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

I thoroughly enjoyed "This is Your Brain on Music" and anticipated a similar combination of witty, widely observed (pop, jazz, classical), and helpfully presented (science-for-non-specialists) material. All those qualities are present but distractingly encumbered by puffery (yes, yes, you lunch with rock stars and academic luminaries) and organization-by-digression. The dangers of first success? A timid editor? I'd wait for a revised edition.

Daniel Levitin is both a rock musician and a cognitive scientist. That is, he looks at how the brain behaves as you perceive things. Music is one of those interesting puzzles that allows people like Levitin to see the brain behave in ways different than our other everyday behaviors, even speech. He wrote an interesting book "This Is Your Brain On Music" that I liked and reviewed. You can see it here: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

In this book, the author uses what he knows about music (almost always popular music) and the brain to speculate about what these imply about human evolution and how our development as a species and in our various social cultures was influenced by music and how these inner human qualities influence the expression of music.

The title's use of "six songs" is a bit misleading, though it is nicely poetic and provocative at the same time. Levitin is really talking about six TYPES of songs. The six categories are Friendship, Joy, Comfort, Knowledge (teaching and memory songs), Religion, and Love. Also included in each of these six are the opposites. So, really it is twelve categories. Nor does he deal with purely instrumental music much, or the uses of music that fall outside of these categories. Art music, for example, he assumes is included in what he writes. But the kinds of music he writes about, while art, are not art music any more than butchers and surgeons are the same because they both cut meat. Nor does he deal with categories such as introspection, abstract instrumental music (non-programmatic music or absolute music), or complicated forms that deal with many of these categories (such as opera, passion plays (they are more than just religion), or even Broadway musicals). Heck, what about Ralph Sampson playing the banjo in something like "Cuttin' the Cornbread"? It isn't really telling you about cornbread. We enjoy it and it makes us happy, but it doesn't fit into these categories anymore than a Bach Fugue or Suite or Stravinsky's Piano Sonata does.

While you can lump all kinds of pieces into these broad categories, after awhile they contain so many disparate items that the names become somewhat useless. For example, where would you put Schubert's "Erlkönig"? As fear (the opposite of comfort)? Well, it is also fantasy, drama, it also has the father and son connection where the father fails to save the son despite his best efforts because he cannot see, comprehend, or believe in what the son sees. Or maybe it was just a fever after all and the son's dealing with the phantom was just the son's hallucination. Or what about "Auf dem wasser zu singen"? Is this merely about ecstasy? Or is it about the glorious sensory impressions of being on a boat on the water in the light of sunny day? This is a song about mortality and existence but isn't about love, comfort, religion. Maybe you could put it in the joy category. But I think that it would be stretching it quite a bit to lump it in with "I heard it through the Grapevine" or "Suspicious Minds". But this becomes the problem of categories.

This is a very entertaining book that will help you learn more about what scientists currently know and suspect about our brain. Obviously, the science knows a lot more than it did, but not nearly as much as they will down the road. Some of what they are certain of today will become outmoded. But no one knows what that is yet.

Levitin writes in a breezy and entertaining style. He drops lots of names and that is both fun and, at times, a tad irritating. However, I recommend the book pretty strongly. Not only for what you will learn about how your brain works, but because Levitin talks about art and music in ways beyond what the mere consumer of music usually considers and he does it without sounding academic, or using dense or complex language. The book is actually fun.

Get it and enjoy it.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

I liked this book a lot - I think Howie Klein said it best in his review in the Huffington Post (which is why I bought the book in the first place) so I'm pasting his review here.

I am not a scientist, and I didn't like science in school. Something about the Krebs cycle and the free electrons in isotopes (whatever they were) left me cold. I do read a lot of non-fiction, mostly political books, as part of my new "day job" of helping to raise money for the Democratic party. But in my former life I ran a record company and I consider myself to have had a lifelong obsession with music and art.

I first met Levitin in 1981 when he was playing in a San Francisco punk band that had one or two songs I liked, The Mortals. I introduced him to some friends of mine who were in bands and he produced them back in the 80s. In the 90s he went to college and got a Ph.D. in neuroscience. When his first book came out, "This Is Your Brain on Music," I read it first because of the cleverness of the title's play on the assinine Nancy Reagan-era "This is your brain on drugs" ad campaign. That book taught me a lot of things that I had always wondered about - not just what a scale is, or why some musicians succeed where others fail, but also the way that music is studied in scientific laboratories (it's not just poor monkeys being given electrical shocks by soulless nerds in white coats).

"The World in Six Songs" sounded to me like a terrible idea for a book. I'm not sure what I expected - maybe a list of six songs that Levitin felt were the best in the world, or the six songs that shaped human culture. The world doesn't need more lists and music doesn't work that way - people's tastes are too subjective. I decided to read the first few pages just to see where the book was going, and I planned to put it down. I had better things to do. Obama had just become the de facto nominee for 2008, and I was busy tracking dozens of critical local races across the country where a progressive candidate was pitted against a truly vile, corrupt opponent. The world needed some electoral change, not silly lists. I picked it up at breakfast and would put it down before I was even done with my grapefruit.

Sometimes things don't work out like you planned them. By lunch I was in the middle of Chapter 3 and I had already learned how music helped to form cooperative bonds, the very sort that were necessary to create societies, about the chemical changes that take place in the brain when people sing together, and about how music that you like (not any music will do) can mimic the functions of anti-depressants. The musical examples ranged from Abba to Zappa, and from Tuvan throat singing to 18th century opera and the theme song from Ren & Stimpy. (And believe it or not, there's a connection between all these.)

