The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions and The Nature of The Evidence

05-Malloch-Chap05 6/3/08 5:52 PM Page 61
Chapter 5
The evolution of music:

Theories, definitions and the
nature of the evidence
Ian Cross and Iain Morley
5.1 Introduction
It is nowadays uncontroversial among scientists that there is biological continuity between
humans and other species. However, much of what humans do is not shared with other animals.
Human behaviour seems to be as much motivated by inherited biology as by acquired culture,
yet most musical scholarship and research has treated music solely from a cultural perspective.
Over the past 50 years, cognitive research has approached the perception of music as a capacity of
the individual mind, and perhaps as a fundamentally biological phenomenon. This psychology of
music has either ignored, or set aside as too tough to handle, the question of how music becomes
the cultural phenomenon it undoubtedly is. Indeed, only over the past 10 years or so has the
question of the ‘nature’ of culture received serious consideration, or have the operations of mind
necessary for cultural learning explicitly engaged the attention of many cultural researchers
(D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996). The problem of reconciling ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ approaches
to music, and indeed to the nature of mind itself, remains.
One way of tackling this problem is to view music from an evolutionary perspective. The idea
that music could have evolutionary origins and selective benefits was widely speculated on in the
early part of the twentieth century, in the light of increasing bodies of ethnographic research and
Darwinian theory (e.g., Wallaschek 1893). This approach fell rapidly out of favour in the years
before the Second World War, for political as much as for scientific reasons, with the repudiation
of biological and universalist ideas in anthropological and musicological fields (Plotkin 1997).
However, evolutionary thinking has again become central in a range of sciences and in recent
philosophical approaches, and music’s relationship to evolutionary processes has been increas-
ingly explored over the past two decades (see also Dissanayake, Chapters 2 and 24; Brandt,
Chapter 3; Merker, Chapter 4, this volume).
5.2 Music in evolutionary thinking

Previous writings on the evolution of capacities for music have made one of two assumptions:
either music is a by-product of other cognitive and physiological adaptations, or there are bene-
fits associated with musical behaviour in its own right. Views advocating non-adaptive roots
for music have been prominent over the past 20 years. A widely publicized view (Pinker 1997)
proposes that the complex sound patterns of music make stimulating use of adaptations for
language, emotion and fine motor control, which evolved independently through selective
pressures not associated with any functions peculiar to music.
62 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY
Music may not be essential for survival, as eating or breathing are, but, like talking, may confer
a selective benefit and express a motivating principle that has great adaptive power. Music may
have developed from functions evolved for particular life-supporting purposes as a specialization
that elaborates and strengthens those same purposes. As Huron (2001, p. 44) puts it, ‘If music
is an evolutionary adaptation, then it is likely to have a complex genesis. Any musical adaptation
is likely to be built on several other adaptations that might be described as pre-musical or
proto-musical.’
Let us consider the theories that have been proposed to explain how our capacity for music
may have evolved.
5.2.1 Music promotes group cohesion

Roederer (1984), like H. Papousek (1996) and Dissanayake (2000; and Chapters 2 and 24, this
volume), proposes that music developed from mother–infant communication. The musical
manner of their interaction, he suggests, strengthens emotional bonds between mother and
infant, and practices the extraction of speech information from the musical components of talk,
such as vowels, inflections and the pitch cues cultivated in some oriental languages. Roederer
notes that music can transmit emotional information to many people at once, equalizing the
emotional state of the group, which results in a bonding effect between the group members. This
is an effect clearly identified earlier in Blacking (1969).
Sloboda (1985) observes that all cultures require the cognitive and social organization of
practices and mental techniques for survival, and that while modern cultures have ‘many
complex artefacts that help us to externalize and objectify the organizations we need and value’
(Sloboda 1985, p. 267), in non-literate societies the ‘organizational structures’ must be evidenced
and expressed primarily in terms of the expressive ways that people interact with one another.
For example, music can provide a mnemonic framework for the knowledge of a community, as
well as a way of expressing the structure of social relations (Dissanayake, Chapters 2 and 24;
Merker, Chapter 4, this volume).
5.2.2 Music is a product of group selection

The potential function of music in selection at the level of the group needs to be assessed in the
light of the extensive debate within recent evolutionary thinking on the nature and existence of
mechanisms of selection at the group level. Shennan (2002), in a comprehensive evaluation
of models of evolutionary selection applicable to theories of human prehistory, observes that
selection can occur at numerous levels, including that of the group. Group behaviours affect the
social environment in which individuals live, feed and breed. As Shennan puts it,
All theoretical schools, including those that are sceptical about other levels of evolutionary process
than that of individual inclusive fitness, recognize that such [individual] interests may often be served
by co-operating rather than competing with other individuals of the same species.
(2002, p. 213)
In consequence of frequent interaction with the same people, an individual’s behaviours are
likely to acquire the form of approved prosocial norms that emerge within a population.
Adherence to these norms can benefit the members of the group by giving additional rewards
for behaviours that they choose to undertake as individuals (Bowles and Gintis 1998). In
other words, optimal behaviours for the well-being of an individual can be determined
through engagement with conspecifics, as well as between each individual and their non-human
environment. In a social species, the likelihood that individuals will survive to procreate or have a
THE EVOLUTION OF MUSIC: THEORIES, DEFINITIONS AND THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 63
high rate of procreation depends on their ‘cultural fitness’—how they behave in relation to others
in their social group, not just their physical fitness.
Behaviours that contribute to ‘group cohesiveness’ may make other cooperative behaviours
more likely. Bowles and Gintis (1998) have demonstrated through their game theory model that
‘populations [without a centralizing control] whose interactions are structured in such a way that
coordination problems are successfully overcome will tend to grow, to absorb other populations,
and to be copied by others’ (Shennan 2002, p. 216).
It can be seen that the emergence of musical behaviours as a prosocial norm assisting
coordination within a group could lead to the growth of such groups and the spread of those
behaviours. Not only could musical behaviours become a behavioural norm in their own right,
but, because of their foundations in powerful motives for social awareness and expressive
behaviours, those individuals with well-developed capacities for musical action and perception
should also be best at identifying and engaging with other norms of social interactive behaviour.
Therefore, in theory, musical behaviours fit well with the models of selection, at both individual
and group levels, that demonstrate how the development and spread of musical behaviours
is possible.
5.2.3 Socio-emotional bonding is favoured by evolution

