The greatest song of all time, according to science (2024)

Pythagoras, one of the significant figures of Ancient Greece, claimed that music was the language of maths and that there was a science to making sequenced sounds appealing to the human ear. He effectively discovered that harmonics are a feature of physics, and ever since, scholars have been delving into the science of songs. In essence, there is theoretical correctness to perfectly composed music.

Within this, there are various knowns and unknowns. We know what notes are harmonious on musical scales. There are unknowns that we might not be able to pin down, but we can still study the effects. You don’t have to think too much about Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ to know that you’re listening to the cry of a lovelorn fellow—even a babbling baby could somehow tell you that. The sounds simply invoke a weepiness from our psyche, and given we can monitor things like dopamine releases, this too can be scientifically mused (even if tribes are now throwing curveballs into our understanding of this).

So, with science able to analyse the various facets of music, both in terms of mathematical musicology and the emotive side of it that makes us ‘feel’, what song has been deemed the greatest? Well, Gizmondo gathered a team of neuroscientists and music experts to get to the bottom of this, and, naturally, ‘Africa’ by Toto came out on top. Genuinely. In an age whereby science has increasingly borne the scorn of society’s troubling conspiratorial revolution, you have to wonder whether this verdict is a helpful one.

“Toto turns out to be remarkably good and sophisticated according to musicians,” Dave Poepell, the Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, explains. “Toto was a group of hardcore, highly respected studio musicians. They crafted those songs pretty carefully and were incredibly successful with those four albums. And musicians actually really love Toto.”

Largely, this is determined through very natural means. “The best way to test a song is still a human,” Neuroscientist Daniel Glaser explains. “We can measure how people respond to songs in a bunch of ways, including brain scans, measures of chemicals in the brain, including dopamine (which is associated with the internal reward system reward perhaps you give yourself a pat on the back for selecting a great playlist). Actually measuring foot tapping or the smile muscles is probably just as good as most more ‘scientific methods’.”

However, while ‘Africa’ may well have been declared the winner as a bit of fun. Ultimately, despite music’s mathematical grounding, it is so much about response; aural beauty is still very much in the ear of the eloper. As Amy Belfi, who studies the brain’s reaction to music, explains: “The challenge in psychology, but especially when we’re looking at music, is the fact that there’s individual differences. Taste is so varied in terms of music. In several studies about musical chills or really positive responses to music, they have the participants in the study bring in their own music to listen to. So you would have to have a comparison of highly pleasing music versus non-pleasing music. So the highly pleasing music is totally different from one person to another.”

What makes a song good?

And despite music theory remaining the same for aeons, new discoveries are constantly challenging what we once held as true. For instance, if you hate Toto’s track, you are not a cynical heretic going against scientific truth, as the case of the Bolivian Tsimane tribe recently proved. Their music went against all standard norms. It was atonal, and the keys seemed to infer opposites, and so on. Why does it defy what we perceive to be the mathematical rules of music?

Well, a recent study by MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany looked into this dissonant disparity. Immediately, they found no biological difference. The Tsimane’s hearing was the exact same as ours. So, with this in mind, they wanted to figure out whether octave pitches were routed in universal maths or culturally learned.

The findings showed that our musical language of octaves is a purely learned one. It might seem natural to us to match the same notes on an octave scale, but to the Tsimane tribe, this was a foreign language. In essence, this proved that while music might be a universal communicator,we speak in different tongues within it.Some of us just understand ‘Africa’ even if science shows that it is technically and emotionally sound to most people. The inference of progressive artistry, contribution to the zeitgeist, intellectual stimulation, originality, and so on only crowd the picture further. So, in this instance, you can take science with a pinch of salt.

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