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The Science Behind The Music: Cultural Influences

September 8th, 2009

Music is unusual among all human activities for being everywhere all that once, and also for being so old and ancient. No human culture during any time period, from the past to the present, has lacked music. In fact, some of the oldest artifacts found by archeologists in excavation sites are indeed musical instruments.

When human beings come together as a group, music is always there. Weddings, funerals, college graduations, soldiers marching off for war, stadium sporting events, going out for a night on the town, romantic dinners, mothers rocking their babies to sleep, and students studying are all examples of when we use music.

Music is and was a part of everyday life, even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western cultures. Only recently (relatively speaking, 500 years ago) have we found that a distinction has come about that has cut human society into two, resulting in different classes of musicians. These may be known as the professionals and the amateurs.

Our culture makes a unique distinction between expert performers. For example, we have professional singers and regular folk who will pay for to listen to those performers. Regular people view these professionals in another class level.

However, if you were invited by an African tribe to take part in an authentic, African tribal song and dance celebration, this would be different. If you told the leader of that tribe, “Sorry, I don’t sing,” he would look at you, puzzled, and say, “What do you mean you don’t sing? You can talk, can’t you?”

It’s just as odd as saying that you can’t dance, even though that you can walk, run, skip, and so on. Singing and dancing in these cultures is seen as something that is a completely natural activity, involved by everyone. It’s interesting to see how modern society classifies the “experts” from the “non-experts.”

Just a couple of generations ago (before television), a lot of families would spend their time playing music for entertainment. Today, there is an enormous emphasis on technique and skill set. Is a musician “good enough” to play in public?

Music has indeed become a sort of reserved activity in modern society, where the rest of us just sit and listen. The music industry is one of the largest business sectors in the world, employing hundreds of thousands of people, making billions of sales in albums, Internet downloads, and concert tickets.

Americans actually spend more money on music than they spend on sex or prescription drugs. Considering this fascinating fact, I’d say that the entire human race definitely qualifies as expert music listeners.

We exhibit the cognitive ability to detect incorrect notes, to search for music that we enjoy, to remember hundreds of melodies, and even to tap our foot to the beat of the music—an activity so complex, involving meter extraction that most computers cannot even do it.

Why are we so intrigued by music and why are we willing to spend so much money on it? Two tickets to a concert can cost as much as a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four, and one CD can cost the same as a piece of clothing or basic monthly phone service. Understanding why we love music so much is an open window on the essence of human nature.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Stay tuned for my next lesson on this topic. In the next article, I will be looking at evolutionary psychology in relation to human likings of music.