In my last post, I asked whether mathematics might serve as a universal language. (TLDR version: I thought the answer was yes, but with some qualifications). In a companion piece this week, I will examine a different candidate that is sometimes proposed as a universal language -- music.
A 2019 ethnographic study by Mehr and colleagues found that some form of music exists in all known human cultures. However, the function and impact of music varies from one society to another. The authors of the study identified three factors that can be used to differentiate the role of music across cultures: (a) formality of the performance, (b) arousal level, and (c) religiosity.
Most societies have multiple types of music, or music that varies within several of these dimensions. However, about a third of societies are atypical, and use music in more circumscribed ways. For example, in Mehr et al.'s study the Kanuri people of eastern Africa were found to have musical traditions that were considered to be less formal than any other cultural group, while the Akan people of Ghana in west Africa used music almost exclusively in a religious context. Cultures with more formal musical traditions may also be more formal and structured in other aspects of life. Even in more formal societies some music was less formal, however, and even in less-formal societies there were some higher-formality songs.
One attractive feature of music as a candidate for universal language is that it can exert a powerful pull on our emotions. (In Two Minds Theory, as you might recall, emotions are strongly identified with the Intuitive Mind, based on their nonlinear and nonverbal nature as well as their localization in subcortical brain areas such as the limbic system). In the Mehr et al. study, people were able to successfully identify the songs of another culture based on their function -- lullabies, healing music, dances, and love songs -- based on factors like their tempo, pitch, and accents. Dances versus lullabies, and dances versus love songs, were the most readily differentiated; healing songs and love songs were the hardest to tell apart. These findings suggest that some characteristics of music really are perceived in a universal way based on how the song affects the listener. However, other cross-cultural research shows that the same piece of music does not have the same emotional impact on every listener: In a study of American, Chinese, and Korean listeners, there was relatively good agreement about the characteristics of songs considered wistful/poignant or silly, but less agreement about music that was considered intense, angry, or exciting -- perhaps reflecting different expectations about these emotions across cultural groups. This wasn't a clear East/West difference, with American and Korean listeners in agreement about some song types, but Korean and Chinese listeners agreeing about others.
Philosopher David Livingstone Smith suggests that music is not necessary a way of communicating emotion from one person to another, but rather a "way of knowing" in which people make their own discoveries. Smith writes, "The knowledge that I’ve acquired from listening to “Velodrome” isn’t propositional knowledge. The song didn’t present me with any new facts, and the knowledge that it gave me can’t be expressed in sentences. “Velodrome” gave me a new experience of the world around me. It gave me new experiential knowledge. We usually acquire experiential knowledge of things by coming into contact with them. The first time you taste chocolate, you gain experiential knowledge of the taste of chocolate. After tasting it, you know what chocolate tastes like, even though you could never put this into words. If an alien from a distant planet were to ask you what exactly chocolate tastes like, you wouldn’t know what to say. You’d know it, of course, but you couldn’t put your knowledge into words."
Music, then, is a universal Intuitive-Mind language, just as mathematics is a universal Narrative-Mind language. It creates a context in which listeners each have their own experience, and those experiences can be as unique as the people who have them. Yet the ethnographic research also shows that across individuals the experience of a single piece of music tends to be more similar than not. Rather than knowing that, we know how -- how a piece makes us feel, how it changes our perceptions, how it makes us in some way different people than we were before we experienced it. We can't necessarily, however, put the experience into words; Intuitive understanding is massively parallel, having effects on us in multiple ways at the same time in a holistic way.
In my post about mathematics, I identified aspects of math that might function at the Intuitive level, for example perceptions of symmetry in numbers that can be cleanly divided into other numbers. In a parallel way, are there Narrative-Mind aspects of music? One can certainly learn to appreciate music in a different way that just listening and feeling, as you can learn in any college-level Music Appreciation course. Music has formal properties such as pitch, rhythm, tempo, and timbre, and the Narrative Mind can learn to analyze these properties as a piece of music plays. Music also has cultural or social purpose, as described in the cross-cultural research cited above, and one could analyze music in terms of its role in a society. This Narrative-level thinking is slower and more sequential, like all Narrative thinking; in some ways it offers a less rich understanding than simply listening and feeling the effects of the music. Some people therefore find that "analyzing" music (shifting into the Narrative mind) renders it flat and uninspiring, and that trying to think this way degrades the qualify of their experience.
However, it's also true that people with the habit of Narrative thinking can both experience the music and analyze it at the same time. The Narrative understanding then becomes part of the Intuitive experience, just another way in which we have an aesthetic experience of the music. This extra layer on top of the others is still a Narrative layer -- unlike the rest, it can be put into words. But it doesn't detract from the Intuitive experience; it becomes part of it.
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