Is Music Really Auditory Cheesecake?

In a recent episode of The Nature & Nurture Podcast, I had the chance to speak with Courtney Hilton, a cognitive scientist and postdoctoral research fellow at The Music Lab of Harvard University, about musical cognition.

One of the things we talked about is psycholinguist Steven Pinker’s famous “auditory cheesecake” metaphor for music. Did we really evolve to like cheesecake? No, there was no such thing as cheesecake in our evolutionary past. We evolved to enjoy high-fat- and high-sugar-content foods, because of their high energy content. It just so happens that cheesecake, a relatively new invention, has this high-sugar, high-fat content that we enjoy—voila! Humans like cheesecake.

A Happy Accident?

Analogously, Pinker argues that music is an example of “auditory cheesecake”—that music takes advantage of pre-evolved faculties for language, pattern recognition, and emotion, but that it is an evolutionary byproduct—a happy accident.

I was fully convinced that music was auditory cheesecake before speaking with Courtney. Now, I am less so.

I asked Courtney how we manage to associate music with emotions—how it is so easy to identify a “happy” or “sad” piece. One theory, he explained, is that we have evolved to associate a higher, melodic pitch with friendliness and a lower, harsh pitch with menacing. Across the animal kingdom, animals raise their voice during play and lower their voice during dominance disputes.

This doesn’t mean that music is not auditory cheesecake—if learning to associate emotions with pitch is a byproduct of social interaction, this may be analogous to learning to identify sweet taste. We had evolutionary reasons for it, but tasting cheesecake specifically was not that reason.

Mothers Singing to Infants

What really changed my mind was Courtney discussing some recent research coming out of his lab at Harvard, in which they found that across dozens of cultures worldwide, mothers singing to their infants is a universal phenomenon. This is distinct from “baby talk”—raising your voice in that friendly manner when talking to babies and animals—which is also a human universal and likely evolved as a byproduct of that much earlier association between pitch and friendliness. We want to appear as friendly as possible to those who are vulnerable and cute.

Singing, however, seems to be unique. Courtney argued that a mother’s soothing voice may strengthen mother–infant bonding, which is mediated by oxytocin (“the love hormone”). During our conversation, he also hypothesized this may be related to the evolution of bipedalism—as our early hominin ancestors descended from the trees and began to walk upright, the narrowing of our hips, combined with our growing brains, forced humans to start giving birth earlier.

Unlike chimpanzees, whose infants can easily cling to their mother’s backs, our premature births led to human infants being entirely dependent and immobile for at least the first year of life. This causes a stronger need for mother–infant bonding and, perhaps, singing.

Even if you buy this argument, we have just made a case that singing has an evolved purpose, but that does not explain music as such. Nevertheless, this adds more complexity to the cheesecake, so to speak. Perhaps singing is more like the process of baking—we evolved very early on to cook with fire, but this versatile process does not lead to only one type of sweet treat. Singing may be involved in crafting opera pies or theater cakes, for example. Instrumental music, however, may always be true (unbaked) auditory cheesecake. Either way, we have evolved to find it delicious!