How Music Evolved: From Prehistoric Rhythm to Digital Futures

Name: How music rewires and impacts the human body | Michael Spitzer: Full Interview
Uploaded: 2026-05-11T15:15:26+00:00
Duration: 58 min 21 s
Channel: Big Think
Description: Summary and key takeaways on How Music Evolved: From Prehistoric Rhythm to Digital Futures, covering The Prehistory of Music Music predates Homo sapiens by at

Big Think

May 11, 2026

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58 min video

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Music predates Homo sapiens by at least a million years. Because organic materials decompose, the oldest surviving evidence consists of lithic instruments such as rock gongs and resonant stalactites, which survive through non‑biodegradation. Bone flutes recovered from South‑German caves, dated to roughly 40,000 years ago, mark a later milestone.

Four million years ago, hominins adopted bipedalism. The rhythmic pattern of walking—symmetrical, regular, and embodied in the body—provided the first template for musical meter. The simultaneous evolution of a lowered larynx and an enlarged hyoid bone later enabled the articulation of sustained song.

Music as Memory and Ritual

Music functions as a “congealed muscle memory,” preserving origin stories and ancestral communication. The Kuli tribe of Papua New Guinea, for example, encodes its creation myths in song. Natural resonators such as caves amplified ritual sound, while hearths offered a stable focal point for cyclical, communal music‑making.

Cross‑Cultural Perspectives

Hunter‑gatherer societies treat music as an integral part of daily life, whereas sedentary farming cultures often embed music within formalized rituals. Environmental pressures shape musical function; Inuit groups, for instance, have used song to mediate conflict and reinforce social cohesion.

The Impact of Notation

Staff notation, invented around 1020 AD by Guido of Arezzo, allowed the medieval church to standardize music across vast territories. By “freezing” music on paper, notation turned an activity into an object, creating a divide between composer and performer. During colonial expansion, notation became a tool of globalization, exemplified by the teaching of Spanish polyphony to the Aztecs.

Neurological Foundations

The brain processes music in layered stages, from the brain stem up to the neocortex. Mirror neurons enable listeners to experience emotional contagion, feeling the motion encoded in sound. Musical training rewires the brain, shifting processing from the right hemisphere toward the left‑temporal language areas. Extreme musical moments can trigger “chills,” a physiological response that mirrors the brain’s handling of safe fear. Clinically, music can lower cortisol and aid mental health, though prescriptions must consider individual conditions.

Mechanisms & Explanations

Fractal Theory of Music – Music mirrors the cosmos because both share self‑similar, fractal structures found in natural noise such as wind and water.
Emotional Contagion – Mirror neurons cause listeners to sympathetically mirror the emotions embedded in music, much like humans mirror yawns.
The “Chills” (Sublime) – Sudden, intense musical passages activate brain circuits that process “safe” danger, producing goosebumps.
Evolutionary Synthesis – Humans combined insect rhythm, bird melody, and ape gesturality into a uniquely human musical form.

The Future of Music

Technology is poised to make music more instrumentalized, with bespoke medical applications and sensory expansions beyond sound. Digital platforms are already reviving the participatory condition of music, allowing global collaboration and real‑time creation. Looking ahead, music may integrate taste, color, and other senses, reshaping the human experience of art.

Takeaways

Music predates Homo sapiens by at least a million years, with the earliest surviving evidence coming from lithic instruments that resist biodegradation.
Bipedal locomotion established a rhythmic foundation that later shaped musical meter, while the descended larynx and hyoid bone enabled vocal song.
Staff notation, invented around 1020 AD, transformed music from a participatory activity into an object, allowing churches and colonial powers to standardize and control musical practice.
Mirror neurons create emotional contagion, producing “chills” and rewiring the brain so that musical training shifts processing toward language‑related regions of the left temporal lobe.
Digital platforms are reviving participatory music‑making and point toward future expansions that integrate sound with other senses such as taste and color.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did bipedalism influence the development of musical rhythm?

Bipedalism introduced a regular, symmetrical gait that produced a steady beat; early humans could synchronize movement to this pulse, laying a neural and cultural groundwork for rhythmic patterns in music. This gait‑derived meter became a template for later musical structures.

