During the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, inventors created a series of lifelike androids, many of them capable of performing whole playlists of music. The link between music and artificial life inspired musical compositions that imitated life processes and also fostered musical metaphors for nerve activity that continue to influence twenty-first century neuroscience—not always in a sensible way.
In April 1738, the members of the French Academy in Paris saw something that astonished them. It was a life-size figure of a seated man with a flute at his lips. But it was a figure with a difference: it actually played the flute. A young inventor, Jacques de Vaucanson, had created the first genuine android. Its lifelike, skin-covered fingers moved on the flute’s keys, its tongue retracted when it played, it breathed into the instrument, and it had a repertoire of twelve different melodies. Later that year Vaucanson exhibited the flute player to the public. The result was a sensation. People flocked to see and hear the android for months on end, despite steep ticket prices. Several commentators subsequently lauded Vaucanson as a modern Prometheus—not as the thief of fire, but as the giver of the arts and sciences to the creatures, human beings, whom he had created from clay.
This version of Prometheus had the secret of imparting life to inert matter. The question of how to do that was at the center of eighteenth-century life science. Debates raged between “vitalists” and “materialists.” Was there an independent life force that animated animal and human bodies? Or was life the product of mechanical processes inherent in the bodies themselves? It is likely that part of the appeal of Vaucanson’s android was that it seemed to demonstrate a “Yes” answer to either question.
Life, however, operated in “lower” and “higher” forms. There was organic, animal life, that moved, nourished itself, and reproduced, and there was sentient life, which felt, thought, and willed. Vaucanson’s flute player simulated the sentient aspect. The proof of its artificial life was its demonstration of a skill that in a human performer would require high-order intelligence and expressive intention. As if sensitive to the need to address the organic aspect as well, Vaucanson followed up on the flute player with an artificial duck. The duck became his most famous creation. It simulated the process of digestion, from ingestion to excretion. (Vaucanson, not above a bit of flimflam, claimed that the digestion was real. It was actually a trick, but remained unexposed for more than a century.) The duck could swallow, use its beak, and move up and down on in its legs. It could also quack.
These eighteenth-century issues have never lost their relevance, though their terms have naturally changed with advances in science. The distinction between human and machine has been insecure from that day to this, and now, with human-machine interfaces a routine part of everyday life and the AI revolution off to a freewheeling start, they may be less secure than ever. We have no choice about whether to live with this uncertainty. We do, however, have choices about how. And there is a high degree of continuity between the Enlightenment predicament and our own.
Disputed Borders: Music, Mechanism, Life
To challenge the distinction between human and machine, eighteenth-century androids—the one-of-a-kind duck aside—had to pass two tests. First, the android could not just move of its own accord. It had actually to do something. Second, what it did had to involve the expression of thought or feeling. All of the principal androids—five of them—that succeeded the flute player did just that. Vaucanson himself contributed another one, which—who?—played twenty different patterns on a small drum; Peter Kintzing fashioned a dulcimer player, a gift to Marie Antoinette, with eight melodies in her repertoire; and the Jacquet-Droz family of Swiss jewelers produced a trio of figures which are still intact and fully functional: a writer, a draughtsman, and a harpsichord player. The harpsichord player is especially lifelike; she sways and breathes as she plays, as you can see in the video right below.
The story of these androids has been told often and well (1). But one of their key features has received too little attention, though it has always been recognized: four of the six androids are musicians. My book Music and the Forms of Life picks up that neglected thread and traces a line of musical metaphors for vital processes from the Enlightenment to the present. One of those metaphors, with roots in antiquity, equates the nerves with vibrating strings. That particular metaphor proved to be consistent with both organic and intelligent life. Its twenty-first century offshoots raise important, far from settled questions about intelligent life in particular and the value of scientific explanation in general.
