Insights
Evolving to the Beat
Rock musician Sting (left) with Daniel Levitin.
Owen Egan
As a well-connected veteran of the music industry—his contributions as a sound engineer and record producer can be heard on albums by Santana, the Grateful Dead and Blue Öyster Cult—DANIEL LEVITIN believes there is truth to a truism often heard in music circles. "In almost no case is a band's second album better than its first."
There are groups that buck this trend, Levitin warrants, listing Led Zeppelin and the Eagles among them. But it stands to reason that a band's first effort will outclass its second. "You've got your whole life to write the songs for that first album, and only eight months or so to write the songs for your second one."
Levitin, now an associate professor of psychology at McGill specializing in the relationship between the mind and music, hopes the same doesn't hold true for books.
His first book, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, was an unqualified hit, spending six months on the New York Times bestsellers list and earning a nomination for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Levitin wrote that book "to communicate some of the newest findings in the neuroscience of music to the average person. I wanted to reach people who don't normally read about science and get them as excited about the process of scientific discovery as I am."
When his publisher asked Levitin to write a second book, it would have been easy enough to churn out This is Your Brain on Music: The Sequel. But Levitin had other ambitions.
"I didn't want to just cash in on my 'brand.'" Realizing that his first book's success and the readership it attracted offered "a once in a lifetime opportunity," Levitin decided to tackle riskier terrain—evolution. "The idea is to use music as a window for examining evolutionary biology."
Levitin says his newest book, The World in Six Songs, "doesn't bully people into giving up their religious beliefs, but it does attempt to persuade them of the elegance and explanatory power of Darwinian theory."
It's a controversial topic, and not just for the millions of North Americans who refuse to accept the scientific evidence behind evolution. There are prominent scientists who don't see eye to eye with Levitin when it comes to his views on music. Harvard neuroscientist Steven Pinker, BA'76, DSc'99, for one. "Pinker sees music as an evolutionary byproduct," says Levitin. In Pinker's view, while language has played a pivotal role in humanity's development over the centuries, "music just kind of went along for the ride."
In his new book, Levitin begs to differ. "There is no known culture now or any time that lacks [music], and some of the oldest human-made artifacts found at archaeological sites are musical instruments."
In putting The World in Six Songs together, Levitin canvassed an array of top musicians for their thoughts on why music matters so much, including Sting, Joni Mitchell and Pete Seeger. One musician who turned down Levitin's request for an interview, even though he reportedly enjoyed the psychologist's first book, was Paul McCartney.
"Some musicians approach their work very systematically and others approach it in a much more intuitive way," says Levitin. "McCartney worries that if he analyzes what he does too much, he won't be able to do it anymore, whereas someone like Paul Simon is very methodical, very aware of the process. Joni Mitchell too. She'll fuss with a lyric for months."
And Levitin himself?
"I'm a systematic person. I want to know how things work."