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Full Transcript YouTube

I'm Michael Spitzer. I'm professor of
music at the University of Liverpool in
the United Kingdom. I've written a book
called The Musical Human: The History of
Life on Earth.
>> Chapter 1, the history of music.
>> People often write books in response to
reading other books. And when I read
Yuval Harari Sapiens, which blew my
mind, I thought, well, hold on. Music is
at least a million years older than
sapiens.
And most books about music do the usual
thing of which composer wrote what piece
at what time. And I wanted to get away
from that and see the bigger picture.
We're in a kind of moment of um thinking
of the the global of the universal and
music is absolutely universal. It also
transcends sapiens because animals have
music. birds and whales and other
creatures and ultimately the musical
human is a musical animal. It's almost
inconceivable to write a prehistory of
music because Edison invents the
phonograph and prior to that we have no
record of any sound. One of the problems
with instruments is that the materials
biodegrade. Um but looking as far back
as we can, what doesn't degrade um are
lithic instruments made of rocks such as
stallctites or the famous rock gongs in
Tanzania.
The absolute landmark are the bone
flutes discovered in the South German
caves
about 40,000 years old and they were
constructed from the bones of a griffin
vulture. But other than that we have to
wait until um the invention of ceramics
um on over which people stretched high
to create the first frame drums. But of
course skin and leather um biodegrades
and we have no evidence for exactly when
these were were made and even more so
for strings. So the first string
instruments harps and loots were created
after the invention of farming once
people farmed cows and created strings
from twisting the guts of of animals. So
we create harps and loots but again um
strings biodegrade. So we have to work
inferentially by mapping from what we do
know and looking at say um the
prehistory of anatomy
of the evolving technology of tools
reverse engineering from linguistics to
model language and observing
everyday life in across the world in
huntergatherer societies in different
environments. It's um as much about
piecing together a number of
disciplines. And here is here's an
example of an inferential argument.
About 1.5 million years ago, Homo Air,
one of our homminin ancestors, invents
what is called a bfacial axe. This is an
axe with two symmetrical faces. Now, the
the capacity to create symmetry in an
axe besp speaks um two things. um an
ability to create um a beautiful form, a
symmetry and an enjoyment of form for
aesthetic reasons. We can also borrow
from psychology to create an inference
that you can map from the domain of
tools to the domain of sound because um
mental capacity is crossodal.
So the uh ability to to create symmetry
is also found in sound and we call
symmetrical sound meter or regular
rhythm. So it's a fair argument that uh
given the evidence of a bfacial handax
homoastaster would have been able to tap
that axe in a symmetrical rhythm or
using musical meter.
When we talk about the origin of music,
um it's really um about assembling
elements of music which were synthesized
much further down the road. And one of
these elements was bipedalism.
That what marks um the first hominins
apart from um apes and our common
ancestor was getting up on our feet. 4.4
And 4 million years ago, an
oralopythesine called AI stood on her
legs and walked. And ever since then,
the rhythm of walking has stamped human
music. But much more than that, that pun
intended, that the first steps put us on
the path to forging links between the
brain and muscular exertion and sound.
And the homminins learn to to hear
footsteps as a pattern. And what
patterns give you is a sense of time.
You can predict what will happen next.
And um the idea of walking um also gives
humans a fascination with this metaphor
that music moves. And if you think about
it, music does not move. Uh music is
just sounds or tones floating through
the air. But we imagine that one note
moves to the other. And most of music,
be it a a symphony or a or or a a song,
um unfolds a journey. And this journey
takes us uh from one point to another in
in a in our minds. It's an imaginary
journey um a very long-distant echo from
uh the journey of our ancestors out of
Africa.
But um walking is the first step of a
whole uh uh cascade of evolutionary
adaptations and so many things evolve.
Our cranial um volume triples in size.
We become a lot smarter and with um our
increased brain size comes a capacity to
control our fingers to make links with
um the motor domains of our brain. they
become more dextrous and ultimately more
capable of crafting flutes and and
playing them. But standing up also um uh
gives gives us more space to breathe and
our um larynx descends through our vocal
tract. Our hyoid bone which supports our
tongue evolves so we can articulate what
we sing. As our um vocal tract um
learned how to produce um an infinitely
greater variety of sounds
um our capacity to make sounds exceeded
their function. If you compare us with
say the verd monkey, they can make four
kinds of calls and each call um uh warns
um other monkeys of a particular kind of
prey.
But when you can produce a thousand
kinds of sounds, there's an excess of
sounds. And this is where music starts
to become a possibility where you're
playing with sound. You're enjoying
sound for sound's sake, no longer having
a function. And at this point, I think
that human music steps away from animal
vocalization or animal calls.
One of the uh I think
profound messages which I discovered in
writing my book was that music is all
about memory and and history. When
somebody um two million years ago
teaches their son how to nap a rock,
their son remembers that. And tradition
is I call it um um congealed muscle
memory.
Um learning how to to do something is a
haptic. It's a meme, as Dawkins would
say. It's mimemetic. Not necessarily um
cognitive. Your muscles learn how to do
it. And then you get the bone flutes and
you have little parallel lines insized
on the flute which tell you where to
place your fingers. Indeed, the five
