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Evolutionary Musicology
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Evolutionary musicology is a subfield of biomusicology that grounds the
psychological mechanisms of music perception and production in evolutionary
theory. It covers vocal communication in non-human animal species, theories of
the evolution of human music, and cross-cultural human universals in musical
ability and processing.
History
The origins of the field can be traced back to Charles Darwin who wrote in his
Descent of Man:
"When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather
some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true
musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the
present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this
power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes,-would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph,--and
would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the
imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words
expressive of various complex emotions."
This theory of a musical protolanguage has been revived and re-discovered
repeatedly, often without attribution to Darwin.
The origin of music
Two major topics for any subfield of evolutionary psychology are the adaptive
function (if any) and phylogenetic history of the mechanism or behavior of
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interest including when music arose in human ancestry and from what ancestral
traits it developed.. Current debate addresses each of these.
One part of the adaptive function question is whether music constitutes an
evolutionary adaptation or exaptation (i.e. by-product of evolution). Steven
Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, for example, argues that music is
merely "auditory cheesecake" - it was evolutionarily adaptive to have a
preference for fat and sugar but cheesecake did not play a role in that selection
process.
Adaptation, on the other hand, is highlighted in hypotheses such as the one by
Edward Hagen and Gregory Bryant which posits that human music evolved
from animal territorial signals, eventually becoming a method of signaling a
group's social cohesion to other groups for the purposes of making beneficial
multi-group alliances.
The bipedalism hypothesis
The evolutionary switch to bipedalism may have influenced the origins of
music. The background is that noise of locomotion and ventilation may mask
critical auditory information. People often synchronize steps subconsciously.
Human locomotion is likely to produce more predictable sounds than those of
non-human primates. Predictable locomotion sounds may have improved our
capacity of entrainment to external rhythms and to feel the beat in music. A
sense of rhythm could aid the brain in distinguishing among sounds arising from
discrete sources and also help individuals to synchronize their movements with
one another. Synchronization of group movement may improve perception by
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providing periods of relative silence and by facilitating auditory processing. The
adaptive value of such skills to early human ancestors may have been keener
detection of prey or stalkers and enhanced communication. Thus, bipedal
walking may have influenced the development of entrainment in humans and
thereby the evolution of rhythmic abilities. Primitive hominids lived and moved
around in small groups. The noise generated by the locomotion of two or more
individuals can result in a complicated mix of footsteps, breathing, movements
against vegetation, echoes, etc. The ability to perceive differences in pitch,
rhythm, and harmonies, i.e. “musicality,” could help the brain to distinguish
among sounds arising from discrete sources, and also help the individual to
synchronize movements with the group. Endurance and an interest in listening
might, for the same reasons, have been associated with survival advantages
eventually resulting in adaptive selection for rhythmic and musical abilities and
reinforcement of such abilities. Listening to music seems to stimulate release of
dopamine. Rhythmic group locomotion combined with attentive listening in
nature may have resulted in reinforcement through dopamine release. A
primarily survival-based behavior may eventually have attained similarities to
dance and music, due to such reinforcement mechanisms . Since music may
facilitate social cohesion, improve group effort, reduce conflict, facilitate
perceptual and motor skill development, and improve trans-generational
communication, music-like behavior may at some stage have become
incorporated into human culture.
Another proposed adaptive function is creating intra-group bonding. In this
aspect it has been seen as complementary to language by creating strong
positive emotions while not having a specific message people may disagree on.
Music's ability to cause entrainment (synchronization of behavior of different
organisms by a regular beat) has also been pointed out. A different explanation
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is that signaling fitness and creativity by the producer or performer in order to
attract mates. Still another is that music may have developed from human
mother-infant auditory interactions (motherese) since humans have a very long
period of infant and child development, infants can perceive musical features,
and some infant-mother auditory interaction have resemblances to music.
Part of the problem in the debate is that music, like any complex cognitive
function, is not a holistic entity but rather modular – perception and production
of rhythm, melodies, harmony and other musical parameters may thus involve
multiple cognitive functions with possibly quite distinct evolutionary histories.
The Musilanguage hypothesis
This section lends undue weight to certain ideas relative to the article as a
whole. Please help to discuss and resolve the dispute before removing this
message. (August 2011)
"Musilanguage" is a term coined by Steven Brown to describe his hypothesis of
the ancestral human traits that evolved into language and musical abilities. It is
both a model of musical and linguistic evolution and a term coined to describe a
certain stage in that evolution. Brown argues that both music and human
language have origins in a "musilanguage" stage of evolution and that the
structural features shared by music and language are not the results of mere
chance parallelism, nor are they a function of one system emerging from the
other. This model argues that "music emphasizes sound as emotive meaning and
language emphasizes sound as referential meaning." The musilanguage model is
a structural model of music evolution, meaning that it views music’s acoustic
properties as effects of homologous precursor functions. This can be contrasted
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with functional models of music evolution, which view music’s innate physical
properties to be determined by its adaptive roles.
The musilanguage evolutionary stage is argued to exhibit three properties found
in both music and language: lexical tone, combinatorial phrase formation, and
expressive phrasing mechanisms. Many of these ideas have their roots in
existing phonological theory in linguistics, but Brown argues that phonological
theory has largely neglected the strong mechanistic parallels between melody,
phrasing, and rhythm in speech and music.
Lexical tone refers to the pitch of speech as a vehicle for semantic meaning. The
importance of pitch to conveying musical ideas is well-known, but the linguistic
importance of pitch is less obvious. Tonal languages such as Thai and
Cantonese, wherein the lexical meaning of a sound depends heavily on its pitch
relative to other sounds, are seen as evolutionary artifacts of musilanguage.
Non-tonal, or “intonation” languages, which do not depend heavily on pitch for
lexical meaning, are seen as evolutionary late-comers which have discarded
their dependence on tone. Intermediate states, known as pitch accent languages,
which exhibit some lexical dependence on tone, but also depend heavily on
intonation, are exemplified by Japanese, Swedish, Serbian and Croatian
language.
 Combinatorial formation refers to the ability to form small phrases from
different tonal elements. These phrases must be able to exhibit melodic,
rhythmic, and semantic variation, and must be able to combine with other
phrases to create global melodic formulas capable of conveying emotive
meaning. Examples in modern speech would be the rules for arranging
letters to form words and then words to form sentences. In music, the
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notes of different scales are combined according to their own unique rules
to form larger musical ideas.
 Expressive phrasing is the device by which expressive emphasis can be
added to the phrases, both at a local (in the sense of individual units) and
global (in the sense of phrases) level. There are numerous ways this can
occur in both speech and language that exhibit interesting parallels. For
instance, the increase in the amplitude of a sound being played by an
instrument accents that sound much the same way that an increase in
amplitude can emphasize a particular point in speech. Similarly, speaking
very rapidly often creates a frenzied effect that mirrors that of a fast and
agitated musical passage.
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