1 “The reason that most frogs synchronize their calls is that it makes it more difficult for predators to locate them …”
Tuttle, M. D., and M. J. Ryan, (1982). The role of synchronized calling, ambient light, and ambient noise, in anti-bat-predator behavior of a treefrog. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 11: 125–131.
2 “survival is only enhanced by sorting out fact from fiction …”
Of course, organisms can “get ahead” by telling lies, Huron told me. So, deceptive communication can enhance survival of the deceiver. The point is not that communication should be truthful, but that organisms will have a selective advantage if they can decipher fact from fiction. One can easily imagine an arms race of deceivers trying to stay one step ahead of a developing ability to spot deceit, or vice-versa, and this does occur in the animal kingdom.
3 “Music’s direct and preferential influence on emotional centers of the brain and on neurochemical levels supports this view [that music and brains co-evolved].”
See Chapter 4.
4 “By seven months, infants can remember music for as long as two weeks …”
Saffran, J. R., M. M. Loman, and R. R. Robertson. (2000). Infant memory for musical experiences. Cognition 77(1): B15–B23.
5 “… mother-infant vocal interactions exhibit striking similarities across a wide range of cultures.”
Trehub, S. (2003). The developmental origins of musicality. Nature Neuroscience 6(7): 669–673.
And summarized in: Cross, I. (in press). The evolutionary nature of musical meaning. Musicae Scientiae.
See also, for related and relevant ideas: Cross, I. (2007). Music and cognitive evolution. In Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by R. I. Dunbar and L. Barrett. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 649–667.
Cross, I. (in press). Music as a communicative medium. In The Prehistory of Language (Vol. 1), edited by C. Knight and C. Henshilwood. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Cross, I. (in press). Musicality and the human capacity for culture. Musicae Scientiae.
6 “Mothers also use these musiclike vocalizations to direct their infants’ attention …”
Dissanayake, E. (2000). Antecedents of the temporal arts in early mother-infant interactions. In The Origins of Music, edited by N. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 389–407.
Gratier, M. (1999). Expressions of belonging: The effect of acculturation on the rhythm and harmony of mother-infant interaction. Musicae Scientiae Special Issue: 93–112.
7 “… some mice might have stumbled upon the fact that if they made low-pitched sounds with their throats and mouths, it might serve to intimidate other mice …”
Owings and Morton call this “expressive size symbolism.” Owings, D. H., and E. S. Morton. (1998). Animal Vocal Communication: A New Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
See also: Cross, I. (in press). The evolutionary nature of musical meaning. Musicae Scientiae.
8 “‘Vicarious musical plea sure … seems to put a damper on musical self-expression.’”
Robison, P. (n.d) Blackwalnut Interiors. Unpublished manuscript. I am grateful to Paula Robison’s grandson Toby Robison for providing this.
9 “In the 1930s, Albert Lord and Milman Parry recorded folk songs in the mountains of (then) Yugoslavia …”
Lord, A. B. (1960). The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
10 “Some of them memorize their songs with very high accuracy …”
Lord, A. B. (1960). The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
11 “The Gola of West Africa place a particularly high value on the preservation and transmission of tribal history.”
D’Azevedo, W. L. (1962). Uses of the past in Gola discourse. Journal of African History 3: 11–34.
12 “Oliver’s mind had brought up Mahler’s song of mourning for the death of children …”
Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Knopf, p. 280.
13 “‘All this time, I still remember everything you said’”
Banks, T., P. Collins, and M. Rutherford. (1986). In too deep [Recorded by Genesis]. On Invisible Touch [CD]. Virgin Records.
14 “‘I remember the smell of your skin …’”
Adams, B., and R. Lange. (1993). Please forgive me [Recorded by Bryan Adams]. On So Far So Good [CD]. A&M Records.
15 “… mutually reinforcing, multiple constraints of songs are crucially what keeps oral traditions stable over time.”
Wallace, W. T., and D. C. Rubin. (1988). “The wreck of the old 97”: A real event remembered in song. In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, edited by U. Neisser and E. Winograd. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 283–310.
16 “… literal recall is seldom important.”
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. London: Cambridge University Press.
