“It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll
(But I Like It)”
I felt ridiculous. I was only a few minutes into my first session with Micah Barnes, and I was already giggling nervously. He’d made me lie down on my back on his couch and make weird noises. After asking me to sing “Amazing Grace” a couple of times, he was hassling me about my breathing, trying to get me to do it with my diaphragm instead of my chest.
“Fill your diaphragm with air to make a balloon,” he said, “and press your fingers against the balloon.” But when I took in a breath my shoulders rose, which meant that I wasn’t doing it right.
So he asked me to lie down and sigh repeatedly. “Put your hand on your diaphragm and as you breathe in, work against gravity and then let go. Feel how that’s like a balloon that fills up and lets go? That’s the secret.”
“But that’s not helping my ear,” I said.
“You don’t know that yet. Blow up a balloon and then let it go so it goes aaah. Oh, and do it with your tongue out.”
Barnes, who was born in 1960, rents an apartment above a men’s clothing store on a lively Toronto strip of bars, restaurants, and galleries called West Queen West. I’d expect a much younger man to live here. Streetcars rumble by regularly; occasionally fire trucks from the nearby station wail their sirens. When I started my lessons in 2011, he had a large black sectional couch from Ikea, a curved white chair from Structube, and a black bookcase full of CDs, LPs, photos, and keepsakes. He’s not shy about showing off his favourites: he often displays albums and, for a long time, a copy of a songwriting magazine with Elvis Costello on the cover rested on a music stand. An upright piano, borrowed from a friend, sat by a window, overlooking the street. The place had no air conditioning, so in the summer he set up a fan and left the windows open, which made me especially self-conscious about appalling (or amusing) everyone on the sidewalk below. I’d been here once before, a year and a half earlier, when I’d first contacted him about my nutty idea to try to learn how to sing. Now, at long last, I was back, chequebook in hand and ready to do it.
Unlike me, Barnes comes from a musical tradition. His father, Milton Barnes, was a classical composer, and his younger brothers also went into the family business. Daniel is a drummer and bandleader, and Ariel is a cellist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. In the 1980s, Micah played gigs as part of the Micah Barnes Trio, a cabaret act that included his brother Daniel, while also working in film, TV, and theatre. Realizing that the actors who were supposed to deliver his lyrics weren’t good enough singers, he started inviting them to his place so he could offer a little informal training—and soon discovered that he had a knack for helping people free their minds and bodies so they could become better singers. And like many artists, he also figured out that teaching is a good way to supplement an income that can be meagre or sporadic or both.
In 1989, he joined The Nylons. A Canadian institution, this popular a cappella group has survived many lineup changes since 1979. Hired to sing baritone, Barnes soon understood that the job also meant singing tenor, including falsetto, and bass, depending on which of the four Nylons was singing lead. He was too busy to do much teaching, but he learned how crucial good technique is. Barnes lasted with the group until 1994, when the touring became too much of a drag. He moved to LA, where he kept playing and teaching. In 2003, he and house music producers Thunderpuss released a single called “Welcome to My Head” that hit number one on Billboard’s club chart.
He’s operated his one-teacher school, called Singers Playground, since 1996. Most of his clients are professional singers and actors (I was probably more impressed than I should have been when I learned that he’d worked with Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany) or people who want to be pros. For most amateurs—the folks who say, I’ve always wanted to sing and I’m finally going to take lessons—he’s too expensive, charging $125 per session (or $400 for four).
After doing the breathing exercises for a while, I asked, “What do your neighbours think?”
“They know what I do for a living,” he responded matter-of-factly. And he makes even good singers do this exercise, because it gets them relaxed. If you’re relaxed, he assured me, you’ll hit the notes better. Maybe not perfectly, but better. That’s how babies breathe—they use their stomach, not their chest. But as we get older, we unlearn the correct way and learn the wrong way: tension-filled breathing.
I kept doing as he asked, but I couldn’t get over the giggles. Part of it was nervous tittering, but the whole situation was so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. He wondered what was up. “I looked at you and started laughing,” I said. “I won’t do that again.”
While Barnes grew up in a musical home, I didn’t. My mother didn’t even sing to me when I was a baby. But she did play DJ for my sisters and me when we were little, even spinning records for us on an all-request basis. As a small boy, my favourite song was Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff (the Magic Dragon),” which I insisted she play over and over again so I could sing along.
My father’s vinyl collection was limited: bagpipe records; Christmas carols, which he played even in the summer; and Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass. (I don’t remember him ever playing that record. He may have owned it only for the seriously great cover featuring a beautiful woman slathered in whipped cream.)
