The memetic of music

Music and society: a memetic (r)evolution

Abstract:
Richard Dawkins's suggestion of the meme concept in his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene proposes that human culture is composed of a multitude of particulate units, memes, which are comparable to the genes of biological transmission. These cultural replicators are transmitted by imitation between members of a community and are subject to mutational-evolutionary pressures over time. This paper represents an attempt to integrate the central ideas of analytical musicology with a neo-Darwinian meme perspective. Using this new paradigm the article develops a different perspective on the relationship between music and social structure, and underlines the links between cultural, ethnic and geographical elements of identity and how all this is related with new global, technological, cultural and economic elements. In other words this paper aims to cover the theoretical aspects of the memetics of music, in order to understand the interplay between human nature and musical culture especially in some realities in which conscious processes are untied from creator intentions. The article concludes with a brief musical iter with some observations on the transmission and mutation of musical memes, and an account of how this process engenders the evolution of musical styles.

Keywords: Meme, memetics, biological and socio-cultural evolution, mutant archetypes, music, hierarchy, replication, style, self-organizing system.






Introduction:

“Without music, life would be an error.” Friedrich Nietzsche

As expressed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche we perfectly know that music has a very important part in our lives and that is the reason why in this article I aim to answer the question: what impact does music have on our societies? Using a new evolutionary musicology paradigm it will be easier to explain how music plays crucial roles in different aspects of our social realities and we will obtain a holistic approach useful to better understand human evolution. In fact if we accept, as I do, the language-centered view of humanity it’s necessary to include, to have a complete analysis of human evolution, also music as important social catalyzer: first, because the evolution of language is highly intertwined with the evolution of music; second, because music provides a specific and direct means of exploring the evolution of human social structure, group function, and cultural behavior.
Because human cognition is creative and collective, socio-cultural learning activities, like music, generate phenomena that can be observed in a genetic way as adaptation and drift. It is therefore commonly thought that elements of culture evolve through natural selection. Moreover, elements of culture cannot be treated as rigid structure because they constantly interact and influence one another. It is proposed that what evolves through culture is the mind: ideas and artifacts are merely reflections of its current evolved state. Interacting minds are transformed through a Darwinian process similar to that by which early life evolved, involving not survival of the fittest but actualization of their potential.
Music making is one of the most important human cultural activities, and music is a very widespread element in all cultures. The study of music evolution promises to shed light on such important issues as: human group structure, the capacity for designing and using tools, symbolic gesturing, brain function, the phrase-structure of language, emotional and behavioral manipulation through sound, self-expression and catharsis, creativity and aesthetic expression, the human affinity for the spiritual and the mystical and finally, of course, the universal human attachment to music itself.
Furthermore music influences physically the way a person thinks in order to change the way a person acts. Most researchers and scientist, for example, agree that music does have a positive effect on the brain development. Music helps humans to learn rhythms, improve their language and promotes the overall growth of their mind by challenging them and placing new concepts to learn in front of them.
Finally music provides a challenging system for the analysis of cultural evolution. The dialectical approach to music seeks to identify the internal stylistic tensions and contradictions (in terms of thesis and antithesis) which give rise to new musical forms (synthesis). The Darwinian alternative to dialectics, memetics, seeks to interpret the evolution of music by examining the adaptability of its various component parts in the selective environment of culture.


