Editorial: The Evolution of Music

Nikolsky, Aleksey; Perlovsky, Leonid

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.595517

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Since Darwin and Spencer initially discussed it ( Kleinman, 2015 ), evolutionary theorizations about musicality have improved and diversified. Many empirical articles (e.g., Hagen and Bryant, 2003 ; Varella et al, 2010 , 2022 ; Pearce et al, 2016 ), review articles (e.g., Hauser and McDermott, 2003 ; Fitch, 2006 ; Snowdon et al, 2015 ; Killin, 2018 ; Fink et al, 2021 ), books (e.g., Wallin et al, 2000 ; Mithen, 2005 ; Ball, 2010 ; Morley, 2013 ; Honing, 2018 ), and special issues ( Peretz, 2006 ; Honing et al, 2015b ; Nikolsky and Perlovsky, 2020 ) have been published, including guiding principles to improve/advance the field ( Honing and Ploeger, 2012 ; Fitch, 2015 ; Merker et al, 2015 ; Currie and Killin, 2016 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Varella

2023

Front. Psychol.

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Human musicality exhibits the necessary hallmarks for biological adaptations. Evolutionary explanations focus on recurrent adaptive problems that human musicality possibly solved in ancestral environments, such as mate selection and competition, social bonding/cohesion and social grooming, perceptual and motor skill development, conflict reduction, safe time-passing, transgenerational communication, mood regulation and synchronization, and credible signaling of coalition and territorial/predator defense. Although not mutually exclusive, these different hypotheses are still not conceptually integrated nor clearly derived from independent principles. I propose The Nocturnal Evolution of Human Musicality and Performativity Theory in which the night-time is the missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle of human musicality and performing arts. The expansion of nocturnal activities throughout human evolution, which is tied to tree-to-ground sleep transition and habitual use of fire, might help (i) explain the evolution of musicality from independent principles, (ii) explain various seemingly unrelated music features and functions, and (iii) integrate many ancestral adaptive values proposed. The expansion into the nocturnal niche posed recurrent ancestral adaptive challenges/opportunities: lack of luminosity, regrouping to cook before sleep, imminent dangerousness, low temperatures, peak tiredness, and concealment of identity. These crucial night-time features might have selected evening-oriented individuals who were prone to acoustic communication, more alert and imaginative, gregarious, risk-taking and novelty-seeking, prone to anxiety modulation, hedonistic, promiscuous, and disinhibited. Those night-time selected dispositions may have converged and enhanced protomusicality into human musicality by facilitating it to assume many survival- and reproduction-enhancing roles (social cohesion and coordination, signaling of coalitions, territorial defense, antipredatorial defense, knowledge transference, safe passage of time, children lullabies, and sexual selection) that are correspondent to the co-occurring night-time adaptive challenges/opportunities. The nocturnal dynamic may help explain musical features (sound, loudness, repetitiveness, call and response, song, elaboration/virtuosity, and duetting/chorusing). Across vertebrates, acoustic communication mostly occurs in nocturnal species. The eveningness chronotype is common among musicians and composers. Adolescents, who are the most evening-oriented humans, enjoy more music. Contemporary tribal nocturnal activities around the campfire involve eating, singing/dancing, storytelling, and rituals. I discuss the nocturnal integration of musicality’s many roles and conclude that musicality is probably a multifunctional mental adaptation that evolved along with the night-time adaptive landscape.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Varella

2023

Front. Psychol.