of musical signalling
Brown (2000a) proposes that music and language have common origins in a single communica-
tive system (see also Scherer 1991). According to Brown, both music and language can be
conceived of as functioning at ‘phonological’ and ‘meaning’ levels. The stream of sonic events
that constitutes spoken language is interpreted as lexical items by means of a ‘phonological
system’, the output of which feeds into a ‘propositional system’ for the production of speech,
within which units have both relational (syntactical) and referential (semantic) value.
Analogously, a phonological system can be conceived of as transforming a stream of musical
sounds into discrete entities (e.g., motifs, harmonic configurations), that is, ‘fed into a system
of pitch-blending syntax that specifies a set of relationships between sound patterns and
emotions … [which] deals with the issues of sound emotion, tension and relaxation, rhythmic
pulse and the like’ (p. 274). In this model, systems for dealing with sound information in both
music and speech are identified as dissociated but employing comparable tiers of ‘processing’,
each derived from a common set of hypothetical principles for interpreting and generating
phrasing in action and experience (see also Brandt, Chapter 3, this volume).
Brown proposes that this common set of principles arose first as a unitary vocal communica-
tive medium, ‘musilanguage’, and that language and music then became separate capacities
though a process of divergence and functional specialization. Language came to fulfil proposi-
tional functions such as the expression of ‘truth values’, whereas music came to constitute a
pre-eminently social or interpersonal phenomenon. He suggests that, ‘the principal function of
music making is to promote group cooperation, coordination and cohesion’ (p. 296).
Brown subsequently (2000b) adds the notion of music as reinforcing ‘groupishness’, which he
defines as a ‘suite of traits that favour the formation of coalitions, promote cooperative behaviour
towards group members and create the potential for hostility towards those outside the group’
(p252). Music supports these traits through the opportunities that it offers for the formation and
manifestation of group identity, for the conduct of collective thinking (as in the transmission of
group history and planning for action), for group coordination through synchronization (the
sharing of time between members of a group), and for group catharsis (the collective expression
and experience of emotion). Ultimately, Brown sees music as having become established
in human cultures through its role as ‘ritual’s reward system’; music, for him, is a type of
‘modulatory system acting at the group level to convey the reinforcement value of these
activities … for survival’ (p. 257). For Brown, music’s survival value is thus not immediate and
individual, but lies in its ability to promote group cohesion.
A different position is adopted by Hagen and Bryant (2003), who suggest that rather than
causing social cohesion, music and dance signal social cohesion achieved by other means. Hagen
and Bryant’s overall thesis is that
For humans and human ancestors, musical displays may have … functioned, in part, to defend territory
(and perhaps also to signal group identity), and that these displays may have formed the evolutionary
basis for the musical behaviours of modern humans.
(2003, p. 25)
They propose that music and dance act as indicators of group stability and the ability to carry out
complex coordinated actions (as exemplified, perhaps, in the New Zealand All Blacks’ football
cry, haka). They propose that the time needed to create and practice music and dance corre-
sponds to the quality of the coalition performing them, indicating how much time they have
devoted to preparing their skill.
Hagen and Bryant justify their position, and reject other explanations, on the grounds that
musical behaviours cannot contribute directly to the cohesion of a group, because they are not a
good indicator of an individual’s ability to contribute to the group’s survival. However, this view
of group cohesion purely in terms of immediately perceived costs and benefits of group member-
ship ignores emotional bonding and the loyalty engendered by a mutual emotional experience.
Individuals may already have established their credibility within a group, in terms of their ability
to contribute to its survival, but this provides no indication of their likelihood of doing so, or to
whom they will direct their assistance. The ability of music to act as a forum for the practice of
integrated, complex, coordinated group activities resulting in a powerful sense of membership
and trust provides a coherent explanation as to why these behaviours persisted at a group level.
One of the manifestations of this role may have been ‘coalition signalling’, and this may even have
led to its perpetuation; however, this is unlikely to have been the primary selective force for
music’s development.
At a psychobiological and individual level, rather than a behavioural and social level, musical
experience has been linked with the release and action of life-sustaining regulatory hormones.
Freeman (1995) reports that the neuropeptide transmitter oxytocin aids in the formation of
strong positive emotional memories and in the supplanting of negative emotional memories,
having its strongest effects during trauma or ecstasy. Oxytocin is released into the brain in
females during lactation, and is produced by males and females following sexual orgasm. It medi-
ates in interpersonal bonding, both pair-bonding and mother–infant bonding. Critically,
Freeman suggests that oxytocin is likely to be released while a person is merely listening to music.
This would provide a strong neurological rationale for the role of music in the formation
of social bonds, both in intimate interactions between people and in group musical activities
such as crowd chants (Huron 2001; see Panksepp and Trevarthen, Chapter 7, and Osborne,
Chapter 25, this volume)
5.2.4 Music promotes sexual selection

Charles Darwin proposed that the evolution of music in humans has its roots in courtship songs.
He believed that the vocalizations with the greatest pitch changes made by apes tend to be
produced by males when soliciting mates (Darwin 1871). Miller (2000, 2001) argues that musical
behaviours can indicate sexual fitness, signalling status, age, physical well-being and fertility. He
suggests that dancing reveals aerobic fitness, coordination, strength and health; voice control may
reveal self-confidence and status; rhythmic ability may indicate the ‘capacity for sequencing com-
plex movements reliably’, whist virtuosic performance per se, ‘may reveal motor coordination,
capacity for automating complex learned behaviours, and having the time to practise’ (Miller
2000, p. 340). The last characteristic may also, in young adults, signal sexual availability, as it
implies a lack of parenting demands. These properties of musical and dramatic displays could
lead to aesthetic preferences for particular forms of those behaviours, which leads Miller (2000)
to propose that
Any aspect of music that we find appealing might also have been appealing to our ancestors, and if it
was, that appeal would have set up sexual selection pressures in favour of musical productions that
fulfilled those preferences.
(2000, p. 342)
This logic, however, implies that any musical trait for which there is a preference will subse-
quently be selected for by sexual selection. To this, an important qualifier should be applied: by
definition, selection, sexual or otherwise, for a particular trait can occur only if that trait can arise
by mutation of a gene and can be inherited. Behaviours and skills (for example, a particular lan-
guage or music) can be transmitted in other ways. In addition, if sexual selection was responsible
for the evolution of motives that cause most humans to find features of music aesthetically
appealing, then we would expect convergence in behaviours of musical expression, and in the
aspects of them that give pleasure. While musical behaviours are found in all cultures and share
dynamic features and social motivations and uses, aesthetic preferences are often culture-specific.
Miller argues that ‘If one can perceive the quality, creativity, virtuosity, emotional depth and
spiritual vision of somebody’s music, sexual selection through mate choice can notice it too’ (p. 355);
however, he admits that such rationales are speculative. While his thesis is presented as a call for
empirical testing, Miller’s hypothesis of the fitness-display properties of music does intuitively
make sense. It could provide a mechanism by which musical behaviours may have become
refined, perpetuated and spread in human evolution. His theory attempts to explain how the
forms of musical behaviour may have evolved in the species, rather than how musical forms
became appealing. It may be that the core factor in the appreciation of the quality of the musical
behaviour (and its creativity and virtuosity in artistically developed forms) is its very ‘emotional
depth’, i.e., the extent to which its perception elicits a compelling emotional response, and that
this experience of emotion might not be a product of sexual selection. (See Dissanayake, Chapter 2;
Lee and Schögler, Chapter 6, on emotional expression in movement, this volume).
5.3 The need for a comprehensive definition of music

