Section 1 (People Matching) - Exercise 22

Reference

• While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery—mere ‘auditory cheesecake’, as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.
• Musicologists have long emphasised that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities.
• Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.
• Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular—which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage.
• Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott argued that animals don’t create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory chimpanzees can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system.
• No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub.

Questions