Musicality and the evolution of mind, mimesis, and entrainment

Topics in Cognitive Science, 2012

What was the role of music in the evolutionary history of human beings? We address this question from the point of view that musicality can be defined as a cognitive trait. Although it has been argued that we will never know how cognitive traits evolved (Lewontin, 1998), we argue that we may know the evolution of music by investigating the fundamental cognitive mechanisms of musicality, for example, relative pitch, tonal encoding of pitch, and beat induction. In addition, we show that a nomological network of evidence (Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004) can be built around the hypothesis that musicality is a cognitive adaptation. Within this network, different modes of evidence are gathered to support a specific evolutionary hypothesis. We show that the combination of psychological, medical, physiological, genetic, phylogenetic, hunter-gatherer, and cross-cultural evidence indicates that musicality is a cognitive adaptation.

Musicae Scientiae

Music is a human universal. It exists in every known culture, and emerges spontaneously in an early stage of human ontogenetic development. This alone is a strong hint towards some kind of evolutionary origins of music perception and performance. While Darwin himself was somewhat undetermined on how to explain music’s phylogenetic roots, and finally decided for sexual selection as an explanation, the current decade has witnessed an unforeseen boost of theory development and empirical research about the origins of music. [...] This Special Issue [of the scholarly journal Musicae Scientiae, published by Sage] is the first larger compilation of state of the art contributions on Music and Evolution since the turn of the millennium, with 16 peer-reviewed papers on topic.

In recent years the relation of music to human evolution has begun to be explored from many different perspectives. In large part, these explorations are motivated by the sense that an evolutionary perspective may be the best way to integrate an understanding of music as a biological phenomenon with an understanding of music as a component of culture. This paper is intended to identify the nature and the sources of the evidence in which explorations of the relations between music and evolution must be rooted in order adequately to address the concerns of musicology, anthropology, archaeology and cognitive science. The principal sources of evidence fall into six categories: functional, phylogenetic, developmental, physiological, ethnographic and archaeological. The first, functional, deals with the social and individual roles of 'music' across cultures, and provides the fundamental delimitation of what can legitimately be construed as 'musical'. The second, phylogenetic, is required to assess the degree of homology between human musical behaviours and 'musical' competences in other species. The third, developmental, provides indications as to the genetic component of sets of behaviours, while the fourth, physiological, sets the boundaries for the possession and exercise of 'musical' capacities and behaviours. The fifth, ethnographic, examines the roles and possible forms and artefacts of music in current lifeways and environments that are similar to ancient lifeways and environments, while the sixth, archaeological, is concerned with the 'hard' evidence of ancient artefacts and their find contexts. The evolutionary perspective on music needs to be examined and its evidentiary bases need to be made explicit in order to elucidate the relation of culture to biology and situate music within that relation as well as, critically, to delimit the implications of an evolutionary view.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2006

We seem able to define the biological foundations for our musicality within a clear and unitary framework, yet music itself does not appear so clearly definable. Music is different things and does different things in different cultures; the bundles of elements and functions that are music for any given culture may overlap minimally with those of another culture, even for those cultures where "music" constitutes a discrete and identifiable category of human activity in its own right. The dynamics of culture, of music as cultural praxis, are neither necessarily reducible, nor easily relatable, to the dynamics of our biologies. Yet music appears to be a universal human competence. Recent evolutionary theory, however, affords a means for exploring things biological and cultural within a framework in which they are at least commensurable. The adoption of this perspective shifts the focus of the search for the foundations of music away from the mature and particular expression of music within a specific culture or situation and on to the human capacity for musicality. This paper will survey recent research that examines that capacity and its evolutionary origins in the light of a definition of music that embraces music's multifariousness. It will be suggested that music, like speech, is a product of both our biologies and our social interactions; that music is a necessary and integral dimension of human development; and that music may have played a central role in the evolution of the modern human mind.

specificity pose challenges to adaptationist models of music evolution. In articulating a series of constraints, the authors of the target articles provide strategies for investigating the potential origins of music. We propose additional approaches for exploring theories based on exaptation. We discuss a view of music as a multimodal system of engaging with affect, enabled by capacities of symbolism and a theory of mind.

Music is a fascinating topic for evolutionary theory, natural philosophy, and narrative construction: music is a highly valued feature of all known living cultures, pervading many aspects of daily life, playing many roles. And music is ancient. The oldest known musical instruments appear in the archaeological record from 40,000 years ago (40 Kya) and from these we can infer even earlier musical artefacts/activities, as yet unrepresented in the archaeological record. I argue that, following research couched in the social brain hypothesis framework, a theoretical basis is emerging for the proposition that the (incremental) evolution of proto-music took hold in the late mid-Pleistocene, roughly 400 Kya, and perhaps earlier. Subsequently, musical activities and traditions incrementally evolved throughout modernity (from 250 Kya onwards), global dispersal from Africa (currently thought to be from 60-100 Kya onwards), and the Holocene (from 12 Kya). In this article I provide an overview of recent research and a sketch of music's evolutionary career. I identify avenues for future research, including work in the evolution of the emotions, and the application of signalling theory to music archaeology.

