The World in Six Songs

Set a toddler on the floor while music is playing and watch the little one bob up and down. It’s a response to rhythm and melody that’s primitive. This automatic response to tunes and beats has been carried through the ages and through generations. But why? And how?

Daniel Levitin is a musician and record producer turned scientist. His bestselling book This Is Your Brain on Music showed us why music affects us so deeply. His new book proposes that humans didn’t only develop a love for music, but that the human brain developed because of music.

Music laid the groundwork for language and complicated tasks of survival and bonding, stories were passed down in songs, and adaptive societies dominated their enemies using synchronized drums and hollers as weapons of war.

Consider how song and movement and ritual dances unified early humans, and prepared groups for other coordinated, collective tasks, like building structures and plowing fields. Music brings pleasure, connection, seduction, celebration, sorrow and spirituality. It is, in effect, the soundtrack that helped shape civilization.

Daniel Levitin runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University. His new book is called The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. He joins Word of Mouth from Montreal.

(Photo by David)