Primitive Music
A paper written by Dr Mario Mendez, a neurologist at the University of California, describes a patient who, in his fifties, had suffered a stroke that crippled his understanding of language. So, for example, the patient could not understand a simple request such as “touch your chin.” But after his stroke, the patient, who had been unmusical, discovered a passion for music, and the attending of concerts became his main activity. He would often answer Dr Mendez’s questions by breaking into song.
The greatest determinant of musicality is pitch: the better your pitch, the more likely you are to enjoy music. And perfect pitch (the ability to sing a note to order) is rare among adults — perhaps only 1 in 10,000 has it. Yet perfect pitch is common among the autistic.
And musical savants are not rare. In his book Musical Savants: Exceptional Skill in the Mentally Retarded, Leon Miller, of the University of Illinois, described 13 people who were indeed mentally retarded. Typically, their IQs and social skills were so rudimentary that they could not speak or dress themselves. But musically they were gifted, not only playing well but also composing creatively. And, typically, they had perfect pitch.
When we talk to babies, we instinctively use a cootchy-coo language that is essentially musical. We do so because babies understand pitch and the other elements of song. Dr Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, has shown that babies respond appropriately, with smiles or frowns, to praise or admonishment when delivered in baby talk, even if the language is foreign. “What a good girl!,” delivered in French, provokes a happy smile in an English nursery.
Studies on mothers have shown that, in the privacy of their homes, 100 per cent of mothers — even the unmusical ones — sing to their babies because singing so effectively influences babies’ moods.
And the babies respond because, as Jenny Saffron of the University of Rochester, New York, has shown, we humans are born with perfect pitch. But babies lose their perfect pitch when language kicks in. We can see, therefore, how musical savants might arise, because intelligence and language are separate from music.
Songbirds have perfect pitch and, despite their tiny brains, they can be good composers, employing many of the repetitions that characterise human music such as refrains, rhymes and reprises. So the winter wren will, from the adults around him, learn a set of songs that he will then dissect into shorter phrases to rearrange into thousands of different songs. The chocolate-backed kingfisher moves up and down its own scale, while the music wren sings with a near-perfect scale.
In The Singing Neanderthals, Steven Mithen, an archaeologist at Reading University, argues that Neanderthals sang but did not speak, and that it was Homo sapiens’s development of language about 100-200 thousand years ago that allowed us to create the superior skills that, in their turn, allowed us to drive the Neanderthals into extinction.
Geoffrey Miller, of the University of New Mexico, has examined the gender and age of the singers of 6,000 recent jazz, rock and classical albums, and showed that 90 per cent of commercial songs are produced by males, and that their peak age of production is 30 (the peak age for male success in coition, apparently).
“Sorry, Maestro Barenboim. Music is for idiots and Neanderthals,” by Terence Kealey, The Times