The World in Six Songs

The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others.

The six types of song that have shaped human nature—friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs—I've come to think are obvious...

We may have had music before we had a word for it.

Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems. ...Humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and... conferred a survival advantage on their offspring.

Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. ...that is a feature of the musical brain.

Music combines the temporal aspects of film and dance with the spatial aspects of painting and sculpture, where pitch space (or frequency space) takes the place of three-dimensional physical space... frequency maps in the auditory cortex... function much the way that spatial maps do in the visual cortex.

The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.

Music... is... a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.

Music has been a shaping force... music has been there to guide the development of human nature.

Human process music using both absolute and relational processing... we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species... These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art.

Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans.