Evolutionary musicology
Encyclopedia
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.
who wrote in his Descent of Man
:
This theory of a musical protolanguage has been revived and re-discovered repeatedly, often without attribution to Darwin.
are the adaptive function (if any) and phylogenetic history of the mechanism or behavior of 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.
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 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.
It is both a model of musical and linguistic evolution and a term coined to describe a certain stage in that evolution. Brown states that both music and human language have origins in a phenomenon known as the "musilanguage" stage of evolution. This model represents the view 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–indeed, this model asserts that "music and language are seen as reciprocal specializations of a dual-natured referential emotive communicative precursor, whereby 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 with functional models of music evolution, which view music’s innate physical properties to be determined by its adaptive roles.
Musilanguage hinges on the idea that sound patterns produced by humans fall at varying places on a single spectrum of acoustic expression. At one end of the spectrum, we find semanticity and lexical meaning, whereby completely arbitrary patterns of sound are used to convey a purely symbolic meaning that lacks any emotional content. This is called the "sound reference" end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum are sound patterns that convey only emotional meaning and are devoid of conceptual and semantic reference points. This is the "sound emotion" side of the spectrum.
Actually, both of these endpoints are theoretical in nature, and music is seen as falling more towards the latter end of the spectrum, while human language falls more towards the former. As we can easily witness, music and language often combine to utilize this spectrum in unique ways; musical narratives that lack clearly defined meaning, such as those of the band Sigur Rós
, where the vocal element is in a made-up language, fall more on the "sound emotion" end of the spectrum, while lexical narratives like stories or news articles that have a greater amount of semantic content will fall more towards the "sound reference" end of the spectrum.
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 language
s, wherein the lexical meaning of a sound depends heavily on its pitch relative to other sounds, are seen as evolutionary artifacts of musilanguage. According to Brown, the majority of the world’s languages are tonal. Nontonal, or “intonation” languages, which don’t 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, are exemplified well by Japanese
, Swedish
, Serbian
and Croatian language
. These languages exhibit some lexical dependence on tone, but also depend heavily on intonation.
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 be combined 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 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 that this can happen both in speech and language that exhibit many interesting parallels to one another. 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 will accent a particular point that a language speaker is trying to make when he or she speaks. Similarly, speaking very rapidly often creates a frenzied effect that mirrors that of a very presto musical passage.
These properties, when taken together, provide all of the necessary foundations for the emergence of language and music as distinct communicative media that nonetheless are seen to share the common ancestor of musilanguage, in which they combined to form a single expressive medium. The explorations of the origins of music are still in their infancy, but the concept of "musilanguage" offers an exciting theoretical springboard for further exploration into the origins of music.
suggested that music (as well as several other universal elements of contemporary human culture, including dance and body painting) are the result the forces of natural selection
through the predator control system by early hominids. He suggested that rhythmic laud singing and drumming, together with the threatening rhythmic body movements and body painting, was the core element of the ancient Audio-Visual Intimidating Display (AVID). AVID was a key factor also to put hominid group into a specific altered state of consciousness
which he calls "battle trance" where they would not feel fear and pain, and would be religiously dedicated to group interests. Jordania suggested that listening and dancing to the sounds of loud rhythmic rock music, used in many contemporary combat units before the combat missions is directly connected to the primordial evolutionary function of music as an important psychological factor of defense. Apart from the defense from predators, Jordania suggested that this system was the core strategy to obtain food via confrontational, or aggressive scavenging. Apart from loud rhythmic singing-stomping-dancing, Jordania also suggested that soft humming could have played an important role in the early human (hominid) evolution as contact calls
. Many social animals produce seemingly haphazard and indistinctive sounds (like chicken cluck) when they are going about their everyday business (foraging
, feeding). These sounds have two functions: (1) to let group members know that they are among kin and there is no danger, and (2) in case of the appearance of any signs of danger (suspicious sounds, movements in a forest), the animal that notices danger first, stops moving, stops producing sounds, remains silent and looks in the direction of the danger sign. Other animals quickly follow suit and very soon all the group is silent and is scanning the environment for the possible danger. Charles Darwin
was the first to notice this phenomenon on the example of the wild horses and the cattle. Jordania suggested that for humans, as for many social animals, silence can be a sign of danger, and that's why gentle humming and musical sounds relax humans (see the use of gentle music in music therapy
, lullabies
)
Biomusicology
Biomusicology is the study of music from a biological point of view. The term was coined by Nils L. Wallin in 1991. Music is an aspect of the behaviour of the human and possibly other species...
that grounds the psychological mechanisms of music perception
Music Perception
Music Perception is a music journal published by University of California Press, in Berkeley, California. Published five times a year, Music Perception publishes empirical and theoretical papers on such topics as psychology, psychophysics, linguistics, neurology, neurophysiology, artificial...
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 DarwinCharles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
who wrote in his Descent of Man
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex is a book on evolutionary theory by English naturalist Charles Darwin, first published in 1871. It was Darwin's second great book on evolutionary theory, following his 1859 work, On The Origin of Species. In The Descent of Man, Darwin applies...
:
- "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 psychologyEvolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
are the adaptive function (if any) and phylogenetic history of the mechanism or behavior of 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
Adaptation
An adaptation in biology is a trait with a current functional role in the life history of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection. An adaptation refers to both the current state of being adapted and to the dynamic evolutionary process that leads to the adaptation....
or exaptation
Exaptation
Exaptation, cooption, and preadaptation are related terms referring to shifts in the function of a trait during evolution. For example, a trait can evolve because it served one particular function, but subsequently it may come to serve another. Exaptations are common in both anatomy and behaviour...
(i.e. by-product of evolution). Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...
, in his book How the Mind Works
How the Mind Works
How the Mind Works is a book by Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, published in 1997. The book attempts to explain some of the human mind's poorly understood functions and quirks in evolutionary terms...
, for example, argues that music is merely "auditory cheesecake
Cheesecake
Cheesecake is a dessert consisting of a topping made of soft, fresh cheese, usually on a crust or base made from biscuit , pastry or sponge cake. They may be baked or unbaked...
" - 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.
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
Entrainment (biomusicology)
Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, usually produced by other organisms with whom they interact socially...
(synchronization of behavior of different organisms by a regular beat) has also been pointed out. A different explanation 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
Modularity of mind
Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established evolutionarily developed functional purposes...
– perception and production of rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
, melodies
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
, harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
and other musical parameters may thus involve multiple cognitive functions with possibly quite distinct evolutionary histories.
The Musilanguage hypothesis of music phylogeny
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 states that both music and human language have origins in a phenomenon known as the "musilanguage" stage of evolution. This model represents the view 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–indeed, this model asserts that "music and language are seen as reciprocal specializations of a dual-natured referential emotive communicative precursor, whereby 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 with functional models of music evolution, which view music’s innate physical properties to be determined by its adaptive roles.
Musilanguage hinges on the idea that sound patterns produced by humans fall at varying places on a single spectrum of acoustic expression. At one end of the spectrum, we find semanticity and lexical meaning, whereby completely arbitrary patterns of sound are used to convey a purely symbolic meaning that lacks any emotional content. This is called the "sound reference" end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum are sound patterns that convey only emotional meaning and are devoid of conceptual and semantic reference points. This is the "sound emotion" side of the spectrum.
Actually, both of these endpoints are theoretical in nature, and music is seen as falling more towards the latter end of the spectrum, while human language falls more towards the former. As we can easily witness, music and language often combine to utilize this spectrum in unique ways; musical narratives that lack clearly defined meaning, such as those of the band Sigur Rós
Sigur Rós
Sigur Rós is an Icelandic post-rock band with classicaland minimalist elements. The band is known for its ethereal sound, and frontman Jónsi Birgisson's falsetto vocals and use of bowed guitar. In January 2010, the band announced that they will be on hiatus. Since then, it has since been announced...
, where the vocal element is in a made-up language, fall more on the "sound emotion" end of the spectrum, while lexical narratives like stories or news articles that have a greater amount of semantic content will fall more towards the "sound reference" end of the spectrum.
Properties of the musilanguage stage
The musilanguage stage exhibits three properties which help to make it a viable explanation for the evolution of both language and music: lexical tone, combinatorial phrase formation, and expressive phrasing mechanisms. Many of these ideas have their roots in existing phonological theory in linguistics, but phonological theory has largely neglected the strong mechanistic parallels between melody, phrasing, and rhythm in speech and music.Lexical tone
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 language
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
s, wherein the lexical meaning of a sound depends heavily on its pitch relative to other sounds, are seen as evolutionary artifacts of musilanguage. According to Brown, the majority of the world’s languages are tonal. Nontonal, or “intonation” languages, which don’t 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, are exemplified well by Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
, Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
and Croatian language
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
. These languages exhibit some lexical dependence on tone, but also depend heavily on intonation.
Combinatorial formation
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 be combined 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 notes of different scales are combined according to their own unique rules to form larger musical ideas.
Expressive phrasing
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 that this can happen both in speech and language that exhibit many interesting parallels to one another. 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 will accent a particular point that a language speaker is trying to make when he or she speaks. Similarly, speaking very rapidly often creates a frenzied effect that mirrors that of a very presto musical passage.
These properties, when taken together, provide all of the necessary foundations for the emergence of language and music as distinct communicative media that nonetheless are seen to share the common ancestor of musilanguage, in which they combined to form a single expressive medium. The explorations of the origins of music are still in their infancy, but the concept of "musilanguage" offers an exciting theoretical springboard for further exploration into the origins of music.
AVID model of music evolution
Joseph JordaniaJoseph Jordania
Joseph Jordania is an Australian-Georgian ethnomusicologist and evolutionary musicologist. In some early publications his name was spelled as Zhordania...
suggested that music (as well as several other universal elements of contemporary human culture, including dance and body painting) are the result the forces of natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
through the predator control system by early hominids. He suggested that rhythmic laud singing and drumming, together with the threatening rhythmic body movements and body painting, was the core element of the ancient Audio-Visual Intimidating Display (AVID). AVID was a key factor also to put hominid group into a specific altered state of consciousness
Altered state of consciousness
An altered state of consciousness , also named altered state of mind, is any condition which is significantly different from a normal waking beta wave state. The expression was used as early as 1966 by Arnold M. Ludwig and brought into common usage from 1969 by Charles Tart: it describes induced...
which he calls "battle trance" where they would not feel fear and pain, and would be religiously dedicated to group interests. Jordania suggested that listening and dancing to the sounds of loud rhythmic rock music, used in many contemporary combat units before the combat missions is directly connected to the primordial evolutionary function of music as an important psychological factor of defense. Apart from the defense from predators, Jordania suggested that this system was the core strategy to obtain food via confrontational, or aggressive scavenging. Apart from loud rhythmic singing-stomping-dancing, Jordania also suggested that soft humming could have played an important role in the early human (hominid) evolution as contact calls
Contact calls
Seemingly haphazard sounds made by many social animals are known as contact calls. Contact calls are very different from many other types of calls , as contact calls are not a specific signal, designed to communicate some specific information...
. Many social animals produce seemingly haphazard and indistinctive sounds (like chicken cluck) when they are going about their everyday business (foraging
Foraging
- Definitions and significance of foraging behavior :Foraging is the act of searching for and exploiting food resources. It affects an animal's fitness because it plays an important role in an animal's ability to survive and reproduce...
, feeding). These sounds have two functions: (1) to let group members know that they are among kin and there is no danger, and (2) in case of the appearance of any signs of danger (suspicious sounds, movements in a forest), the animal that notices danger first, stops moving, stops producing sounds, remains silent and looks in the direction of the danger sign. Other animals quickly follow suit and very soon all the group is silent and is scanning the environment for the possible danger. Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
was the first to notice this phenomenon on the example of the wild horses and the cattle. Jordania suggested that for humans, as for many social animals, silence can be a sign of danger, and that's why gentle humming and musical sounds relax humans (see the use of gentle music in music therapy
Music therapy
Music therapy is an allied health profession and one of the expressive therapies, consisting of an interpersonal process in which a trained music therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their...
, lullabies
Lullaby
A lullaby is a soothing song, usually sung to young children before they go to sleep, with the intention of speeding that process. As a result they are often simple and repetitive. Lullabies can be found in every culture and since the ancient period....
)
See also
- BiomusicologyBiomusicologyBiomusicology is the study of music from a biological point of view. The term was coined by Nils L. Wallin in 1991. Music is an aspect of the behaviour of the human and possibly other species...
- Origin of languageOrigin of languageThe origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
- Origin of music
- Vocal learningVocal learningVocal learning is the ability of animals to modify vocal signals in form as a result of experience with those of other individuals. This can lead to signals that are either similar or dissimilar to the model...
- humming