Clearly, theories of how music may have evolved are divergent. For Pinker, music is a technology,
ultimately dispensable, with no evolutionary significance. For Roederer, Sloboda, Brown and
Hagen and Bryant, music may have had significant adaptive roles in selection at the group level,
while for Miller, music may well have played a part in sexual selection. Nevertheless, all of these
theories rely on what Huron (2001, p. 44) has described as ‘the nebulous rubric music’. They pro-
vide no clear demarcation of what is intended by the term ‘music’. It seems that these authors are
employing something like a standard dictionary definition of music, such as, ‘the art of combin-
ing sounds of voices or instruments so as to achieve beauty of form and expression of emotion’,
and a ‘pleasant sound’, both from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Sykes 1982) or ‘the art or
science of arranging sounds in notes and rhythms to give a desired pattern or effect’ – from the
Penguin Dictionary of Music (Jacobs 1972).
For contemporary musicologists and ethnomusicologists, these definitions are unsatisfactory.
They could apply to, say, a CD recording of a Beethoven string quartet, or a live performance by a
rock band such as Coldplay. It is unclear whether the dictionary definition would embrace either
the musical intentions of a contemporary composer such as Brian Ferneyhough, the sonic
surface of contemporary popular forms such as electronic dance music, or the drum and dance
music of a shamanic ritual in Borneo. To the musicologist and ethnomusicologist, these phe-
nomena are indubitably musical, but ‘sounds combined so as to produce beauty of form and
expression of emotion’ scarcely captures what can be considered to be musical in them. Several
of the scientific conceptions of how musical behaviours and appreciations arose in evolution (for
example that of Miller, 2000 and 2001) appear implicitly to define music according to current
Western musical practices, where music is produced by few and consumed by many.
All of these notions of music reveal themselves to be ideological constructs rooted in the
workings of broader socio-economic and political forces, which are dynamic, changing processes.
As Magrini (2000) notes, changes in the ways in which music is manifested result in the discour-
agement of alternative and often older ways of engaging with music, particularly as an active
element in everyday life. An ‘inhibition’ of musical practices may occur through processes of the
reification of elements in cultural models of engagement with music; this occurs as the role of
the music consumer—as opposed to that of a participant or everyday practitioner in musical
activity—is created, then enhanced and eventually enforced, by institutionalizing or commodifying
the processes of knowledge acquisition. Music-making may thus be inhibited through the loss of
roles, contexts, situations and practices and the impoverished models of music and its social roles
that result may all too easily be taken by music scholars to represent all possible kinds of music.
Before assessing the relationship between music and evolution, it is essential to frame the object
of study in a different way—to perceive music in all of its manifestations.
5.3.1 Music across cultures and times

All known cultures have or have had something that can be regarded as music. To be more
precise, in the words of John Blacking (1995, p. 224), ‘every known human society has what
trained musicologists would recognize as music’ (our emphasis). Across cultures and over time,
the forms and significances of music are extremely diverse. In many, perhaps most, non-Western
cultures, music requires overt action and active group engagement; the differentiation and
specialization of the roles of performer and audience might almost be considered a minority
practice. In most cultures, music is employed not just in entertainment and courtship, but as an
essential component of ritual, often marking transitions between different stages of life (e.g.,
from adolescence to adulthood), as well as consequential events such as funerary rituals and
seasonal festivals. It may function in the maintenance of oral traditions by virtue of its mnemonic
powers. And it seems that in most, if not all, cultures, interactions between caregivers and infants
have features that can be interpreted as musical.
Music appears to be something of a universal social fact. However, as the continuation of
the quotation from Blacking above makes clear, ‘there are some societies [not confined to the
African continent] that have no word for music or whose concept of music has a significance
quite different from that generally associated with the word “music”’. It is notable, moreover, that
where a term exists, in a non-Western society, that embraces the activities that a Western musi-
cologist might conceive of as music, for example the Igbo nkwa (Waterman 1991), that meaning
tends not to differentiate between music and dance.
In general, it seems that practices that are recognizable as music in societies beyond contempo-
rary global Western culture are characterized by their use of sound and movement together. They
tend to involve collective performance: that is, they are characterized in terms of not only sound
and action, but interaction between the music makers. They are marked by (1) an apparent
‘non-efficaciousness’, in that their immediate and evident consequences are not observable
through material change in the local environment or in the subsequent behaviours of the
participants, and (2) ‘embeddedness’ in a wide range of everyday and special practices. In most,
if not all cases, they also manifest significant hedonic value (Panksepp and Trevarthen, Chapter 7,
this volume).
Accepting that something like music—even if not discretely identified as such by its
practitioners—is in all human cultures, the definitions in our dictionaries seem clearly
unsatisfactory. ‘Music’ as a universal human behaviour is marked by sound, action, interaction,
non-efficacy, and a multiplicity of social functions and emotional effects. These characteristics
will now be assessed in more detail, to arrive at an operational definition of music that might
enable its relationship (if any) to evolutionary processes to be addressed comprehensively.
5.3.2 Music as embodied expressive movement

Since the advent of sound recording, listening, with no overt and observable behaviour on the
part of the listener, has been the paradigmatic mode of engagement with music in Western
societies. However, before the advent of sound recording, the notion of music as involving action
would have seemed self-evident. While it may seem trivial to suggest that music entails activity in
its making, there are many instances where music’s sonic patterns are not just caused by actions,
but have a structure and identity that is inseparable from the doing and regulation of the actions
themselves. This is evident in the studies by Blacking (1961) of southern African kalimba thumb-
piano music, where he showed that the melodies can, on occasion, depend more on the sequence
of movements involved in the production of the melody than on the pitch patterns produced.
Similar findings are reported by Baily (1985) for the repertoires performed on Afghani dutars,
and Nelson (2002) for melodic patterns in blues guitar solos.
In these three instances, action on the part of a performer is an integral component of the
identity of the music. Several instances can be cited where actions by participants, in situations
where the performer–audience distinction is absent, constitute a framework essential for the
intelligibility of musical sound patterning (e.g., Stobart and Cross 2000). A recent meta-analysis
of neuroscientific studies of music perception (Janata and Grafton 2003) demonstrates that
passive musical perception appears to involve areas of the brain associated with motor behaviour,
perhaps elicited by the sound sequences of music mirroring aspects of physical movement
(Scherer and Zentner 2001, pp. 377–78; Benzon 2001). Music seems better understood, not as
abstract patterns of sound contemplated in immobility, but as a thoroughly embodied activity of
human agents (Lee and Schögler, Chapter 6; Turner and Ioannides, Chapter 8, this volume)
5.3.3 Music as entraining others, and engaging them in movement

