The Origins of Music
Heather Briere
Lee Choong-Yong
John Gunther
Yoemun Yun
• Music offers important insight into the
study of human origins and human history
in at least three principal areas.
• Evolutionary Musicology- using music to
study human origins and human culture
1. Music is a universal and multifunctional cultural
behavior.
2. Music and language share many underlying
features
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Evolution of the human vocal tract
The hominid brain expansion
Human brain asymmetry
Lateralization of cognitive function
The evolution of syntax
Evolution of symbolic gesturing
3. Music can contribute to a study of human
migration patterns and the history of cultural
contacts.
Biomusicology
Major Issues in Evolutionary
Musicology
1. The question of animal song - “What is music?”
“There is no a priori way of excluding
the possibility that our distant forbears might
have been singing hominids before they
became talking human, and if so, that
hypothetical fact would surely have some
bearing on the way we approach the question
of the origin of music.”
2. Music evolution versus language
evolution
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Many connections exist between music and
language at the structural level.
Three possible interactive theories for the
evolution of music and speech
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Music evolved from speech
Speech evolved from music
Both evolved from a common ancestor
3. Selection Mechanism for music
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What is music for?
Under what conditions did it evolve?
4. The evolution of meter
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The human ability to keep time is distinguished from
the ability of most animals (including humans).
Humans have unique ability to entrain their
movements to an external timekeeper (drums).
5. Absolute Pitch
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Genetics
Cultural exposure
Learned at a young age
In non-musicians
In animals
6. Music Universals
“…provides a focus on the unity that underlies the great
diversity present in the world’s musical systems, and
attributes this unity to neural constraints underlying
musical processing.”
Examples of universal musical aspects:
1. Octaves are perceived as equivalent in almost all
cultures
2. Virtually all scales of the world consist of seven or
fewer pitches per octave
3. Most of the world’s rhythmic patterns are based on
divisive patters of two’s and three’s
4. Emotional excitement is universally expressed
through loud, fast, accelerating, and hugh registered
sound patterns
Methods in Evolutionary
Musicology
• The comparative methods and analysis of
animal song
– Acoustic analysis of song
– Neurobiological analysis of song production
and perception
– Behavioral-ecological analysis of singing
behavior and it’s associated displays
• Physical anthropology and musical
archeology
• Music-language comparative analysis
• Human brain imaging
• Comparative musicology
Music Evolution: Biological
versus Cultural
• Looks at music from the standpoint of
cultural evolution and tries to tie it in with
the biological evolution of musical capactiy
during hominid evolution
• Darwinian theories of culture
• Musical classification and history
• In a study by Alan Lomax of over 4,000
songs from 233 different cultures, he was
able to classify the performance styles into
10 basic categories. From this study he
further hypothesized a kind of musical
language tree with two evolutionary rootsone in east Asia and one in sub-Saharan
Africa.
Vocal Communication in
Animals
Music, Language, and Human
Evolution
Theories of Music Origin
Neurobiological Role of
Music in Social Bonding
Walter Freeman
An exploration in the role of music as an
instrument of communication beyond words
as a way in which humans come to trust one
another. How and why, in biological terms,
can music and dance bring humans together
with a depth of bonding that cannot be
achieved with words alone?
The Biological Dynamics of
Perception
The mechanisms of the ear that transform
sounds to neural messages and the
pathways that carry messages to the auditory
cortex are well understood.
What's less understood is what happens
afterwards.
Some of what has been observed:
The information is processed through neighboring
cortical areas concerned with speech and music.
• Exchanges occur between parts of the "newer" brain and
older parts of the fore brain.
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Experiments have shown brain
activity continuing after stimulus
has ceased.
An experiment traced the path in brains of rabbits from an odor
stimulus. After transmission to the cerebral cortex, stimulusdependent activity vanished. What appeared in place were
new patterns of cortical activity. This phenomena was also
observed in the visual and auditory systems.
In all these systems, traces of the stimuli were replaced by new
patterns of neural activity. Evidence finds this same principle
holds for all sensed in all animals including humans.
The conclusion: The only knowledge that animals and humans can
have of the world outside themselves is what they construct
within their own brains.