holes on those flutes tell you how to
play it. That's also a memory.
Um, most cultures across the planet um,
uh, see music as a way of explaining
um, where their music came from. Here's
an example. Um, the Kuli tribe of New
Guinea, Papua New Guinea, they believe
in their belief system that music comes
from the mooney bird, a kind of fruit
dove. And they believe that the birds
hovering above the forest canopy are
literally their ancestors speaking to
them.
And in imitating the call of the dove,
they're participating in the great
circle of life. They're singing back
their ancestors songs. And that is
recorded history.
in the west. An example of that is a
Beethoven symphony like the heroica
which rehearses a memory of what it's
like to live under Napoleon and fight a
battle in 19th century France. So all
music uh be it in the west or across the
planet or going back millions of years
ago is very intimately connected to
memory and to history. When we
discovered the first bone flute, some of
the shards of the broken flute were
discovered in points of maximum
resonance within the caves, suggesting a
natural um marriage, if you'd like,
between music and sound and acoustics
and architecture. And that also obtains
um you know, in the west it's no
accident that a church is essentially a
cave to worship a god. and the natural
affinity between plain chant, singing in
in church and the acoustics, the
resonance of that. So music goes
together with architecture.
In the caves, it's very likely that they
were reserved for um rituals. Nobody
wants to live in a cave. Um, so these
were dark and and and um possibly
dangerous places full of mystery,
portals to the divine, the layers of of
savage beasts and uh they would be
reserved for special ceremonies or
rituals um utilizing the astonishing
resonance that the cave uh the stone
affords to the flutes or the human voice
or or banging stallctites.
Um otherwise people would uh create
music around the hearth. The hearth is a
point of stability where you have the
fire. Fire and the the fixed quality of
fire is a symbol for the fixed quality
of a musical ritual. And the circularity
of the hearth is that rituals tended to
um repeat in a cycle. Um because they
were um performed often after uh ritual
events like the hunt or the um the uh uh
the eating of the meat that you that's
that you obtain through the hunt and um
there would be no necessarily
distinction between uh singing and
physical motion or dancing. So in the
west we have this word music and only
the west has a single word to cover the
plurality of things which go on in
music. Most cultures um have different
words for uh song for instrumental sound
for for dancing for telling stories to
music and all these things were tangled
together into a single ceremony.
Now the caveat is that of course we
cannot go back in time a million years.
Everything we we say has huge scare
quotes on it. But that said, it's very
striking that looking at the spread of
huntergatherer peoples across different
environments from deserts to savas to
rainforest to the polar snow caps, they
share a core and that survival of a core
bespeak something essential. So it's
more than a high-end parable. So if you
compare say peoples as different as the
Aboriginal peoples of Australia with the
Inuit of North America, what they share
is an entanglement of humanity with
animals. In some ways the purpose of
music is to tell us an origin story of
where we came from and we came from
animals. And so much of their songs
imitates the calls of animals or the the
dancing of animals. Darwin himself when
he observes the karabbery samurai in
Australia, he saw that the Aboriginal
peoples imitated the the dance of kiwis
and um kangaroos. And if you look at the
way that Inuit imitate the sound of a um
seal cub in their songs to lure the cub
to be trapped and to be and and to and
to be hunted.
It's similar looking at the Native
Americans and imitate the call of a
buffalo cub. So in each context
um modern hunter gatherers are imitating
the calls of animals. But not just that,
the way they think of themselves as
entangled also with the landscape.
Um, we have the very famous song lines
that Bruce Chatwin observed in the way
that Aboriginal peoples of of Australia
as they journey through or sail through
the desert, they tag each feature of the
landscape with a song and they navigate
the landscape in terms of song and they
view music as a a sort of um shamanistic
uh spirit journey where led by the
shaman um music is a it gives you wings.
It enables you to fly through layers of
the cosmos and ultimately to what they
call the dreamland of their ancestors.
Now, if you compare um the different
environments that the sand of Australia
is very different from the snow of um of
North America and in a certain sense we
can extrapolate back to the conditions
obtaining 40,000 years ago in the ice
age.
The thing about snow compared to sand,
it leaves no footprints. It leaves no
traces. It's very hard to navigate snow.
And so you can extrapolate from that and
make and and make the um the inference
that Inuit um navigate trails in their
mind and much less um footsteps through
through the snow. and you begin to
imagine a web of culture um superseding
the web of footsteps or with the web of
trails in the landscape. Snow is al also
much more enimical to human survival
than sand. Um and uh the inuit have to
learn to live with each other with
enclosed spaces of egloos. So music's
function is really about um anger or
conflict management.
Um, you can't afford to have a fight if
you're dependent upon one another in a
small space in the middle of a polar ice
gap. Which is why so much of Inuward
music is full of laughter and jokes. And
you see that in the lyrics of Inuit
songs. It's it's fostering
um a playful sociability and diffusing
potential for for conflict. If you're
looking at the broad picture, the wide
angle lens picture of the evolution of
sapiens, then the epochs are hunter
gatherer,
sedentary or farming community and then
the founding of cities and city states.
And usually these epochs is associated
with mentalities.
So hunter gatherers tended to be nomadic
and we can see that in examples of
huntergatherer peoples across the whole
world from the Inuit in North America,
