Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning

INTO THE GROOVE

How Music Really Evolved

Wednesday and Thursday at the camp pass by in a blur: endless rehearsals, many mistakes, much anxiety. But little by little, things get better. On Friday, the final morning of DayJams, we get a last chance to rehearse.

Our first run-through— after what seems like hours of sound checks— is quite shaky. Fortunately, our band’s instructor, Michael, quickly de duces the source of our problems. It’s not that the band has forgotten everything we’ve learned; it’s that our drummer, who sits behind a giant Plexiglas screen (to spare us from deafness), can’t hear the rest of the band. In principle, a drummer is supposed to get feedback from a “stage monitor”—a speaker positioned so that it sends a bit of the sound from the rest of the band back behind the Plexiglas screen. But the drummer’s monitor was switched off, and Riley, who’s only been onstage once before, doesn’t even realize he’s supposed to be able to hear us; he just soldiers on without a monitor, happily playing his part without realizing that the rest of us are out of sync. After Michael sorts that out, we play through a second time, and now the band sounds like a real band. We do a third take, and the camp staff gets it down on MP3. Our first live recording!

Afterward, Michael decides to do something different, to try to keep us loose— and the minute he does, something clicks. Rather than forcing us to rehearse our song yet again, he moves over to the keyboard (we’ve only ever seen him play guitar, and didn’t even realize he knew how to play keyboard) and tells us all to start jamming in the key of G. Riley lays down a beat he’s been working on, and the rest of us play whatever we like, as long as it’s in time and in that key. And together we produce real music. Michael then moves over to drums and asks us to jam in F and G, alternating between the two chords. Freed from the challenges of counting sevens, and freed from the responsibility of having to achieve perfection, I feel liberated, and it’s obvious that the whole band feels the same way. As a listener, I never especially liked “jam” bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish, but for a performer, a well-coordinated jam, in which each person makes up a part that fits together into a spontaneously generated whole, is nothing less than euphoric.

But what really clicks is not the music; it’s my understanding of the origins of music. In a single moment, I suddenly understand the origins of music in a whole new way.

The dominant theory of music evolution— introduced by Darwin, developed by Geoffrey Miller, and endorsed by Daniel Levitin— is that music is all about sexual selection: guys play music because girls like music, and guys like girls. Playing music was good for Jimi Hendrix’s genes, and, so the story goes, our love of music evolved as a way of getting primeval men laid. Hendrix, Miller tells us, had

sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more.

Mick Jagger has had seven children, Jimmy Page five. Were “musical notes and rhythm … first acquired … for the sake of charming the opposite sex,” as Darwin wrote? Miller piles on the evidence, reporting, for example, that in a sample of six thousand recent jazz, rock, and classical albums, 90 percent were produced by men.

But I’m not convinced, and not just because Beethoven appears to have been childless. Although the sexual selection theory sounds very clever, it has a slew of serious flaws.

First, in most aspects of physiology that are shaped by sexual selection, we generally see a significant dimorphism, which is to say noticeable variation between males and females. Peacocks have plumage, their female counterparts don’t; male songbirds sing, females generally don’t. At one point in human history, one might have conceived of human music in the same way— as the product of males alone, and Miller’s data on recordings initially seem consistent with that. But in hindsight, that apparent dimorphism is most likely more about opportunity and sociology than a necessary fact about human biology. We now know with certainty that women can be just as capable musicians as men. Consider, for example, what has happened in the classical world in recent decades. Before the advent of blind auditions (in which aspiring musicians play behind a screen), men drastically outnumbered women in most orchestras; now most symphonies are near parity. My hometown orchestra recently became one of the first major symphonies to hire a female conductor (Marin Alsop), and many more are sure to follow. The Songwriters Hall of Fame is filled with women, like Carole King (“You’ve Got a Friend”), Marilyn Bergman (“The Way We Were”), Betty Comden (“Singin’ in the Rain”), Dolly Parton (“I Will Always Love You”), and Joni Mitchell (“Both Sides Now”). In the contemporary rock world, performers like Tori Amos, Sinead O’Connor, and Alicia Keys are every bit as talented and original as their male counterparts; Mariah Carey has had more No. 1 hits than Elvis. Meanwhile, women like Alison Krauss, Mary J. Blige, Linda Perry, and Missy Elliott helped finally break the glass ceiling in the world of music production. There’s no reason to believe that in humans there is a bona fide sexual dimorphism in either the listening to or the creation of music.

