Michael Spitzer on Music Evolution, Brain Mechanics, and AI

Name: The past, present, and future of music, in 59 minutes | Michael Spitzer: Full Interview
Uploaded: 2026-05-08T13:00:04+00:00
Duration: 59 min 57 s
Channel: Big Think
Description: Summary and key takeaways on Michael Spitzer on Music Evolution, Brain Mechanics, and AI, covering Prehistory and Origins Q: What evidence shows that music

Big Think

May 08, 2026

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59 min video

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3 min read

YouTube video ID: aTL4qSLXlGE

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Q: What evidence shows that music existed long before modern humans?

A: Music is at least a million years older than Homo sapiens. The earliest physical traces are lithic instruments such as rock gongs and bone flutes made from Griffin vulture bones, dated to around 40,000 years ago. These artifacts indicate that early hominins already produced and valued sound.

Q: How did bipedalism influence the emergence of rhythm?

A: Walking on two legs let early humans hear their own footsteps as regular patterns. This created a sense of time and predictive rhythm that later became the foundation for musical meter. The ability to perceive symmetrical, repeating beats in locomotion linked movement to rhythmic perception.

Q: In what way does music act as a “keeper of history”?

A: Music stores cultural memory through muscle memory and oral tradition. Repeated gestures and melodic patterns embed knowledge in the body, allowing information to survive even when written records are absent.

The Evolution of Society and Music

Q: How did the shift from hunter‑gatherer to farming societies change musical practice?

A: Hunter‑gatherer music was nomadic, portable, and avoided repetition, reflecting a mobile lifestyle. In contrast, farming societies produced cyclical, rooted music that could be repeated in settled environments, supporting communal rituals and agricultural cycles.

Q: What role did staff notation play in music’s development?

A: Guido d’Arezzo’s invention of staff notation in 1020 AD enabled the Church to standardize music across empires. Notation “freezes” music, turning an activity into an object, creating a divide between composer and performer, and paving the way for global musical exchange.

Q: How did the “concert” model emerge?

A: As notation spread, music moved from participatory settings to a professionalized concert model. Performers became interpreters of written works rather than co‑creators, reinforcing the notion of the composer as a singular genius.

The Brain on Music

Q: What neural mechanisms underlie our response to music?

A: Music is fractal, mirroring self‑similar patterns found in natural noise and the cosmos. The brain processes music through layered systems: the brain stem handles reflexes, the basal ganglia generate pleasure, the amygdala governs emotion, and the neocortex detects patterns. Mirror neurons enable emotional contagion by simulating the performer’s actions, producing the “chills” described as “violence without danger.”

Q: How does musical training reshape the brain?

A: Training rewires neural pathways, shifting processing from the right hemisphere toward the left temporal lobe, the region associated with language. This change enhances pattern recognition and analytical skills linked to musical structure.

Q: Are there clinical applications and risks?

A: Music’s ability to trigger emotional and physiological responses makes it useful for therapy, yet misuse can lead to overstimulation or dependence on artificial musical cues.

The Future of Music

Q: What trends are shaping music’s next evolution?

A: Technology, especially AI, acts as an extension of human imagination, similar to the original bone flute. Music is becoming more “instrumentalized,” tailored for clinical treatment, and may expand beyond sound to incorporate taste, color, and other sensory inputs.

Q: Will music become more homogenized or more distinct?

A: The tension between globalized, digital‑era sounds—exemplified by groups like BTS—and the drive for unique identity will shape future musical landscapes. While AI can generate endless variations, cultural forces push creators toward distinct, personalized expressions.

Q: How might AI redefine the concept of a musical work?

A: AI can generate bespoke compositions in real time, blurring the line between composer and performer. This capability could transform music from a static object into a dynamic, adaptive experience that responds to individual listeners.