17 “It may also seem … that your brain is not generating all the possible rhymes for a forgotten word, but research has shown that this is in fact what’s happening …”
Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review 95(2): 163–182.
Schwanenflugel, P. J., and K. L. LaCount. (1988). Semantic relatedness and the scope of facilitation for upcoming words in sentences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14: 344–354.
18 “… when singers of a given tradition are asked to write a new ballad … they tend to employ all of the same tools …”
Wallace, W. T, and D. C. Rubin. (1991). Characteristics and constraints in ballads and their effects on memory. Discourse Processes 14: 181–202.
19 “… they changed twenty-four words in ‘The Wreck’ to eliminate assonance, alliteration, and rhyme.”
Wallace, W. T., and D. C. Rubin. (1988). “The wreck of the old 97”: A real event remembered in song. In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, edited by U. Neisser and E. Winograd. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 283–310.
20 “… there are strong cultural pressures to recall such material accurately or not at all.”
Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press, p 179.
21 “Insight into the matter [theory of multiple, reinforcing constraints] comes from another very clever experiment by Rubin.”
Rubin D. C. (1977). Very long-term memory for prose and verse. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16(5): 611–621.
22 “Rubin asked fifty people to recall the words of the Preamble to the United States Constitution …”
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
23 “This of course does not have music …”
My graduate student, Mike Rud (considered one of the best jazz guitarists in Canada) tells me: “As a very young Canadian, my first exposure to the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution was the fantastic Schoolhouse Rock version from ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons. A recent resurgence of interest in Schoolhouse Rock lead to its reissue on DVD. I find for memorizing this passage, this funky melody is of more help than the beautiful but rather convoluted syntax of the original. The listener is kept waiting for well over thirty words after the sentence’s subject before hearing the verb! But the melody’s unique constraints really help a kid remember some otherwise difficult-to-parse prose.”
24 “… these rhythmic units usually coincide with the units of meaning in oral traditions.”
Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 179.
Rubin also cites: Bakker, E. J. (1990). Homeric discourse and enjambement: A cognitive approach. Transactions of the American Philolological Association 120: 1–21.
Lord, A. B. (1960). The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Parry, M. (1971a). Homeric formulae and Homeric metre. In The making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, edited and translated by A. Parry. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 191–239. (Original work published 1928.)
Parry, M. (1971b). The traditional epithet in Homer. In The making of Homeric verse: The Collected papers of Milman Parry, edited and translated by A. Parry. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–190. (Original work published 1928.)
25 “The reality of these chunks has been demonstrated many times …”
Another good example of using poetics to remember was provided to me by Jamshed Bharucha. An Indian man, Rajan Mahadevan, was at one point listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for being able to recite thirty thousand plus digits of Pi from memory. He showed Bharucha how he uses chunking, meter, and rhythm. His digit span and spatial memory are not much different from average, but through chunking, poetics, and lots and lots of practice, he got to this huge number.
26 “… it takes college undergraduates much longer to say what letter comes just before h, l, q, or w than before g, k, p, and v.”
Klahr, D., W. G. Chase, and E. A. Lovelace. (1983). Structure and process in alphabetic retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 9(3): 462–477.
27 “… some professional musicians and Shakespearean actors do indeed have perfect recall for a memorized string and can begin anywhere …”
Oliver, W. L., and K. A. Ericsson. (1986). Repertory actors’ memory for their parts. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 399–406.
28 “‘I will sing it and you tell me when the demon you want has his name mentioned.’”
This is reported as a personal communication (occurring in November 1991) from Kapferer to David Rubin.
Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in Oral Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 190.
29 “… words containing a long-short-long or short-short-short syllabic structure can’t be used in Homeric epic …”
Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in Oral Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 198.
30 “… in the Zoroastrian tradition …”
I thank Jamshed Bharucha for contributing the passage about Zoroastrian prayers.
31 “… ‘music and singing carry ing obscene content …’”
On the Correspondence of Music, Musical Instruments and Singing to the Norms of Islam. (2005). Retrieved March 6, 2008, from http://umma.ws/Fatwa/music/.