My parents did make an effort. They signed my sisters up for the obligatory middle-class piano lessons. I started drumming classes but then had mysterious health problems—diagnosed several years later as childhood migraines—and never returned. My second-youngest sister took guitar lessons, but when the teacher tried to show her how to tune it, he was astonished that she couldn’t hear the difference between pitches. She couldn’t distinguish the frequency of notes (how high or low they are). Later, when my youngest sister took up guitar as an adult for a few years, she too was frustrated by her inability to hear pitch well enough to tune the instrument and eventually gave up trying. There wasn’t a musician in the bunch.
So we did not make music together as a family. My mom figured we were all tone deaf, so what would be the point? And I don’t remember my friends or cousins making a lot of music with their families. I’m sure some did, if only singalongs on road trips, when I wasn’t around. But it was the 1960s and my generation—Generation Jones—grew up around the television, the electronic babysitter, not around the piano.
Still, I loved music. At twelve, I went to my first concert, an all-day, all-Canadian affair at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium headlined by The Guess Who. By sixteen, I wanted to be Marvin Gaye. In the late ’70s, I pogoed at punk shows. I was not the coolest kid—I was the only person in a button-down Oxford shirt and chinos in the mosh pit at a Viletones gig at Montreal’s Hotel Nelson, and I’m still not sure if that punked-out woman who seemed so fascinated by my presence was hitting on me or goofing on me—but I loved giving myself over to what I was hearing. Still do.
Music means the most to us when we are in our teens and early twenties. That’s when we have the time and the angsty need to connect with our emotions and with other people experiencing them. One U.S. study found that fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds spend just over three hours a day listening to tunes, with girls devoting more time to the activity than boys, and black and Hispanic kids more dedicated than white ones. For many people, music loses some of its power as they grow up. They don’t have the time to seek out new artists—when I first began to notice this tendency among my friends, I joked about people whose last new album was Michael Jackson’s Thriller—and seem content to buy overpriced tickets to see tired reunion shows in hockey arenas and football stadiums.
Regardless of our age, the way we listen to music has changed. As a teenager, I’d take some money I’d saved or earned and go downtown to the flagship Sam the Record Man store on Yonge Street or, later, while going to school in Montreal, I’d head over to Phantasmagoria on Park Avenue. I’d browse for a long time, flipping through the albums, buy one (ideally, more than one, if I was flush), and then go home to play it. I wouldn’t just play it, I’d listen to it with focus and enthusiasm. I didn’t try to multi-task other than studying the liner notes; the music fully captured my attention. Even if I’d invited a friend over when I’d just bought a new record, we would really listen, though maybe we’d also smoke a joint.
I devoted so many hours to the ritual of just listening. I don’t do that as much anymore. A few years ago, feeling ashamed that I knew next to nothing about classical music, I took a couple of night courses to learn about it. The textbook talked about the need for “active listening.” I understood why, and I heard so much more when I listened actively, but I really did it only because I was studying for the exams. Then I went back to my old habits—passive listening. I’m now too hyper and distracted to just sit and do one thing. And the technology makes that ritual of really listening seem anachronistic: the idea of inviting someone over to hear songs you just downloaded is laughable. Even downloading is starting to feel old-fashioned as people turn to YouTube and streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify.
But passive listening risks turning music into aural wallpaper. Along with producing several great albums (including some by the Talking Heads), Brian Eno has devoted much of his innovative career to developing ambient music. Contemplating Eno’s influence on music over more than four decades, Sasha Frere-Jones writes in The New Yorker that the Ambient 1: Music for Airports album is “too beautiful to ignore” and so it’s a failure as ambient music. “But, in some ways, history and technology have accomplished what Eno did not,” he goes on. “With the disappearance of the central home stereo, and the rise of earbuds, MP3s, and the mobile, around-the-clock work cycle, music is now used, more often than not, as background music.”
If you ever find yourself in a room full of music psychologists and start to get bored, you can always liven things up by blurting out “auditory cheesecake.” This is the advice Peter Pfordresher, a University of Buffalo psychologist, gave me. That’s because there’s no agreement on why humans developed the capacity for music. And a little uncertainty is all academics need for a food fight.
Music stimulates the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the pleasure centre that produces the chemical messenger dopamine and is linked to reward and motivation. The VTA, which is also turned on by chocolate, cocaine, and lust, triggers emotional responses that are separate from our intellectual ones. Except for a small percentage of people who suffer from specific musical anhedonia, an inability to derive pleasure from music, almost everybody enjoys listening to tunes. So it’s no surprise that all existing cultures make music. Humans dig it. A lot.