Socio-musical r-evolution:
Society is “in a natural state of equilibrium or balance” and when changes occur in one part of society there must be adjustments made in the others. If this does not take place, the equilibrium of society would be endangered and tension is placed on its social order. I believe that those processes happen also in music but that, moreover, some processes are liable to synergetic principles independently of conscious processes or intention of creators. Memetics and archetypal nature of musical work are part of a musical structure that is liable to the principles of self-regulating and self-organizing system which – we suppose – the music is based on. The theory of memes based on the theory of genes offers a very interesting explanation of this complex structure: this scientific discipline give us new scientific tools for studying not only biological organisms but also other systems (social, psychological or musical systems), their interactions and the way of behaving in their environment. We suppose, following traditional theories, that the basic natural principles of a musical work are related to musical archetypes but I propose to define the relation between memes and cultural activities, in this case the musical production, using the idea of mutant archetype assuming that the nature of a musical work is not only the result of the unconscious processes but also of the processes in self-regulating and self-organizing systems. A memetic approach permits to describe in this cultural process two basic forces: competitive and cooperative. In a musical system the competitive forces are represented by the contest of two contrast themes and the cooperative force is represented by the principle of similarity in repetition and reprise. These principles are present in each musical work of every time. We can say that principles of contrast and similarity operate as archetype in a musical work. A clear example of this two basic forces process is jazz: “the jazz culture is, in part, a huge pool of memes which musicians call on in their performances. Thus memes are held in a large body of recordings made for corporate profit and are reassembled by the musicians during live performance. When jazz musicians perform, they thus call on various intersecting pools of material which they then assemble into a performance. While there are some solo performances, jazz is primarily a collaborative art. Musicians interact with one another to shape the current performance. What happens in the moment is spontaneous, but we must remember that that spontaneity draws on a large body of well-practiced licks and routines”.
Memetics therefore describes the order parameter which plays an important role in self-regulating and self-organizing systems. This parameter operates as regulator balancing extreme situations in the system. More complicated systems such as evolution systems – to which music and its subsystems belong – are characterized by complicated processes conditioned order parameters at the same time and also characterized by processes resembling to the cyclic and chaotic attractors. From this point of view the creating of musical work is not evoked by the linear dynamic and it can’t be assumed or derived from the previous development. Attractors and order parameters “tell” the system musical work how to behave, what is acceptable and important for remaining alive. Balancing between new and old, long and short, complicated and uncomplicated
So this new musical paradigm is using memes as central elements of musical transmission inside a bigger process of the cultural evolution that include also the evolution of knowledge.
Applying the three Dawkins characteristics of meme into a musical system we can say that the copying-fidelity could be seen in the musical styles (copying of the style of some composer), in musical performing (fidelity of interpretation) and also as the ability to form communities around our favorite artists or musical style. Fecundity works basically as dynamic attractors (style and mode in music) emphasized obviously in the modern era with a massive musical distribution and longevity as natural selection processor and selector.
















The memetic relation between music and space:
“A meme could be an idea or a snatch of music or a dance”. R. Dawkins

Musical styles, both compositional and interpretational, may change extensively within the lifetime of one individual but, on the other hand, some musical styles have remained relatively static, particularly those of non-western cultures and those involved in ritual function. This property of variable rates of change over time and an overall, if erratic, tendency towards increasing complexity has many parallels with biological evolution.
Cultural evolutionism, the tendency to consider human culture as an evolving phenomenon, has been an often controversial element in anthropology and sociology since Darwin’s time but there is no doubt that Dawkins, with his theories, changed forever those fields. This was principally due to two factors which were not present in previous reductionist approaches. The idea of meme, or better, of a selfish meme openly invited the direct transposition of the terminology and methods of evolutionary genetics to cultural studies, in a way that had not previously been contemplated. Thus Dawkins’ novel slant transformed cultural evolutionism into memetics.
What is at issue is the claim that memetics can be a genuinely scientific approach to cultural evolution? Thirty years after its initial presentation in the first edition of The Selfish Gene, the idea of memes has spread widely in human culture – it is clearly a successful replicator. While the reproductive success of a replicator is no guarantee of the veracity of the ideas it encapsulates (popularity, in other words, does not signify truth), the meme has, nevertheless, shown itself to be a powerful tool for understanding human behaviour and the artefacts it gives rise to. The time is ripe to apply the meme concept systematically to music, to develop a memetics of music.
The purpose of this paper, in fact, is to show that memetics offers a new perspective on musical structure (which can be conceived as the disposition of memes within a work, at various hierarchical levels) and musical style (the nature of memes within a single work, within the output of a composer, or within the output of an historically or geographically discrete group of composers). It’s clear that music is spatial-linked to particular geographical sites, bound up in our everyday perceptions of place, and a part of movements of people, products and culture across space. It’s necessary to develop an innovative perspective on the relationship between music and mobility, underlining the way in which music in linked to cultural, ethnic and geographical elements of identity, and how all this, in turn, is bound up with new, increasingly global, technological, cultural and economic shifts
For example the Malaysian Aborigines group, Temiar, express their religion, culture and social structure through music. The ceremonial centerpiece of Temiar life consists of public performances by spirit mediums involving choral singing, dance and trance. Individuals enter into initial communication with their spirit guides through dreams. Performances are put on when there is a demand for shamanic healing rituals or when someone's spirit guide, the most important figure of Temiar society, has indicated in a dream that it wishes to be entertained. The sessions are known as gnabag (singsongs). Most of the community is involved, with the women and children singing responses in overlapping canon to the lead verses sung by one or more mediums. The song lyrics are considered to be the spirit guide's own, sung through—not by—the medium. Each song is supposedly passed on, through I argue a memetic system, by its composer (the spirit guide) to its initial performer (the halaa') in revelations that occurred while the latter was in a waking dream, most typically around dawn. The halaa' will often be called on to perform healing rituals on the sick during the ceremonies and also in non-ceremonial circumstances during the daytime.
Another case is represented by the Kaluli, a rain forest people of Papua New Guinea. In this context, men, the top of the pyramidal social structure, will more deliberately compose or structure songs for formal events such as ceremonies and spirit medium séances. Songs, weeping and poetics are thus intimately connected with the environment and ornithology, weeping, poetics and song give poignant expression to the fundamental social and cultural concerns of the Kaluli. They invoke bird in order to evoke from within listeners experiences central to the feel of Kaluli life. Their music penetrates with clarity a socio-linguistic maze to bring to life processes through which individual emotions become the well-spring for social and cultural structures and social and cultural structures become the bedrock of the experiential world.
Those two examples clarify how the accumulation of stories over thousands of years through a process of cultural sedimentation can also be thought of as creating the cultural mythscapes within and through which individuals could orientate themselves in a unified natural and social world. Also Bruce Chatwin describes the Australian aboriginal walkabout through their ancestral landscapes as following “songlines”. Each feature of the landscape and characteristics of the animals and plants which lived there was recalled, recreated and ritually performed in the process of such journeys. A kind of narrative map of the landscape constituted both the group's collective knowledge of and identity with the “meaning” of the landscape. The location and performance of these narratives, in the landscapes shaped by ancestor creatures in the dreamtime, was a way of singing the land into being, bringing the land alive, and linking the past, present and future. Chatwin summarized his idea in the following way: “I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men must have trodden they have left a trail of song; and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man shouted the opening stanza to the World Song: I am!”’