Second, the Jimi Hendrix theory conflates the powerful image of a single exceptionally talented guitarist with the realities of most musicians. Some musicians probably do indeed do it to get girls, but only about half of college-degreed musicians, for instance, are even able to make a living in a musical career; a handful make a living soloing with symphonies, but most make a living giving music lessons or leave the field altogether. Even after Juilliard, one out of four graduates can’t make ends meet as a musician. Most musicians pursue music because they are passionate about music, not because it makes them rich or popular. “I sing lead vocals in a death metal band” may be a come-on, but “I teach trombone to fourth graders” probably isn’t. Even in the time of Mozart and Haydn, as one historian of music put it to me, musicians were not particularly well regarded, typically dressing in livery, like servants, not living like modern-day rock royalty. The Hendrix theory only works if it turns out that on average people who invest the many hours required for musical expertise have more offspring than people who spend that time in other ways, and I know of no data to support that conjecture.

Third, the Hendrix theory is premised on a view of the present that hardly resembles the past in which we evolved. Hendrix lived in a time in which it was possible for musicians to make millions of dollars and become internationally famous, but whatever genes contribute to music evolved long before there were radio stations or record deals. Court jesters made music, too, but their status was hardly that of contemporary rock stars. Before Mozart in the 1760s and Paganini’s rise in the early nineteenth century, few performers became internationally renowned, and the big money arrived only in the age of recording (and is disappearing again, now, in the download era).

Fourth, the Hendrix theory makes it sound as if there were a specific music module in the brain that was somehow targeted by evolution, but as we saw earlier, there is no distinct “music center” in the brain, but rather a coalition of neural tissue, virtually all of which predates music— suggesting that the Hendrix theory is after the wrong quarry.

Finally, the Hendrix theory— as well as just about every other theory of music evolution I have ever encountered— is musically naive, because it makes it sound as if all music were equal. Play any old song, get mate, end of story. Would that it were so easy! As anyone who has ever produced a record realizes, we humans are a fickle lot. No one genre pleases everybody, and no one song pleases everybody. Making good music is hard work, and often unpredictable. The Hendrix theory makes it sound as if our love for music were undiscriminating, as if we listeners were helpless creatures in a snake charmer’s bucket. In reality, our love for music is far more individual and idiosyncratic. Some arrangements of notes move us; others don’t.

Another common claim is that music evolved because it leads to social bonding. No one would argue that music can’t bring people together, but such theories miss the point in at least two different ways: they don’t say why patterns of sound organized over time should play any special role in bonding, and they miss the fact that many other things that weren’t part of our adaptive heritage— like the relatively modern invention of drinking beer— also induce social cohesion.

Precisely parallel issues arise in all the arts. Why do we love poetry? Sculpture? Painting? Forty-eight-minute crime dramas? For every art, there’s an evolutionary theory. But none of them is particularly persuasive. The standard explanation for just about everything in evolution is that we engage in a certain behavior because it’s in the interest of our genes. But most art, whether we are spectators or participants, isn’t in the interest of our selfish genes.

For a Picasso or a Dalí, the math may work out. The genes that underwrote their creative work made them legends, and with fame came considerable access to sexual partners; hence, as judged by the yardstick of evolution—reproductive fitness— they were winners. But for every Picasso or Hendrix there are hundreds or thousands of unsung heroes, poets, and painters who toil in obscurity, perhaps becoming famous after death (like van Gogh), when it is too late to spread their genes, or never getting any recognition at all. For the vast majority of people, investments in the arts are, from a strictly genetic perspective, weak bets. Time spent on art— especially as a spectator, but even as a participant— is time away from gathering food, building shelter, developing new skills, or making babies. People don’t indulge in the arts because it’s good for their genes; they do it despite their genes.

To paraphrase the great philosopher Waylon Jennings, scientists have been looking for explanations of creativity in all the wrong places. The brain has not evolved a special-purpose music instinct or art instinct, any more than it evolved a special instinct for craving small portable electronic gadgets. Just because we like something doesn’t mean we evolved a specific taste for it.

