Power of a song

Music is a primordial instinct and invokes different meanings in different contexts.

Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody/ I've got some money 'cause I just got paid/ Now, how I wish I had someone to talk to/ I'm in an awful way ...

It came to him unbidden, that song from his college days. Only now it meant something completely different. There was a man on a stretcher before him, draped in a poncho. It was 1967, but Howard Sherpe had already decided that the American war in Vietnam was pointless, that the dead man before him had died for nothing.

Sherpe felt lonely, but not the same way he felt back in college when he didn't have a date on a Saturday night. He felt existentially alone. In his mind, he heard Sam Cooke's voice, but the lyrics were different.

"Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody/ I got all bloody and feel some pain/ I just want to get the hell out of here/ I'm in an awful way ...

Total recall

Nearly 40 years later, Sherpe needs to hear only a few bars of the song to be transported back to Vietnam, where he served as a medic. The music brings the sights and sounds and smells roaring back. He can even see a cigarette in his hand that is splotched with the dead man's blood.

"What I feel is the sense of all of this was in vain, it was for nothing," said Sherpe, 62. "That sense of loss ..."

The experience of having a tune bring to mind a powerful memory is something everyone can relate to. For neuroscientists, this raises a question: How is it that music connects people to faraway places and events from long, long ago?

Music hooks deep into emotions and memories in ways that words do not; in fact, Sherpe is contributing to a project that aims to get at a history of the Vietnam War through the music of the era.

At the University of Wisconsin, scholar Craig Werner and Vietnam vet, Doug Bradley, have found that music is a highway into veterans' memories of the war.

"Words are tied up in politics," said Werner, who is the chairman of the Afro-American studies department. "When we talk about wars, it becomes an issue of liberal ideology versus conservative ideology, hawks versus doves, you are for it or against it … For the guys who were there, the words don't fit the complexity of the experience."

"What music does is reach down into parts of our brain, it opens networks and pathways that you can't get to via language," he added.

For neuroscientists, the power of music poses a puzzle. McGill scientist, Robert Zatorre, once hypothesised that because music is abstract, it must activate parts of the brain that process abstract ideas — areas that developed relatively recently, as humans evolved from apes. But when Zatorre asked people to listen to their favourite pieces of music as he ran brain scans on them — kinds of music that sent chills down their spine — he found that music activated very ancient parts of the brain.

"Because music was abstract, we thought it would activate higher levels of cortex," he said. "Instead we got this very ancient system which is usually involved in biological reward ... What we found in a nutshell is when people experience chills there was a huge range of activity all over the brain. It lit up like a Christmas tree."

Accidental evolution

Music seems to activate pleasure networks that are typically activated by food, water and sex. Why would music have the same effects on the brain as biological experiences integral to survival?

Zatorre hypothesised that the capacity to appreciate music might be an accidental outgrowth of other abstract human skills. But Mark Jude Tramo, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and a songwriter, said that notion sells music short — and overestimates the importance of words to survival.

"Some of the most emotionally laden sounds we hear and make are non-speech vocalisations, like moans and groans and oohs and aahs and laughing and crying," Tramo said. "If you believe music does not have evolutionary significance you are in a very small minority."

Tramo argued that the sounds and grunts widespread in the animal kingdom set the stage for the human brain to appreciate music. If music grew out of non-verbal communication, it would make sense that music should hook deep into the brain. For social species such as humans, Tramo said music can bind groups.

"In a tribal courtship dance, the other members of your group who share that same experience can also relate to it through music," he said. "So music is iconic ... You would never play a wedding song at a funeral. ... A culture depends on such associations."

Werner, who was part of a band that used to play during the Vietnam War, said the issue of music always comes up around war veterans.

But as he started researching his book, which is to be called We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Experience of Vietnam Vets, he found that songs popular among troops in the field were not always the ones popular on the home front.

Music by the Doors, for example, was huge on campuses in the United States and even in Saigon, but not out in the field where the battles raged.

Credence Clearwater Revival was always popular with vets, as was that old sailor's anthem, the Beach Boys' Sloop John B. As with Sherpe and Another Saturday Night, Werner said the vets often took away their own meanings from songs.

Aretha Franklin's Chain of Fools was about a relationship gone bad. But for many vets, especially African-Americans, Werner said it became a song of disillusionment after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Why, these soldiers asked themselves, were they being asked to fight for freedom in a distant land, when their own country had allowed a leader who fought for their freedom to be murdered?

"The lyric is, 'one of these mornings, the chain is going to break'," Werner said. "One guy said he thought the song was about the chain of command and how it was going to break."