Paul's Posts — 12 March 2012
By Paul McGowan
There’s increasing evidence that rhymes, poems, meter and cadence in stories were created not because they are beautiful but because they helped us keep the words straight before the advent of written language. It is how our civilization kept important lessons, histories, messages and stories intact without writing anything down.
Imagine any rhyming story or poem you know and repeat it so the cadence or the rhyme doesn’t work – you know it’s wrong instantly because you’re memorizing a pattern that makes it all fit. This is the first human programming exercise and it has stayed with us throughout time.
Did music evolve in the same way and for the same reason? Certainly you know instantly when a wrong note is hit – and what’s amazing about that is you’re able to identify a single error in a many thousand line piece of “code” that you probably didn’t may much attention to.
Imagine trying to memorize thousands of words and making sure each is 100% correct. Most of us cannot do this but nearly all of us can memorize complex musical passages, symphonies and songs and know instantly when the pattern or the coding is wrong.
See? And you thought it was simple.
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demeter
There is a bestseller book on this issue: “This is your brain on music” from Author Daniel J. Levitin.
Absolutely to read!
Terry Franklin
That is an excellent book. Another to consider is HARNESSED: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi.
Paul McGowan
Thanks for the reading suggestions!
Bassman23
Levitin’s next book, “The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature” is excellent as well.
Regarding your post, as a bass player for over 40 years, I had an interesting conversation with a piano player. He saw music as linear; I see music as geometric. We realized that our respective instruments “programmed” our awareness and appreciation of music. Music is linear, as it flows along a timeline. It is also geometric, as simultaneous harmonic notes have a “structure” that I can clearly see on a fretboard. Either way, it will always jump out when a note is out of place – whether in the dialect of a linear keyboard or geometric fretboard.
straylight
The Discovery channel recently ran a documentary on word-puzzle championships around the world. These are the puzzles of the same type published daily in the NYTimes. It was very interesting to learn that the very best champions are often musicians or programmers in their day jobs. The ability to arrange words into interlocking & ingenius patterns or the ability to ‘make sense’ of immense amounts of data input also parallels musical composition talent. The additional abilities of the human ear to discern and delineate extremely small changes in pitch makes the human machine perfectly designed to create really incredible musical arrangements.
Andy Stoneman
You know what, straylight, that’s really interesting! I cannot play anything (even for toffee!) but that makes complete sense. Thanks.