The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [117]
The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which half-human ancestors long ago aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their courtship and rivalry.
This is genuinely plausible. Song—speech rhythmically expressed pitched tones—is universal and obviously the simplest musical form. But there is an important feature instrumental music also shares with language, a feature that tends to go unnoticed. The language-recognition machinery of the human brain fundamentally distinguishes vowel sounds—pure, simple tones—from consonants, which are more complex, and combined with vowels create a gigantic realm of linguistic possibility. This enables us not only to distinguish human speech from other noises but to make countless subtle aural differentiations. Music exploits the ability to perceive such minute and subtle distinctions, only with the singing voice but in instrumental music as well. Musical pitches are the equivalent of vowels—“supervowels,” they have been called—that stand in systematic relation to each other: the fifth, the diatonic tuning, and so forth. The attack of an instrumental note, first tenth of a second or less, is picked up by the ear in the way spoken “play,” “bay,” “ray,” “stray,” “day,” and “stay” are minute, happening in the first milliseconds of the words. Anyone who has played digital editors or even magnetic tape may know that, in exactly way as removing the consonant, snipping off the attack of a note make it impossible to distinguish whether it is being played by or a violin or a clarinet.
If you add rhythm to the quasi-speech of vocally or instrumentally produced pitched sounds, and load tonal harmony and melody onto that, you have music as we know it. Music is a peculiar art form in a few respects that are worth paying attention to. First, it tolerates repetition a way no other art does. The music psychologist David Huron has studied work from fifty widely scattered musical cultures across the globe—Navajo war dance, Gypsy, flamenco, Punjabi pop, Estonian bagpipe, and so on—and found that on average “94% of all musical passages longer than a few seconds in duration are repeated at some point in the work.” With many Eu ropean classical works that figure would be higher, with repetitions embedded in repetitions. Not only is repetition intrinsic musical composition and expression, musical works bear wholesale repetition in a way found in no other art. I must have heard the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies hundreds of times, and yet could with plea sure listen to night to another performance of these works. No other art encourages repetitive experience quite so much: poetry does some extent, but reading a novel or story hundreds of times is unlikely. Drama allows repetitions, but our willingness to see Shakespeare performed over and over depends on new productions and actors. Even among the most devoted movie fans, there is no appetite for repetition film experience that matches the eagerness to hear the same music recordings over again, from Haydn to Leadbelly, Sarah Vaughan Glenn Gould.
As mentioned earlier, most of us walk the streets with thousands fragments and whole pieces of music available in memory. We can hear initial notes of pieces and often sing through them completely minds. Pieces of music can get “stuck in your head,” repeating over over again to the point of annoyance, and in a manner that is seldom experienced with scraps of poetry, prose, or visual sense. Memory tasks spontaneous accessibility of music, its clear association with sure, and our memory for it should strike us as uncanny.
Memory and repetition make it