Most of the contexts in which music occurs are not only active but participatory, involving the
overt and active engagement of people in musical group activities. An intrinsic component of
this participation is ‘entrainment’ (Clayton et al. 2004), which involves the coordination in time
of one participant’s musical behaviours with those of others. This process appears to involve
the perceptual inference or abstraction of a regular periodic pulse or beat from a sequence of
rhythmic events, and the intuitive or cognitive organization of the timing of actions and sounds
around the motivating pulse. It orientates attention prospectively to the time points presented in
the pulse, with a concomitant periodic modulation of the amount of attentional resources
devoted to tracking the temporal flow of the music, again orientated around the pulse (Drake
et al. 2000).
According to a cognitive interpretation, pulse abstraction facilitates an optimal use of atten-
tional resources over time. Experiments show that events occurring in temporal alignment with
the inferred pulse are detected and identified more easily than events that occur out of phase with
the pulse (Jones and Yee 1993). What is conceived as the ‘attentional load’ is modulated in time in
accordance with the pulse the subject infers. At a neurophysiological level, the experience of pulse
seems intimately related to the different ranges of timing in the coordination of gross and fine
movements (Thaut 2005). Entrainment to an external pulse may be either volitional (under
conscious control) or preconscious (Stephan et al. 2002).
We conclude that musical interaction between human participants is rooted in intuitive, mind-
generated processes of pulse abstraction/generation within the individuals. These processes
implement the optimal allocation (modulation in time) of attentional resources and may focus
experience in hierarchical temporal structures. The perceptual processes are integral to
the prospective temporal control of periodic motor behaviour. Music as an interactive social
behaviour thus affords the means for synchronizing the deployment of a participant’s experience
of moving with that of other participants, facilitating the individual and the collective
(intersubjective) focus on specific moments and sequential patterns in the temporal unfolding of
the music.
5.3.4 The ambiguity of musical intentions and a definition

of musical meaning
A broad interpretation of these entrainment processes, or the prospective perceptual control of
socially engaged musical movements, might impute similar characteristics to language.
Conversational language also relies on features that coordinate the timing of an individual’s
behaviours with those of others, as well as synchronizing the deployment of participants’
attention (Auer et al. 1999). In language, however, the meaning of an utterance with reference to
an object in the world can be specified with some precision; this is not the case for music.
The ‘outside’ meaning or denotational significance of music can rarely be pinned down
unambiguously. As John Blacking noted (1995) ‘the “same” sound patterns … can … have different
meanings within the same society because of different social contexts’ (p. 237); in Langer’s (1942)
words, in music, the ‘actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not
fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never
explicitly made’ (p. 195). In effect, the same piece of music can bear quite different meanings for
performer and listener; it might even bear multiple disparate simultaneous meanings for a single
participant. Music, to a much greater degree than language, appears to have a ‘floating intentionality’
(Cross 1999), gathering meaning from the contexts when it happens, or where and how it is
remembered to have happened, and in turn contributing meaning to those contexts.
While language can articulate complex propositions that can be interpreted as referring exclu-
sively to particular states of affairs in the world, which may have ‘truth value’ in respect of these,
this is not the case for music. Although possessing a similar potential to language for the articula-
tion of complex syntactic structures in action and awareness of action, music never seems to
achieve direct or unequivocally interpretable reference to things beyond itself. While music can be
interpreted as referring both to itself and beyond itself (as possessing both ‘sense’ and ‘reference’,
after Frege 1952), it is only in respect of its perceived reference to itself (its sense) that its ambiguity
may be minimized or entirely resolved (Cross 2005; Brandt, Chapter 3, this volume).
As music flows in time, it presents rhythmic and melodic patterns that may give rise to expec-
tations for listeners or participants as to how and when it will continue. In the rhythmic flow of
the music, those expectations may be realized or abrogated. Thus, music can generate allusion
to future possibilities of unfolding; when those future possibilities become actualities, the
significance of those earlier musical events may become clear, their sense (at least partially)
disambiguated, giving rise to what Meyer (1956) has called music’s evident meanings.
Those patterns of evident meaning, together with the music’s sonic and gestural qualities as it
unfolds, may also yield a degree of reference, this time beyond the music itself. They may result in
the elicitation of emotion or the evocation of specific conceptual–intentional complexes in the
mind—complexes of ideas with which aspects of the music have become associated through indi-
vidual experience or cultural convention, or because of biosocial predispositions (Cross 2005;
Lavy 2001; Morley 2003, pp. 150–162). But while those conceptual–intentional complexes may
themselves be complex, they are neither propositional nor decomposable in relation to definite
objects of human thought and action. Their experience is likely to vary from participant to
participant, taking form in what Meyer (1956) referred to as connotative complexes. Their sense
and reference is not bound to a specific situation or set of circumstances, but rather to a range of
situations, as a particular emotional or affective mind–brain–body state may be relevant to a range
of circumstances for any one individual (Oatley and Johnson-Laird 1998). Hence, while aspects of
music’s sense may (retrospectively) be disambiguated, its objective reference cannot.
In certain circumstances, however, music can appear to bear meanings in much the same way
as language. Results from functional brain imaging studies support this conclusion. Koelsch et al.
(2004) demonstrated that music can elicit brain responses similar to those elicited by language in
respect of ‘semantic mismatches’, although the responses following a musical context were less
consistent than those following a linguistic context. Music and language both mean; they can
both function in the conceptual–intentional domain as acts of meaning. Nevertheless, language
can express more semantically decomposable propositions; it can refer unambiguously to
complex states of affairs in the world. Music embodies and exploits an essential ambiguity, and in
this respect, language and music may be at complementary poles of a communicative continuum,
meeting somewhere near poetry (Cross 2003c). This inherent ambiguity—together with the
quality of the actions and interactions that were noted earlier as integral to music—suffices to
differentiate music from language, enabling it to be efficacious for individuals and for groups in
contexts where language would be unproductive or impotent, precisely because of the need for
language to be interpreted unambiguously (Brandt, Chapter 3, this volume).
Hence, music might be defined broadly and operationally as embodying, entraining, and
transposably intentionalizing time in sound and action (Cross 2003a), typically expressed
by voices and instruments that articulate patterns in pitch, rhythm and timbre, and involving
correlated gestural patterns of movement that may or may not be oriented towards sound
production. This definition is not intended as an alternative to conventional dictionary
definitions; such definitions effectively delimit those aspects of music that appear significant
within recent Western culture. The broad definition is intended to delineate those attributes that,
in every community, appear to distinguish music from other spheres of human activity in a way
that might enable its relationships to cultural and biological processes to be evaluated. It is not
intended to be either constitutive or essentialist.
5.4 The communal functions of musical actions

Music, as broadly defined above, is capable of engaging and rewarding communities, groups
and individuals. In collective musical behaviour, individuals act and experience what they do
in shared, purposeful time. The experience of the coordinated nature of the collective activity is
likely to engender a strong sense of group identity with the communication of pleasure. Music
both entrains movement and experience, and allows each participant to interpret its significances
for him or her self, independently, without the integrity of the collective musical behaviour being
undermined. Music’s ambiguity—its ‘floating intentionality’—in the self and for or with others,
may thus be highly advantageous for groups, serving as a medium for participation and
contributing to the maintenance of social flexibility.
A clue to music’s efficacy for the individual might be found in Meyer’s (1956) suggestion that
music does not merely embody metaphors, but is a ‘metaphorizing medium’ through which
seemingly disparate concepts may be experienced as related and become part of a transforming
experience of the self. Music appears to constitute a medium that facilitates access to, and the
formation of, conceptual–intentional complexes and metaphorical representations that may
apply to many individual and social circumstances. As Meyer puts it:
Music does not [for example] present the concept or image of death itself. Rather it connotes that rich
realm of experience in which death and darkness, night and cold, winter and sleep and silence are all
combined and consolidated into a single connotative complex… What music presents is not any one
of these metaphorical events but rather that which is common to all of them, that which enables them
to become metaphors for one another. Music presents a generic event, a ‘connotative complex’, which
then becomes particularized in the experience of the individual listener.
(1956, p. 265)
Thus, music can be interpreted as facilitating the formation of conceptual–intentional complexes

across multiple domains of experience, providing a synthetic medium that can bind together the
experiences of disparate situations and concepts in whole forms that cannot be decomposed into
sets of discrete propositions. This may be of particular significance where two or more domains
of experience with fundamentally irreconcilable characteristics appear to coexist, as may be
encountered in ritual or religious contexts (Cross 2003c; Merker, Chapter 4, this volume).
5.4.1 The developmental value of music

While music can function as a concept-linking medium for mature members of a culture, we
suggest that it is also powerfully effective in infancy and in childhood, for the individual and
for pairs or groups. ‘Protomusical behaviours’ (M Papousek 1996) have been identified as the
foundation of the ability infants have to interact with others predictively, to exercise the capacity
for Trevarthen’s ‘primary intersubjectivity’ (1979, 1980, 1999; Dissanayake, Chapter 2, this
volume). For older children and adults, musical behaviours can be interpreted as providing ways
of interacting that—by virtue of their ambiguity, or flexible significance—are likely to minimize
social conflict. As a group of children play together musically, for each child the significance of
their own and others’ musical behaviour can be quite different and individual; yet the integrity of
the overall musical interaction, and the pleasure gained, need not be compromised. Music’s
ambiguity allows for the exploration and rehearsal of skills in interacting with others, minimi-
zing the risks of engaging in conflict or misunderstanding, risks that would be more likely were
the medium linguistic with unambiguous reference. Musical play can be a way to exercise and
acquire social competence and confidence in cost-free and mutually rewarding interaction.
In early childhood, protomusical and protolinguistic abilities are intimately interlinked, sharing
many features and relying on common systems in children’s cognitions and behaviours. As children
develop the capacity for ostensive/inferential communication, the extent to which vocal and gest-
ural behaviours can substitute for one another in linguistic contexts is increasingly constrained;
utterances become more fixed and unambiguous in their significance and meaning. In contrast,
protomusical and musical behaviours retain a degree of ambiguity or transposability in their
‘aboutness’, particularly in the babbling stage (Elowson et al. 1998). This ambiguity is evident in
the capacity of prelinguistic utterances to reflect or engage with the temporal dynamics of the
joint actions, physical events, experienced affective states and changes of affective state that can
be shared in social exchanges. The elements of protomusical behaviour can be associated,
for infants and children, with any or all of a wide range of types of event in their experience of
the world.
In what is still the only large-scale study of children’s music and musicality in a non-Western
context, Blacking (1967) notes that music subserves primarily social functions for the children of
the Venda society in southern Africa: ‘Most Venda children are competent musicians … and yet
they have no formal musical training. They learn music by imitating the performances of adults
and other children’ (p. 29). In a society where music is chiefly manifested as interactive behaviour
that plays an especially significant role in structuring social relations in both ritual and everyday
contexts (Blacking 1976), the musicality that emerges from enculturative processes has profound
effects on children’s socialization. Blacking’s findings relate directly to research on how children
learn all manner of knowledge and skills in different cultures, and specifically to the prevalence of
‘intent participation learning’ in the majority of societies (Rogoff et al. 2003), particularly where
there is little or no institutionalized schooling. While the Venda culture that Blacking studied
might be regarded as exceptional in the importance that it accords to music in structuring social
relations, music seems equally socially significant in many other non-Western societies, such as
those of the rural Andes (Stobart 1996), or the partially urbanized and heteroglot cultures of
north-west China (in the form of hua’er songs—Yang 1994). Music and activities exhibiting
musicality in infancy and childhood can be conceived of as providing a medium through which
social flexibility may be acquired and sustained.
Music may also aid development of the individual’s cognitive flexibility. Over the past 20 years,
cognitive psychologists have found that infants do not come into the world as blank slates
(Spelke 1999); neonates are predisposed to pick up and to process experience in quite specific
ways. Capacities for consciousness of events and objects emerge too rapidly to be explained by
the operation of a general-purpose learning mechanism, and their adaptive purpose is now
abundantly evident. Moreover, it has been shown that infants assimilate information pertaining
to the use of physical objects and events quite differently from how they acquire and manage
their intentions toward people and social events. For example, very young children may show a
highly developed capacity to reason about the social world at a level that may not be manifested
in their reasoning about physical objects (Donaldson 1992; Cummins 1998). It could be said that
infants come primed for ‘physics’ and primed for ‘psychology’, each in domain-specific ways.
Yet infants and children ultimately acquire what can be thought of as a domain-general compe-
tence that is useful for grasping meanings in any kind of cultural context. We suggest that music,
or rather protomusical behaviour, is efficacious in the emergence of this domain-general cultural
competence by virtue of its ambiguity—its transposability or floating intentionality. Infants
not only emerge into the world primed for investigation of what a psychological scientist might
identify as physics and psychology, but predisposed to engage in music-like activities in
their interactions with caregivers, which are neither or both of these. Thus, the foci and signifi-
cances of these protomusical activities—inherent musicality—can lie equally in either domain
(Cross 1999): it seems probable that they operate at a more fundamental motivating level,
enhancing the likelihood of integration of information across physical and social experience, and
facilitating the formation of a general competence not tied to any cognitively specialized domain
(Cross 2005).
There is tentative evidence for this suggestion in the positive correlations between IQ and the
engagement in musical activities found in studies reviewed by Schellenberg (2003). His own
more rigorously conducted study (Schellenberg 2004) shows that engaging in music lessons leads
to a small but statistically significant enhancement of IQ. While this evidence suggests that music
has limited effect on the intellectual capacities of some individuals, it is also possible that, for
Schellenberg’s participants, the formal Western music lesson (which tends to take a form very
similar to a school lesson) provides a highly culture-specific learning context that minimizes
the extent to which the apparent social efficacy of music can be explored and exercised (for an
exception to this learning context, see Fröhlich, Chapter 22, this volume).
We conclude that music and language, while different parts of the human communicative
toolkit, both provide purposeful syntactic frameworks that serve human needs of joint action
and interaction. Similar capacities underlie their use, including the capacity to produce complex
and hierarchically structured sequences of events (sounds and actions) and to abstract structure
from such patterns produced by others. However, where language and music diverge is in the
ways in which the structures of those patterns are endowed with significance. In language,
considerations of reference and of relevance with regard to states of affairs in the world (Sperber
and Wilson 1986) are paramount. In music, unambiguous reference and relevance are much less
significant; the primary determinant of musical experience might well be how the perceived
sounds fit with the temporal structures experienced in a moving human body.
5.4.2 Is musicality a universal human talent, and if so,