Biological Isolation of
Brains from Each Other
These experiments indicate that all knowledge is
created within the brains of individuals.
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If true, how can a mind really be sure that any
other mind exists or for that matter the world?
How can knowledge of natural laws and
mathematics emerge?
If knowledge is expressed in a private language
within each mind, how can it be shared and
verified as being the same in different minds?
Philosophers call this Solipsism where everything that
exists is the projection of a brain.
Repeated attempts to answer these questions by logic
and computation have not succeeded.
The problem lies in establishing mutual understanding
and trust through shared actions during which brains
create the channels, codes, agreements, and
protocols that precede reciprocal exchange of
information in dialogues.
“It takes more than a telephone line and a dictionary to
make a call to a foreign country.”
Selected Neuropeptides
Dissolve the Solipsistic
Barrier
Music has the power to induce and modulate different
emotional states and these states are accompanied
by the release of neurohormones.
Other activities in which the release of neuropeptides
can be observed in brain function include copulation
to orgasm in males and females and in female
lactation.
The neuropeptides appear to dissolve pre-existing
learning by loosening the synaptic connections in
which prior knowledge is held.
This opens the opportunity for learning new
knowledge, understanding, and trust
This process of transformation has also been
observed in the experiences of:
Brainwashing, Dancers in preliterate tribes, and
parishioners involved in intense religious
conversion. In all experiences, the person
has undergone severe sensory overload.
This “brain in crisis” is followed by a state of
malleability and opportunity for reeducation,
providing an opportunity for the formation of
allegiance and trust.
Music and Dance as the
Biotechnology of Group
Formation
Anthropologists and ethnopsychiatrists have
documented the prevalence in preliterate tribes of
singing and dancing to the point of physical and
psychological collapse during religious and social
ceremonies.
The same neurochemical mechanisms that evolved to
support sexual reproduction and the formation of
allegiance and trust, appear to be triggered by the
experience of intense singing and dancing, producing
a feeling of belonging and bonding among the
participants.
Biocultural Evolution of
Music in Socialization
Here in its purest form is a human technology for crossing
the solipsistic gulf.
It constructs the sense of trust and predictability in each
member of the community on which social interactions are
based.
A siginificant discovery by our remote ancestors may have
been the use of music and dance for bonding in groups
larger than nuclear families. This would be valuable for
survival.
Music can be observed today bonding people together
worldwide, particularly young people.
Universals in Music
“Human Processing Predispositions
and Musical Universals”
By: Sandra Trehub
• Long-term exposure to the music of a particular
culture is largely responsible for adults’ implicit
knowledge of music.
• Children exhibit better perception and retention of
music with increasing age.
• Adults and children show superior memory for
melodies that are structured in conventional rather
than unconventional ways.
• Formal music training is associated with enhanced
perception and retention of music by children as
well as adults.
• Nevertheless, basic principles of auditory pattern
perception may still lie at the heart of mature music
processing.
• Do the similarities stem from processing
predispositions that are common to all members of
the species or from long-term exposure to similar
kinds of music?
• If this were true, music from different cultures could
be expected to share some fundamental properties
that make it discernible and memorable, perhaps
even appealing.
The Experiments
• Trehub and her colleagues studied infants’
perception of music or music-like patterns.
• Melodies consisted of sequences of pure tones
(sine waves).
• Trehub ascertained which features of a melody are
salient and memorable for such naïve listeners
– Six- to nine-month-olds were presented with repetitions
of a melody sounding from a loudspeaker at one side,
and were rewarded with an interesting visual display
from responding (by turning to the loudspeaker) to
specified changes in melody.
• These procedures revealed that infants’
perception of music-like patterns is
remarkably similar to that of adults.
Relational Processing of
Auditory Patterns
• After listening to a brief, unfamiliar melody, adults generally
remember little more than its melodic contour and rhythm.
• If infants hear a melody which is subsequently transposed
(with all intervals between notes unchanged) they treat the
transposition as equivalent to the original melody.
• In contrast, a change in contour resulting from the
substitution of a single tone or the reordering of tones leads
infants to consider the altered melody as unfamiliar, much
like adults.
• Therefore, the pitch contour of a melody seems to be central
to its identity.
