Music, Language, and the Brain Review

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Music, Language, and the Brain ReviewThis is the best book so far on language, the brain, and music. It is highly technical, especially the first five chapters. Nonspecialists with a serious interest can get through the last two ("Meaning" and "Evolution") but the first five are hard going unless you are fairly advanced.
Patel reviews an enormous, and almost entirely very new, literature on similarities and differences at the micro level between language and music. Overall, music is clearly related to language in many ways, but equally clearly a separate realm--a different communicative modality.
He also points out that music and its meanings are learned. We are not born knowing that minor key is "sad"; that's a recent west-European idea, unknown to the rest of the universe. We have to learn about the pastorality of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and so on. On the other hand, lullabyes sound like mothers shushing their babies, and I would add that laments in every culture sound like ordinary weeping. Still, most musical meanings appear to be culturally learned.
This is an excellent book, and I am duly impressed with all of it, but I do have some modest points to raise. First, I would find music and language somewhat closer than he does. He rules out of consideration a number of intermediate forms--chant, rhythmic speech (like African-American sermons), incantation, word-music poetry (like Russian romantic lyrics), children's play-games, and a great deal more. It seems that a huge percentage of human communication, including much of the most important religious material in every culture, is in that neglected border zone. Something very important is here and is being missed.
Second, he concludes language definitely evolved, but music is a rather recent invention--not an evolved part of communication. I am usually highly allergic to "genes as destiny," and this is surely the first time I ever argued for a genetic explanation against a learning-based one! But I can't separate music and language enough to see music as a recent invention. It depends on some of the same recursive hierarchic-nesting systems of planning as language does; it is universal among humans; it is deeply important; it seems a physical need for a lot of people. Of course I cannot be sure if this means there really is an evolved mechanism, and the question remains open.
Third, he rather misses the relevance of bird song. He is aware of, but strangely downplays, recent work showing that many (most?) songbirds learn their songs and use them to recognize their mates, neighbors, local dialect sharers, and so on. Birds also use song to keep in touch with their families, show their levels of health (as pointed out by Marlene Zuk), show their reproductive status, find each other, and much else. They also use song to communicate their mood states: level of arousal, type of arousal, and more. This is important, as will appear below.
Many songbirds are quite brilliant composers; mockingbirds and many others incorporate all sorts of learned noises into their songs, change the noises to fit their song patterns, work them into original phrases, and so on. Of course no bird comes close to composing even a simple song in the human sense (i.e. a single hierarchically-nested composition using phrases to carry out an overall plan). Bird song has mere "phrase structure grammar," to be technical; they don't do sentences. (No nonhuman animal is known to.) But they are doing something more than just marking territory and finding a mate. Actually, many of the best singers mate for life and don't need to find a mate in most years. Yet they and their mates often sing to each other. Also, many birds sing all year round, not just in the breeding season. We don't know what they are saying, but obviously a lot. Very simple calls do fine for territory-and-mating. Song is incredibly dangerous (hawks and cats home in on it) and expensive (it takes a lot of brain tissue, enough to be a real cost in flying). If the simple and humble songs of birds are this complex and demanding, human music must be a really major enterprise, far more important than social scientists have allowed till now. Bird songs are important because no nonhuman primates and very few other mammals are known to have complex learned songs. Bird songs are about our only models. (Whales sing too, but don't make great lab animals.)
I think music evolved, and did so to handle the management, manipulation, and communication of broad, general, but intense mood-states. Language handles the specific cognitive information; music handles the powerful but unsayable moods. Partly, the moods are directly represented in the music (as in lullabyes and laments); partly we learn our cultures' rules about communicating.
There is a great deal more to say about this, especially when one folds religious chants into the mix. We need more dialogue and better cross-cultural and cross-species knowledge. Is there a group out there working on this?Music, Language, and the Brain OverviewIn the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers.Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms.Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines.This volume provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.Winner of the 2008 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award

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