what kind of talent?
Our account of the functions of music presumes that music is not only culturally but humanly
universal, i.e., that not only do all known cultures engage in practices that are recognizable as
musical, but that all individuals of those cultures have the capacity for musicality. This assump-
tion would be seriously undermined were evidence to be found that a significant proportion of
normally developing individuals in any human population were incapable of displaying musical
behaviours. On the basis of current evidence, we believe that this is not the case.
In many traditional societies, a capacity to engage in musical activities appears to be expected
of all its members (Blacking 1995; Arom 1991). While it is accepted that some people will be
more adept or creative than others, a capacity for music is expected of all, like a capacity for
speech. In contemporary Western societies, a similar situation prevails: even individuals who feel
that they have no capacity to engage in overt musical behaviours are generally expected to have
the capacity to listen to music with a degree of appreciation.
There are, nevertheless, persons who are classified as amusical—who app ear, when tested, to
lack the capacity to engage with or comprehend the sounds produced by musical behaviours.
This deficit may be consequent on a brain trauma, but some individuals with no identifiable
neurological damage also appear to lack musical capacities, as defined by particular tests (Peretz
2003). These individuals typically show a dissociation between their capacities to deal with infor-
mation in the pitch and time domains, frequently exhibiting more profound deficits in the
processing of melody than of rhythm. Peretz suggests that an inability to process fine-grained
pitch differences inhibits the development of a capacity to engage in musical activities, a condi-
tion that she defines as ‘amusia’. While earlier studies (e.g., Kalmus and Fry 1980) suggested that
some five per cent of the normal population are amusical, evidence from the application of a
more sophisticated test instrument—the Montréal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA)—
suggests that amusia is extremely rare: only 2 per cent of those tested had scores of less than two
standard deviations below the mean, but even here, performance was around 70 per cent correct
(Peretz et al. 2003).
It appears that there is no strong evidence that musicality is not a universal human attribute.
However, very little scientific research into the possession of musical capacities has been
conducted outside the confines of contemporary Western society, and for a wider picture one
must rely on the ethnographic record. From the evidence presented in the ethnographic and
scientific literature taken together, we conclude that, as with language, all humans (with a very
few rare exceptions) have the capacity to engage in musical behaviours.
In view of the extent to which music appears entwined with other domains of human
behaviour, it seems feasible to suggest that this human capacity for music may comprise a
number of components, which may have come about under the influence of a range of different
evolutionary pressures. The integrated suite of behavioural capacities that constitutes modern
human musicality might have a variety of sources in prehistoric adaptive changes.
Pinker’s (1997) description of music as a technology with no evolutionarily adaptive value, a
view apparently predicated on the notion that music consists simply of sonic patterns, is unac-
ceptable to us. As we have seen, music cannot be reduced to patterns of sound, and its effects
appear more far-reaching than simple and immediate hedonic response in individuals. Miller’s
(2000) sexual selection theory, which focuses on music as display, may well describe some of
the ways in which musicality was adaptive in human evolution. However, as evident from the
foregoing, music is more than display: it typically involves coordinated interaction in individual
performance. It seems highly likely that music plays a significant role in forming and maintaining
group cohesion among humans, as Brown (2000b) suggests, by virtue of its capacity to entrain
activity, and its floating intentionality. Despite differences, there appear to be close functional
correspondences between music and language, which support Brown’s (2000a) suggestion that
they share a common and deeply rooted evolutionary origin.
5.4.3 Altriciality and play

Considered as a universal human behaviour, music does appear to have significant proximate
effects; however, these effects are not necessarily equitable with ultimate causes. To evaluate
music’s status in processes of human evolution, it is also necessary to consider how musical
behaviours might have become part of the human behavioural repertoire. We propose that
processes of progressive juvenalization evident in the later hominid lineage may have spurred the
emergence of behaviours that are central to the modern human faculty for music. In the hominid
lineage, each successive species appears to have been more altricial than its predecessors, with a
progressively longer proportion of the total lifespan spent in increasingly differentiated juvenile
states (Bogin 1999).
Joffe (1997) has shown that primate species with complex social organizations are more likely
to be altricial; she proposes that a complex social organization is enabled by an extension of the
learning period in which members of a species manage their social interaction in more flexible
ways. A significant feature of the behaviour of juvenile animals, particularly of predatory
or social species, is play, which can be identified as action and interaction that appears to be
purposeless (Bekoff 1998) carried out within a world largely constructed by the participants.
Play usually involves the employment of functional behaviours in modified forms, and when
used among individuals it requires the negotiation of cooperative agreement (Bekoff 1998). Play
enables juveniles to learn to deal with their environment by testing features of it through action,
and to acquire the skills necessary to engage with conspecifics when rehearsing and elaborating
skills of social interaction. It is also self-stimulating fun in its own right (Panksepp and Burgdorf
2003). Play thus has many musical features and comparable individual and social efficacy. Hanus
Papousek (1996, pp. 46–47) describes infant and early childhood musical behaviours as forms of
play involving higher-level integrative processes that act to nurture ‘exploratory competence’.
Vocal play, in the form of babbling, does not appear to be unique to humans; Elowson et al.
(1998) note that this behaviour occurs in juvenile pygmy marmosets, and that response from
a caregiving adult is more likely when the juvenile is vocalizing, and suggest that pygmy
marmoset babbling has relevance to understanding the evolutionary processes of human vocal
development. It may be that an association between vocal play and a positive caregiving response
privilege the social function of these types of play.
We suggest that in an increasingly altricial lineage, the need to accommodate to population
structures with an increasing proportion of members with access to juvenile modes of cognition,
motivation and behaviour (other factors being equal) may have favoured the emergence of some-
thing like musicality as a means of assimilating the value of those juvenile modes of exploratory
cognition into the adult behavioural repertoire, while regulating its modes of expression. Given
that play is a particular feature of the behaviour of juveniles in social mammals, and that it is
likely to have positive survival value for members of those species who engage in it, it is probable
that group behaviours that both enable and regulate it to co-opt its utility into the adult reper-
toire are likely to have some adaptive or exaptive value. Music can be interpreted as one of these
mechanisms, emerging under the selection pressures of the progressive extension and stage-
differentiation of the juvenile period in the later hominid lineage.
5.5 The archaeological record

