Chapter 1
Introduction

We begin with a sestet penned by Robert Herrick, a seventeenth-century poet whom playwright A. C. Swinburne once called "the greatest song-writer ever born of English race."

Just what is it that makes music so compelling? Herrick's Musick is a deity that lives and breathes with a power ferocious in its docility. And it is not merely the poetically-inclined who have used animate descriptions to put a face upon music. Consider the following, written in 1813 by German music critic E. T. A. Hoffmann on the subject of Beethoven's instrumental compositions.

…in this artful structure there alternate in restless flight the most marvelous pictures in which joy and grief, melancholy and ecstasy, come side by side or intermingled to the fore. Strange figures begin a merry dance, now floating off into a point of light, now splitting apart, flashing and sparkling, evading and pursuing one another in various combinations, and at the center of the spirit realm thus disclosed the intoxicated soul gives ear to the unfamiliar language and understands the most mysterious premonitions that have stirred it. Hoffmann, 1813, p. 1196

Music is commonly said to push, to pull, to strive, to yearn, to reach, to move, to desire, to ease, to relent, to rise, to fall, to abate, to explode. Music can be said to roar to life, or to die out with a final whimper. Perhaps more amazingly, music can be happy, sad, distraught, ebullient, proud, or morose—all emotions that can be felt only by living, sentient beings. Moreover, it seems that music's ineffable ability to evoke all of these ideas and feelings is intertwined with its ability to command attention and compel us to move and feel along with it. But when we do, just what is the 'it' that we respond to, and why should this be so?

Many perspectives on these questions have been offered over the course of western history, many of which have appealed to deities, numerological relations, or a divine resonance with the soul. The present naturalistic approach will hopefully be at least as profitable (as well as more currently fashionable). Specifically, it will be argued that those elements of music we are most likely to hear and respond to are musical lines—melodies or other horizontally-connected segments of music with perceptual relevance. As real neurally-encoded 'objects' that are abstracted from surface textures, musical lines have a concrete reality that makes them reasonable objects of study.

By removing musical lines from their artistic context and pinning them to the dissection table we do not wish to trivialize their role in musical artworks or expression. Quite to the contrary, we propose that musical lines gain their power from their quantifiable resemblance to exactly the sort of sound that humans have always found particularly enchanting: those created by other humans.

Like other forms of culture and communication, music can be seen as a ritualization of pre-existing biological tendencies and behaviors. But although the musical art in this sense could be seen as derivative of more commonplace human behaviors, this does not render music in any way deficient. Rather, music might instead be the artful distillation of our perceptual proclivities, appearing at times more human than even humans typically do. Perhaps this is precisely what one would expect from a Queen of Heaven.

Conspectus

The present study will argue that music is compelling precisely because it is likely to be understood as being alive, and having originated from a human source. This is not simply because we learn to associate music with its human creators from experience, or because we apply artistic license when describing it. Rather, it is because music exhibits anthropomimetic animacy cues that compel our sensory apparatus to interpret it as coming from a living human source. In essence, music is a human creation that resembles human voice, movement, and intellect, even when performed instrumentally or mechanically.

A biological account of perceptual animacy will be provided in Chapter 2, along with an argument that the categorization of sensations into 'animate' and 'inanimate' types is a perceptually primitive, bottom-up process. In Chapter 3, it will be suggested that humans possess perceptual systems that are specifically attuned to human sounds. Three distinct musical features will be seen to imitate recognizable human characteristics: First, musical lines resemble human voices in their pitch and timbre. Second, the recurring beats characteristic of meter resemble human locomotion. Finally, because music exhibits syntactic patterns of rhythm and intonation, this suggests the presence of an intelligent human producing a structured linguistic signal.

If musical lines are processed as though they come from individual humans (even when they do not), then one might expect emotional responses to vary according to the implied social situation. Chapter 4 is a test of perceptual voice numerosity's effect on perceived musical emotion. Finally, Chapter 5 provides an empirical test of the notion that higher music is faster, with results suggesting that the answer depends on musical organization into lines.