32 “… the Talmud is— a record of what were essentially judicial proceedings and deliberations about what precisely the oral teachings were …”
I’ve somewhat simplified the story here, because I’m not so concerned in this book with details of the Torah and its transmission, but rather, with the fact that it was set to music and forms a nice example of a knowledge song. But I’ll expand a bit here. According to traditional rabbinic sources, the entire Torah was given to Moses by God, and it was given in two parts: the Torah proper (which was allowed to be written down) and a system of commentaries and emendations (known as the “Oral Torah”). The Oral Torah—according to the rabbis—was the part that was not written down for one thousand years, and about which there were many debates. It is possible, however, that the so-called “Written Torah”—what we call the Five Books of Moses (the first five chapters of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Chronicles, and Deuteronomy)—was not actually written down either during hundreds of years; we have only the rabbis’ teachings on this. The earliest known/preserved written documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, have been carbon dated to be no older than the second century B.C.E., so we don’t have any independent confirmation that the Written Torah was written down any earlier than the Oral Torah. There are debates on both sides, and at this point, the debates have not been resolved by any physical evidence.
33 “… if melodies can change, so can words.”
One way we infer this is by the discovery of Jews in Ethiopia in the 1980s who had been cut off from contact with other Jews for two thousand years or so, and who are believed to be descended from a liaison between the queen of Sheba and King Solomon. DNA studies have failed to show a genetic descent, and the dominant scholarly view is that contemporary Ethopian Jews are descended from local converts. Regardless, when discovered, they believed that they were the only Jews in the world. They had Torah scrolls and observances similar to those of contemporary Jews, but they did not celebrate the post-biblical holidays of Purim or Hanukkah, having been cut off from the rest of world Jewry after the establishment of those holidays. Many of the melodies they sang for religious songs, Psalms, and Torah were different from any that are currently sung today. Some believe that these melodies may be closer to the original melodies sung by King Solomon himself and, hence, closer to the melodies sung by King David, Moses, and biblical-era Jews. The point is that the drift in melodies between these two groups, whose separation over two millenia seems difficult to dispute, is evidence that the melodies can and do change over time, and if melodies can, so can words.
34 “… [the writer] weaves into the message two well-known Old Testament references.”
Performed by Hank Williams, Aubrey Gass, Tex Ritter, and others. Gass, A. (1949). Dear John [Recorded by Hank Williams]. On Dear John [45rpm record]. MGM Records. (1951).
35 “… there are manifest cognitive benefits that are conferred to the group-as-a-whole … when people sing together.”
In addition to those references previously cited, for a computer science/artificial intelligence perspective, see also:
Gill, S. P. (2007). Entrainment and musicality in the human system interface. AI & Society 21(4): 567–605.
36 “No single ant ‘knows’ that the hill needs to relocate … but the actions of tens of thousands of ants result in the hill being moved …”
See for example: Gordon, D. M. (1999). Ants at Work: How an Insect Society Is Organized. New York: The Free Press.
Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribner.
Strogatz, S. H. (1994). Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Engineering. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
Strogatz, S. H. (2003). Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life. New York: Hyperion.
Wiggins, S. (2003). Introduction to Applied Nonlinear Dynamical Systems and Chaos. New York: Springer-Verlag.
37 “… nonlinear dynamical systems … even the faddish propagation of hit songs …”
The art of mixing a popular song has nonlinear components, according to producer and pundit Sandy Pearlman, as instrumental parts interact with one another and with signal processing devices in ways that are too difficult to easily predict or characterize.
The mathematics involved for calculating a single interaction is usually nothing more complicated than what Newton had available in his time, but he didn’t have the computational capacity we have now to model all the possible interactions. (Without a computer, Newton couldn’t cope with all the calculations necessary to characterize three planets, let alone fifty thousand ants—there are just too many computations and the calculation grows extremely fast with the number of constituents.)
38 “This trade-off is itself nonlinear and dynamic, changing throughout the course of a performance …”
I thank my colleague Frederic Guichard for this formulation.
39 “‘Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can’t explain it [music].’”
Bill Evans Quotes. (n.d.). Retrieved March 7, 2008, from http://thinkexist.com/quotes/bill_evans/.