\n
Parshall: I love it, and I hate it.<\/p>\n
So in this one you can hear the lyrics, but you can\u2019t hear the melody at all. So it\u2019s kind of the inverse. And you can hear that both of these dimensions of sound\u2014the temporal and the spectral\u2014are really important for both song and speech. Like, you would not want to listen to my voice for very long if I sounded like a Dalek. But generally speech relies more on that temporal information, and song relies more on the spectral information.<\/p>\n
Feltman: And this is true across different cultures, too?<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, so in a study published this summer, Zatorre\u2019s team found that this distinction holds true across 21 cultures, and they surveyed urban, rural and smaller-scale societies from around the world. And despite how different some of these languages and singing traditions are from each other, it held true that songs had more spectral information and speech had more temporal information overall.<\/p>\n
And so, since we can link these differences to different methods of processing in the brain, there\u2019s actually a potential biological mechanism in humans that separates music from speech.<\/p>\n
Zatorre: So the story we\u2019re trying to tell is that we have two communication systems that are kind of parallel: one is speaking; [the] other is music. And our brains have two separate specializations: one for music, one for speech. But it\u2019s not for music or for speech per se; it\u2019s for the acoustics that are most relevant for speech versus the acoustics that are most relevant for music.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, and it kind of makes sense to me that we\u2019d have these two parallel communication systems because they basically allow us two separate channels to convey totally different types of information. And, like, imagine how long this podcast would be if I sang everything instead of speaking it. And then imagine that I couldn\u2019t incorporate language at all, like, via lyrics, and I just had to do it with notes. That\u2019s just impossible\u2014unless we came up with some elaborate code. But then also imagine trying to sit here and explain to me your favorite song in words and all the feelings it brings up for you and why you love it. Like, could you do that?<\/p>\n
Feltman: Probably not. It would be really hard.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Probably not. It\u2019s conveying\u2014there\u2019s, like, something extra that you\u2019re conveying with song that just resists being conveyed via speech.<\/p>\n
So all that to say, \u201cauditory cheesecake,\u201d quote, unquote\u2014music as this little accidental cherry on top of language\u2014that doesn\u2019t seem to be the right way of thinking about why we sing. Here\u2019s Savage again.<\/p>\n
Savage: It suggests that it\u2019s not just a by-product\u2014like, there\u2019s something that is causing them to be consistently different in all these different cultures. Like, they\u2019re kind of functionally specialized for something. But what that something is is very speculative.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: \u201cThose Rainy Days,\u201d by Elm Lake]<\/p>\n
Parshall: That speculative X factor that he\u2019s talking about, that reason why we evolved to sing, if you had to come up with a theory, Rachel, what would it be?<\/p>\n
Feltman: I mean, when I think about reasons to sing that I, like, can\u2019t imagine humanity just not doing, I don\u2019t know\u2014I picture people soothing babies; people celebrating with each other; people, like, engaging in spiritual practice; like, standing outside a crush\u2019s window with a boom box. Singing is a thing we do to get each other\u2019s attention and share an emotional experience.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, I think that sharing feels really important, and I feel like I have a similar intuition. And that\u2019s basically what Savage thinks, too: that music has played some sort of social role. So that could be really wholesome, like the boom box or us bonding together, singing songs around a campfire. Or\u2014I mean, it could be less wholesome. It could be, like, us singing war songs before we do battle with our enemies.<\/p>\n
This is one of those evolutionary hypotheses, as many of them are, that it\u2019s kind of impossible to fully prove or disprove. It\u2019s really hard to get evidence that would be able to say, \u201cOh, we sing because it, you know, bonds us closer together.\u201d But it\u2019s very compelling.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah. So just to recap: we know that we have these two very different ways, from a neuroscience perspective, of conveying information. We\u2019ve got this, you know, melodic musical, and then we\u2019ve got this, like, very straightforward speech. And sure, we can\u2019t go back in a time machine and ask, you know, our distant ancestors, \u201cWhy\u2019re you singing? Why\u2019re you doing that?\u201d So what\u2019s next? How do we move this research forward?<\/p>\n
Parshall: It can be a little tricky, obviously, to come up with specific proof, but one of Savage\u2019s co-authors is hoping to find some clues in an upcoming experiment.<\/p>\n
So her name is Suzanne Purdy, and she\u2019s a psychologist also at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. And she\u2019s involved with something called the CeleBRation Choir. And this choir is super cool because it\u2019s made up of people [with communication difficulties, including people] who have what\u2019s called aphasia, so their ability to speak has been impacted by events like a stroke or like Parkinson\u2019s. But one of the very interesting things about aphasia is, oftentimes, people\u2019s ability to sing remains intact. So that might be because it is relying on different parts of the brain\u2014you know, more varied parts of the brain\u2014than speech does.<\/p>\n