Rhythm also makes important contributions to the
identity of a pattern.
• Infants consider faster or slower versions of a tone
sequence as functionally equivalent, provided the
rhythm or temporal pattern remains unchanged.
It is also clear that infants group or chunk
components of tone sequences on the basis of
similar pitch, timbre, or loudness in much the
same way as adults.
– Infants detected a pause inserted within a group of
similar tones easier than between groups of tones.
Therefore, one can propose three processing
universals:
1. The priority of contour over interval processing
2. The priority of temporal patterning over specific
timing cues
3. The relevance of gestalt principles of grouping
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All of these principles involved a priority for
global, relational cues over precise, absolute
cues.
It is interesting that this contrasts with
nonhuman species, for they focus on absolute
pitch details in auditory sequences.
Interval Processing: Frequency
Ratios
• Infants’ ability to perceive invariant contour and
rhythm across changes in individual pitches and
durations is not confined to music, but also to
spoken patterns.
• Other adult-infant similarities, such as a sensitivity
to small-integer frequency ratios, are more
specifically linked to music. Ancient and
medieval scholars claimed that tones related by
small-integer ratios are pleasant, or consonant, and
that those related by large-integer ratios are
unpleasant, or dissonant.
• Infants and adults show better retention of melodic
intervals of perfect fifths and fourths than tritones.
• Infants and adults tend to categorize intervals on
the basis of consonance or dissonance rather than
size.
• Also, they more easily detect a change from a
consonant harmonic interval to a dissonant
interval than to another consonant interval.
• In short, the priority of small-integer over lateinteger frequency ratios can be considered another
processing universal.
Scale Structure
• Despite variations of scale structures of different
cultures, they are all very similar.
• They all tend to have 5-7 pitches per octave
• Specific intervals tend to predominate, notably small-integer
ratios
• Scales incorporate variations in step size
• Unequal-step scales are thought to confer
processing advantages, such as allowing different
tones to assume distinctive functions, facilitating
the perception of tension and resolution, and
providing the listener with a sense of location
within a melody.
• Infants and adults were presented with transposed
repetitions of three ascending-descending scales.
– An equal-step scale
– The major scale
– An unequal-step scale
• For each scale, infants were required to detect a
three/four-semitone change in one tone. Adults had to
detect a one/two-semitone change in one tone.
• It was no surprise that adults performed better on the
familiar major scale than on either unfamiliar scale.
• Infants performed significantly better on both
unequal-step scales than on the equal-steps scale.
• Therefore, exposure could then be ruled out as a factor
contributing to performance differences.
These findings are consistent with the view
that unequal-step scales have their origin in
perceptual processing predispositions, but
they also indicate the potency of culturespecific exposure. There is a definite
priority for unequal over equal steps in
scales, which can be considered another
processing universal.
Rhythmic Structure
• The diversity of rhythmic structures across
cultures makes it easy to imagine that musical
rhythms have their foundation in culture rather
than in nature.
• It has been proven that infants perform better on
rhythm changes than pitch and rhythmic changes,
and adults prefer a natural bias for certain rhythm,
which suggests a natural bias for certain rhythmic
forms.
Lateral Asymmetric in Processing
• Asymmetries in brain structure and function are
evident from the earliest days of life.
• In dichotic listening tasks, infants generally
exhibit the characteristic right-ear (left
hemisphere) advantage for speech and left-ear
(right hemisphere) advantage for music.
• Adults show a left-ear advantage for contour
processing and a right-ear advantage for interval
processing. However, when infants are reexamined at 8-months-old, they show the same
results as the adults.
Implications of Adult-Infant
Similarities
• Infant listeners with minimal exposure to
music and adult listeners with extensive
exposure make a compelling case for
“inherent learning preferences.”
Speech and Sign for Infants
• Caregivers everywhere enhance their vocal
messages to prelinguistic infants by making
them more musical than usual.These
caregivers use:
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Specific pitch contours
Articulate words poorly
Raise their pitch level
Slow their tempo
Make utterances more rhythmic and repetitive
Music for Infants
• The lullaby is a distinct genre of song with it’s
slow tempo, simplicity, repetitiveness, and a
preponderance of falling pitch contours.
