The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

THE WORLD IN SIX SONGS

DANIEL J. LEVITIN is the author of The Organized Mind and the New York Times bestseller and Los Angeles Times Book Award nominee This Is Your Brain on Music. He runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University. Before becoming a research scientist, he was a record producer and professional musician. As a producer, he has a number of gold records to his credit, and has worked on albums by artists such as Stevie Wonder, Midnight Oil, and k.d. lang. He has played professionally with Mel Tormé, Blue Öyster Cult, and David Byrne. He has published extensively in scientific journals such as Science and Neuron and in audio trade journals such as Grammy, Billboard, and Audio magazine.

Praise for The World in Six Songs

A lively, ambitious new book . . . whose combined elements can induce feelings of enlightenment and euphoria. Levitin is . . . able to show off his natural passion and estimable aptitude for writing about music. . . . Will leave you awestruck.

—The New York Times

"For fans of This is Your Brain on Music this is a must-read. For other readers, this is a literary, poetic, scientific, and musical treat waiting to be discovered."

—Seattle Times

"Why can a song make you cry in a matter of seconds? Six Songs is the only book that explains why. With original and awe-inspiring insights into the nature of human artistry, it is irresistibly entertaining. Anyone who loves music should read it."

—Bobby McFerrin, ten-time Grammy Award–winning artist (Don’t Worry, Be Happy)

"Equal measures of neuroscience and Nick Hornby–esque enthusiasm . . . A rare feat, both brain workout and beach read, a book that explains the mysteries of oxytocin (the trust-inducing hormone released during communal singing as well as in women during childbirth) and why Sting chants ‘eh-oh’ at the end of ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.’"

—The Very Short List, www.veryshortlist.com

Exquisitely well-written and easy to read, serving up a great deal of scientific information in a gentle way for those of us who are—or just think we are—a bit science-phobic. More than that, the book is fun. Who would have thought that a scientific hypothesis could be supported by the ‘Slinky’ song or by Dylan’s ‘Death Is Not the End?’

—Huffington Post

Without music, we would be little more than animals, and Daniel Levitin explains it beautifully.

—Sir George Martin, CBE, producer of the Beatles

Music seems to have an almost willful, evasive quality, defying simple explanation, so that the more we find out, the more there is to know, leaving its power and mystery intact, however much we may dig and delve. Daniel’s book is an eloquent and poetic exploration of this paradox. There may be no simple answer or end in sight, but the ride is nonetheless a thrilling one, especially in the company of a writer who is an accomplished musician, a poet, a hard-nosed scientist, and someone who can still look upon the universe with a sense of wonder.

—Sting

Daniel Levitin writes about music with all the exuberance of a die-hard fan, and all the insight of a natural-born scientist. This is a fascinating, entertaining book, and some of its most inventive themes may stay stick in your head forever, something like a well-loved song.

—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.

—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

This book brilliantly covers a lot of ground, tells an intimate version of a universal truth, and, finally, explains why a simple love song like ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ can take on a religious aura; a book you can use.

—Ben Sidran, musician, producer, and composer of, among many others, Steve Miller’s hit song Space Cowboy

Fascinating. Provides a biological explanation for why we might tap our feet or bob our heads in time with a favorite song, how singing might soothe a baby, and how music emboldens soldiers or athletes preparing for conflict. An easy read.

—Associated Press

His passionate journey into the hearts and minds of the musically obsessed is a fantastic ride. Along the way, you’ll hang out with Sting, Joni Mitchell, and Oliver Sacks, as well as people you likely won’t have heard of but will be equally interested to meet, like music theorist Ian Cross.

—New Scientist

Levitin creates a rich account of how music has allowed humans to thrive even when faced with war, loss, and dwindling romance.

—Seed Magazine

Enthusiastically recommended . . . Expansive, highly readable, inspirational. . . . brilliant, popularistic music commentary.

—Chamber Music Today

"Thoughtful and wide-ranging . . . entertaining, captivating. Read Six Songs. Maybe we can have our cheesecake and eat it too."

