Hooked on Sonics

[February 7th, 2007] I once spent a whole week with Harry Nilsson's "Me and My Arrow" stuck in my head. Right now it's Wombstretcha's "On a Daily" [Ed note: Oddly enough, turn to page 37 for more on Wombstretcha]. Why, why, WHY? I mean, nobody ever gets smells stuck in their head. What is it about music that makes it so addictive, so powerful—as a torture device, mood enhancer or catharsis?

Just what it is about music is the subject of Daniel Levitin's new book, This Is Your Brain on Music. Levitin, who went to grad school at the University of Oregon, is a neuroscientist. He spent 10 years as a record producer before returning to school to become a cognitive psychologist. For the past seven years, he's been running the Levitin Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University. WW spoke with him by phone about Johnny Cash and circumcision—a warm-up for his reading at Powell's Books Wednesday night.

WW: What drove you to make the leap from record producing to psychology?

Daniel Levitin: Well, the record business was sort of falling apart in the early '90s.... When the record companies started dropping artists like Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell because they weren't selling enough records, that indicated there was something wrong with their priorities. I went back to school to do something different. I had all these questions built up...about how artists do what they do, how good songs are composed, how a musician can evoke so much emotion. Psychology classes were the ones that were...coming up with answers.

What are you working on now?

We have 20 different research projects going in the lab. We're looking at how musical emotion is perceived in people with autism. We're looking at the importance of seeing musicians perform—we tend to think of music as an auditory medium, but it turns out you get quite a lot of information if you can see the faces and the gestures of the musicians. We're looking at questions concerning memory for music...why some things are remembered better than others.

You know, people often ask me, did I learn enough to write a hit song? I can look at something and tell you whether I think it's a good song or not. And I can articulate why. But as to [why it becomes] a hit—nobody really knows that. It's not always good songs that become hits, either. It's not just that we don't understand why songs become hits—why do movies or books? Why are there fads in food or fashion? I don't think anybody really understands that.

There's a theory that music began as a mating ritual—would that mean musical talent is a practical thing to have, evolutionarily speaking?

Darwin thought that music had something to do with sexual selection. It could be something as simple as a mnemonic. Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line" is kind of an archetypal song. On the surface, he's singing it to her: You know, I'll be true, don't worry. But at a deeper level, I think what's really going on is that he's singing it to himself to remind himself of the commitment he's made. He's out on the road and he's gotta have something, every time a good-looking girl walks by, to remind him of the commitment. We remind ourselves of these promises we make each other in different ways—with an amulet, or a tattoo, or with the ancient Hebrews it was circumcision, right? You would cut off a piece of your foreskin to remind you that you'd made a vow to be having sex only with certain people under certain conditions.

That would be pretty hard to forget.

Yeah. So it seems to me that "I Walk the Line" is functioning as a memory aid to the person who wrote it.

What makes a song get stuck in your head when you haven't heard it aloud in ages?

We don't know, but there could be some trigger in the environment that reminds you of the song on a subconscious level.

Any truth to the theory that Sting songs will get any other song out of your head?

You mean Gordon Sumner? [laughs] I hadn't heard that.... The basic cure is you just play a different song. But a catchy song.