the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the
pygmies in Africa. Um and they they
share um a nomadic uh way of life and if
you're essentially journeying through a
landscape, what you don't do is carry
heavy instruments. Uh music has to be
portable. ideally just a voice or if not
the a very light flute or a small
percussive instrument. We also see um in
music of the moment um is that music
tends to be very playful avoiding
repetition. So the idea of a of a piece
or a work which which could be repeated
was a very modern notion.
And if you look at the music that is
played by by the Cameroon Pygmies, every
time they play a piece, it sounds
different. It's very much music of the
moment.
Now what changes when you invent farming
and agriculture? You settle down and
your whole mindset becomes fixed on the
circle of the seasons, the circle of
life. And music has roots. It digs down.
And there's music composed for every
frame of the circle of life, the the
cycle of the seasons.
Um and you invent the work the repeated
repeatable work and the structure of the
work becomes as cyclical as life itself.
You invent the circle in music invent
musical rituals and once music migrates
from the farm to the town certain
changes happen. Instruments can become
heavy because you start to set quite
permanent roots into the town. um you
create heavy instruments like bells and
gongs but also very delicate ones like
harps and lootes which will be damaged
over a journey and music's function now
also changes with the growth of social
hierarchy. The job of music is to be a
handmaidaden to serve the power, the
power of the prince or the church. And
musicians become professionalized and
their job is to um create music to be
listened to for people with leisure. And
this is the origin of what we call
concerts.
We have to get away from the modern
notion that music was performed in what
we call concerts. To to have a concert
requires leisure.
um requires money and often times it's
the aristocrats or the um the the the
upper middle class who had the the time
to sit back and enjoy music performed
for them. For most people over millions
of years that didn't happen. So the rule
is that most music was performed
functionally um in the fields.
For instance, the cotton hollers we have
in the 19th century were performed um on
the water and we think of examples of
sea shanties. The quality of the song
reflects the activity. So um on a boat
you're closely confined and when you're
hauling the anchor the rhythm of hauling
um blow the man down a sea shanty
necessarily imitates the rhythm of work.
away.
>> If you compare that with a cotton
holler, you're no longer on a ship.
You're in a wide open space. You have to
raise your voice to connect to somebody
quite far away.
>> And you get a sort of wailing contour.
And indeed um many people uh argue that
blues in jazz originates from the
sadness the grief of wailing which
happens naturally in a cotton hole where
you'll be wailing literally bewailing
your state of life and similar um
comparisons could be made um with
fulling cloth where the rhythm of
creating or or weaving you hear that in
these uh rotations of the wheel and
spinning songs uh are memories of the
origin of spinning songs uh when you
were actually creating the cloth. Most
music was performed as we say whistle as
as you work. Also, it was performed in a
participatory way. So, there was no um
distinction between those who create the
music and those who listen to it. It was
the same people. The idea that we have a
composer and we have a listener is a
purely modern invention. As soon as
civilization invents writing, it invents
musical notation. The Babylonians and
the Samrians
invent the first musical notation. And
the first example of that is the Hurian
hymn number six,400
BC which nobody can unfortunately
decipher. The first decipherable
uh complete piece of music is the
seculos song dated 200 AD and found in
modern day Turkey or Anatolia.
But the west in many ways splits apart
from the continental mainstream when it
invents staff notation which is writing
music in five lines. A thousand years
ago in a thousand 20 an Italian monk
called Gido invents staff notation and
life was never again the same for
western music. Why is that so important?
Staff notation was a tool of church
control. And through writing chants
down, the church could ensure literally
that um monks singing at the furthest
outpost of the empire of Christendom,
say Hadrien's wall in the northern
extreme of England, literally sang from
the same hem sheet. You can control what
people were doing across the entirety of
the empire. And then once the empire
expands beyond the Mediterranean basin
and Cortez invades Mexico in 1519,
he takes notation with him. He takes
manuscripts of Spanish polifany written
down in staff notation and he teaches
the Aztecs how to sing Spanish
counterpoint. And what is astonishing is
that 10 years after Cortez
um decimates the Indians in 1519, by
1530 you have Aztec musicians singing
Spanish polifany in Mexico Cathedral.
So music notation becomes the um the
sharp end of the stick of globalization
and the domination of the planet.
Now there are various consequences to
staff notation. Many of them um are
frankly bad.
By pinning notes down to a page, almost
like capturing a butterfly, you're
taking a note away from the voice.
You're making it very precise. If you
look at the way most people speak or
sing, the pitch slides, it fluctuates.
This doesn't stay still. Notation
freezes a note. It becomes rather cold
and mechanical. It also freezes music as
an object, which is actually quite
counterintuitive. Music isn't an object.
It's an activity. It's a thing you do
like dancing or jogging. But once you
turn it into an object, um, you create a
division between the composer of the
object and those who merely mechanically
reproduce it, a performer. and tradition
becomes frozen into a museum an
imaginary museum of musical works and if
you compare that to what's done um say
in the karnatic tradition or the
Hindustani tradition of India music
there is an organic and evolving oral
tradition which is handed down from guru
to disciple where a disciple doesn't
mechanically reproduce a work
uh they creatively
improvise around the idea of the work.