—Evolutionary Psychology

With protean musical reach and intellectual grasp . . . a Pied Piper celebrating diversity within community, in this exploration of music, emotion, and the brain. Now with a freer, more personal voice, Levitin provides an exemplary mix of scientist and artist, student and teacher, performer and listener.

— Library Journal (starred review)

Charles Darwin meets the Beatles . . . an intriguing explanation for the power of music in our lives as individuals and as a society.

—Publishers Weekly

"A truly fascinating book with enormous scope, The World in Six Songs provides music lovers, and others, with an education in music as it influenced human and cultural evolution. Levitin presents his information in a scientific yet approachable manner and keeps what could be a very heavy topic fun and anecdotal."

—Powell’s Books, Portland, OR

It’s a provocative theory and an ambitious undertaking, but Levitin is up to the task. Through interviews with musicians and evolutionary biologists and his own scientific research, Levitin forms a compelling argument. As important as this work is, Levitin keeps things light. The result is a tremendously fun yet thought-provoking book.

—P. Egan, Elliot Bay Book Company, Seattle

I found this a fresh, compelling construct that allows the author to explain how music enriches and informs our lives, how it teaches us, how it helps us—and also for him to share vivid stories that illustrate his points. . . . This one’s worth not just a read but a couple of wonderful rereads.

—Reader’s Digest

An entertaining read. You will constantly learn new things.

—The Vancouver Sun

Daniel Levitin is one of the most interesting writers and thinkers about music in the world today.

—Edwin Outwater, former resident conductor, San Francisco Symphony; guest conductor, San Francisco and Chicago Symphony Orchestras

"I was skeptical when I began reading. The stated goal seemed outlandish. But by the time I was about one-third the way into The World in Six Songs, I realized just how powerful it is. It really is a tour de force. It is exquisitely written, and brings together a vast array of knowledge, tying things together in creative ways, while always remaining accessible. This promises to be not only another widely read hit, but also an important document for the field of music cognition."

—Jamshed Bharucha, provost and professor of psychology, Tufts University

"To try to cover the meaning of music throughout the history of mankind to how we still use it every day is extraordinarily ambitious. Combining musical expertise, psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary science, Daniel Levitin’s Six Songs has accomplished this astonishing task."

—Jon Appleton, composer and professor of music, Dartmouth College and Stanford University

Insightful and stimulating, with personal anecdotes that add a poignant dimension anyone can relate to.

—Gary Lucas, guitarist and composer for, among many others, Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley

He’s an amazing guy: a successful music producer that went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience. As a professor at McGill University, he is now doing pioneering research on how music relates to the brain and vice versa. This book documents his studies and offers some unique theories. A fascinating read.

—Alex Skolnick, Testament, Trans-Siberian Orchestra

I read every word, and even hummed along with many of the songs. It is a friendly, joyous, comforting, knowledgeable, religious, and lovely book. An amazing piece of work.

—Lewis R. Goldberg, senior scientist, Oregon Research Institute

"On a per-page basis, there is more interesting stuff in The World in Six Songs than in any other book about music you’re likely to encounter."

—The Globe and Mail (Canada)

"Daniel J. Levitin returns with the same smart, readable mix of science, personal anecdote, and musical example that made last year’s This Is Your Brain on Music so engaging. For anyone interested in music, evolution, or the nature of society, this is a must-read."

—Now Toronto

"Captivating . . . Levitin goes beyond mere taxonomy in The World in Six Songs, by giving us a comprehensive genealogy and historical perspective on each song type, as well as audaciously tying together diverse scientific, philosophical, and theological strands. Levitin is to be commended for approaching this subject with passion and verve and giving us a buffet of food for thought."

—Toro Magazine (Canada)

Also by Daniel J. Levitin

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Previously published as a Dutton hardcover and Plume paperback.

First Dutton paperback printing 2016

Copyright © Daniel J. Levitin, 2008

Excerpt from Weaponized Lies © Daniel J. Levitin, 2017

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eBook ISBN: 9781101043455

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE DUTTON HARDCOVER EDITION OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS:

Levitin, Daniel J.