Eighteenth-century life science took vibration as one of its chief concerns. The initial impetus came from Isaac Newton’s theorization of a universal medium, the ether, through which light, sound, and motion were propagated. Newton suggested that nerves were, in effect, organic strings whose vibrations traveled through the ether and transmitted sensation to the entire body: “All sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles”. Subsequent thinkers interpreted this idea with reference to sympathetic vibration, the phenomenon by which the sound of one object elicits sound from another one nearby. Since the nerves were understood on the model of strings, sympathetically vibrating strings quickly became a favorite metaphor for nervous excitation. And since the keyboard instruments of the era worked via plucked strings, some prominent thinkers took them as the best means to give the metaphor a musical form. The French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote that human beings are sentient harpsichords, “instruments endowed with sensibility and memory. Our senses are so many keys which are struck by nature surrounding us and which often strike themselves”. Similarly, Gottfried von Herder explained the power of music to move its listeners by invoking the inherently musical constitution of the nervous system: “Music performs on the clavichord within us that is our inmost being” (2). (Spoiler alert: twenty-first century neuroscientists do much the same thing.) Diderot, for one, drew out the implications without hesitation, asking rhetorically of “living and resonant” harpsichords: “Is a lark, a nightingale, a musician, or a man anything else?”
As late as 1865, the Irish scientist John Tyndall coupled the idea of the ether with the musical metaphor of human sentience:
Nature is not an aggregate of independent parts, but an organic whole. If you open a piano and sing into it, a certain string will respond. Change the pitch of your voice; the first string ceases to vibrate, but another replies. Change again the pitch; the first two strings are silent, while another resounds. . . . And thus is sentient man sung unto by Nature, while the optic, the auditory, and other nerves of the human body are so many strings differently tuned and responsive to different forms of the universal power.
Tyndall’s closing sentence is no longer even metaphorical. Music has become the principle inherent to the very concept of organism, here projected onto the sounding body of nature in a modern, scientific revival of the ancient concept of cosmic harmony.
During the first half of the twentieth century Jakob von Uexküll would take this idea even further. In developing a theory of the relationship between organisms and their environments, von Uexküll hypothesized the working of musical forms at every level of life, from nerve cells (bell sounds) to organs (melodies) to organisms (symphonies). Nature as a whole follows the laws of harmony more than it does the laws of mechanics. It moves in obedience to a vast musical score.
Vitalist Composition: Musical Embodiments of Life
By the late eighteenth century, composers were returning the compliment that Enlightenment scientists had paid to music. And not just any composers: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all did it. Where the scientists had explained life with musical metaphors, the composers from time to time modeled music on metaphors drawn from the life sciences, thus taking the first steps toward the full identification of music and life reflected in Tyndall. Vibrating strings were no exception. In at least one famous piece by Franz Joseph Haydn, actual vibrating strings form metaphors of their own vital energy.
The piece is the final movement of Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 50, no. 6. You can watch it down here.
The quartet is known as “The Frog” because of a raspy sound that pervades the movement. The nickname did not originate with Haydn, but from some unknown nineteenth-century listener. But it has stuck, like the animal nicknames given to several other Haydn works (“The Bear,” “The Hen,” “The Lark”). And for good reason. Animal mimicry is an old and still familiar way of linking music to life. A listener who keeps the “Frog” title in mind is welcome to hear the croaking of a frog, even if Haydn didn’t. When the composer Georg Philipp Telemann, a generation older than Haydn, actually did want to mimic a frog, he used the same technique that Haydn later used in the quartet. The technique is called bariolage; it consists of playing the same note on two adjacent strings, one fingered, the other open. Unlike Telemann, Haydn uses bariolage at breakneck speed. The result is a pungent sound that highlights the acoustic reality of what one hears: strings in vibration. The sound begins solo and eventually spreads to every corner of the movement. It also sets the pace for the more shapely melodic writing that adjoins it. As metaphor, Haydn’s bariolage emits the nerve impulses that permeate and drive the whole organism.
The heyday of what might be called vitalist composition was relatively brief, perhaps because the link it drew between music and life became generalized; specific metaphors were no longer needed. Tyndall’s and Uexküll’s extension of musical vibration from the human body to the whole of nature exemplifies this change. But the subsequent development of modern neuroscience would revive the eighteenth century’s musical metaphors for sentient life. By the twenty-first century they had returned in droves.
Modern Neuroscience and the Enlightenment Legacy: Uses and Abuses
Of course, there are differences, and not just because today’s science is exponentially better. The eighteenth century was mainly concerned with the innately musical character of neural functioning. The nerves made sense only when one thought of them in musical terms. Current neuroscience looks instead at the effects of music on the brain, seeking in the hippocampus or the amygdala the reasons why music moves us and why we move to music. But the neural operations for music tend to act as the ideal example of the operation of the nervous system in general. And for that operation musical metaphors have remained indispensable.
