Voice modulatory cues to structure across languages and species

Matzinger, Theresa; Fitch, W. Tecumseh

doi:10.1098/rstb.2020.0393

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 145 publications

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“…141 In this sense, a musical piece and a trek are structurally similar. While universals in the structuring of music in time may be due to biological and other constraints such as the need for vocal pauses in singing due to lung capacity and respiratory patterns, 142 the structure of EL may influence the structure of musical expression. Disassociation and entrainment of paced running might involve not only rhythm, but also tonality and even other structural features of music as well.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pace setting as an adaptive precursor of rhythmic musicality

Qirko

2024

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Human musicality (the capacity to make and appreciate music) is difficult to explain in evolutionary terms, though many theories attempt to do so. This paper focuses on musicality's potential adaptive precursors, particularly as related to rhythm. It suggests that pace setting for walking and running long distances over extended time periods (endurance locomotion, EL) is a good candidate for an adaptive building block of rhythmic musicality. The argument is as follows: (1) over time, our hominin lineage developed a host of adaptations for efficient EL; (2) the ability to set and maintain a regular pace was a crucial adaptation in the service of EL, providing proximate rewards for successful execution; (3) maintaining a pace in EL occasioned hearing, feeling, and attending to regular rhythmic patterns; (4) these rhythmic patterns, as well as proximate rewards for maintaining them, became disassociated from locomotion and entrained in new proto‐musical contexts. Support for the model and possibilities for generating predictions to test it are discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pace setting as an adaptive precursor of rhythmic musicality

Qirko

2024

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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“…As noted above, very often a skip is followed by step-wise motion, generally in the opposite direction, so as partially to “fill-in” the skip—a “gap-fill” motion, in Meyer's terms (Meyer, 1973 ; see also Bigand, 1993 ). Such Narmourean Reversals satisfy a perceptual-cognitive urge that has its basis in an evolutionary-physiological constraint (Matzinger and Fitch, 2021 ). As formalized in Fux ( 1965 ) on the basis of the style of Palestrina (Jeppesen, 1992 ), a skip in one direction followed by motion, step or skip, in the same direction will risk moving outside the natural range of the voice, so a reversal is in part a tessitura-preserving mechanism, one that persists even in instrumental music, where there is normally a wider tessitura available, as an artifact of the vocal origins of human music (see also Huron, 2001 ).…”

Section: Evolution and The Distinction Between Vocal And Instrumental...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Song and dance: a memetic angle on the evolution of musicality and music via case studies of a musemeplex in Saint-Saëns and ABBA

Jan

2024

Front. Psychol.

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Applying the theory of memetics to music offers the prospect of reconciling general Darwinian principles with the style and structure of music. The nature of the units of cultural evolution in music—memes or, more specifically, musemes—can potentially shed light on the evolutionary processes and pressures attendant upon early-hominin musicality. That is, primarily conjunct, narrow-tessitura musemes (those conforming to Ratner's “singing style,” and its instrumental assimilations) and primarily disjunct, wide-tessitura musemes (those conforming to Ratner's “brilliant style,” and its vocal assimilations) appear to be the outcome of distinct cultural-evolutionary processes. Moreover, musemes in each category arguably acquire their fecundity (perceptual-cognitive salience, and thus transmissibility) by appealing to different music-underpinning brain and body subsystems. Given music's status as an embodied phenomenon, both singing-style and brilliant-style musemes recruit and evoke image schemata, but those in the former category draw primarily upon vocal images of line, direction and continuity; whereas those in the latter category draw primarily upon rhythmic impetus and energy. These two museme-categories may have been molded by distinct biological-evolutionary processes—the evolution of fine vocal control, and that of rhythmic synchronisation, respectively; and they might—via the process of memetic drive—have themselves acted as separate and distinct selection pressures on biological evolution, in order to optimize the environment for their replication. As a case-study of (primarily) singing-style musemes, this article argues that a passage from the love duet “Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix” from Camille Saint-Saëns' opera Samson et Dalila op. 47 (1877) is the cultural-evolutionary antecedent of the Introduction/Chorus/Outro material of ABBA's song “The Winner Takes It All.” Discussion of their melodic and harmonic similarities supports a memetic link between elements of Saint-Saëns' duet and ABBA's song. These relationships of cultural transmission are argued to have been impelled by the fecundity of the shared musemes, which arises from the image-schematic and embodied effects of the implication-realisation structures (in Narmour's sense) that comprise them; and which is underwritten by the coevolution of musemes with vocal- and rhythmic-production mechanisms, and associated perceptual-cognitive schemata.

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“…Perhaps our lopsided focus on symbolic content broadsides us to other intuitive elements in speech which would tell us about the metastructure of discourse, power, and our willingness and desire to engage (or not) in certain milieus. & Fitch, 2021;Salmi et al, 2022). Yes, one function of an alarm call is to communicate vital information that can be acted upon (qua digital component); but these calls are also an excellent example of how musicality can feature in what appears to be a (quasi-)linguistic act (qua analog component).…”

Section: The Case Of Alarm Callsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Musical Turn in Biosemiotics

Slayton

Hendlin

2023

Biosemiotics

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Human music and language are two systems of communication and expression that, while historically considered to overlap, have become increasingly divergent in their approach and study. Music and language almost certainly co-evolved and emerged from the same semiotic field, and this relationship as well as co-origin are actively researched and debated. For the sake of evaluating the semiotic content of zoomusicology, we investigate music from a ‘bottom-up’ biosemiotic functionalist account considering iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of meaning not in a hierarchy but according to their effects on agents. Such an approach avoids overintellectualizing the representational aspects of music, and instead inverts, as it were, the traditional hierarchy of semiotic categories to produce illocutionary effects. Understanding aesthetics and action not as a priori separate but rather fundamentally co-arising elements of the same events. The focus of musicality again returns to interpretation and how semiosis precipitates expression.

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Voice modulatory cues to structure across languages and species

Cited by 11 publications

References 145 publications

Pace setting as an adaptive precursor of rhythmic musicality

Pace setting as an adaptive precursor of rhythmic musicality

Song and dance: a memetic angle on the evolution of musicality and music via case studies of a musemeplex in Saint-Saëns and ABBA

The Musical Turn in Biosemiotics

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