Conclusions:
What is indisputable is that the development of a symbolic language system has been fundamental in the development of Homo Sapiens and that for an overwhelming part of the species existence all cultural knowledge would have been essentially transmitted in an oral and narrative format. This would also have been substantially true for populations without mass literacy or access to modern communication technologies, arguably quite large groups of the global population, until very recent times. Oral, face to face systems and conventions of communication are being displaced and replaced in important areas of social and cultural activities at a pace that far exceeds any other comparable changes within human evolutionary history. Globalization it is claimed is also producing a new environment of evolutionary adaption characterized by risk, change and instability in which the individual must develop liquid, highly individualized and self referential narratives of identity. Quite how various groups will adapt to this emerging contemporary narrative landscape remains to be seen. The fact that such a fundamental change has happened in such a short time does however raise a whole range of questions about the potential impact of this change on the narrative construction of our identities.
Looking back to the beginning of this essay, it is easy to understand how music is both “natural” and “fundamental”. In the light of this research, it can be seen that music cannot exist without culture, it could never be a product of nature in any immediate sense. Music is a product of culture, it is a product of nature performed by humans and many other creatures, but each of those creatures in its own way is communicating, via a complex of cultural understanding. We can see now that the medium which is absolutely natural is the culture within which music is created. Culture within humans is an imperative because, as I assessed, we need to communicate, yet through this need we create complex languages within cultural boundaries, which are unnatural. I would assert that creativity is not born from the Human need to express directly, but culture is.
In music, a memes are empathic and consist of affective components that are meant to influence with emotion: melody, rhythm, the loudness of music, and any other sounds that may add to the effectiveness of the emotional meme. Effectively, in the end, a meme transports concepts developed by an artist to be allowed to travel through the neural pathways of the minds of an audience: a single concept which affects each member of the audience in a ways unique to each of their individual neural pathway mapping. They are ideas as lyrics are, and they are often promoted by sounds, as music does to sway us. But art is special; as music enters the ears, sounds are absorbed neutrally into areas of the brain that process emotionally, but there is meaning in the music; the music creates deeper understanding within the consciousness; the music helps bring the mind to a place of understanding felt by the musician; this is a meaning of empathy. The listener empathically recreates the entire scope of the composers and performers experiences, effectively joining their community and sharing their community of knowledge. Meme in music, but generally in art, is not just a term for a biological phenomenon but describe the transport of empathic ideas.
Creativity is a product of the desire to communicate, using the potential within current boundaries within particular cultures. Whether it is a symphony by Mozart, Beethoven or Mahler, a Chet Baker or Miles Davis jam session, a sitar melody from India or a hip-hop song from Africa, a Cantonese opera or a rock song, we can now consider each of these pieces as a paragraph, a distinct part of a chapter of human history that will hold meaning only as a metaphor for the age and society whence it came. Yet some things never change, so for the meantime they still stir within us an understanding of the world that is around us now.
If the resources of nature have no limitations, the intelligence, imagination, and sensibility of man is also infinite. Each work of art is a particular case of solving the always complex problems of human expression and with the constant technological advances occurring both now and going into the future, we can expect parallel advances in music that will lead to as yet nonexistent art forms.









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