>> Chapter 2, the universality of music.
One of the surprises is that music is
fractal in its nature. It's as fractal
as a universe, which is to say that um a
galaxy has the same shape as a brain
cell. Um the universe exhibits self
similarity at rising orders of magnitude
just as music does. Music is the art of
repetition. You have notes and a bar.
You have bars repeated in a phrase. You
have phrases in a section section in a
work and so on add infin item. And this
is extraordinary because this music
draws this capacity from the nature of
sound or noise itself. If you take a
spectrograph
um of noise which is a way of um
representing noise through waveforms the
waveforms exhibit self similarity
however um much you focus it. So if you
blow up a detail of the waveform it
looks the same in the same way as a um a
coastline or a cloud is fractal.
So the noise of nature, the sound of the
wind softing through the grass or the
ripples of water, we enjoy this sound.
Um it's pleasant, it's fractal. And
music has the same uh um structure as as
nature, as natural noise in this
respect. And this makes music really
perfectly natural. And it's a much more
interesting way of regarding the
relationship between music and the
cosmos and the rather old-fashioned myth
of the um harmony of the spheres or
universal harmony. Um so the ancients,
the Greeks and the Chinese and the and
the Sumerians believe that u music
mirrors the cosmos because it represents
the same harmonic proportions which you
see in the intervals. So fifths and
octaves and fourths the acoustic um
ratios are natural in that respect. So
Capernicus thought that the planets um
orbited in musical proportions. That's
the oldfashioned view of um music's
universality. I think um the fractal
theory is much more interesting and it
plugs in much more dramatically into the
latest findings in in astronomy and and
in the analysis of musical structure.
Now, once you widen the lens as widely
as possible and you see the big picture
of where sapion music comes from, the
the cosmic joke, the irony is that
humans aren't very musical at all
compared to how naturally musical birds
and whales are. And we know this because
we evolved along the ape line. And apes
compared to birds are not musical. How
can I say that? Birds have vocal
learning. They can creatively learn new
songs. Apes can't do that. They are
confined to the cause they're born with.
Insects
can uh uh pulse together in in rhythm.
They have a sense of rhythm. Some birds
have a sense of rhythm and apes don't
have that.
So it's it's very odd that humans
evolved from apes who not were not
musical but humans evolved music again
from the ground up from scratch.
So humans are the great synthesizers.
I think it's a reason why although human
music is innate and universal, it's also
learned.
And there's also a reason why humans
have always been haunted by nostalgia
for bird songs.
We hear birds in the trees and this
gives us a sense of inadequacy because
bird song is natural and human music is
not. Um what humans brought to the table
is that we're the great synthesizers. We
put put together the rhythms of insects,
the melody of birds, the gesturality
of of apes. We also reflect the fractal
structure of the cosmos. But what we
brought to it was the very human
um drives of emotions and indeed the
finite quality of human life that the
fact that we die I think um haunts us
and the idea of a limit is one of the
horizons or boundary conditions of human
music.
So whilst the elements of music might
still be there in the future once humans
are gone. So uh fractal structure and
the hierarchical quality of music of
musical structure without human emotions
or the finitude of the human lifespan it
wouldn't it wouldn't be what I call
music.
So when NASA sent the golden record
aboard Voyager 40 years ago, this
suggested an a very interesting thought
experiment because NASA stock the record
with diverse examples of human music.
For instance, a Bach Vandenberg Conurto,
Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Good.
Pan pipes from the Solomon Islands.
Court music gamlan from Java.
If we imagine aliens open this in a
billion years, will they be able to um
extrapolate some common denominator,
something uh fundamentally human in this
assortment of of earth music? And this
begs the question, what do they have in
common? Now, I think what they do have
in common, even for an alien, is that um
sapiens are flatlanders.
We inhabit a very narrow band of
perceptual
space. We can't hear as low as whales.
We can't hear as high as bats. Our songs
aren't as long as whale songs, which can
be 23 hours long. They aren't as fast as
a pipist bat song, which can be as short
as um a single wingbeat. What they will
see though is a lot of commonality um
between sapiens music and animal music.
Both are hierarchical as to say that we
repeat at rising levels as do birds and
whales and that might strike aliens as
interesting and they might say well
actually this isn't so different from
animal music.
Um but they will recognize sapiens for
perhaps having um this uh walking meter
which goes back to asopithesines 4
million years ago that we have a rhythm
of walking whereas whales have a rhythm
of a much more fluid rhythm of floating
through their own medium just as bird
song is as jerky as the motions of a of
a of a bird. So each species bird, whale
and sapun is um reflects the kind of
motion that their bodies pursue in their
environments. I think that'll be
apparent to aliens. So the question of
is music a universal language is an
interesting one because on the surface
every culture in the world though it um
values music has different kinds of
scales and harmonies but um you can say
that there is a music instinct that
we're all born for a capacity for music
expressed through an ability which is
innate to uh recognize rhythm to beat in
time to rhythm to recognize melody to
recall a melody. So this universality
then changes that the second that
culture gets its hooks into a child, it
actually matters um whether you bounce
your baby in rhythms of two or three
beats. It'll determine the kind of
rhythm the baby will grow out to enjoy.
It matters to the baby the kind of
melodies you sing to the child. um
babies born in the west prefer