Instead, scientists who have considered the evolution of music and art have often made what I think of as “the error of the historical present”: people tend to automatically assume that what’s true now was always true; we see a mountain and think it’s been there forever. Contemporary music and modern arts are incredibly compelling to contemporary brains, but the first question is whether the artistic productions of our ancestors would be equally compelling. We may get a kick out of seeing cave paintings, but that doesn’t mean your average cave painting would capture a human brain’s attention to the same extent as the 3-D computer-generated renderings in Avatar. The artistic media that capture our imagination now far exceed anything available to our ancestors.

And that’s because over the years, artists, especially commercial artists, have gotten savvier and savvier at understanding what makes human beings tick. Take, for instance, the image of Mickey Mouse. As the late Stephen Jay Gould once pointed out, over the decades Disney has slowly but surely retooled Mickey’s image every few years, in ways that might initially escape the eye. Yet the direction of change has always been the same, toward cuter and cuter: less adult, less threatening, more juvenile, more adorable.

My contention is that music is like Mickey: not the direct product of evolution at all, but the product of artists evolving their craft in order to tickle the brain in particular ways. Music, art, and iPhones spread not because we have innate circuitry for funky dance beats or electronic toys but because musicians, artists, and inventors are often uncommonly talented at reverse-engineering the human psyche.

What clicked the morning I was jamming with my bandmates was exactly the thing that so many of those musicians have been striving for: not sexual selection or anything quite so linear, but a state of joyous immersion, wherein one loses all sense of time passing— the wondrous state that the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced “ chick-SENT-me-high-ee”) has called “flow.”

Flow, according to Csíkszentmihályi, is a state of being fully engaged in a challenging activity requiring skill, a merging of action and awareness. It is characterized by a sense of concentration on the task at hand and a sense of control, a loss of self-consciousness, and an altered sense of time.

This defines jamming almost perfectly, and it also, I believe, gives a big clue into the true prehistory of music. Music isn’t a special inborn modular mental mechanism; it’s a technology, refined and developed over the last fifty thousand years, in no small part to maximize flow.

Each new generation of artists craves new ways to broaden the palette, and hence better ways of keeping both listeners and performers entranced, in a state of flow. The technological underpinnings of music are most immediately obvious in the evolution of physical instruments. The piano, for instance, represented a huge advance over its immediate predecessor, the harpsichord. Both instruments used keyboards to span a vast pitch range, but the harpsichord had no dynamics, which is to say that each note could be played either loudly or not at all. The piano, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in about 1700, basically added a volume control for each individual note, replacing a set of picks or plectra, often made of bird quills, with a system of padded hammers that could strike a given note loudly, softly, or somewhere in between. Once Cristofori’s technology became refined, the piano (short for piano forte, from the Italian terms for “quiet” and “loud”) almost entirely replaced the harpsichord, much like a new species displacing an old one, because the more variable dynamics of the piano offered the musician a whole new world of expression. New playing techniques developed as well, as musicians learned to exploit the possibilities in varying the loudness of notes and later discovered ways of adding complexity to the parts they played with their left hand; as the psychologists Andreas Lehmann and Anders Ericsson have argued, the level of sophistication of piano players has steadily increased over historical time as new techniques have been developed and disseminated.

Synthesizers and electric guitars (especially in combination with pedals that add complexity to the guitar’s intrinsic sound) similarly multiplied the range of options available to musicians, and the microphone opened equally compelling new worlds for vocalists, allowing whispers to be as audible as screams. It is no wonder that all these innovations spread rapidly once developed; they are the musical equivalent of new species, which open new niches and are in some ways better adapted to the environment than many of their predecessors. Ditto for the advent of multitrack recording: once the cat was out of the bag, every musician wanted to experiment with the new possibilities that techniques like layering and overdubs opened up.

