The Revelation Hypothesis

Beethoven

Beethoven famously said (ref wikiquotes):

Musik höhere Offenbarung ist als alle Weisheit und Philosophie.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

One could reasonably ask: "What is it that music reveals?"

Or even: "I listened to some music by Beethoven, and it sounded good, but it didn't reveal anything to me.

If we take this quote very literally, it doesn't make too much sense, other than as some kind of poetic worship of the strong feelings that music invokes in us as we listen to it.

But it makes more sense if we realise that music feels like it's a revelation.

In other words, Beethoven listened to music, and it created a strong feeling in him that the music was revealing something to him, and that's what inspired his quote.

It's almost as if the music is telling us: "I am revealing information, and this information is something very significant, something very emotionally significant."

The music itself isn't actually revealing anything to us, at least not if it's "pure" music, devoid of any additional context, not contaminated or annotated with any kind of spoken language, and not associated with any specific scenario such as a scene in a movie where the music is the score.

But I propose that music creates a feeling within us, as listeners, that something significant is being revealed to us.

As listeners, when we listen to music, and music invokes in us this feeling that emotionally significant information is being revealed, we will be motivated to latch on to something specific which constitutes the revelation, and this might come from the song lyrics (if it's a song), or the scene in the movie, or it might just be something that comes from our own imagination.

So, this is my hypothesis:

The music may additionally give some hint as to the nature of the emotion involved, such as sadness, or happiness.

However, in many cases, the exact nature of the emotion is not specified.

Are there any evidences in favour of this proposition?

I cannot claim any hard proof beyond my own subjective feelings on the matter when listening to music.

And Beethoven was a great composer, but I think it's fair to say that he wasn't a scientist.

However, I can give some arguments in favour of this hypothesis, which might count as some kind of "evidence".

Evidence 1: Song Lyrics

There is something about song lyrics which makes them different to other forms of prose.

But it can be hard to pin down exactly what it is that is different about them.

Typically song lyrics are made up of proper words, and those words are almost always put together to make proper grammatical sentences.

So by those criteria, song lyrics are just like any other kind of prose.

One specific feature of song lyrics is that they almost always rhyme, although it's not immediately obvious what purpose rhyming serves, or why it should be so important.

One thing we can observe about song lyrics is that, compared to normal narrative prose, they can be terse and somewhat incoherent.

In the case of normal prose, the writer endeavours to make it reasonably clear to their readers what is going on, and what the context is. The writer gives priority to their reader's understanding of the material.

The prose writer may also be concerned to provoke an emotional response in their readers as a story unfolds. But there are practical limits as to how often the writer of prose can reveal emotionally significant information to their audience without abandoning the need for coherence and comprehensibility.

With song lyrics, it as if these limits are ignored. The music is all about making revelations with emotional significance, and song lyrics are all about packing as much relevation in as it is possible to pack in to the available space, and damn any considerations of coherence. Some kind of coherence is usually preferred, but it's not the priority.

The emotional structure of song lyrics is very line-oriented.

One line of lyric typically corresponds to a musical phrase, and the end of the line is exactly where the rhyming usually occurs. (Albeit more dense forms of rhyming occur with rap lyrics, ie not just at the ends of lines but also the middles and pretty much anywhere the lyricist can get them to appear.)

The emotional structure of lyrics is line-oriented in the sense that at least one revelation has to occur within each line, and, furthermore, the revelation often fully completes its emotional significance on the last word of the line (which also happens to be where the rhyme is). That is, if the line stopped before the last word, it would remain unclear to the listener what was being revealed that was of such emotional significance.

Here is an example of a portion of lyrics from a song Different People by singer Jessia:

1. Oh we really did some damage
2. I never knew a heart could break like that
3. Finally ripping off the bandage
4. And this time really feels like it's the end
5. I don't wanna wonder where you are
6. but I don't have control over my heart
7. No I don't wanna wonder where you are – tonight

All of these lines have emotional impact considered individually, and each line reveals some new thing, except for line 7, which starts off as a repetition of line 5 (this kind of repetition is another thing that occurs often in song lyrics but rarely in normal prose).

I would say that in lines 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 the last word is very significant.

With line 7 there is a double-whammy – almost ending on the word "are", which mostly clarifies the question of what she is wondering about, the line then fully ends on "tonight", which significant ups the ante, ie it's nighttime and the implication is that he's probably with some other girl already.

The Revelation Hypothesis is telling us that music is not about emotion per se, rather it is about the revelation of information that has emotional significance.

What this tells us, when we are writing song lyrics, is that it is not enough for the lyrics to "express emotion", rather the lyrics should consist of a constant stream of emotional revelations.

Evidence 2: Origin of Spoken Language

The Revelation Hypothesis is not just a theory about the meaning of music – it also potentially provides us with a theory about the origin of human spoken word-based language.

I use the term "word-based" here, because the hypothesis is that the initial form of human language was an ancestor of music, which did not have any words in it.

This initial pre-language did not have any words, but at the same time it created the pre-conditions for the evolution of spoken language as we know it, with words, and grammar, and sentences.

A very abstract description of many spoken utterances is the following:

This is very abstract, because all the details are left out, ie what is the something that I know?

Apart from the details, there is also the question of value.

A certain amount of effort is required for the speaker to speak and for the listener to listen.

For speech to be worth speaking and listening to, there has to be some value attached to the information.

There are two basic criteria by which we can assign value to the content of a possible speech utterance:

1. Is the speech content something important? That is, does it have emotional significance?
2. Is the speech content something new? Is it something that speaker only recently became aware of, and therefore the listener probably doesn't know it yet?

The Revelation Hypothesis suggests a possible model for the pre-language, where the content was 100% abstract, but the value of the content was asserted, both in relation to recency and emotional significance.