certain kind of tuning system to those
born in say Indonesia.
Another aspect of this universality is
that we all share a vocabulary of basic
emotions
um sadness, happiness, anger,
fear and so on. And um you could you
could you could say that this goes to
the structure of the human brain which
is layered. So the cultural specificity
of the brain is due to the neoortex, the
most evolved, the most advanced part
which um is occupied with learning
patterns and experiences. The deeper you
dive into the human brain, the more
universal one's propensity for music and
for emotion goes. If you start with the
brain stem, our oldest layer, this is
what the simplest organisms have. Brain
stems flinch to reflexes in sound. So
shocks and loud bangs will trigger the
brain stem reflex. The next layer up,
the basal ganglia, responds to pleasure,
whether a sound is pleasant or
unpleasant. This is a reptilian brain.
The mamalian brain, the um amygdala is
where emotions happen. Sadness,
happiness, anger, fear. And the most
modern layer, the neoortex is the point
where you process
patterns and the complexities of music.
So, as a rule, the deeper you dive into
the brain, the more universal
music is.
So one of the interesting facts about
Sapiens that everywhere Sapiens travels
in the world he takes music with them.
So when um Cortez goes to South America
to Mexico he brings Spanish
counterpoint. When the English go to
North America they bring Puritan
hemtunes. When the Victorian mission of
Christians go to Africa they again bring
Christian hemp tunes. which is why most
African national anthems sound like
Christian him tunes. Going back to the
Silk Road, everywhere that people take
um their caravans laden with spices or
or with with food, they bring
instruments like like loots or violins.
They also bring melodies. And if you
watch what happens to the violin and the
loot which were invented in central
Asia, they travel to China, they travel
to Japan, they travel to India, they
travel to the Middle East, they
eventually travel to Germany and Spain
and through there into central Europe.
Everywhere the loot goes, it will change
its name. If you look at um Lisbon in
1520, 10% of the population of Lisbon
was African and the Africans brought
African dancers such as Shyons and
Sarabans which will eventually find
their way into Yoan Sebastian's Barks
dance music.
So there's even an African cargo in a
German composer's Barack compositions.
Because once um music or just like
cricket is enculturated by another
people it becomes naturalized and I mean
who is to say that um once the Aztec
Indians have absorbed the Spanish
counterpoint it's no longer um Indian it
becomes Indianized in a similar way to
um even more dramatically that
Japan has a tradition where every New
Year's Eve they perform Beethoven's
Symphfully
and in Japanese eyes this may sound
incredible. Beethoven is a Japanese
composer.
Why is that? Beethoven but also Mozart
and Schubert resonates with a Japanese
sensibility for etiquette or formal
formality and respect for tradition. So
what Japan is getting from Beethoven
isn't necessarily the same thing that
we're getting from Beethoven. So
Beethoven's line symphony which for us
is very individualistic
for Japanese culture is expressing the
opposite ethos of um uh social
togetherness and an extinction of the
ego. It's a much more zen quality.
Major difference between the west and
shall we say the east is that the west
has a problem with nature or or sonic
nature being the sound of the trees or
the wind and we conceptually distinguish
notes from sounds. If you look at an
image of Confucious the great Chinese
sage is typically portrayed playing a
zither called a chin in Chinese. It's a
flat harp. And Confucious plays this
under an apricot tree. And there was a
tradition of viewing the the very
delicate sounds of the zither of the
chin as melding into the sounds of the
wind and the bamboo and the grass and
the water. There's no distinction
between music and nature. It's more
natural, you could say. And the west is
by the same token rather unnatural.
And this goes right back as far as you'd
like to go. So um one of the great
monuments of Chinese civilization are
the marquee ye of Zen bells discovered
in 1978. Who was the marquee of Zen? He
was a warlord who died in 433 BC and his
tomb contained an extraordinary thing 65
bronze bells. And what these bells show
is that more than 2,000 years ago,
Chinese acoustic science was infinitely
superior to western acoustics.
The kind of acoustic partials that a
bell generates are so complex they can't
be captured arithmetically,
which is why we don't have bells in
western music. We exile bells to church
towers. Only the Chinese got taught how
to play bells. the understood sound,
understood sonority. And this
sensibility for natural sound, it
permeates all of Chinese and Japanese
music. And the West has lost that.
Western music was one of many
civilizations. And if anything, it was
on the back foot compared to the more
advanced musical cultures happening in
China, in India, in the Middle East. And
then what happens next um through
globalization is the takeover of the
planet because of music notation that
what goes round comes round and what we
see now is that the west is being
colonized by two tidal waves flowing
across the Pacific and the Atlantic
oceans.
um African music
um jazz and rock has become the lingua
franker of western music in America and
Europe. In a similar way, the most
popular band in the world is is BTS,
K-pop and the West is re-educated about
sound. We in the west have tended to
have a misconception that history of
music is a history of works or
compositions and a history of composers
people who wrote these works.
This tends to reduce music into an
object into an exhibit in an imaginary
museum.
It also um
overvalues the role of a composer
compared to most people who are innately
musical. So in some ways you need to
take music away from the musicians and
give it back to the people. The the west
has a misconception that music is in the
hands of geniuses who receive their
inspiration from a divine authority. And
then when God dies as it were in the
19th century, they turn the composer
themselves into a divine figure with
divine authority. This authority extends
to every note