Archaeological evidence is clear: musical behaviours have been a part of human life for many
millennia. Modern humans in Europe were manufacturing musical pipes from the bones of birds
at least 36,000 years ago, and the sophistication of these instruments exceeds that of many
medieval and contemporary examples of such pipes (Scothern 1992). It seems likely that when
modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago, they had already developed instru-
mental musical behaviours; it is likely that instruments were in use far earlier, and that musical
behaviours that made use of the voice and body movements had a long history prior to the devel-
opment of musical artefacts.
From 30,000 years ago, however, there is a marked increase in the evidence for musical activities,
including rasps, percussion instruments, many more bone pipes, and in the evidence that rocks
and caves were exploited for their acoustic properties (Cross and Watson 2006; Morley 2003).
These musical activities seem to have been widespread, often occurring in what appear to be loci
of intense human activity, which includes the making of graphical art. The evidence—fragmentary
as it is—suggests that musical performance was a group activity, rather than one involving a
select few individuals. The differential preservation of bone over other organic materials is likely
to bias the record, and with the focus of archaeological research on Europe, the rest of the old
world that was occupied by anatomically modern humans has been neglected. There is the possi-
bility that objects used for sound production have yet to be identified. Increasingly sophisticated
analysis (e.g., d’Errico et al. 2003) and methods of excavation, and experimental work on the
potential sound-producing properties of archaeological materials (cf. Cross et al. 2002) should
help to fill out the record of musical activities in prehistory. However, we do know enough to
assert that musical behaviours are extremely ancient, probably dating at least to the emergence of
behavioural complexity in anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
While a fully integrated capacity for musicality is evident in early modern humans, musicality
appears to be made up of a number of psychological capacities, including those for the produc-
tion and perception of complex sequences of sounds and actions, for social entrainment, and
for creatively engaging with patterns of sounds and actions—all manifestations of multiple
intentionalities. The palaeo–anatomical and archaeological records suggest that these different
capacities arose at different times in the hominid lineage that leads to modern humans (Morley
2002; 2003).
The evidence suggests that our nearest primate relatives have few capacities that could be
interpreted as musical. Chimpanzees and bonobos lack the phonational capacity for the produc-
tion of complex vocal signals, partly because of their very different physiques (Morley 2002), and
there is no evidence that either species can entrain to regular patterns of visual or sonic stimuli
(however, see Fitch 2006). A recent survey of systems of animal communication (Seyfarth and
Cheney 2003) concludes that even among primates, the interpretability of vocal signals by
conspecifics is generally bound so tightly to the awareness of present circumstances that they
cannot be regarded as referential. Calls that might be conceived of as conveying disembedded
information to conspecifics are better thought of as expressing an individual’s affective state,
without reference or intention to inform others. As the authors note, ‘In sum, a variety of results
argue that, in marked contrast to humans, nonhuman primates do not produce vocalizations in
response to their perception of another individual’s ignorance or need for information’ (p. 159).
It appears that although some non-human primates, notably gibbons, can produce complex and
long sequences of sound and action, a key element of musicality—the engagement with the
intentionalities of such sequences—is absent (Merker, Chapter 4, this volume).
The likelihood of significant continuities between the lifeways of other primates and of
australopithecines (currently the oldest known ancestor genus leading to modern humans)
suggests that no significant components of a human faculty for music emerged with this latter
group of species, although it might be hypothesized that the move to bipedalism laid some of the
foundations for a capacity for entrainment in rhythmic stepping and gesturing. Recent evolu-
tionary thinking (see Wood and Collard 1999) interprets the very early humans Homo habilis
(and possibly Homo rudolfensis) (from 2 million years before the present) as manifesting a high
degree of continuity with australopithecine lifeways and capacities; however, the archaeology
associated with the species shows significant changes in the evidence for toolmaking and the
transmission of traditions of tool manufacture. While H. habilis and rudolfensis remains are frag-
mentary and their interpretation is debated, the manufacture and use of tools suggests that the
species had more muscularly developed hands, perhaps with a longer thumb, than did their pred-
ecessor species, and a greater degree of refinement in the control of manual movement (Wilson
1998). These capacities are likely to have allowed for the beginnings of finely controlled expres-
sive manual gesture, an intrinsic component of all modern human communicative systems.
With Homo ergaster and Homo erectus (from about 1.8 million years before the present), major
changes occurred; brain size reached around 1000 cc, and body size and configuration approxi-
mated those of modern humans. H. ergaster and H. erectus had more complex lifeways and toolkits
than their precursors, and a vast increase in geographical range. The capacity for the much-
enhanced control of phonation—conferred by a barrel-shaped chest, the enhanced articulatory
capacities of the vocal system, and the presence of an ear canal of modern proportions—suggests
that vocal sounds were increasingly significant for this species. This may indicate significant
changes in social life, perhaps marking the emergence of a rich vocal repertoire to replace other
forms of interpersonal interaction (in conformance with Dunbar’s [1992] ‘grooming-to-gossip’
model). The evidence also suggests that some foundational components of musicality were in
place, most likely expressed in the use of vocal sounds to articulate complex emotion states in the
regulation of social relations, and possibly to convey referential information.
It was not until the appearance of Homo heidelbergensis (c.700 to 500 kyr BP), however, that we
find the fully modern vocal tract, together with an auditory system that is maximally sensitive
to speech frequencies (Martinez et al. 2004). This coadaptation suggests that vocal sounds were
crucially significant for this species, more so than other environmental sounds. This can be
construed as a refinement of earlier H. ergaster capacities, which is supported by evidence for the
production and use of an expanded range of artefacts. This advance in creativity is likely to have
been manifested in the capacity to produce and perceive increasingly complex vocal sounds and
sequences, including behaviours that we might identify as singing.
Following the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, which dates back some
150 kyr BP, we ultimately find evidence for symbolic intelligence or ‘fully modern sapiens
behaviour’ (Henshilwood and Marean 2003), and unambiguous evidence of musical behaviours.
These behaviours are built on cognitive, physiological and behavioural foundations that emerged
in the preceding hominid species, as outlined above. At what point these behaviours can be
considered symbolic, in the sense of having the capacity to indicate meaning through an arbi-
trary coupling of sign and referent, is open to debate, but the capabilities probably emergent