In other words, an utterance in the pre-language would have expressed the following:

We might wonder whether such an abstract utterance would have had any value to the listener – it includes an assertion that the information involved is of value, but it does not include any details of what that information is.

To derive any real value from such an utterance, it would be up to the listener to guess what said information might be.

The speaker has asserted that they have become aware of some information that is emotionally significant, and which is therefore of likely value to the listener, if the listener can figure out what that information is.

In some situations the new information will have been revealed as a result of perceiving something in the immediate environment, that is, the speaker saw something, or heard something (or smelled or touched or tasted).

In some of those situations it would be sufficient for any listeners to pay extra attention to any possible clue in the environment that resulted in the speaker's utterance, to see or hear whatever it was that the speaker saw or heard, and to figure out for themselves what the fuss was about.

If indeed such a pre-language provided an evolutionary advantage to speakers and listeners, then it would be selected by the forces of natural selection, and become a mainstay of the vocal repertoire of the individuals of that species.

Also, once such an abstract pre-language existed, that would immediately create a selective pressure to find ways to provide additional details for those abstract utterances. Which would initially lead to the evolution of words, and later on the evolution of more complex grammar and sentences as we know them.

In a scenario where there is abstract communication with no details provided, the addition of any detail will increase the value of the communication. So, for example, even a single word could provide a useful clue to the content of the relevant information, even though the word itself is not the whole content of that information. So it would be possible for individual words to evolve as an initial incremental improvement to the abstract pre-language, without there being any initial requirement for the words to be combined in a manner that fully stated the information content that the pre-language utterance was referring to.

Eventually, after further evolution, including evolution of complex grammar, the word-based component of the language would become capable of expressing all of the details of the information, including, if necessary, the emotional significance of it, and the original abstract pre-language would itself become redundant, and would disappear from the spoken word-based language.

What I propose is that what we know as music is a descendant of this now-redundant prehistoric abstract pre-language.

Music is something that tells us that information has been revealed, and this information has emotional significance, even though the music itself does not contain any details of what that information is, and often the music is rather vague even about which particular type of emotion it is.

In other words music roughly matches the features and effects of the proposed abstract pre-language. (The major difference is that music is, according to another hypothesis of mine, intensified by a Glial Illusion, and what here I call "pre-language" corresponds to "proto-music" as outlined in that article.)

Evidence 3: The Evolution of Human Imagination

I have proposed that the ancestor of music was an abstract pre-language that expressed the revelation of information with emotional significance.

But if this pre-language was eventually replaced by word-based language that expressed all the relevant details of the information, and rendered the original abstract pre-language unnecessary, then how come music still exists as a thing?

I propose that the evolution of music from this redundant pre-language occurred as follows:

• The development of a glial-based regulatory system for managing the neural processing of speech sounds independently of variations in speech tempo.
• The discovery (by our ancestors) of a glial illusion that causes this regulatory system to falsely intensify the emotional response to the (mostly redundant) proto-musical pre-language.
• The invocation of this glial illusion, ie music, as a motivation for human imagination.

Music, in its final form, invokes a very intense feeling that information has been revealed which has deep emotional significance.

This intense feeling is the result of an illusion – it is a false signal.

Listeners to music will attempt to find some possible revealed information that is consistent with the intense feelings of revelation produced by the music.

This hypothetical revealed information might consist of some alternative reality, or some major change applied to the current reality of the listeners. Some alternative reality so different from existing reality that strong emotions would have to result from discovering that the alternative reality actually existed.

So the final result of listening to music is that it would encourage listeners to use their imagination to imagine things and situations as different as possible from the existing ordinary mundane reality that they lived in.

At a certain time in human pre-history, music may have played a significant role in expanding the reach of human imagination, where in some cases those imaginings resulted in individuals taking concrete actions to bring some aspect of those imagined alternative realities to life.

Note: The possible (pre-historically) recent decline of music

As I have suggested in previous articles (starting with this one), the emotional effects of music on listeners may have faded somewhat in the recent pre-historic past, and our modern experience of music may be a somewhat reduced version of what music used to be.

Let us suppose that the primary function of music was to motivate the imagination of alternative realities.

One consequence of the development of "civilisation" in the last ten or twenty thousand years is that we are all part of or at least loosely associated with a very large society of minds consisting of almost everyone else in the world.

One consequence of being part of this large society of minds is that there is much less need for any particular individual to have crazy imaginings, because there is much less need to start from scratch.

That is, we all have available to us a considerable store of imagined realities that other people have already imagined, and if we want to imagine some strange alternative reality, we can use one of those previously imagined realities as a starting point.

Also, because many other people have already done a lot of imagining, and the most interesting of those imaginings have spread culturally and become well known to everyone in society, it is somewhat less likely that any particular individual will imagine something significantly new that is of any great use. (Of course there are still plenty of things yet to be imagined, but the cost/benefit ratio has changed with regard to the effort required to imagine something majorly different from anything that has previously been imagined.)

Also, with music, there is a tendency to mix music with discussion of pre-invented alternative realities AKA religion, and if the musical effect is too strong then this will motivate the individual to over-invest effort into thinking about the content of the religion, even though typically religious content is too disconnected from actual reality to serve any useful purpose as a source of information about anything (other than the social problem of knowing the content of other people's alleged religious beliefs).

So, for all these reasons, it is plausible that there was a time when music played a significant role in the development of human imagination, but that time has now largely passed, and what we experience as music is a partial shadow of its former self.

(Of course modern technology enables both the development and delivery of new and more powerful kinds of music, but this may be happening against a background of a slow and steady evolutionary decline in the instinctive human desire to listen to music.)