Contemporary music review, 2003

Music is definable in a broad sense as 'embodying, entraining and transposably intentionalising time in sound and action'. Human infants, in infantcaregiver interaction, and in childhood patterns of thought and behaviour, appear universally to engage in activities that share those attributes, and musics can be construed as cultural particularisations of those infant/childhood interactive and individual behaviours. Music as defined in this way appears to be uniquely human and ancient, most likely arising with Homo sapiens sapiens, ourselves. It is notable that our primate relatives do not appear to engage in activities with all the attributes of 'music' as defined here. However, several primate behaviours and attributes might constitute precursors of musicality. In particular, it is suggested here that music may have arisen in the course of evolution in part as a result of processes of progressive altricialisation (a lengthening of the pre-reproductive juvenile period) in the primate and hominid lineages.

Frontiers in Neuroscience - Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, 2017

Despite evolutionary musicology's interdisciplinary nature, and the diverse methods it employs, the field has nevertheless tended to divide into two main positions. Some argue that music should be understood as a naturally selected adaptation, while others claim that music is a product of culture with little or no relevance for the survival of the species. We review these arguments, suggesting that while interesting and well-reasoned positions have been offered on both sides of the debate, the nature-or-culture (or adaptation vs. non-adaptation) assumptions that have traditionally driven the discussion have resulted in a problematic either/or dichotomy. We then consider an alternative 'biocultural' proposal that appears to offer a way forward. As we discuss, this approach draws on a range of research in theoretical biology, archeology, neuroscience, embodied and ecological cognition, and dynamical systems theory, positing a more integrated model that sees biological and cultural dimensions as aspects of the same evolving system. Following this, we outline the enactive approach to cognition, discussing the ways it aligns with the biocultural perspective. Put simply, the enactive approach posits a deep continuity between mind and life, where cognitive processes are explored in terms of how self-organizing living systems enact relationships with the environment that are relevant to their survival and well-being. It highlights the embodied and ecologically situated nature of living agents, as well as the active role they play in their own developmental processes. Importantly, the enactive approach sees cognitive and evolutionary processes as driven by a range of interacting factors, including the socio-cultural forms of activity that characterize the lives of more complex creatures such as ourselves. We offer some suggestions for how this approach might enhance and extend the biocultural model. To conclude we briefly consider the implications of this approach for practical areas such as music education.

Over the course of the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in one of the most mystifying features of the human evolutionary story: the origins of musicality. Mankind's fascination with music is close to universal: there does not appear to be a single recorded society that did not have some form of behaviour that could be classified as musical.

Anthropological Review, 2021

The aim of this paper is to review recent hypotheses on the evolutionary origins of music in Homo sapiens, taking into account the most influential traditional hypotheses. To date, theories derived from evolution have focused primarily on the importance that music carries in solving detailed adaptive problems. The three most influential theoretical concepts have described the evolution of human music in terms of 1) sexual selection, 2) the formation of social bonds, or treated it 3) as a byproduct. According to recent proposals, traditional hypotheses are flawed or insufficient in fully explaining the complexity of music in Homo sapiens. This paper will critically discuss three traditional hypotheses of music evolution (music as an effect of sexual selection, a mechanism of social bonding, and a byproduct), as well as and two recent concepts of music evolution - music as a credible signal and Music and Social Bonding (MSB) hypothesis.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, 2020

Music is a universal human activity. Its evolution and its value as a cognitive resource are starting to come into focus. This chapter endeavors to give readers a clearer sense of the adaptive aspects of music, as well as the underlying cognitive and neural structures. Special attention is given to the important emotional dimensions of music, and an evolutionary argument is made for thinking of music as a prelinguistic embodied form of cognition—a form that is still available to us as contemporary music creators and consumers.

It is commonly argued that music originated in human evolution as an adaptation to selective pressures. In this paper we present an alternative account in which music originated from a more general adaptation known as a Theory of Mind (ToM). ToM allows an individual to recognise the mental and emotional state of conspecifics, and is pivotal in the cultural transmission of knowledge. We propose that a specific form of ToM, Affective Engagement, provides the foundation for the emergence of music. Underpinned by the mirror neuron system of empathy and imitation, music achieves engagement by drawing from pre-existing functions across multiple modalities. As a multimodal phenomenon, music generates an emotional experience through the broadened activation of channels that are to be empathically matched by the audio-visual mirror neuron system.

2009

In an earlier survey of ideas about the adaptive function of art (Dissanayake 1994), I invoked the old analogy of blind men examining an elephant to describe what kind of creature it is. The concept of art, I said, is similarly composed of a variety of features, some as different from one another as the elephant's trunk from its ear or tail. Yet to discuss the subject of art's function (or origin) cogently, we need to know what it is that we are referring to-we need to have an idea of the larger whole.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2015

Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the extent to which they are present in nonhuman species. We argue for the importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective means of studying them in human and nonhuman animals. It is virtually impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole, but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity is an excellent starting point for a research program aimed at illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an autonomous trait.

2020

Two decades ago, the collective effort of numerous scientists laid the foundation of a new synthesis of physical anthropology, paleoneurobiology, ethology, biocultural evolution, systematic musicology, semiotics, historical linguistics, and developmental psychology in "The Origins of Music" (MIT Press, 2000). The purpose of this was to overcome the lack of archaeological evidence for the prehistoric development of music. This volume, "The Evolution of Music", updates these fields and adds to them a few other new ones: organology, musicological analysis, geomusicology, demography, information theory, statistical modeling, paleo-aesthetics, paleo-phonology, and biological motion. In addition, we address a number of interdisciplinary problems, especially the growing conviction amongst Western ethnomusicologists that humanities and sciences are fundamentally split, and that the scientific approach somehow introduces an "anti-humanitarian" bias.