in H. ergaster, and then developed in H. heidelbergensis, would have featured strong associations
between emotional content and vocal and physical gesture. Symbolic culture, in which signs enter
into a web of interrelationships that come to constitute a significant feature of the ecology of the
human mind (Chase 1999), emerged with modern Homo sapiens.
Thus, we suggest that the emergence and development of complex manual and vocal gesture,
under the conditions of greater social complexity associated with H. ergaster and H. erectus,
constituted the foundations of what would come to be melodic vocalization, i.e., singing. It seems
likely that the production and perception of complex sequences of sounds with the voice was
very important by the time of H. heidelbergensis, and that the social roles of such vocalizations,
including the potential to rehearse and refine social interactions, were built on subsequently, to
become a part of music and language in the fully symbolic culture that emerged in modern
humans.
5.6 Conclusions
The evolutionary story can be read as indicating that a version of Brown’s (2000a) musilanguage
may have emerged with H. ergaster, perhaps restricted to the exchange of social information, with
a further development of a capacity for more general reference with H. heidelbergensis. It seems
likely that the divergence between music and language arose first in modern humans, with
language emerging to fulfil communicative, ostensive and propositional functions with immediate
efficacy. Music, operating over longer timescales, emerged to sustain (and perhaps also to foster)
the capacity to manage social interactions, while providing a matrix for the integration of infor-
mation across domains of human experience. We propose that music and language enabled the
emergence of modern human social and individual cognitive flexibility (Cross 1999). We regard
both music and language as subcomponents of the human communicative toolkit—as two
complementary mechanisms for the achievement of productivity in human interaction though
working over different timescales and in different ways.
While the selection pressures for the emergence of language are widely regarded as self-evident
(Pinker 1994), those for music appear less well understood, perhaps because the effects of music
appear less immediate and direct, or obvious, than do those of language (Mithen 2005).
However, we suggest that a degree of adaptation to changes in the rate of individual maturation
evident in the later hominid lineage may be a factor that led to the human capacity for musicality,
distinct from, and perhaps foundational, in respect of language (Cross 2003b).
Musical capacities are built on fundamentally important social and physiological mechanisms
and, at an essential level, are processed as such. Music uses capacities crucial in situations of
social complexity; the vocal, facial and interactive foundations of these capabilities are evident in
other higher primates, and such capacities would have become increasingly important and
sophisticated as group size and complexity increased. Vocal emotional expression, interaction,
and sensitivity to others’ emotional state would have been selectively important abilities; individ-
uals in which these capabilities were more developed would have been selectively favoured.
Fundamentally integrated into the planning and control of complex sequences of vocalizations,
and related to the prosodic rhythm inherent in such sequences, is rhythmic motor coordination.
The motor system is primed in the instigation of such vocal behaviours, and corporeal gesture is
consequently incorporated into the execution of the vocal behaviour.
In terms of their potential selective advantages, developed musical behaviours could confer an
advantage on individuals in terms of sexual selection; this was due to their foundations in the
capacities to communicate emotionally and effectively, to empathize, to bond and elicit loyalty.
Musical abilities have the potential to be a proxy for an individual’s likelihood of having strong
social networks and loyalties, and of contributing to a group. Musical behaviour also has the
potential to be a mechanism for stimulating and maintaining those networks and loyalties;
because of the stimulation of shared emotional experience as a consequence of participation
in musical activities, it can engender strong feelings of empathic association and group
membership. Musical or protomusical behaviour has the potential to make use of several cogni-
tive capacities at once, relying on the integration and control of biological, psychological, social
and physical systems; it gives the opportunity to practise and develop these integrated skills in a
context of limited risk.
The emergence of full (specialized, as opposed to proto-) musical behaviours, with founda-
tions in social interaction, emotional expression, and fine control and planning of corporeal and
vocal muscular control, lends them extremely well to integrating important cognitive skills. The
execution of musical activities could become increasingly important and beneficial on both indi-
vidual and group levels, with increasing social complexity within and between groups. Because
music production and perception is processed by the brain in ways that are complex and related
to interpersonal interaction and the formation of social bonds, it stimulates many associated
functions. It seems that musical participation, even without lyrics or symbolic associations, can
act on the brain in ways that are appealing to humans, because of their vicarious stimulation of
fundamentally important human interactive capacities.
While this model for the emergence of musicality appears to fit well with the evidence available
from ethnographic, cognitive, comparative, palaeo–anatomical and archaeological sources, other
ecologically observable behaviours suggest further facets to the evolutionary story require
consideration. The investigation of the origins, emergence and nature of musical behaviours in
humans is in its early stages, and has more to reveal. It concerns an element of human behaviour
that, in contrast with Pinker’s (1997) opinion, the vast majority of people would miss very much
if they were suddenly bereft of it. It would be impossible to do away with music without removing
many of the abilities of social cognition that are fundamental to being human.
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05-Malloch-Chap05 6/3/08 5:52 PM Page 61

The evolution of music:

5.2 Music in evolutionary thinking

62 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

5.2.1 Music promotes group cohesion

5.2.2 Music is a product of group selection

5.2.3 Socio-emotional bonding is favoured by evolution

64 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

5.2.4 Music promotes sexual selection

5.3 The need for a comprehensive definition of music

66 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

5.3.1 Music across cultures and times

5.3.2 Music as embodied expressive movement

5.3.3 Music as entraining others, and engaging them in movement

68 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

5.3.4 The ambiguity of musical intentions and a definition

5.4 The communal functions of musical actions

70 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

Thus, music can be interpreted as facilitating the formation of conceptual–intentional complexes

5.4.1 The developmental value of music

72 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

5.4.2 Is musicality a universal human talent, and if so,

5.4.3 Altriciality and play

74 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

5.5 The archaeological record

76 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

78 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

80 IAN CROSS AND IAIN MORLEY

Trevarthen C (1980). The foundations of intersubjectivity: Development of interpersonal and cooperative

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