Takeaways

Music predates Homo sapiens by at least a million years, with early lithic instruments and bone flutes providing the oldest physical evidence.
Bipedalism allowed early humans to hear rhythmic footfall patterns, establishing an innate sense of time that underlies musical meter.
Guido d'Arezzo’s staff notation in 1020 AD froze music into an object, separating composer from performer and enabling global standardization.
The brain processes music through layered systems—from reflexive brainstem responses to pleasure in the basal ganglia, emotion in the amygdala, and pattern recognition in the neocortex—while training shifts processing toward the left temporal lobe.
AI and other technologies are extending music beyond sound, creating bespoke clinical applications and multisensory experiences that could redefine what counts as music.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does bipedalism matter for the origin of rhythm?

Bipedalism let early humans hear their own footsteps as regular patterns, creating an innate sense of time and predictive rhythm that later formed the basis for musical meter. This auditory feedback linked locomotion to rhythmic perception, providing a natural scaffold for the development of structured music.

How do mirror neurons contribute to emotional contagion in music?

Mirror neurons simulate the performer’s actions and emotional states in listeners, allowing them to feel the encoded emotions directly; this neural mirroring creates the “chills” or intense emotional responses often described as “violence without danger.”

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What evidence shows that music existed long before modern humans?

** Music is at least a million years older than *Homo sapiens*. The earliest physical traces are lithic instruments such as rock gongs and bone flutes made from Griffin vulture bones, dated to around 40,000 years ago. These artifacts indicate that early hominins already produced and valued sound.

Helpful resources related to this video

If you want to practice or explore the concepts discussed in the video, these commonly used tools may help.

The Musical Human By Michael Spitzer Recommended

This is the book authored by the expert in the video, providing the full research and context behind his theories on music's evolutionary history.

Amazon →

Beginner Bone Flute Musical Instrument

Bone flutes are identified as the earliest physical evidence of human musicality; this allows the user to experience the primitive origins of sound.

Amazon →

Metronome For Musicians And Rhythm Training

The video discusses how bipedalism and rhythm are linked; a metronome helps users practice the predictive rhythm and timing discussed.

Amazon →

Book On Music And The Brain

The video explores the cognitive mechanisms of music; books on music psychology provide further insight into how the brain processes sound.

Amazon →

Links may be affiliate links. We only include resources that are genuinely relevant to the topic.