The world in six songs: how the musical brain created human nature / Daniel J. Levitin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780525950738 (h.c.)

ISBN 9780452295483 (pbk.)

I. Music—Psychological aspects. 2. Music—Social aspects. 3. Music—Origin. I. Title. ML3838.

L48 2008

781'.11—dc22 2008012298

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Version_4

To K.Z.

who always knows what music I'll like

and for L.R.G.

who put the kibosh on that whole llama farm thing

Contents

About the Author

Also by Daniel J. Levitin

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

CHAPTER 1: Taking It from the Top

or  The Hills Are Alive . . .

Music and poetry. The two uniquely human components of the music brain.

CHAPTER 2: Friendship

or  War (What Is It Good For)?

Social bonding, synchronous coordinated movement, the evolution of emotional bonding, protest music for group cohesion.

CHAPTER 3: Joy

or  Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

The first song. Neurochemical effects of music and music therapy.

CHAPTER 4: Comfort

or  Before There Was Prozac, There Was You

Why we listen to sad music when we’re sad. Lullabyes and the blues. (And a short story about depressed restaurant workers pushed to the edge by a happy song.)

CHAPTER 5: Knowledge

or  I Need to Know

Music as an information-bearing medium. Learning, memory, and oral histories.

CHAPTER 6: Religion

or  People Get Ready

The role of music and ritual in creating order, reducing ambiguity, and commemorating important times and events.

CHAPTER 7: Love

or  Bring ’Em All In

The sense of hearing and the prefrontal cortex. Tools, musical instruments, and shaping the environment. The evolution of social structure.

Appendix

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

An Excerpt from Weaponized Lies

CHAPTER 1

Taking It from the Top

or  The Hills Are Alive . . .

On my desk right now I have a stack of music CDs that couldn’t be more different: an eighteenth-century opera by Marin Marais whose lyrics describe the gory details of a surgical operation; a North African griot singing a song to businessmen passing by in the hopes of securing a handout; a piece written 185 years ago that requires 120 musicians to perform it properly, each of them reading a very specific and inviolable part off of a page (Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9). Also in the pile: forty minutes of groans and shrieks made by humpback whales in the Pacific; a North Indian raga accompanied by electric guitar and drum machine; a Peruvian Andes vocal chorus of how to make a water jug. Would you believe an ode to the gustatory pleasures of homegrown tomatoes?

Plant ’em in the spring eat ’em in the summer

All winter without ’em’s a culinary bummer

I forget all about all the sweatin’ and diggin’

Every time I go out and pick me a big ’un

Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes

What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes?

Only two things that money can’t buy

That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes

(Guy Clark)

That all these are music may seem self-evident to some, or the stuff of argument to others. Many of our parents or grandparents or children say that the music we listen to isn’t music at all, it’s just noise. Noise by definition is a set of sounds that are random, confused, or uninterpretable. Could it be that all sound is potentially musical if only we could understand its internal structure, its organization? This is what the composer Edgar Varèse was driving at when he famously defined music as organized sound—what sounds like noise to one person is music to another, and vice versa. In other words, one man’s Mozart is another’s Madonna, one person’s Prince is another’s Purcell, Parton, or Parker. Perhaps there is a key to understanding what is common to all these collections of sounds, and to what has driven humans since the beginning to engage with them so deeply as not just sound but music.

Music is characterized both by its ubiquity and its antiquity, as the musicologist David Huron notes. There is no known culture now or anytime in the past that lacks it, and some of the oldest human-made artifacts found at archaeological sites are musical instruments. Music is important in the daily lives of most people in the world, and has been throughout human history. Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution, mind, and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans, at the way that music and people co-evolved, each shaping the other. Musicologists, archaeologists, and psychologists have danced around the topic, but until now, no one has brought all of these disciplines together to form a coherent account of the impact music has had on the course of our social history. This book is a lot like making a family tree, a tree of musical themes that have shaped our ancestors’ lives: their working days, their sleepless nights—the soundtrack of civilization.

Anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, and psychologists all study human origins, but relatively little attention has been paid to the origins of music. I find that odd. Americans spend more money on music than they do on prescription drugs or sex, and the average American hears more than five hours of music per day. We know now that music can affect our moods and our brain’s chemistry. On a day-to-day level, a better understanding of the common history between music and humanity can help us to better understand our musical choices, our likes and dislikes, to harness the power of music to control our moods. But far more than that, understanding our mutual history will help us to see how music has been a shaping force, how music has been there to guide the development of human nature.

The World in Six Songs explains, at least in part, the evolution of music and brains over tens of thousands of years and across the six inhabited continents. Music, I argue, is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next. This book explains how we can better understand the role that music has played in our species by thinking about six kinds of songs. They are songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.

Much of the world’s music is now available on compact disc, or on the medium that is rapidly replacing it, digitized sound files on computers (generically—and somewhat inaccurately—referred to as MP3s). We live in a time of unprecedented access to music. Virtually every song ever recorded in the history of the world is available on the Internet somewhere—for free. And although recorded music represents only a small proportion of all the music that has ever been sung, played, and heard, there is so much of it—estimates suggest 10 million songs or more—that recorded music is as good a place as any to start to talk about the music of the world. Thanks to intrepid musicologists and anthropologists, even rare, indigenous, and preindustrial music is now available to us. Cultures that have been cut off from industrialization and Western influence have had their music preserved, and by their own accounts, it may have been unchanged for many centuries, giving us a window into the music of our ancestors. The more I listen to music like this and to Western artists that are new to me, the more conscious I become of how large music is and how much there is to know.

The diversity of our musical legacy includes songs that tell stories about people, such as Bad, Bad Leroy Brown or Cruella de Vil; there’s a catchy song about a murderous psychopath who kills the judge at his own trial; songs exhorting us to buy this meat product and not that (Armour hot dogs versus Oscar Mayer wieners); a song promising to keep a promise; a song mourning the loss of a parent; music made on instruments believed to be one thousand years old and on instruments invented just this week; music played on power tools; an album of Christmas carols sung by frogs; songs sung to enact social and political change; the fictional Borat singing the equally fictional national anthem of Kazakhstan, boasting about his country’s mining industry:

Kazakhstan greatest country in the world

All other countries are run by little girls

Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium

All other countries have inferior potassium

and a song about suburban noise pollution:

Here comes the dirt bike

Beware of the dirt bike . . .

Brainwashing dirt bike

Ground-shaking dirt bike

Mind-bending dirt bike

In control

Soul-crushing dirt bike

In spite of all this diversity, I believe that there are six kinds of songs, six ways that we have always used and experienced music in our lives that carry a great deal of explanatory power.

I have been making and studying music for most of my life—I had a career producing pop and rock records for a number of years and now I direct a research laboratory studying music, evolution, and the brain. Yet I was concerned when I started this project that I might be blinkered. I didn’t want to be ego- or ethnocentric. I didn’t want to be culturally biased, or fall prey to any of a number of other insidious biases of gender, genre, or generation, or even pitch bias or rhythm bias. So I asked a number of musician and scientist friends what they thought all music has in common.

I visited Stanford University to meet with my old friend Jim Ferguson, who is the chairman of the Anthropology Department there; we went to high school together and have been close friends for thirty-five years. Anthropologists study culture, how it shapes our thoughts, ideas, and our worldview, and I thought for sure Jim would help me to avoid all the pitfalls and prejudices that I feared could be so seductive. Jim and I discussed how songs have many functions in the daily lives of people throughout the world and that over the millennia music has been used in so many ways we can’t hope to enumerate them all.

Ubiquitous are work songs, blood songs, lust and love songs. . . . There are songs about how great God is, songs about how our god is better than yours; songs about where to find water or how to make a canoe; songs to put people to sleep and to help them stay awake. Songs with lyrics, songs of grunting and chanting, songs played on pieces of wood with holes in them, on tree trunks, with sea and turtle shells, songs made by slapping your cheeks and chest Bobby McFerrin style. I asked Jim what all these types of music had in common. His answer was that this was the wrong question.

