Music, Cognition, Culture, and Evolution

Abstract

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.

The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective

“…Indeed, it seems likely that the affective and aesthetic power of music derives from these differences. Music, rather than being semantically deficient relative to language, encourages a complementary mode of interpretation that is a major source of its appeal (Cross, 2003). Thus, it is more accurate to characterize music as being like language without propositional, combinatorial meaning.…”

“…First, human music typically occurs in specific performative contexts: particular songs or styles recur in specific social contexts, especially ritualistic contexts stressing supernatural or mystical themes (Arom, 2000;Cross, 2003;Nettl, 2000). These contexts vary considerably from culture to culture: Western classical music may have very specific contexts (e.g., the opera house) compared to folk musics (Nettl, 1995), but all cultures seem to differentiate celebratory music from dirges or laments, menÕs music from womenÕs music, lullabies from work songs, or draw some similar distinctions.…”

“…Sloboda, 1985). Furthermore, there is commonly a mapping between musicÕs acoustic form and movement, especially dance (another human universal, (Nettl, 1983)), and this music M dance mapping is not easily subsumed by the term ''emotion'' (Cross, 2003). Movement provides objectively measurable ways of examining the expressive nature of music.…”

“…We can easily match the tempo and ''gestural form'' (Bierwisch, 1979) of a piece of music to an appropriate sequence of movements in dance, or reject inappropriate mappings, and this demonstrates that some kind of non-arbitrary mappings between the sonic domain of music and various other domains exists (see also Clynes, 1977Clynes, , 1995Juslin & Sloboda, 2001;Trainor & Schmidt, 2003). Ian Cross has suggested that the difficulty in pinning down the nature of this mapping actually reflects a crucial aspect of musical meaning (Cross, 2003), which is the capacity of music to imbue any situation with meaningfulness, which is nonetheless potentially quite different for different participants; Cross has dubbed this ''floating intentionality''. Without entering into further discussion I will cautiously denote this final design feature of music, a ''gestural form'' which includes flexible mappings to both mood and movement, as its capacity to be a-referentially expressive.…”

“…Miller, 2000). For example, Cross has suggested that music represents a form of play that both aids child development and decreases tension within groups (Cross, 2003). In the context of the weaknesses of sexual hypotheses described above, and the recent upsurge of interest in multi-level selection, it seems likely that such socially oriented hypotheses will increase in popularity.…”