Something that is less obvious— but no less important— is that some of the most innovative technologies of music have been intellectual rather than physical. Until roughly A. D. 900, virtually all music was monophonic, which is to say it consisted of only a single melody, perhaps sung in unison by multiple singers, as in Gregorian chant; ideas like counterpoint (with multiple voices singing distinct lines) had not yet been invented: no barbershop quartets, and no delicate Simon and Garfunkel harmonies. Around A. D. 900, or perhaps a bit earlier, some musician or set of musicians came to realize that two singers didn’t have to always sing the same note at the same time to sound good together. One musician could sing the note C, another could sing G (forming the interval known as the perfect fifth), and the two would sound good together. This observation gave rise to a form of music known as organum, in which two different musicians sing separate (but related) melodic lines. Even then, though, composers tended to stick to only a small subset of possible musical intervals (the perfect fifth and the perfect fourth); such harmonies often sound stilted to modern ears. The notion of a major or minor chord had not yet been invented— that wasn’t until around the twelfth century, when composers began to toy with including three distinct voices, including major thirds and minor thirds, the intervals that help define major and minor chords, respectively. Then, and only then, was something we might recognize as modern Western harmony invented.

Eventually, what these composers initially worked out for singers was mapped onto keyboards and other musical instruments. Composers and keyboard players figured out strict rules for which sets of notes (chords) sounded good together and which sounded dissonant, and they figured out rules for which sets of chords sounded good in sequential combination and which ones didn’t, giving rise to techniques like three-part harmony and barbershop quartets; virtually all modern music depends on this discovery of how harmony and its attendant units, chord progressions, function. Once that knowledge, a kind of technological innovation, was developed, it spread rapidly throughout the world.

The favor was returned when the notion of a steady percussive beat was imported from Africa into the West. Virtually every song you hear on the radio nowadays combines these two musical techniques— harmony and steady percussion— both of which in essence had to be invented.

To take another example of a technology that is more intellectual than physical, consider the musical form known as the twelve-bar blues, a particular set of chords played in a particular order, which literally couldn’t have been invented before the idea of harmony was developed. The twelve-bar structure is found in countless blues songs and more broadly throughout modern music, ranging from the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” to the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” and dozens of tunes by Chuck Berry and Eric Clapton.

None of these modern innovations are strictly necessary; a simple unadorned melody can still be compelling. But on the whole, earlier forms of music that lack harmony— like Gregorian chants— often feel flat to modern observers, like paintings from before the discovery of perspective: worth a look, but not central to most modern people’s aesthetic experience. Chants, for instance, rarely get heavy playlist rotation, in part because they don’t exploit the flow-inducing properties of harmony. As a result we habituate faster, enjoying them briefly because of their novelty but soon growing tired of them. (The last pop tune to feature Gregorian chant— Enigma’s 1990 anthem “Mea Culpa”—didn’t rest on chant unadorned, offering its listeners nothing but voices in unison. Instead, it enhanced the underlying monophonic chant with all sorts of modern production techniques, ranging from close-miked, sexy French-language overdubs to drum machines, sound effects, and electric guitar solos.)

Music may not be improving over the ages in an artistic sense— that’s up for debate and a matter of taste. But the craft and the reservoir of techniques constantly improves, in music as in any other technology, and that gives musicians more and more options, which means it is easier to keep listeners in a state of flow.

Inevitably, some new musical inventions turn out to be fads, techniques that remain on the scene for but a brief period of time. But others— like Western harmony, percussive beats, the microphone, the piano, and the electric guitar— spread rapidly and stick around when invented, and for good reason: they fit well with the psychology of the human mind. What advocates of music as an evolved instinct often forget 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. New tools and ideas lead to new musical techniques, and the ones that are better (or at least more effective in holding listeners’ attention) stick around.

With all of the techniques at the disposal of the modern producer— ranging from the intellectual (like harmony and regular percussion) to the technical (like equalizers, limiters, and compressors, which help clarify and amplify the distinctive sounds of each instrument) to the logistical (like click tracks, which keep musicians tightly and pleasurably in time) to the sonic (like synthesized sounds, distortion pedals, and techniques like echo, delay, and reverb)—we can’t help but get into the groove.

* One might make similar remarks about common song structures like the aaba form (Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl,” and, in modified form, the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) or an older form, typically abaca, known as the rondo, in which a main theme keeps returning. (The end of the first act of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is one example.) No one structural form has a lock on all music, in part because we like variation itself, from one song to the next. But alternations of verse and chorus, unfamiliar and familiar, keep listeners in the game and keep dopamine—likely a key player in the neural basis of flow—coursing through our brains.