All the extinct cultures we’re aware of made music, too. In 2008, researchers found a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes in a cave in the south of Germany. They probably date from about 35,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic period. They may be the oldest musical instruments ever found, now that archaeologists believe the Divje Babe flute, a 43,000-year-old cave bear femur discovered in Slovenia in 1995, was really just bones chewed up by hyenas. Surely, though, music making didn’t begin with flutes—we likely started with percussion instruments. Or maybe the human voice. But we don’t know which came first: speech or song or if they developed together.
That’s where the delightful but divisive term “auditory cheesecake” comes in. Steven Pinker didn’t drop it as much as detonate it in his 1997 book, How the Mind Works. A cognitive scientist and linguist, he believes language served an evolutionary purpose because it gave humans an advantage over other animals and over the environment. That was crucial, since humans are a little wimpy compared to some other animals. Music, on the other hand, is an enigma—and biologically useless.
“Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once,” he writes. Sure sounds like fun to me. But that doesn’t mean it played any evolutionary role. “I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake,” writes Pinker, who calls it “an exquisite confection” that tickles several parts of our brains. By this argument, music is a by-product of language. It’s enjoyable, but not crucial, just as cheesecake is enjoyable—tantalizing, even—but not an essential part of a balanced diet, despite our evolutionary craving for sugars and fats, which our ancestors sometimes had trouble getting enough of. In other words, if we didn’t have music, humans would survive. Indeed, writes Pinker, “compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.”
Pinker devotes just eleven pages of his massive tome to music. And his choice of an empty-calorie dessert for his analogy, rather than a higher-brow but equally tasty food, suggests he might have been intentionally trolling his colleagues. Some of them agree with him, though. Dan Sperber, a French cognitive and social scientist, dismisses music as “an evolutionary parasite.” American psychologist Gary Marcus, author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning, has Pinker’s back, too. (No surprise, given that he studied under Pinker.) “To an alien scientist, music—and our desire to create it—might be one of the most puzzling aspects of humanity,” writes Marcus. Although he notes that the ability to hear pitch well would be helpful when moving around and avoiding danger, as either predator or prey, he makes a strong case against the evolutionary role of music. “What advocates of music as an evolved instinct often forget,” he contends, “is that the music we see now—and that seems so compelling to us—is at least as much a production of cultural selection as it is of natural selection.” By this argument, music is a cultural technology, developed over thousands and thousands of years, not something stamped on our genome.
While many regions of the human brain—including the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex, the amygdala, and Broca’s area—are active when we create or listen to music, the cheesecake gang is quick to point out that no region is dedicated to music. Instead, like reading, music takes advantage of several other parts with their own functions.
But the other side has its arguments and its own star witnesses, from Charles Darwin to high-profile contemporary thinkers. While Pinker grew up in Montreal and now teaches at Harvard University, Daniel Levitin was born in San Francisco and is now a professor of psychology and behavioural neuroscience at McGill University. Along the way, he worked as a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer. In This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of Human Obsession, he admits that when someone of Pinker’s stature issues a challenge such as “auditory cheesecake,” it’s a jolt to the scientific community. People re-examined positions they’d never bothered to question. “Pinker got us thinking,” writes Levitin, though in his case, the reevaluation didn’t lead to a change of mind. He’s not alone: English archaeologist Steven Mithen also took umbrage at Pinker’s suggestion and one chapter in Mithen’s 2005 book, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, is called “More than cheesecake?” (Spoiler alert: yes.)
The pro-evolutionary crowd is armed with no shortage of theories to fling at the other side. Starting with sex, naturally. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin writes, “I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.” The idea is that the more musical the man, the more mates he attracts. Every teenage guy who picks up a guitar tests this theory, with admittedly mixed results. Birds and whales use song in mating (and perhaps other reasons, including marking territory), though some experts contend this is more analogy than direct connection.
Levitin argues that the ability to sing and dance—which have only recently been seen as two separate things—indicated stamina and good physical and mental health to potential mates. More than that, musical ability is like the peacock’s tail. “The colourful tail,” he writes, “signals that the healthy peacock has metabolism to waste, he is so fit, so together, so wealthy (in terms of resources) that he has extra resources to put into something that is purely for display and aesthetic purposes.”
The flaw in the mating and dating argument is that it doesn’t explain the Ella Fitzgeralds, the Aretha Franklins, and the Neko Cases. Despite systemic sexism in the music industry, men do not have any innate musical advantage over women. In fact, music might be even more important to women. My mother may not have sung to me, but across almost all cultures mothers sing to their children. For most people, that’s the first music they hear. Mothers use music to soothe their kids with lullabies, engage them with nursery rhymes, and teach them with jingles. And the sing-songy pattern that adults use when talking to babies, a musical speech called motherese, connects with infants more than normal speech or singing.
