Our Need to Make Music From the Cacophony of It All
Brains keep looking for a beat, even when there isn’t one, research shows
Our Need to Make Music From the Cacophony of It All
Brains keep looking for a beat, even when there isn’t one, research shows
Illustration:
Tomasz Walenta
All cultures have music that is rhythmic, and these rhythms show universal properties, as summarized in 2011 by Steven Brown and Joseph Jordania in the journal Psychology of Music. Wherever you go in the world, rhythmic music has regularly spaced beats, emphasizes some beats over others (for example, “downbeats” in Western music) and contains two- and three-beat motifs (like marches and waltzes, respectively). Another commonality is that the time intervals between beats tend to be multiples of 200 milliseconds. From a marching band in Peoria to a tribal drummer in the tropics, these patterns keep popping up.
Does the human brain automatically generate them? Andrea Ravignani of Belgium’s Free University Brusseland colleagues tackled this question in a study published late last year in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The authors used a computer to create 32 rhythmic patterns that sounded like a snare drum. Each consisted of 12 beats, averaging about five seconds long. Crucially, the spacing between beats and strength of each one were totally random.
The authors then allowed these random rhythms to “evolve” experimentally with 48 student volunteers from the University of Edinburgh, divided into six chains. In each chain, the first subject listened to one of these random patterns and tried to repeat it as accurately as possible on an electronic drum pad. His recorded imitations were played for subject No. 2, who tried to repeat them. The second subject’s recorded imitations went to the third subject for imitation—all the way until subject No. 8.
A perfect chain of imitations would mean that No. 8’s drumming pattern would be identical to the original one. But rhythms drifted with each repetition. If such drift was random, the rhythm patterns of each subject No. 8 would have differed randomly from each subject No. 1. But instead, with each round of attempted repetition, the imitator imposed more structure—until, by the eighth generation, subjects produced patterns that conformed to the universals of rhythmicity that I described.
These patterns were structured. The first eight beats predicted the rest. Beats were regularly spaced and contained two- or three-beat motifs. The intervals between beats were statistically likely to be around 200 or 400 milliseconds. Just like in real music.
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This isn’t the only instance of universal structure emerging from the complexity of our brains. Take the evolution of language. Linguistic history has shown that people speaking a hodgepodge of languages (for example, West African slaves in the Americas) soon create simple pidgin communication systems built from fragments of the individual languages. But their children then evolve the pidgins into creole languages that are grammatically similar world-wide, as Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii and others have shown.
Our brains are the universe’s supreme anti-entropy machines. From “tell me what you see in this inkblot” to perceiving scatterings of stars as a centaur or winged horse, we turn randomness into patterns. It makes things easier to learn, conveys information, provides comfort in explaining the inexplicable—and makes for better, catchier music.