Quoting the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Jim said that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ. The notion that humanity can be best appreciated by extracting those features common to all cultures is a bias that I held without even knowing it. Ferguson—and Geertz—feel that the best way, perhaps the only way, to understand what makes us most human is to thrust ourselves face-to-face with the enormous diversity of things that humans do. It is from the particulars, the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves that one can best understand human musicality.

We are a complicated, imaginative, adaptive species. How adaptable are we? Ten thousand years ago humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the Earth; now we account for 98 percent. Humans have expanded to live in just about every climate on the surface of the Earth that is even remotely habitable. We’re also a highly variable species. We speak thousands of different languages, have wildly different notions of religion, social order, eating habits, and marriage rites. (Kinship definitions alone account for mind-boggling variability among us, as any introductory college anthropology text will attest.)

The right question then, after due consideration of music’s diversity, is whether there is a set of functions music performs in human relations. And how might these different functions of music have influenced the evolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit across distinct intellectual and cultural histories? What role did the musical brain have in shaping human nature and human culture over the past fifty thousand years or so? In short, how did all these musics make us who we are?

The six types of songs that shaped human nature—friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs—I’ve come to think are obvious, but I accept you may take some persuading. The people of a given time or place may not have used all six. The use of some has ebbed while others flowed. In modern times with computers, PDAs, even since the beginning of written language, around five thousand years ago, we haven’t needed to rely so much on knowledge songs to encapsulate collective memory for us, although most English-speaking schoolchildren still learn the alphabet through song and the number line through counting songs, such as the politically incorrect One Little Two Little Three Little Indians. For many of the world’s still preliterate cultures, memory and counting songs remain essential to everyday life. As the early Greeks knew, music was a powerful way of preserving information, more effective and more efficient than simple memorizing, and we are now learning the neurobiological basis for this.

By most definitions, a song is a musical composition intended or adapted for singing. One thing the definition leaves unclear is who does the adapting. Does the adaptation have to be constructed by a professional composer or orchestrator, as when Jon Hendricks took Charlie Parker solos and added scat lyrics (nonsense syllables) to them, or when John Denver took Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and added lyrics to the melody? I don’t think so. If I sing the intro guitar riff to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones (as my friends and I used to do frequently when we were eleven years old), I am the one who has done the adapting, and even if separated from the vocal parts of that song, this melodic line then stands alone and becomes a song by virtue of my friends and I singing it. More to the point, you can sing As Time Goes By with the syllable la and never sing the words—you may have never seen Casablanca and you may not even know that the composition has words—and it becomes a song by virtue of you singing it. For that matter, suppose that only one person in the world knew the words to As Time Goes By, and that all of us went on blissfully humming, whistling, and la-la-la-ing the melody. My intuition here is that just because we didn’t sing words wouldn’t mean that it wasn’t a song.

Most of us share this intuition that song is a broad category that includes anything we might sing or any collection of sounds that resembles such a thing. Again, The World in Six Songs is not, I hope, culturally narrow-minded. African drum music has an important role in the daily lives of millions of people and might not strike some as being songs, but to ignore such purely rhythmic (and difficult to sing, unless you’re Mel Tormé or Ray Stevens) forms of expression would betray a bias toward melody. The rock, pop, jazz, and hip-hop that are the most popular forms of music today would not exist without the African drumming that they evolved from. As I will show, drumming, among its many qualities, can produce powerful songs of social bonding, of friendship.

In trying to understand the evolution of humanity and the role that music has played in it, it seems wise to begin with open minds (and ears) and not exclude any form of music too soon. However, the evolution of mind and music is easiest to follow in music that involves lyrics, because the meaning of the musical expression is less debatable. When the notes are hung on words (or is it that the words are hung on notes?), the meaning is easier to talk about usefully. Because music wasn’t recorded until about a hundred years ago, nor even accurately notated until a few hundred years before that, the historic record of music is substantially lyrics. For these two reasons, music with lyrics will be the predominant focus of The World in Six Songs.