uh enshrined in the score. And this
limits the role of a performer into
simply reproducing what the great bark
or the great Beethoven in their divine
wisdom legislates.
Actually because of that we can have a
pretty good idea of exactly how a
Beethoven sonata would have sounded in
1800. Such was the authority of this
divine figure. But the more you get away
from the authority of the composer when
you drift eastwards or southwards in
world history, the less you can be sure
about what the uh composer would have
wanted a few centuries ago.
Chapter 3, your brain on music. What
makes human music so distinctive is our
link between sound and motion which is
due to the connections in the human
brain between the motor regions
controlling our motion
and the regions controlling hearing and
and sound the audiary
um cortex. Uh birds as a rule don't have
that link with the possible exception of
selfacested cockatos. So as long as long
as you want to go back there is this
link between uh rhythm and motion
um if you uh rock a baby to a particular
rhythm that baby will come to like that
particular rhythm.
We also love to imitate rhythm and
that's due to the existence of mirror
neurons in our brains. Uh so when the
brain sees uh an action a physical
action in in somebody else um you don't
have to move to uh experience
that motion in your brain because the
mirror neurons are responding
sympathetically. You've always had um an
instinctive
uh faculty to imitate um we call it
mimmesis
and uh we see that in all walks of life.
Yorns are contagious. If I see you
yawning, I yawn back. But also, emotions
are contagious. If you're sad, I
instinctively
uh cleave to your sadness. I I mirror
it. I I emote with you. And that's the
same with music. When I feel sad, uh uh
when I hear a a sad song,
um my body, my mirror neurons are are
instinctively sympathizing, are
mimicking, I'm mirroring the um the
human sadness encoded in that sad song.
another you know vivid example of
emotional contagion
um which is related to um our mirror
neurons uh vibrating sympathetically to
the perception of somebody else moving.
I once attended a concert and with my uh
infant toddler and there were a thousand
toddlers all jumping up and down
instinctively to the sound of the
orchestra playing the lone ranger. Now
they had never heard the lone bench
before. It's a William Tur by Rini,
but they had an instinctive response to
that that rhythm. And we're we're we're
born for that. And even when you uh do
an experiment
um on babies who aren't sitting on their
parents' knees. So you could perhaps
argue that is the parents who are
prompting their children to jump up and
down. They do the same thing. So it's
it's within the baby, not within the
adult. There's an extreme reaction to
music which has been called the chills
or fo or the sublime. There are moments
in music which are so intense and
they're often triggered by um
breakthrough moments of loudness or
extremity.
Um they're different for every person.
It's interesting because you have the
same parts of the brain which respond to
that as response to fear which is why
the chills give you goosebumps or pyro
erection. The hairs on your skin
literally stand on end like like when
you're getting goosebumps. But you enjoy
this fear and this is very strange. One
of the definitions of uh musical uh
aesthetics is that you learn to take the
danger out of extreme experience. And we
have a similar experience when we go on
a fairground ride or when we're watching
a volcanic eruption in the safety of an
observation platform. It's almost as if
music is is violence without the danger
or the natural infinite the natural
sublime without the danger. Darwin was
the first to observe that emotion had an
adaptive role in the field that animals
and and people they experience emotions
in relation to to goals which help them
survive. So happiness is um when you
achieve a goal. Anger is when the goal
is blocked. Sadness is when uh uh you
lose a loved one. Fear is the most uh
archetypal emotion. Uh when you're
exposed to a threat from a snake, you
have instinctive
uh response to either uh freeze or to
fight or to flee.
And music is full of similar responses.
Music is made of patterns and uh
patterns can either be allowed to run
their course or they can be frustrated
through shocks. And when we hear a shock
in music, it can be a bang or the
interruption of a pattern. Um that
engages the same uh faculties in our
brain as danger out in the field. Of
course, nobody dies in music. This is
only a a derived uh effect of that. But
this is is why we think that music is
able to express emotion in a very
visceral way. Uh and emotions are also
processed at at different levels of the
brain. Starting with the brain stem
which flinches to shocks and then the uh
reptile brain the uh basal ganglia
responds to pleasure or displeasure. The
mamalian amygdala responds to emotions,
happiness, sadness, and the neoortex
processes emotions through pattern. So
when you're listening to music, it's a
kind of mental time travel. You really
are when you're um absorbed in a work,
you're traveling back through layer upon
layer of your brain almost biologically,
which is why I call music a sort of
umbilical cord back to mother nature.
It's mental time travel. The astonishing
fact is
musical training rewires the brain. Now
most of us are rightrained.
Uh if we train a musician they become
left brain. They hear uh music through
the same uh temporal lobe which
processes language which makes sense
because complex music is as complex as
language. And there are so many skills
which fall out of the discipline of
learning to play an instrument. You
learn discipline. You learn how to
practice, how to organize your time. You
learn how to work together in a team. To
play in an orchestra is team building.
You learn how to pay attention.
You learn how to focus on sounds. These
are all highly transferable skills.
Appreciating music purely as a form of
relaxation or entertainment does a
massive disservice to all the things
that music helps you with. Um, let's
list them. Music can bring people
together. The biggest draw to mental
health is loneliness.
You don't have to actively make music
with somebody else. Just to listen to
music plugs you into a social network