Suzanne Purdy: When being with the CeleBRation Choir, with people struggling to communicate verbally, but then hearing them sing, [it\u2019s] so beautiful and amazing. And our research has shown how it\u2019s therapeutic in terms of feeling connected and valuable and able to be in a room and impress people with your singing, even when something terrible has happened in your life.<\/p>\n
Parshall: So I actually have a recording to share with you of the choir because I think it\u2019s super cool.<\/p>\n
[CLIP: The CeleBRation Choir sings \u201cCelebration,\u201d by Ben Fernandez]<\/p>\n
Parshall: So partly inspired by her experiences with the CeleBRation Choir, Purdy and her team are currently developing an experiment where they test whether singing can actually make us feel more connected to each other. So they\u2019re going to bring in students and have them sing together and then compare that to the experiences of students who have just talked together in a group. And then they\u2019ll measure their feelings of connectedness to each other. And they\u2019re planning to actually do this cross-culturally, too. So they\u2019re going to do this for groups of Māori students, Māori being the Indigenous people of New Zealand, and then students of European descent to see if there are any cultural differences in the impact of singing together.<\/p>\n
Purdy: It\u2019s the kind of thing that, you know, companies do with team-building exercises. They don\u2019t usually get people to sing, do they? But they do get people to problem-solve or to talk together. So this\u2014part of this next phase is: Can you achieve the same level of social cohesion through just coming together with a shared purpose without singing? Or does the singing add a special quality, and is that more effective?<\/p>\n
Parshall: Okay, I can\u2019t tell if the idea of a company team-building choir sounds fun or like the worst idea ever, but I do have a feeling that it would be kind of effective.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, I mean, I guess it\u2019s not so different from a karaoke night. And, you know, what brings people together more than a karaoke night?<\/p>\n
Parshall: That\u2019s a good point. Why did I not think of karaoke night? Okay, we\u2019re gonna have to go to our boss with this one. I think it could be really fun.<\/p>\n
It is just still a hypothesis whether music really did evolve\u2014or singing, specifically, really did evolve to bond us together. Like, again, this is not something we have necessarily a lot of proof for. And even if this study that Purdy is developing comes up and shows, you know, these groups of students did feel more bonded together when they sang versus when they spoke, that\u2019s still only just, like, a little bit of clues and proof.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Right, that could just show that we gained this incredible benefit from singing over time. It doesn\u2019t necessarily tell us that that\u2019s why it evolved.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Right. But then I\u2019m always fighting against myself\u2014the instinct to be like, \u201cOh, but it\u2019s true,\u201d because it feels true, right?<\/p>\n
Feltman: It does feel true.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Like, based off of my personal experience and a lot of people around me, it feels like, you know, when you\u2019re in a concert and you look around and you feel, like, the oneness of the world when you\u2019re all singing together in this packed stadium, music, regardless of what science shows, it does have these effects on us personally.<\/p>\n
Feltman: Yeah, and we can definitely get a better understanding of why it\u2019s so important.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Yeah, like, regardless of how we got here, regardless of how we evolved, we can still look at the impact it has on us now.<\/p>\n
Feltman: It\u2019s interesting, I\u2019ve been thinking this whole time\u2014my sister does shape-note singing, which is this old musical notation style that was basically created so that people who were not otherwise musically literate could, like, all come and sing together in a group at, like, a moment’s notice. And it has, like, a big following these days, and people just get together and open these giant old books of, like, mostly Shaker songs and stuff. And I find the shape-note stuff very confusing. It\u2019s very confusing until you learn it, and then it\u2019s allegedly easier than reading other music.<\/p>\n
Feltman: But yeah, it\u2019s just amazing how connected people feel within, like, five minutes of sitting down together and singing together. We don\u2019t need researchers to tell us that that\u2019s a universal experience, but I think it\u2019s awesome that they\u2019re asking these questions to help us understand, you know, just why music is so important to us.<\/p>\n
Allison, thank you so much for coming in to chat about this and for sharing all of these lovely musical snippets. I think that was my favorite part.<\/p>\n
Parshall: Thank you so much for having me.<\/p>\n
Feltman: That\u2019s all for today\u2019s episode, and that\u2019s a wrap on our week of greatest hits. We\u2019ll be back next week with something new.<\/p>\n
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper and Jeff DelViscio. Today\u2019s episode was reported and co-hosted by Allison Parshall. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.<\/p>\n
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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