It took me a while to think of the best opener for a Music Science series - there's so many angles to come from and no matter which one I choose, there seems to be no logical bearing that can cover everything I want to discuss. And it's all so interesting, damn it.

But there's one question that has ailed me for the longest of times: is music biologically innate?

This might seem uninteresting at first, I mean, birds sing and those songs aren't exactly man-made (at least I hope not). But this leads us into a deeper rabbit hole, forcing us to ask 'what is music?' and I'd like to keep that for a later date since again, it seems obvious but it really isn't.

So to avoid meeting The Mad Hatter, I want to specifically look at what we humans define as uncontroversially 'human music'.

Scales

Internationally, there are hundreds of musical scales. We typically think of a few dozen such as A minor and Bb Major, but this is because practically all our music lies in the western cultural set of established notes that hark back to the classical era and beyond. Not much, really, has changed.

This music has, for various historical reasons, spread its influence globally, to the point that even characteristically 'Far Eastern' music I'm exposed to every day abides strictly to the same old, boring progressions we've heard in Europe for centuries. The Asians just mix it up a bit by adding a bamboo flute here and there.

With the oversaturation of music coming from the same evolutionary root around the globe, it's hard to actually become aware of any alternatives. There are indeed scales whose notes do not fit at all into our traditional 12-note octave. Scales that break these boundaries use what we call quarter tones or even microtones - intervals between notes much smaller than tones and semi-tones.

This, unfortunately, is a topic for another day. Today, I want to go completely in the opposite direction. Rather than looking at how complex and varied music scales can be, I find it fascinating that essentially the same few variations of sound has spread so zealously across the Earth. Is it down to centuries of forced colonialism, or is there just something about it that strikes a chord, so to speak, with our heart strings, so to speak?

The Pentatonic

Most music you hear in your daily life, no matter where you are in the world, when boiled down to its essential, deconstructed ingredients ends up landing on the pentatonic scale:

That's it right there. 5 simple notes pretty much summarize all of western music and its global influence. But it's more than that. I don't normally provide videos but this one will astound even the most anti-musical folk among us, and it's important to my point:

Though the video offers no explanation, this phenomenon is indeed true. No human needs any musical training to simply 'get it'. In fact, the more musically trained you are, the more chance you have of screwing this up, having had weird, advanced musical influence distorting your expectations.

But is this biological or is it simply cultural? And if the latter, is that cultural influence a result of being biological?

It's controversial

Of course it is. But here's some intriguing clues. 35,000 years ago, a native German grabbed some old bones and carved out a flute. This is the oldest instrument we've ever had solid evidence for, and although we don't know what pitches it may have had, the number of holes were of particular interest: 5.

5 holes, 5 notes. Remind you of a particular scale? But this is just as easily coincidence than anything else and thus cannot be objectively used as useful evidence.

Another clue is language. There are many tonal languages out there; Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai and so on. Although English is not a tonal language, we and indeed all other languages still use excessive tones to express our communication effectively: A low grumble, a high inquisitive remark, subtle sarcasm and so forth. We would be in a complete mess, getting into numerous fights on a daily basis if we removed all aspect of inflection and intonation in our daily lives.

And this aspect of tonality is clearly innate. In a study on communication between mother and child, it was found that they interact with a kind of synchrony of harmony, coordinating pitches as they went. 84% of these pitches reflected harmonics within the pentatonic scale.

These notes were typically organized around simple intervals; 3rd, 5ths and Octaves, the kind of intervals you hear constantly in modern music, rather than advanced and more dissonant pitch pairs like tritones and such.

A further 10% of the pitches between the two were absolute, that is to say the exact same note was expressed each time the same word or expression was used.

What this all boils down to be discussed is that through Tonal Synchrony and mimicry, familial relationships pass on a series of tonal centres in our speech, and those tonal centres appear around the 5 notes of the pentatonic scale.

Fundamental Frequencies

The scales that humans have evolved culturally to use are apparently ascribed to our familiarity of them in relation to our own speech. Normal speech even reflects the minor and major intervals that in our music portrays sadness and happiness, respectively. In short, if you think of a happy song, you can bet it's in a major scale. A sad song will invariably be in a minor scale.

The difference between major and minor is simply one note; the third in the scale. If you move that third down a semi-tone, it's minor. Move it up again, and it's major. That's all it takes to make a song sound happy or sad, and you can have fun with this by changing the mood of a song by making this one small alteration (oftentimes adhering to other notes that fit in the given scales, too):

Another study demonstrated this in our speech by recording and analysing the speech of actors and actresses told to portray various emotions. Sure enough, their acts of sadness would approximate a minor third interval in speech, and the same with happiness and the major third. To top it off, listeners would overwhelmingly correctly perceive sadness or happiness in their given recorded dialogue (controlled for context), further confirming that this musical code is built into our very language structure.

Conclusion?

It seems that we are naturally drawn to the musical scales and pitches that we find occurring naturally in our own voices, right from birth, which co-develops with language and our taste in music. It appears to me that although cultural influence dominated the globe, spreading the same basic music, this was probably inevitable even if each corner of the globe were never to meet.

Unfortunately, most of the studies I came across are rather small, with barely 100 individuals or so a time. Clearly more work in this area needs to be done!

But for now, what do you think? Let me know any insights you might have. There's actually a lot more to discuss so this might turn into a 2-parter. I guess we'll see!

Images not in below references CC0 Licensed

References: New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany | Tonal synchrony in mother–infant interaction based on harmonic and pentatonic series | The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music.
| A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales