While many species in the world make music, humans have a unique musical ability. In some ways, music might even define what it means to be human. But how did we become so musical? And what is it about humans that sets our music apart from the music found in nature?

Michael Spitzer is a professor of music at the University of Liverpool and the author of the book, The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, which explores mankind’s ability to synthesize rhythm, melody, and culture throughout history and why music is fundamental to our humanity.

Michael and Greg discuss when and how music became an intrinsic part of human life, the changing role of music from a participatory activity to its present-day passive consumption, and the implications of technological advancements in music creation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
• Robin Williams
• Gamelan
• Florentine Camerata

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Liverpool
• Professional Profile on X

His Work:

• The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth

Are we losing the value of music?

43:32: Music should do much more than just relax you. It should make you think and make you feel more alive. The ubiquity means we, it says, as available now as water and air, and it's become cheapened. If you were born on Beethoven's day, you would be lucky to hear a symphony twice in your lifetime. And when you did, it was special because most of the time, you were in silence, and we've lost silence. So, it's swings and roundabouts. We have this fantastic availability all the time, everywhere, everything now, but it means we don't value it very much anymore.

Why is music spiritual?

21:01: Why is music spiritual? It's because you can't see it. Unlike vision, it is out there when you see an object. You have this external objectification of that source. But with music and sound, it's inside you, and ontology, or the experience of sound, that is, it's internal or inside your mind, and you can't see it. So, it's intrinsically related to spirituality. It's invisible; it's ineffable; it's interior; it's linked to contemplation, meditation, and prayer. So it makes sense that music evolved, side by side, hand in hand with spirituality.

Music as the ultimate mimic of emotion and movement

19:23: You can't separate the feeling from the ethology—the ethological dimension of the emotion. How do you get from there into music? Well, I hear music as a gesture. Even though you don't see anything, it's invisible. I mean, there may not even be any words. It could be a jazz improvisation or a string quartet. Music evokes a sense of emotion, of something virtual, in a virtual landscape, moving and gesturing. And also a sense of voice. There may not be a lyric, there may not be a human voice, but a violin or a guitar can definitely evoke a sense of voice. So you've got your voice, your gesture, your action, your movement, and all the ingredients of behavior and emotional behavior. And music is incredibly eloquent in communicating emotional behavior. In short, music is like a mimic, like a great impressionist.

Is music really universal?

24:55: I don't mean that music is universal. Our propensity and our capacity for music are universal. We're born into a culture, and then this is why every musical culture has different vocabularies, different scales, different instruments, and different vocal types.

How do economics play into solving major global issues like pandemics, climate change, or inequality?

Erik Angner is a professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and the author of How Economics Can Save the World: Simple Ideas to Solve Our Biggest Problems. He’s a rare kind of philosopher of science – while most focus on natural sciences, Erik studies social sciences like economics.

In this episode, Erik and Greg discuss why philosophers have not given more attention to social sciences, how economics is not just a discipline but a methodology, and why economists should be more involved when it comes to solving the world’s issues.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• The Economist's View of the World: And the Quest for Well-Being by Steven Rhoads
• Alvin Roth
• Thomas Carlyle
• Don Moore
• Karl Popper

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Stockholm University
• Professional Website

His Work:

• How Economics Can Save the World: Simple Ideas to Solve Our Biggest Problems

Why don’t people recognize the consensus in economics?

45:42: There's a real sort of illiteracy when it comes to economics. We see it in policy questions. We also see it on the private level. So, overwhelmingly, if you ask people questions about interest rates and inflation or whatever, across the world, like, large shares of the population don't understand these concepts, and what that means is that majorities of the population don't have the skills required to make the kind of decisions that they have to make as a citizen of a modern rich country in terms of like choosing mortgages, choosing credit cards, saving for the future, planning for retirement, and so on. We have a system now that requires people to make decisions they're not equipped to make, and that strikes me as a massive problem that we really ought to be doing something about. And it's connected because if people learned more about one, they would maybe learn more about the other.

How does interdisciplinary research drive economic progress?

21:01: There's something interesting that happens when you come from another discipline into economics or whatever: you notice blind spots—you bring your own blind spots. But they might be corrected, and then you begin to see opportunities for progress that people within the community might not have seen.

Why economics can’t ignore values

07:44: For the longest time, economists imagined that they could proceed without any sort of attention to values. The thought was that economics is a science, that science requires us to ignore values, and that to the extent that values enter into our work, the work is thereby deficient in some way. But that picture is gone. It's gone, broadly speaking, in the philosophy of science, and economists themselves have come to appreciate that we have to engage with values in order to do the kind of work that we need to do as economists. [08:48] To the extent that economists are building things and designing things—designing markets and institutions and auctions and retirement systems and healthcare systems and all sorts of things—we sort of have to begin with a picture of the end goal. What are we trying to build here? What do we want our healthcare system to look like? And that's a question of values. You can't pretend that that's something you can settle by means of data alone.