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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. We’re wrapping up our week of summer reruns with one of my absolute favorite Science Quickly episodes. Back in October, SciAm associate news editor Allison Parshall took us on a fascinating sonic journey through the evolution of song. What turns speech into music, and why did humans start singing in the first place? A couple of 2024 studies offered a few clues.

Allison, thanks for coming back on the pod. Always a pleasure to have you.

Allison Parshall: Thanks for having me.

Feltman: So I hear we’re going to talk about music today.

Parshall: We are going to talk about music, my favorite topic; I think your favorite topic, too—I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Feltman: Yeah, I’m a fan, yeah.

Parshall: Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess I would love to know if you have a favorite folk song.

Feltman: That is a really tough question because I love, you know, folk music and all of its weird modern subgenres. But if I had to pick one that jumps out that I’m like, “I know this is genuinely at least a version of an old folk song and not, like, something Bob Dylan wrote,” would be “In the Pines,” which I probably love mostly because I grew up kind of in the pines, in the [New Jersey] Pine Barrens, so feels, you know, appropriate.

Parshall: Will you sing it for me?

Feltman: Oh, don’t make me sing, don’t make me sing. Okay, yes.

Parshall: Yay, okay! I’m sat.

Feltman (singing): “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t even shine / I’d shiver the whole night through / My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me / Tell me, ‘Where did you sleep last night?’”

That’s it; that’s the song.

Parshall: Clapping, yay! Oh, that was lovely. Honestly, I didn’t know if I expected you to sing it.

Feltman: If you ask me to sing, I’m gonna sing.

Parshall: I’m very happy. Well, I will not be singing my favorite folk song—I don’t even know if it qualifies as a folk song—but my grandma used to sing us a lullaby, and that lullaby was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” like, “Mine eyes have seen the glory,” or whatever. Yeah, so I think that’s my favorite one, but I don’t know if it qualifies.

Parshall: But I’m definitely not the only person, like, asking this question; I’m asking it to you for a reason. There’s this group of musicologists from around the world that have been basically going around to each other and asking each other the same thing: “Can you sing me a traditional song from your culture?”

And they’re in search of the answer to this really fundamental question about music, which is: “Why do humans across the whole world, in every culture, sing?” This is something that musicologists and evolutionary biologists have been asking for centuries, like, at least as far back as Darwin. And this year we had two cool new cross-cultural studies that have helped us get a little bit closer to an answer. And actually they’ve really changed how I think about the way that we humans communicate with one another, so I’m really happy to tell you about them.

Feltman: Yeah, why do we sing? What theories are we working with?

Parshall: Well, okay, so there’s generally two schools of thought. One is that singing is kind of an evolutionary accident—like, we evolved to speak, which is genuinely evolutionarily helpful, and then singing kind of just came along as a bonus.

Feltman: That is a pretty sweet bonus.

Parshall: I agree. It’s like we get the vocal apparatus to do the speaking, and then the singing comes along. And the people who buy into this theory like to say that music is nothing more than, quote, “auditory cheesecake,” which is a turn of phrase that has long irked Patrick Savage. He’s a comparative musicologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Patrick Savage: It’s just like a drug or a cheesecake: It’s nice to have, but you don’t really need it. It could vanish from existence, and no one would care, you know?

So that kind of pisses off a lot of us who care deeply about music and think it has deep value. But it’s kind of a challenge—like, can we show that there are any real, consistent differences between music and language?

Parshall: Savage took this challenge very seriously because, if you couldn’t tell, he belongs to the other school of thought about music’s origins: that singing served some sort of evolutionary purpose in its own right, that it wasn’t just a bonus. And if that were true, if music weren’t just a by-product of language but played, like, an actual role in how we evolved, you’d expect to see similarities across human societies in what singing is and how it functions in a way that is different from speech.

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

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