If the evolutionary reason wasn’t sex, then maybe it was violence. Chimpanzees, much closer to our genetic home than birds or whales, defend turf and intimidate others with pant hoots, sometimes accompanied by drumming. Anthropologist Edward H. Hagen and theoretical biologist Peter Hammerstein argue that to proclaim territory, boast about their strength and number, form alliances, and express strategic emotional states such as anger, joy, and sadness, Neanderthals and other human ancestors “needed a signal that closely resembles music: a loud, group-specific, emotionally engaging chorus of highly synchronized sounds performed by group members who had practiced together for weeks, months or years.”
One of the differences between speech and song is the rhythmic pattern. When we listen to something with a regular rhythmic pattern, humans tend to synchronize with that pattern. Even when we’re at a classical concert and we’re supposed to stay still, our brains are dancing with the music because our brainwaves are synchronizing with the music. Our idea of polite and docile behaviour at the symphony is a relatively recent social convention. But it’s a powerful one, as Tom Morris, the artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic in England, discovered when he tried to revive the old ways. At a 2014 performance of Handel’s Messiah, he encouraged the audience to “clap or whoop when you like, and no shushing other people.” He even invited them to create a mosh pit. But when a Royal Society research fellow attempted to crowd surf during the “Hallelujah” chorus, outraged patrons ejected him. Morris claimed the last time something like this had happened at a classical concert was back in the eighteenth century.
Because singing also helps us synchronize with other people, it creates social ties. Early humans who sang and played instruments together had a better chance of survival. A fan of this social cohesion argument, Levitin notes that possible benefits of ancient campfire singing included staying awake, scaring off predators, and nurturing co-ordination and co-operation. For society to work, we need connections with each other and music is one way to build them.
Even without other people, we like to groove to our favourite tunes. It gets us high when we do. Given that our emotions are a control system for our bodies and our minds, Mithen doubts that we “would be so easily and profoundly stirred by music if it were no more than a recent human intervention. And neither would our bodies, as they are when we automatically begin tapping our fingers and toes while listening to music.”
If you’re still undecided about how essential music is to humans, maybe Tom Chau can convince you. The boy who liked to take things apart—“all kinds of things, radios, cassette players, various kinds of toys, probably some household appliances, too”—grew up to study biomedical engineering. But in 1999, after the birth of his first son, he left his job as a technical consultant at IBM to work, for half the salary, at helping kids. He started the PRISM (Paediatric Rehabilitation Intelligent Systems Multidisciplinary) Lab at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto. Chau’s thirty-member team of rehab engineers, therapists, and graduate students have one goal: liberating severely disabled children. And because of inventions such as the Virtual Music Instrument, he’s earned a reputation as a world leader in technology for people with disabilities.
When he first started working on the VMI, Chau was thinking about movement, not melody. To encourage severely disabled children to be less passive and expand their range of motion, he wanted a way to reward them for waving an arm or a hand or whatever body part they could move. He and his team took a computer, a television, and a camera, then wrote software to create a device that plays different notes when a body part moves across coloured shapes on the TV screen. If the kids enjoyed making some fun sounds, that would be good, too.
One day, music therapist Andrea Lamont, who helped develop the VMI, showed a soft-spoken and mild-mannered eight-year-old boy with muscular dystrophy how an early prototype worked by playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Although the boy had no fine motor control and his fingers were chronically clenched, which made holding an instrument impossible, he played a note-perfect rendition of the song. The boy’s parents had no idea their son had such musical talent. Chau watched their chins drop in disbelief. This was an emotional moment for everyone in the room—Chau experiences a lot of those in his job—but it also dawned on him that his invention could be a lot more powerful than he’d ever imagined. He just didn’t know how powerful.
Since the first version of the Virtual Music Instrument in 2003, it has given children with disabilities a chance to engage in leisure activity while encouraging exploration and emotional expression. More than that, it lets kids who couldn’t hold, let alone play, an instrument make music and helps them develop social skills. They can also play with able-bodied friends and family, free of psychological barriers. In 2010, the VMI won a da Vinci Award for innovative developments in assistive technology from the U.S.–based National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Traditionally, locked-in syndrome refers to someone who, perhaps after a traumatic brain injury, is aware yet unable to move or communicate. But Chau sees a lot of people who are essentially locked in because of their disability. Music can be instrumental in unlocking them. A few years ago, his team worked with four adolescents who had no understanding of cause and effect. Trapped in their own bodies and believing that nothing they did had any effect on the world, they had developed a learned helplessness. Music therapists used the VMI to teach the teens that if they moved a specific part of their body, they could keep the music playing.
