And once you widen the lens as widely as possible,

see the big picture where sapien music comes from,

the cosmic joke, the irony is that,

humans aren't very musical at all.

And we know this because we evolved along the ape line-

and apes compared to birds, are not musical.

How can I say that?

Birds have vocal learning.

They can creatively learn new songs.

Apes can't do that.

They are confined to the chords they're born with.

Insects can pulse together in rhythm,

and apes don't have that.

So it's very odd that humans evolved from apes,

who are not musical, but humans evolved music again

from the ground-up from scratch.

I'm Michael Spitzer.

I'm Professor of Music

at the University of Liverpool in the U.K.

I've written a book called "The Musical Human:

A History of Life on Earth."

- 'Voyager 2, like Voyager 1 before it,

is a marvel of technology.

A remarkable instrument

of humanity's search for celestial knowledge.'

- So when NASA sent the 'Golden Record'

aboard Voyager, 40 years ago,

this suggested a very interesting thought experiment

because NASA stocked the record with

diverse examples of human music.

For instance, a Bach-Brandenburg concerto,

Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode,"

pan pipes from the Solomon Islands,

court music gamelan from Java.

If we imagine aliens open this in a billion years,

will they be able to extrapolate some common denominator,

something fundamentally human

from this assortment of Earth music?

And this begs the question: What do they have in common?

Now, I think what they do have in common, even for an alien,

is that sapiens are 'flatlanders.'

We inhabit a very narrow band of perceptual space.

We can't hear as low as whales.

We can't hear as high as bats.

Our songs aren't as long as whale songs,

which can be 23-hours long.

They aren't as fast as a Pipistrelle bat's song,

which can be as short as a wing beat.

What they will see though, is a lot of commonality

between sapiens' music and animal music.

Both are hierarchical,

as to say that we repeat at rising levels.

Music is the art of repetition.

You have notes on the bar.

You have bars repeated in a phrase.

You have phrases in a section.

Section in the work, and so on at infinitum.

And that might strike aliens as interesting.

And they might say, "Well, actually

this is not so different from animal music."

But they will recognize sapiens for perhaps

having this walking meter,

which goes back to Australopithecus, four million years ago.

When we talk about the origin of human music,

it's really about assembling elements of music,

which were synthesized much further down the road.

And one of these elements was bipedalism.

That what marks the first hominins apart from apes,

and our common ancestor, was getting up on our feet.

There is this link between rhythm and emotion,

which is due to the connections in the human brain

between the motor regions controlling our motion

and the regions controlling hearing.

For example, I once attended a concert

with my infant toddler,

and there were a thousand toddlers

all jumping up and down instinctively

to the orchestra playing the "Lone Ranger."

Now, they had never heard the "Lone Ranger" before,

but they had an instinctive response to that rhythm.

So, walking is the first step

of a whole cascade of evolutionary adaptations.

Our cranial volume triples in size;

we become a lot smarter.

And with our increased brain size,

comes a capacity to control our fingers,

to make links with the motor domains of our brain.

They become more dextrous

and ultimately more capable

of crafting flutes and playing them.

But standing up also gives us more space to breathe.

And our larynx descends through our vocal tracts.

Our Hyoid bone, which supports our tongue,

evolves so we can articulate what we sing.

And as our vocal tract learned how to produce

an infinitely greater variety of sounds,

our capacity to make sounds exceeded their function.

If you compare us with, say, the Vervet monkey,

they can make four kinds of calls.

And each call warns other monkeys

of a particular kind of danger.

But when you can produce a thousand kinds of sounds,

there's an excess of sounds.

And this is where music starts to become a possibility

where you're playing with sound, you're enjoying sound

for sound's sake, no longer having a function.

And at this point, I think, human music steps away

from animal vocalization or animal calls.

What also makes human music so distinctive

is the very human drives of emotions.

And indeed, the finite quality of human life.

Sadness, happiness, anger, fear, and so on.

We have mirror neurons in our brains.

If you're sad, I instinctively cleave to your sadness.

I mirror it, I emote with you-

and that's the same with music.

When I hear a sad song, my body,

my mirror neurons are instinctively sympathizing

or mirroring the human sadness

and code it in that sad song.

And music is full of similar responses.

Music is made of patterns.

And patterns can either be allowed to run their course,

or they can be frustrated through shots.

And when we hear a shot in music-

it can be a bang, or the interruption of a pattern-

that engages the same faculties in our brain

as danger out in the field.

But of course, nobody dies in music;

this is only a derived effect of that.

This is why we think that music is able

to express emotion in a very visceral way.

Music is a fantastic way of expressing your deepest emotions

and your identity, which can't be captured by language.

Why is that?

Because music is far too precise

for words to capture what's going on.

And there's a reason why teenagers

imprint their taste in music

with songs they learn at that time.

Because music has always come to define the

identity of who you are.

So the question of is music a universal language

is an interesting one

because, on the surface, music is absolutely universal.

What humans brought to the table is that

we're the great synthesizers-

we've put together the rhythms of insects,

the melody of birds, the gestural sociality of apes.

I think it's a reason why, although human music

is innate and universal, it's also learned.

And there's also a reason why humans

have always been haunted by a nostalgia for bird songs.

We hear birds in the trees.

And this gives us a sense of inadequacy

because bird song is natural and human music is not.