• When a mother sings the same song first directly
to their infants, and then once in the infant’s
absence, both adults and infants can hear the
difference. This is because vocal adjustments are
unconsciously made to enhance the emotional
expressiveness when the mother sings to directly
to her child.
Infants’ Responsiveness to
Infant-Directed Music
Do particular song types and styles of
performance make any difference to the
infant audience?
– Infants prefer the lullaby song form.
– Infants prefer the performer to be a woman.
– Infants prefer the infant-directed performing
style.
Conclusions
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Trehub has proven the following universals to be
true when it came to both adults and infants:
– Greater emphasis on global features than local details
– The prevalence of small-integer frequency ratios,
unequal scale steps, and preferred rhythms
– The existence of a special genre of music for infants
(the lullaby)
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Thus, the findings from these experiments show
that there is a biological base for some music
principles.
“The Question of Innate Competencies
in Musical Communication”
By: Michel Imbery
Gestaltism
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“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
The analogy between language and music
naturally makes one think about the work of
Lerdahl and Jackendoff and their Generative
Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM).
When we apply the GTTM to cognitive theories
of language and music, three postulates form:
1. Specific capacities or competences, for language on
the one hand, and for music on the other are
describable in terms of grammars. Musical
competences constitute a set of aptitudes or innate
capacities that depends very little on particular
conditions of concrete training during childhood and
adulthood.
2. There are musical and linguistic universals that
characterize human thought.
3. These grammatical systems should have their
equivalent in the internal functioning of the brain,
which means that the competencies correspond to
defined and independent neuronal systems.
Universality and Innateness
Rameau once wrote, “Music is natural to us;
we owe the sentiment that it makes us feel
to pure instinct; this same instinct acts in us
with many other objects which can very
well be related to music.”
Two difficulties arise to define the scope of
innateness in the case of musical
competence:
1. Musical competence seems to be reducible to
the capacity to produce variations on
prototypical schemas without possible
limitations or recurrences.
2. The innateness of musical competence is
knowable only through induction in terms of
the universality of these prototypical schemas,
thus suggesting that production processes are
not as primary as they are in language.
The Question of Atonal Music
“The General Theory of Tonal Music is based
on the hypothesis of certain equivalence
between the musical piece’s structure as it is
described and the psychological need for
hierarchical organization in perception and
memory, as well as emotional dynamics.”
Lerdahl formulated a new proposal (based on
Schoenberh’s pieces) that in atonal music,
prolongation structures are structures of the
hierarchical organization of salience. They
are those sounds that immediately catch
one’s attention.
Dynamic Aspects of Salience Clues and
the Concept of Macrostructure
• How can salience create the equivalent of
alternations of tension and relaxation that make up
the emotional dynamism of tonal music?
– A simplified schema is formed and an imprint stored in
memory
– Perceptual organization is founded on temporal
phenomena
• A piece of music is an ordering of auditory events
in time, and the macrostructure is a simplified
schema, a priori an ordering that is filled later by
concrete auditory events of which the progression
for the listener is thus more or less predictable.
• Michel Imberty concludes that “music plays
on representations and fantasies that are
created by experiences of temporal feelings
in human life, between continuity and
discontinuity, between fusional unity and
fragmentation, and between mobility and
immobility. The individual psychology of
time is built upon interactions with others.
Music takes its power in its profoundly
social nature, like language, as a vehicle of
interiorized representations.”
“An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates
Universals in Musical Sound and
Musical Culture”
By: Bruno Nettl
Nettl believes we can look at the world of music in
terms of musical languages and social units, where
each has its own “music.”
Universality of the Music
Concept
“One problem with using universals as a
guide to discovering the origins of music is
the difficulty in defining music in a way that
is equally valid for all cultures and
societies. The world’s cultures vary in the
degree to which they have the concept of
music and in the value and function they
assign to it.”
Music is not easily defined when it comes to
ethnomusicology and exploring the origins
of music. This leads one to ponder:
– Do all societies have a kind of sound
communication that they distinguish from
ordinary speech?
– Where do we draw the line?