The phone rang. I had to take care of some urgent business for a California State assembly race. An hour later I was back in the book and reading about the honest signal hypothesis, the idea from biology that some forms of commucation are impossible to fake. Levitin cites evidence that it is easy to lie with language (Really??? I didn't need to be reminded given my current career is trying to oust lying politicians, and that my former career was in the music business, enough said about that) but that it is harder to lie in music. That is, we can tell whether a singer is being sincere or not and we respond to that on an emotional, and unconscious level. This makes music, historically, something exceptionally valuable in the evolution of human nature: An honest signal. Music is a kind of truth serum. Maybe if politicians had to sing instead of making speeches we'd be better at picking the good ones (Bulworth is still a terrible movie).

There were a few places where Levitin did present lists of songs, but he did so in a kind of self-mocking way - he wasn't self important about them.. The six songs of the title, it turns out, are the six ways (read: six kinds of songs) that Levitin believes humans have used throughout time to manage social, emotional, and cultural development. We use music to comfort babiesfor example. We get together with people and sing or drum or strum and all of a sudden we feel a special bond of friendship. In the Amazon our ancestral cousins used to sing about how to make a canoe.

That passing on ofknowledge function was one of the most interesting because I often have songs stuck in my head throughout the day. Levitin explains that this is actually a clue as to the evolutionary origins of music. Songs were meant to get stuck up there, and music and brains co-evolved among other reasons to pass down information from person to person, and from generation to generation, before there was writing.

As the writers Scott Turow and Elizabeth Gilbert have said, the book is 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 a bit science-phobic. More than that, the book is fun. As the LA Times said, "Masterful." Who would have thought that a scientific hypothesis could be supported by the "Slinky" song or by Dylan's "Death is Not the End?" The last chapter is a love song to love songs, a sort of Valentine to some of the best songs ever sung. Read it if you have ever wondered where music came from, why we have it, and what it really does for us. But for now I have to get back to work. I've got to get Obama and McCain singing so we can see who the liar is.
--Howie Klein, The Huffington Post

This fascinating book explores the powerful force music has played in shaping our common humanity. It's evolution, with a backbeat. Author Levitin makes the case that six basic types of songs have existed throughout the course of human history, all over the world. Mankind, apparently, shares a soundtrack.

The six broad categories of music are songs about friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love. Each has a different function, but all serve to bind us together. They make us stronger as a species.

Levitin, a musician and scientist, cites anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, neurosurgeons, psychologists, and many famous musicians in this book. He includes lyrics from a great range of songs, including "At Seventeen," "The Hokey Pokey," "I Walk the Line," "Twist and Shout," and "Log Blues" from Ren & Stimpy.

Music can be so evocative. A snippet of song can take you back to the exact moment you heard it in childhood or high school or whenever. It's like there is a direct link that exists in the human brain between music and memory.

This books tells us that 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. It's obviously important to us. After reading The World in Six Songs, you'll have a much better idea why.

Here's the chapter list:

1. Taking It from the Top or "The Hills Are Alive..."
2. Friendship or "War (What Is It Good For)?"
3. Joy or "Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut"
4. Comfort or "Before There Was Prozac, There Was You"
5. Knowledge or "I Need to Know"
6. Religion or "People Get Ready"
7. Love or "Bring `Em All In"

As the drum, drum, drumming in the air grew louder the usual pregame roar in Ball One Ballpark in Phoenix softened and attention swung to a pre-game show by the Bashas' Bears High School drumline.

They are good. The driving pulse of a drumline, like the beat of a powwow drum circle, is captivating, dynamic, addictive and hypnotic. Music and its rhythms enchant and entrap our souls, and this book offers a fascinating look at "Why" it has such impact. There are many books about music, but this is a fresh look by a skilled writer about why instead of merely the how, what, when and where of musical notes.

Unlike usual textbooks which are heavy on being textbooks and light on understanding, Levitin has experience enough to explain his subject. Humans are said to be the only species that laughs at itself, or needs to; likewise, we are the only species that creates original music, or has the ability to do so, or perhaps the need, and certainly the desire.

Levitin, a professional musician and successful record producer, now runs a laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University. He is a rare academic, solidly grounded in the everyday world of his specialty instead of mere bookish theory. He is a professional who relates to his fellow artists and thus knows how to express basic ideas and themes in words everyone can understand.

Six songs? I'd add a few, such as the Bears' drumline. Even though a drumline is not melodic, it has a powerful rhythmic appeal. It's an example of how music is more than notes on a scale, and how basic the appeal of rhythm and music is to our senses.

Levitin offers some very basic ideas to understand our need and appeal for music, using wit, charm and personal anecdotes. He's been there and walked the walk ... in his case played the notes professionally ... it gives his thoughts and ideas a perfect pitch.

Exquisitely written, it is really about ourselves because we are such a musical species. It makes me wonder: What if humans had never learned to talk, but merely communicate through music? It seems far more reasonable than merely talking without understanding -- at which we're all too expert.

What then the Bears' drumline? Their rhythms are among the most powerful ideas ever expressed. Like Irish step dancing, a powerful expression of unity without using a word, music can be a dynamic expression of human emotions, ideas and spirit.

Fortunately, Levitin is admirably skilled in his use of words; every bit as good as the Bears' drumline or Beethoven's Sixth.