Popular songs are used to label theories: the theory that music is instrumental in group selection and survival is advanced under the banner of the New Seekers' "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", while the "Ronettes theory" ("Be My Baby") covers the idea that adult musicality is an extension of the process of cognitive stimulation that begins with the sounds mothers (historically) and fathers (more and more) make to soothe and excite their infant offspring. Much as in a primer in the old-fashioned sense, Ball flits between rudimentary briefings on chords, scales and sound-waves, to accounts offered by scientists, philosophers, musicologists and (for once) musicians themselves, trading narratives against each other rather than sculpting a grand one of his own. While the title obviously nods in the direction of Pinker's book The Language Instinct, his method is much more modest, taking the form of a survey of current knowledge and, more importantly, its limits. His latest book is exemplary for different reasons. His "biography" of water stands as an exemplar among the glut of synecdochic histories of this kind, and the more recent Universe of Stone, about the cathedral at Chartres, succeeds admirably in communicating to its readers the same sense of wonder that allowed medieval minds to conjure heaven in stone and glass. Since then, of course, Darwinian accounts of man's ascent have flourished, but it is only recently that advances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have suggested the possibility of providing scientific answers to the question of why the play of abstract sounds should have become something, in Philip Ball's phrase, "we can't do without".īall is an award-winning popular science writer. Indeed, Rousseau went so far as to suggest that music's importance lay precisely in offering alienated modern man a kind of spiritual link with his less depraved ancestors. In the 18th century, both Condillac and Rousseau identified music, alongside language, as separating man from animal, substituting biblical legends of the fall of man with something both more secular and optimistic. Music has been understood as lying at the origins of distinctively human culture – or at the heart of our attempt at self-definition – for centuries. On the side of the humanities, Pinker had gone wrong in appearing to trivialise music simply because science, rather like all British governments since Thatcher, proved unable to offer a convincing explanation as to why we should value it. On the side of evolutionary science, many thought he had simply failed to grasp the nettle: since it is indisputably the case that humankind in some sense needs music, there must be an evolutionary account that explains this need along the lines attempted by Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Those taking umbrage at Pinker's cheesecake quip fell into two opposing camps.
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