Daniel Levitin’s new book follows closely on the heels of his surprise bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music, an entertaining overview of the emerging field of music cognition. While that book contained plenty of whoa, dude insights, The World in Six Songs is at once more ambitious and more personal than its predecessor, arguing that the musical brain – that is, the capacity for creating and appreciating music – lies at the foundation of human society. Indeed, Levitin boldly asserts that the evolution of musical capacity in early humans paved the way for acquiring language.
    Levitin, a scientist at McGill University, identifies six types of songs that he claims encompass how the brain understands music – namely, songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love (or rather, “love and its neurochemical correlates”). Each type of song has a clear evolutionary function: songs of friendship, for example, would have bound together tribes of early humans, allowing them to live together in ever greater numbers; knowledge songs would have allowed preliterate societies to pass along information integral to their survival.
    Levitin has a restless, non-didactic approach that draws equally from science and art. But in Six Songs his deftness as a popularizer of scientific concepts is at times bogged down by unnecessary anecdote, such as a lengthy, nostalgic detour through the 1960s antiwar movement. (This is particularly perplexing since Levitin would have been all of 10 years old during the Summer of Love.)
    Staring into the soupy waters of evolutionary history is inevitably fraught, and Levitin’s attempts to tie the “ineffable power of music” to the survival of the species seem, at times, academic. “Scientists are in the business of wanting proof for everything,” he writes at one point, seemingly dismayed; but then he reassures us, “[Music] only needs to be a plausible adaptation, even one among many possible, for this theory of its [evolutionary] origins to hold.” The net effect is that Six Songs is less vital and less compelling than its predecessor.