I have used the word song here as a convenient shorthand and, in its most inclusive sense, as a stand-in for music in all its forms, to refer to any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics. I’m particularly interested in that portion of musical compositions that people remember, carry around in their heads long after the sound has died out, sounds that people try to repeat later in time, to play for others; the sounds that comfort them, invigorate them, and draw them closer together. I confess that I unwittingly came to this project with the bias that the best songs become popular and are sung by many. Maybe my background in the music industry put that bias in place. After all, Happy Birthday has been translated into nearly every language on earth (even into Klingon, as fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation can attest; the song is called "qoSlIj DatIvjaj").

But Pete Seeger points out that in some cultures, the best songs are meant to be sung and played for only one other person! Seeger penned such songs as If I Had a Hammer and Turn, Turn, Turn (the latter with lyrics taken from Ecclesiastes).

Among American Indians, Seeger explained, a young man got his eye on a girl and he would make a reed flute and compose a melody. And when she came down to get a pail of water at the brook, he would hide in the weeds and play her his tune. If she liked it, she followed and saw where things led. But it was her special tune. A tune wasn’t thought of as being free for everybody. It belonged to one person. You might sing somebody’s song after they’re dead to recall them, but each person had a private song. And of course today, many small groups feel their song belongs to them and they’re not happy when it becomes something that belongs to everybody.

Music is often a private matter, as people hum, whistle, or sing to themselves as they go about their daily business. Neuroscientist Ani Patel discovered that in a tribe in Papua New Guinea, private music-making is the dominant form.

We are all biased to some degree by our specific life history and culture. I carry the biases of an American male growing up in California in the 1950s and 1960s. But I was lucky to have been exposed to a wide variety of music. My parents took me to see ballet and musicals before I was five, and through them (The Nutcracker and Flower Drum Song) I gained an early appreciation for Eastern scales and intervals—neuroscientists now believe that such early exposure to other tonal systems is important for later appreciation of music outside one’s own culture. Just as all of us can acquire any of the world’s languages as young children if we are exposed to them, so too can our brains learn to extract the rules and the structures of any of the world’s musics if we’re exposed to them early enough. This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to speak other languages later in life, or learn to appreciate other musics, but if we encounter them as young children, we develop a natural way of processing them because our brains literally wire themselves up to the sounds of these early experiences. Through my father I developed a love of big bands and swing, through my mother a love of piano music and Broadway standards. My mother’s father loved Cuban and Latin music, as well as Eastern European folk songs. Hearing Johnny Cash on the radio when I was six wired my brain for country, blues, bluegrass, and folk music.

A sentiment that I’ve heard many times is that classical music cannot be compared to anything else. "How can you honestly say that that repetitive, loud garbage called rock and roll is even close to the sublime music of the great masters? To take this position is to ignore the inconvenient fact that a major source of joy and inspiration for the great masters themselves was the common" popular music of their day. Mozart, Brahms, and even great-grandaddy Bach took many of their melodic ideas from ballads, bards, European folk music, and children’s songs. Good melody (let alone rhythm) knows no boundaries of class, education, or upbringing.

Most of us could effortlessly construct a list of our favorite songs, of songs that just make us feel joyful, or comforted, or spiritual, that remind us of who we are, who we loved, of groups we belong to. When I ask people to do this in my laboratory, it is always surprising to see how diverse these lists are. Music is large. It is made by as many different types of people, with as many different backgrounds, as there are listeners. New forms of music are being invented and evolving from earlier forms every day. And each new song is a link in a millennia-long chain of evolutionary enhancements to previous song building—slight alterations in the genetic structure of one song lead us to a new one.

Some songs celebrate a particular individual, but then become enhanced (or diluted) by overapplication and overgeneralization. Anyone named Maria or Michelle in the 1960s (think Bernstein and Beatles) or Alison or Sally in the 1970s (think Elvis Costello and Eric Clapton) knows what it is like to be accosted by the song bearing your name, mentioned by a friend or new acquaintance intoxicated by his own wit at having made this childishly simple connection. Anyone who has the lack of common sense to actually sing you the song with your name in it suffers from the doubly foolish notion that