By the end of the study, two of the four had a clear understanding of cause and effect. In fact, one of the girls started moving her shoulder as soon as someone wheeled her into the room with the VMI. She’d never shown any comprehension of her environment before, but suddenly the ability to do something functional, such as activate a switch, became a possibility. “Music provides a medium of communication and self-expression that transcends cultural barriers and language barriers,” said Chau. “And when you talk about kids who are non-verbal, essentially there is a language barrier. They speak a language that we don’t understand, and they may be speaking that language through their physiology, through their facial expressions, through their movements. Music bridges the gap.”
The lab has continued developing the technology over the years. The researchers have added dozens of instruments, everything from honky-tonk piano to bagpipes. In 2011, Eric Wan, one of Chau’s grad students, used the VMI to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major with the Montreal Chamber Orchestra at Place des Arts. Wan had played the violin before an adverse reaction to a measles vaccine left him paralyzed from the shoulders down at the age of eighteen. By moving his head, he was able to play pre-recorded violin segments—and realize his boyhood dream of bringing down the house in a prestigious concert hall.
The beauty of the VMI is the feedback it offers. Children can hear the tones they produce—and see themselves activating the sound. “That cause and effect is really essential,” Lamont said. “Once we get them hooked, there’s that huge potential for learning.”
Meanwhile, the boy who played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” used the VMI and the Suzuki method, which teaches children to play an instrument by breaking the skill into small steps in a positive environment, to continue developing his musical ability. That helped change the way he thought about himself. One of the first things he said to Lamont when she met him was “I am disabled.” A few years later, she overheard him introduce himself to a reporter by saying “I am a musician.”
I may not be a musician and I may not have been born with a natural ability to sing well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I wasn’t born musical on some level. This is another bun fight among the academics. Steven Mithen argues that we’re all born with an inherent appreciation for music. In addition, we all have some innate knowledge of music: we’re not born knowing all the complexities that grown-up brains can grasp, but day-old infants can detect a beat in music and, after three months, they can detect pitch changes. Gary Marcus, on the other hand, writes: “To the degree that we ultimately become musical, it is because we have the capacity to slowly and laboriously tune broad ensembles of neural circuitry over time, through deliberate practice, and not because the circuitry of music is all there from the outset.”
As such debates drone on, it’s no wonder some cognitive psychologists have an allergic reaction to evolutionary psychology. What frustrates Pfordresher is that the evolutionary adaptation debate tends to fall back on definitions of something that keeps changing. “It’s very hard to define music,” he said, “in part because people in the business of making music often go to great efforts to test the boundaries of what we call music.”
Pinker’s analysis focuses on instrumental music and avoids singing. That streamlines and simplifies the argument. “The problem, though, is that singing may well have been where music started,” according to Pfordresher. Indeed, what we now call speaking might not have been that easily distinguishable from what we now call singing. Even today, speaking and singing can be hard to distinguish. Early speech in babies and children is often song-like—a baby’s cooing is more like singing than speaking—while motherese is a cross between singing and speaking. And even Pinker notes, “Some singers slip into ‘talking on pitch’ instead of carrying the melody, like Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. They sound halfway between animated raconteurs and tone-deaf singers.”
Mithen doesn’t believe language came first. He doesn’t believe music came first. And he doesn’t believe they developed together. Instead, he argues, “There was a single precursor for both music and language: a communication system that had the characteristics that are now shared by music and language, but that split into two systems at some date in our evolutionary history.”
That we’ll probably never know—fossils, after all, aren’t much help when it comes to answering questions about early human cognitive capacity—has only escalated the food fight rather than squelching it.
Some people want to believe that if music played an evolutionary role, that gives it more legitimacy today, especially as an artistic endeavour. That was my gut reaction, but eventually I had to admit that it just doesn’t matter. All you have to do is look around and you’ll see how common music is, how popular it is, and how significant it is in our lives. That should be all the legitimacy anyone needs. As Sean Hutchins, director of research at Toronto-based Royal Conservatory of Music told me, “I don’t think you really need to go hunting for explanations in the deep evolutionary past to make music a meaningful part of people’s lives.”
No matter how humans came to love it, song clearly means so much to us. Many folks devote their lives to making music, even if it’s only as an avocation—and many others wish they could. Including me.