Summarize another video

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:  
A History of Life on Earth. The Past, Present, 
and Future of Music with Michael Spitzer.
Part one, the history of music.
How did you approach 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 a phongraph in  
1777 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.  
Now 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 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 uh 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 homalin an 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 homoagast  
that would have been able to tap that axe in 
a symmetrical rhythm or using musical meter.
How does bipedalism inform human music? 
When we talk about the origin of music,  
um it's really um about assembling elements 
of music which were synthesized much further  
down 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  
Four million years ago, an oralopythesine called 
Adi 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 hominins 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 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 uh 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 tracts. 
our hyoid bone which um 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 vervid 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.
How does music function as a keeper of history?
One of the uh I think uh 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 
what 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 the 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.
In what environments did early musical 
performances exist? When we discovered  
the first bone flute, some of the shards of 
the broken flutes were discovered in points  
of maximum resonance within the caves, suggesting 
a natural um marriage, if you 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 a 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 
savylvanas to rainforests 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 um Inuit of North America, what they 
share is um 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 
um karaby summer in Australia, he saw that the  
um Aboriginal peoples imitated the the dance of 
kiwis and um kangaroos. Um, 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 um the 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. 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 um 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 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 eagloos. 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 Inuit music is full of laughter and jokes. 
Uh, 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.
How did the evolution of society affect music?
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 each of 
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 world 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 dutes 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.
What were the first 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 hollows we have in  
the 19th century or 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. If you compare 
that with a cotton hollow 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 whaling contour. 
And indeed um many people u 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.
When does music notation begin?
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. Um a thousand years ago in 20020  
an Italian monk called Guido 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 
them 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.
What are the consequences of music notation?  
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. It 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, 
the 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. Part two, the universality 
of music. How is music fractal in nature?
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 in a bar. 
You have bars repeated in a phrase. You have  
phrases in a section section in the 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 softening 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 Sumerianss believe that um 
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
is music inherently human
once you widen the lens as widely as possible 
and 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 evolve from apes  
who not are 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 a 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 
gestal ciiality 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 the 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
what does all human music have in common
so when NASA sent the golden record aboard 
Voyager 40 years ago um This suggested an a  
very interesting thought experiment because NASA 
stocked the record with diverse examples of human  
music. For instance, a Bark Vandenberg 
conerto, Chuck Bber's Johnny be good,  
Pan Pipes from the Solomon Islands, Court music, 
Galan from Java. If we imagine aliens openness  
in a billion years, will they be able to um 
extrapolate some common denominator, something  
uh fundamentally human from 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 wing beat. 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  
is not so different from animal music. Um but 
they will recognize saprians for perhaps having  
um this uh walking meter which goes back to as 
fellow epithesines four 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 
sapiens is um reflects the kind of motion that  
their bodies pursue in their environments. 
I think that'll be apparent to aliens.
Is music universal across cultures?
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 recogn 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 up 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  
of 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.
Does music migrate between cultures?
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 being 
Christian hemtunes, which is why most African  
national anthems sound like Christian hemtunes. 
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  
dances such as Shakons and Sarabans which will 
eventually find their way into Johan Sebastian's  
Bark's dance music. So there's even an African 
cargo in a German composers Barack compositions.  
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 and even more dramatically that  
Japan has a tradition where every New Year's 
Eve they perform Beethoven's nine symphony  
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 for  
formal formality and a respect for tradition. 
So what Japan is getting from Beethoven isn't  
necessarily the same thing that we're getting 
from Beethoven. So Beethven's nine 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.
What is the difference between western and 
eastern music? A 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  
um a zither called a chin in Chinese. It's a 
flat harp. Uh, 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  
was 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 bales 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 it 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  
worked out how to play bells. They understood 
sound. understood sorority 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. 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.
What misconceptions do westerners 
have about music? 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 Bach or the 
great Beethoven in their divine wisdom legislates.  
But actually because of that we can have a pretty 
good idea of exactly how a Beethan 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.
Part three, the brain on music. What 
effect does music have on our brains?
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 auditory  
um cortex. Uh birds as a rule don't have that link 
with the possible exception of sulfaced cockatos.  
Um 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.  
We've always had um an instinctive uh faculty to 
imitate um we call him mimmesis and uh we see that  
in all walks of life. Um yawns 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,  
are 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 uh 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 mage before. It's the William  
T by Rousini, 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 these 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 adults.
Why do we get the chills when listening to music?
There's an extreme reaction to music which has 
been called the chills or fo 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. Um 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 from the safety of an observation 
platform. It's almost as if music is is  
violence without the danger or the natural 
infin the natural sublime without the danger.
Are there any connections 
between evolution and music?  
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. Um 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 an 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 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. How does creating music rewire our brain?  
The astonishing fact is musical training rewires 
the brain. Now most of us are rightrained. Uh if  
we train a musician they become leftrain. They 
hear uh music through the same uh temporal lobe  
which processes language which um 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 orchestra is team building. You learn  
how to pay attention. You learn how to focus on 
sounds. These are all highly transferable skills.
What benefits can music have on mental health? 
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. Um, 
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 and makes you happy by flooding the  
brain with neurotransmitters like dopamine. 
Music is an excellent way of tagging memories  
of 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.
Can music have a negative effect on the brain?
Music of course can also harm the brain. It can be 
militarized as we know from examples of Guantanamo  
Bay 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.
Part four, the future of music. 
Will music ever become homogenized?
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.
What might the future of music look like?
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 COVID. 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 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 posonic  
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 will 
be able to amplify to extend our hearing range.  
I think it's fair to say that just as you know uh 
what Thousen or Beyonce is achieving today would  
have been completely out of the ken out of the 
comprehension of of a motorcycle or a betto 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

The Evolution of Society and Music

The Brain on Music

The Future of Music

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What evidence shows that music existed long before modern humans?