Music as a Cultural Tool
Almost every religious tradition leverages music in its rituals and ceremonies. Why did so many memetic packages co-evolve this shared trait? For that matter, why did humans evolve a desire to listen to music in the first place?
Let’s start with the second question: First, enjoying music and dancing to it is not a uniquely human behavior. We see spontaneous dancing in some birds, like Cockatoos, that are known for producing and understanding complex sound patterns as part of communication (look up videos of this; it is adorable). Based on this, we can infer that a baseline ability to enjoy music and dance is a side effect of our brain learning to process complicated sounds, rhythm, and tonality (something we developed when we evolved the ability to understand speech).
Essentially, music acts as a “supernormal stimuli” in the category of changing tonality and rhythm. We talk a lot about supernormal stimuli in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, but suffice to say if a bird evolved to sit on blue eggs and you put a giant blue rock next to it, that bird will sit on the rock—even over an egg—because the rock exudes even more of the stimuli the bird instinctually associates with an egg than a real egg does (and it didn’t evolve to moderate this impulse because giant blue rocks don’t exist in its natural environment). It would seem that music feeds the parts of our brain that evolved to process speech (and speech’s connection to emotion) in a way that stimulates those pathways even more than any form of speech could.
The earliest human enjoyment of music was likely similar to how we might enjoy a massage today. The pleasure that comes from a massage results from our experiencing tactile overstimulation in a gentle, rhythmic fashion that we’d not typically get in a natural environment—but which feels great (with the caveat here that massages may also have some social bonding component that evolved as a result of this behavior being frequent).
Our ability to appreciate music and dance is, therefore, likely an evolutionary accident. How, then, did music and dance get tied to religion? The connection likely resulted from a dynamic known as “niche construction” in evolution research.
Think of a beaver having evolved dam-building behavior coming to face evolutionary pressures from the ecosystems created by this dam-building behavior: This scenario exemplifies niche construction. Similarly, humans may have evolved the accidental pattern of feeling good when massaged by another human. Then, because of this quirk, humans started massaging each other, and because that behavior was most likely shared only among intimate friends, evolution ultimately “picked up” this behavior as a good cue to instinctually deepen human relationships. (If you want to dig deeper on the evolution of an appreciation for music, we suggest the video: “Why Humans Evolved to Play Music” by ReligionForBreakfast.[[22]](#_ftn22))
Having evolved language, humans encountered a problem: Language was great for one-on-one social bonding and maybe one-to-many social bonding but absolutely terrible at many-to-many social bonding. Our brains needed to invent some new tool for this function, and as we say repeatedly in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, “evolution is a cheap programmer:” If it can grab some existing behavior pattern or set of code, it will. In the case of language and many-to-many bonding, evolution lazily grabbed music and dancing impulses that arose accidentally as a means to create an altered mental state that facilitates this social bonding in a few ways.
The “brute force” way the brain does this is by accelerating the rate at which you come to like those with whom you musically engage. This can be seen in a study that shows people in afterschool-type music clubs form bonds faster than those in other types of creative clubs,[[23]](#_ftn23) a study that shows synchronized drumming promotes activity in the caudate nucleus of the brain, making people feel more connected with others,[[24]](#_ftn24) and a study that showed when college students are asked to march around campus together, they form more social bonds if they do so while marching in sync and chanting in unison.[[25]](#_ftn25)
That’s right: When the military has people march and chant things like, “I don’t know, but I’ve been told,” in a sing-song manner, they are leveraging an evolutionary hack to accelerate recruits’ social cohesion. This is a great little instance of cultural evolution, as we are sure that militaries did not realize they were doing this—it just so happens that the military traditions that did this survived at higher rates than those that did not. (As an interesting side note about this cultural tool: Dancing synchronously also appears to alleviate pain.[[26]](#_ftn26))
Through the Baldwin effect—“the process of becoming more genetically adapted over time to perform a novel behavior that was originally only learned”—human evolution leaned into both the production and consumption of music and dancing. But it did more than that. The brain appears to create some sort of altered mental state when music is being played, and this mental state also got “leaned into” as a social tool. Specifically, music seems to remove social barriers and make it much easier to role-play as an individual of a different role or status in society, with almost all role-reversal ceremonies involving some music. It even allows individuals to take on the role of non-human entities, be they spirits or animals—in fact, every spirit possession ceremony we can think of involves some form of music or rhythmic drumming, whether that be Lwa (a Haitian Vodou ceremony), Zar ceremonies, or Korean shaman rituals.
The above two effects of music make it an astounding cultural tool in two specific circumstances. First, in more mundane contexts, music is used as a tool to hijack people’s brains and accelerate social cohesion. This particular dynamic is leveraged a great deal in local churches and is certainly something a House could build into its traditions. This use, however, only provides marginal benefit given how small most Houses will be for the Index’s first century or so.
More interesting is how music can facilitate social bonding among more dispersed groups. This method is seen in almost every culture that happens to be spread out over a larger diaspora and experiences limited opportunities to congregate. Good examples of these cultures can be seen in midwestern Native American groups and the Romani (for some good videos of these types of ceremonies, look up Bulgaria’s Roma marriage markets).
Given how rarely groups congregate in these communities, music plays a crucial role in fast-tracking social bonding (a feature of group music seen in studies mentioned above).[[27]](#_ftn27) Essentially, if you have a larger intercultural network like that which we are trying to create through the Index, leveraging music, dancing in sync, and role-switching[[28]](#_ftn28) during community gatherings will speed up social bonding.
We should add a caveat that these tools only work on “normal humans.” If a culture heavily selects for or against specific sociological tools in a person’s psychological profile, it will disproportionately attract people with certain genetic predispositions, which then can create a snowball effect. This snowballing can lead members of the culture to display that psychological profile more extremely and, through that, attract even more members with that profile—all while alienating and raising attrition among members who don’t have it—which concentrates those effects. This means that some cultures may be moderately “immune” to the effects of music and dance when it comes to accelerating social bonds.
The Calvinist tradition is fairly unique in its disdain for music (and, more broadly, anything that can compromise a person’s mental state)—so much so that Calvinists banned all music but psalm singing in many of their settlements.[[29]](#_ftn29) Given our Calvinist roots, we, your gentle authors, are the descendants of countless generations of people who were OK living without music (I, Malcolm, did not get my first album until grade school and just picked a random CD when a friend took me to a music store because I did not understand the concept).
We have only a slight affinity for music and an instinctual repulsion to even the idea of being encouraged to dance in a group (before studying this data, we actually had a very hard time understanding why people went to nightclubs, as we could not model how it could lead to a positive emotional state through self-reflection and saw clubs as inefficient locations to secure sexual partners). So, while we understand the advantage of utilizing music to promote cohesion at Index gatherings, how music will be used will be up to some other House with a stronger cultural tie to music and celebrations. This is another reason why building a cultural ecosystem is critical: No single culture can solve every problem or leverage every powerful tool.