because every note of music is social,
is formed of social conventions.
Music um lowers stress by reducing
cortisol. It gives you pleasure, makes
you happy by flooding the brain with
neurotransmitters like dopamine.
Music is an excellent way of tagging
memories, remembering the past. Um music
is a fantastic way of expressing your
deepest emotions and your identity which
can't be captured by language. Why is
that? because music is far too precise
for words to capture what's going on.
And there's a reason why teenagers um
you know imprint their taste in music
with um with songs they learn at that
time because music has always come to
define identity of who you are.
Um all these things um you know increase
your mental health and ultimately um
music becomes a mode of mindfulness of
contemplation.
It's not purely relaxing because there's
too much going on when you're listening
and the word relaxation uh gives a sense
of passivity whereas to listen is a very
active and creative activity. Music of
course can also harm the brain. It can
be militarized as we know from examples
of Bontano Mobay when um the army plays
certain kinds of music to inmates. Um as
a rule any um sound you dislike can harm
you. So I may be into metal but you
might not be. So if I play metal very
loudly that will increase your stress
levels. And similarly uh much as we know
about the health benefits of music you
have to be extremely cautious in how you
prescribe it clinically. So for instance
um Alzheimer's patients don't do well
listening to Barack music. Um it's too
repetitive for them and certain
conditions respond better to uh softer
music or to uh uh music with greater
variety.
Um if you're suffering from depression
then you don't want to hear a a kind of
music which reinforces that condition.
So, um, it's it's fine to argue for
music to be a prescribed drug, but you
have to educate the doctors in the kinds
of music to prescribe.
>> Chapter 4, the future of music. It's a a
possibility that with this incredible
ubiquity and accessibility of music
through the internet that eventually
uh all our musics will become
homogenized into a single thing into a
gray homogeneous object. I don't think
that will happen for one very important
reason. Um every artist wants to be
distinctive. there's a competitive um
drive which forces people to always turn
their back on fashion and create
something new. That's always been the
way. A second reason is that with the
proliferation of genres, there are
thousands and thousands of genres and
subg genres. Uh music has always been an
extraordinary tool to express human
identity.
And as long as people have an identity
and are different, they will create
music to reflect their personality. So I
think there's no danger of music
becoming homogenized.
If you were born in Beethoven's time,
you'd be lucky if you heard a symphony
twice in your lifetime, whereas today
it's as uh accessible as running water.
We're drowning in music. The future of
music. Um how can you predict it? Um, I
think one of my um caveats is that given
that we've had music for at least a
million years, it would be foolish to be
uh pessimistic about its future that we
might worry about the next decade, the
next century. But this is only a pin
prick, you know, in the great scale of
things. But I would forecast two main um
developments. one is that music will
become ever more instrumentalized or to
have a a function. Um I could almost
imagine somebody uh um prescribing you
and injecting you with um uh the exactly
the right kind of sound to treat a
condition, depression or some other kind
of emotional disorder. Um it'll be
bespoke as bespoke as anything else in
life would be. My other prediction would
be an ever greater integration with
technology. Now we see that already
accelerated under co
has served to accelerate a cultural
change and we see that in the
extraordinary role of the internet um as
a way of taking music away from
musicians and giving it to normal
people. So through um various digital
stages and platforms we can both create
music in our homes and to share it and
we're regaining the participatory
condition of music which was the norm
thousands of years ago where we all had
an equal stake in creating and enjoying
music.
The other um side of that is a physical
uh connectivity with technology don't
necessarily have to have an implant
because you're holding an iPhone in your
hand. You're already a symbiote. The
symbiotic relationship between yourself
and the the music you're consuming.
uh typically K-pop which is almost
evolved out of the interaction between
consumers and um and digital culture. We
shouldn't forget that technology is not
sinister that all uh musical instruments
are are tools. The original bone flute
was a piece of technology. It serves to
extend human capacity.
Uh it extends the voice or the fingers.
Um so Watson beat which is a computer
program which allows musicians to create
new psonic possibilities
that's no different really to any other
musical instrument which extends our in
this case imagination. But once the uh
instrument or the machine has uh thrown
up these possibilities, it's the role of
the human subject to make decisions to
pass, to edit, to select, to shape all
the things that the computer has has
given us. So I I see that relationship
between humans and machines becoming
ever more integrated, ever more um
imaginative in the future.
And I would like to add one rather bold
prediction is that um in the future
music may not be just about sound.
It may involve
um tastes and colors and our bodies
and frequencies currently not available
to our quite narrow spectrum of hearing.
Um we'll be able to amplify to extend
our hearing range. I think it's fair to
say that just as you know uh what
Stockhousen or Beyonce is achieving
today would have been completely out of
the ken out of the comprehension of of a
motorcycle or a bet a few centuries ago.
We can't even begin to imagine the
possibilities awaiting us in the future.
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May 15, 2026

Music as Memory and Ritual

Cross‑Cultural Perspectives

The Impact of Notation

Neurological Foundations

Mechanisms & Explanations

The Future of Music

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