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“…As a result, in modern ethnomusicological literature, especially coming from Western countries, homophonic textures are often mistaken for polyphonic. This misnomer probably stems from the increasing trend of the lack of training in the structural analysis of music in the curriculum of many Western universities [209]. For the context of our discussion, the musicologically accurate term to refer to the opposite of monophonic musical arrangement is "multipart music" (which encompasses both polyphony and homophony).…”

Section: The Evolution Of Music: An Overview Of the Latest Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar feedback could connect aggression management with progressive sophistication of music syntax and functions that music typically executes. 37 Unfortunately, the view that ethnomusicology should altogether avoid cross-cultural comparisons in order not to hold one culture in any way higher-ranked than another and the resulting denial of global evolutionary development of human music have become a major obstacle for bringing the comparative study of music on par with comparative linguistics [209]. Notably, Bruno Nettl, often cited in the literature on psychomusicology and evolution of music, in just a decade has reverted his views expressed in his chapter in the now classic "The Origins of Music" [214] and pronounced the legacy of Wallaschek, Stumpf, and Hornbostel outdated [215], thereby denouncing his own earlier call for searching for musical universals and establishing the landmarks in cultural evolution of human music.…”

Section: The Evolution Of Music: An Overview Of the Latest Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of human music in light of increased prosocial behavior: a new model

Nikolsky,

Benítez-Burraco

2024

Physics of Life Reviews

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“…The self-domestication hypothesis of human evolution [1], which is central to our hypothesis, also falls within this type, since it acknowledges a great degree of continuity between human evolution and the evolution of other species -e.g., bonobos are claimed to have also gone through a selfdomestication process, like humans [219]. 26 Unfortunately, the view that ethnomusicology should altogether avoid cross-cultural comparisons in order not to hold one culture in any way higher-ranked than another and the resulting denial of global evolutionary development of human music have become a major obstacle for bringing the comparative study of music on par with comparative linguistics [209]. Notably, Bruno Nettl, often cited in the literature on psychomusicology and evolution of music, in just a decade has reverted his views expressed in his chapter in the now classic "The Origins of Music" [214] and pronounced the legacy of Wallaschek, Stumpf, and Hornbostel outdated [215], thereby denouncing his own earlier call for searching for musical universals and establishing the landmarks in cultural evolution of human music.…”

Section: The Evolution Of Music: An Overview Of the Latest Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of human music in light of increased prosocial behavior: a new model

Nikolsky¹,

Benítez‐Burraco²

2022

Preprint

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Together with language, music is perhaps our most distinctive behavioral trait. Following the lead of paleolinguistic research, different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in the species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the theory of self-domestication, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to mammal domestication, triggered by a progressive reduction in reactive aggression levels in response to environmental changes. In the paper, we specifically argue that changes in aggression management through the course of human cultural evolution can account for the behaviors conducive to the emergence and evolution of music. We hypothesize 4 stages in the evolutionary development of music under the influence of environmental changes and evolution of social organization: starting from musilanguage, proto-music gave rise to personal and private forms of timbre-oriented music, then to small-group ensembles of pitch-oriented music, at first of indefinite and then definite pitch, and finally to collective (tonal) music. These stages parallel what has been hypothesized for languages and encompass the diversity of music types and genres described worldwide. Overall, music complexity emerges in a gradual fashion under the effects of enhanced abilities for cultural niche construction, resulting from the stable trend of reduction in reactive aggression towards the end of the Pleistocene, leading to the rise of hospitality codes, and succeeded by increase in proactive aggression from the beginning of the Holocene onward. This paper addresses numerous controversies in the literature on the evolution of music by providing a clear structural definition of music, identifying its structural features that distinguish it from oral language, and summarizing the typology of operational functions of music and formats of its transmission. The proposed framework of structural approach to music arms a researcher with means to identify and comparatively analyze different schemes of tonal organization of music, placing them in the context of human social and cultural evolution. Especially valuable contribution to the understanding of transition from animal communication to human music and language is the theory of so-called “personal song”, described and analyzed here from ethological, social, cultural, cognitive, and musicological perspectives. The emergence of personal song and its development into a social institution are interlinked with the evolution of kinship and placed into the timeline of cultural evolution, based on totality of ethnographic, archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and paleoclimatic data.

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Editorial: The Evolution of Music

Cited by 4 publications

References 32 publications

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

The evolution of human music in light of increased prosocial behavior: a new model

The evolution of human music in light of increased prosocial behavior: a new model

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