One of these in particular has been used so often that it now amounts to a meme or cliché of neuroscientific explanation. The metaphor is that of the neural symphony or neural orchestra, which has taken the place of Diderot’s and Herder’s sentient harpsichord (3). “Symphony” here may refer either to a musical composition or to the orchestral musicians who perform it or to some conflation or alternation of the two. Underlying all three usages is the same idea of organic wholeness invoked by Tyndall and Uexküll. The “symphony” brings a multiplicity of actions in and on the nervous system and the brain into harmonious union. The result is our subjective life.
Or is it? Modern-day versions of the musical metaphor introduce problems that their eighteenth-century antecedents largely avoided. They tend to act as a cover for an understanding that reduces the mind to the brain and collapses thinking and feeling into their neural correlatives. At the same time they tend to inhibit the analysis and critique that might be brought to bear on that understanding. Back in 1747, Julian Offray de la Mettrie published a book entitled Man a Machine (L’homme machine) which aimed to show that “the human body is a machine that winds its own springs” (4). For la Mettrie, who was one of those who compared Vaucanson to Prometheus, we humans were just as much androids as the flute player. Some of the twenty-first century writing on neural processing gives a very similar impression.
Karel Svoboda, writing in 2016, claims that advances in imaging technology have made it possible to “observe directly the neural symphony in the intact brain.” Of that symphony he says:
Our abilities to navigate dynamic environments and store information are based on a sort of symphony of electrical signals that neurons produce, each with its own melody, timbre, and rhythm. Each neuronal “tune” organizes into orchestras, which ultimately conduct our perception of the world and our actions within it . . . . In the neuronal symphony, each neuron’s tune is made up of sequences of electrical signals called spikes, which represent information. Through synaptic communication, these spikes influence the pattern of spikes in other neurons. Each neuron produces a characteristic pattern of spikes, like each instrument in a gigantic symphony orchestra.
Swoboda’s language toggles between the (musical) symphony and the (performing) orchestra without marking the distinction between them. The metaphor is so deeply embedded that it does not have to be coherent as long as it is musical. And a good part of its musical basis is—and this is typical—the social connotation of symphonic music as high art rather than a deep understanding of how symphonies and their orchestras actually work.
Eric J. Lerner, writing in 1997, had done a little better. But only a little:
While a decade ago the dominant analogy for the brain was still the digital computer, today’s brain models look more like a symphony orchestra or a chorus. Conscious states in this view consist of the pattern of variations in frequency, time, and space of the brain’s electrical fields, generated by the correlated electrical activity of shifting assemblies of neurons, as members of a symphony orchestra or chorus work together in shifting patterns to produce a pattern of variations in frequency, time, and space of sound vibrations. Of course, the brain involves millions of “players” at any time, out of a population of hundreds of billions, and the “score” is improvised by the players collectively, like an extremely large jazz band.
The new model is still far from explaining how these shifting patterns of electrical and magnetic fields and the neurons that generate and interact with them produce the phenomenon of consciousness.
Here, too, the force of the orchestral metaphor is more social than musical. Which is it, a symphony orchestra (which in modern music may sometimes improvise) or an oversize jazz ensemble (which cannot improvise freely)? The answer doesn’t matter because the primary use of the metaphor is to give impersonal neural processes an overlay of human warmth. If Lerner had referred to patterns of variation in the brain’s electrical fields and not bothered to invoke the orchestra (or chorus), his description would still be perfectly intelligible. The musical metaphor does not add clarity, especially if you don’t go to symphony concerts. What it adds is music.
But why not? What harm does it do? To answer, we need to refer to another legacy from the eighteenth century. The problem that so vexed the life scientists of the era, the mystery of how inert matter acquired life, has a modern-day counterpart. Now generally referred to as “the hard problem,” after a coinage by the philosopher David Chalmers, this is the mystery of how neurological processes produce the subjective condition we experience as consciousness (5). It is one thing to associate certain states of neural activity with certain states of sentience, but quite another to show that the one causes the other, or, for that matter, if it does, let alone how. Lerner’s musically assisted description takes the causation as a given and reads as if the hard problem is not so hard, after all. It has either been solved sufficiently or soon will be. The “proof” is obvious. All you have to do is think of the way sounds combine to become symphonic music.