Universals
• “Musicness” is separate from “speechness”
• Music is a transforming experience
– Music provides some kind of fundamental change in an
individual’s consciousness or in the ambiance of a
gathering
– Examples: music used to mark the importance of an
event, and music is also virtually universally associated
with dance
• “The world’s simplest style”
– Music in almost every culture consists of songs that
have a short phrase repeated, with minor variations,
using three or four pitches within a range of a fifth.
Nettl concludes that “…universals do exist in
musical sound and in musical
conceptualization and behavior. Those that
involve musical style are at best statistical,
but they might tell us something about the
earliest human music.”
“The Necessity of and Problems
with a Universal Musicology”
By: François-Bernard Mâche
Mâche believes that the invention of the taperecorder
changed the way we think about music, for it
allowed people to record and later listen to the
recorded “music.”
• Without the taperecorder, we would possibly have
missed the fact that the tonal system can no longer
be considered to be universal.
• Without recordings we would also have much
poorer knowledge of animal sound signals, since
we would be forced to rely on our memory in
order to compare and analyze “music.”
• Whether it be good or bad, the taperecorder
made it easier for cultures to imitate each
other and yield a worldwide uniformity.
• Many practices testifying to the cultural
diversity are no longer available outside the
archives where taperecorders allowed the
freezing of their sounds.
Ethnomusicology developed as a new approach to
the music of the world, and pointed out that even
the phenomenon of music itself could be properly
understood only if considered from the inside.
• The invention of ethnomusicology created
extreme cultural relativism, through its focus on
every individual musical culture.
• It claims that no culture has any right to
superimpose its categories on any other, for it
tends to favor a kind of reverse racism by isolating
every culture from all others, while the blending
of musical practice becomes unintelligible.
• Mâche differed slightly from ethnomusicologists.
Mâche believed the main problem was to
understand how precise sound organizations can
be inscribed in every brain, and how musical
choices emerge from them or deal with them.
• Mâche’s goal was to understand how and why
cross-cultural features are met everywhere in
music, even if no universal definition of what
music is has yet been agreed upon. In trying to do
so, Mâche came up with a series of sampled
universal features given by nature in music, by
illustrating several similarities between animal and
human signals.
1. Pentatonic polyphony of a drone (limited to humans)
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Examples: Folk songs from Albania, the Gerewol song of the
Peuls Bororo of Niger, and the music of the Paiwan aborigines
of Taiwan
2. An important family of rhythms among different
musical systems is the aksak. They oppose an
irregular number of basic units, grouped by two and
by three. Sometimes, a song is rhythmically
organized as a whole, meaning that the animal
(example: bird) may have an overview of a very long
duration.
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Example: In both the “Turtur Brehmeri”(song of a blue headed
dove) and “Sarothrura Lugens”(song of the chestnut-headed
pygmy rail) one can see a universal link among accelerando,
crescendo, and rising in pitch.
3. The occurrence of a set of discrete pitches
(Music is claimed to begin with the
invention of a scale)
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Examples: Many mythic traditions, in Greece and
China attribute this creation to a god or a cultural
hero. Many animals also use precise and stable
sets of pitches in their signals.
4. The evidence for a hierarchy between the
degrees of a scale
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Examples: The tonic and dominant in human tonal
systems. The songs of the white-browed scrub
robin also have a keynote that appears at the end
of each stanza.
5. The process of transposition
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Examples: The song of the white-handed gibbon
gets transposed whenever a sound is imitated by
another gibbon whose sound does not fit in the
range of the imitator’s voice.
6. The process of imitation
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Examples: Refrains, rhymes, symmetry, and
reprises are common in many animal’s songs.
Mâche concluded that the idea of a gratuitous aesthetic
pleasure is but a very small part of musical behavior
in humans, and that it did not become all that
important until one or two centuries ago in Europe.
Many cultures have no idea what a concert is!
Instead, many cultures make music only in ritual
contexts.
Mâche also concluded that social singing between
neighboring males has been repeatedly reported, thus
there is an intrinsic pleasure in singing. The
luxurious display of some of the best singers, no
matter their species, suggests that they go far beyond
the signals that would be necessary for keeping a
territory or mating.
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~hmb249
Reference For The Preceding
Findings:
Origins of Music (2000) Wallin, Merker, &
Brown eds. Cambridge: The MIT Press.