The analogy is deceptive. It may be meant as illustration, but it ends up as a kind of mythmaking. Lerner does duly admit that the musical “model” is still “far from explaining” how neuronal actions “produce the phenomenon of consciousness.” But he does not doubt for a moment that the explanation is forthcoming. Neither does Antonio Damasio, whose recent Making Minds Conscious (2021) argues strenuously that consciousness has no mysteries that neuroscience cannot account for. Damasio, too, calls on the musical metaphor for support: “We can think of affect as the universe of our ideas transmuted in feeling, and it is also helpful to think of feeling in music terms. Feelings perform the equivalent of a musical score that accompanies our thoughts and actions” (6). This observation uses one puzzle to explain another. The reference seems to be to film and video scoring, though Damasio elsewhere refers to Mozart and Mahler, but just how such musical accompaniments to thoughts, actions, and images actually work is an open question. For Damasio, though, as for Lerner and many others, orchestral music serves as a kind of promise or even a prophecy that we human machines will soon not just wind our own springs but do so knowingly, and with pleasure.
The metaphor has become so ingrained that it continues to flourish despite being increasingly recognized as inadequate. Some writers backtrack right after invoking it, but only to preserve a deformed version of it, replacing traditional ideas of harmony with descriptions of weird ensembles or weird music, sometimes impossibly so. However improbably, the music goes on. An article entitled “Are Individual Neurons Soloists or Are They Obedient Members of a Huge Orchestra?” asserts that “to understand ongoing [neural] activity, we face the challenge of trying to understand what the orchestra is playing when we don’t have a program in front of us, we don’t hear all the players, and we don’t even know when the music begins and ends” (7). Another essay turns puzzlement to rapture: “In the cortex, the soloists are unrelated to the chorus. Indeed, at times the chorus is closer to Ligeti than [to] Handel, to the awesome noise of Kyrie erupting at our first sight of the monolith in 2001, piles on piles of voices, choruses in separate harmonies, soloists drifting in and out untethered” (8). For the author Mark Humphries, the neural symphony has a virtual sound, even if no one can hear it.
Whether applied to music itself or to conscious life via musical metaphor, modern neuroscience runs the risk of using the universal appeal of music to legitimize claims of causation and explanatory power that it simply cannot justify, at least not yet. The metaphor invites everyone concerned to feel in tune with nature or the cosmos. What could be more appealing? What could be more benign than music? Even precritical deference to the authority of the metaphor, or, worse, to the authority behind the metaphor, seems justified by the result. The neural symphony accepts the beauty of the music in exchange for blindly following the authority of the score, the conductor, and the scientist. That this music has no actual sound is irrelevant. The ideal of music makes the hard problem seem easy.
Can it be solved? Opinions differ; personally, I doubt it. But say that neuroscience does solve it someday. The result may well expose a harder problem that has been hiding in plain sight all along. When Diderot posed the deliberately impudent question of whether there was any difference between a lark, a human, and a sentient harpsichord, he was not so much making a scientific claim like la Mettrie’s as posing an implicit but unmistakable challenge to religion. His rhetorical question might be translated as asking—that is, denying—whether there is any evidence that human beings have souls. The present-day equivalent would be to pose the harder problem in secular terms. Can we account for the translation of neural activity into conscious experience in a way that allows us to justify the imperatives to take responsibility for our actions and exercise our creative imagination to the fullest? Or will we accept a “solution” that really does turn us into sentient keyboards? In which case, we would have no right to complain when someone “plays” us.
holidaymakers.
Lawrence Kramer
References
- Riskin, J., The Restless Clock, 2018; Voskuhl, A., Androids in the Enlightenment, 2015.
- Le Huray, P., and Day, J., Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.
- Brittan, F., “Orchestras of the Mind,” 2023.
- La Mettrie, J., Enlightened Machines, 2018.
- Chalmers, D., “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness,” 1995.
- Damasio, A., Making Minds Conscious, 2021.
- Kenet, T., at al., 23 Problems in System Neuroscience, 2006.
- Humphries, M., The Spike, 2021.
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