Piotr Podlipniak

Many species use conspicuous sound signaling as a defense strategy against conspecifics and heterospecifics. This has prompted some scholars to hypothesize that musical displays can serve as a defensive signaling mechanism. It has been suggested that to achieve this function, hominins may have used synchronized acoustic signals, which then became the roots of musical rhythm. Another important component of music—pitch—has been proposed to result either from other selective pressures or as a byproduct of certain biological constraints. This paper aims to add to the idea of the defensive function of music, by looking at the role of pitch matching in the long‐distance deterrence of conspecifics between singing hominins. Since the production and recognition of musical pitch depend on many abilities, their evolution in the context of this possible defensive function is discussed. In particular, the emergence and role of culturally variable musical pitch elements as hallmarks of group identity are examined when considering selective pressures that occurred from increasing hominin social complexity. In contrast to current monofunctional explanations, this proposal highlights a possible reinforcement between other adaptive functions of musical pitch related to the hominin social niche, which ultimately created a synergistic loop and accelerated the evolution of musicality.

Listening to music can span a continuum from passive consumption to active exploration, relying on processes of coping with the sounds as well as higher-level processes of sense-making. Revolving around the major questions of “what” and “how” to explore, this paper takes a naturalistic stance toward music listening, providing tools to objectively describe the underlying mechanisms of musical sense-making by weakening the distinction between music and non-music. Starting from a non-exclusionary conception of “coping” with the sounds, it stresses the exploratory approach of treating music as a sound environment to be discovered by an attentive listener. Exploratory listening, in this view, is an open-minded and active process, not dependent on simply recalling pre-existing knowledge or information that reduces cognitive processing efforts but having a high cognitive load due to the need for highly focused attention and perceptual readiness. Music, explored in this way, is valued for its complexity, surprisingness, novelty, incongruity, puzzlingness, and patterns, relying on processes of selection, differentiation, discrimination, and identification.

The evolution of human musicality has often been linked to the evolution of the faculty of language since the development of musical and linguistic abilities seems to share a common phase in their ontogenesis. Apart from that, both singing and speaking are, on the one hand, universal forms of human vocal expression and, on the other hand, consist of culturally specific elements. Such a probable co-occurrence of the predisposition to speak and sing, with the cultural variability of both these forms of communication, has prompted researchers to indicate gene–culture co-evolution as the probable mechanism responsible for the emergence of human musicality and the faculty of language. However, in most evolutionary scenarios proposed so far, the evolutionary paths of music and language followed independently after divergence from a common precursor. This article, based on observations of contemporary interactions between language and music, presents a different view in which musical and language-like forms of proto-communication interacted leading to the repurposing of some of their neural mechanisms. In this process, the Baldwinian interplay between plasticity and canalization has been proposed as the most probable evolutionary mechanism that shaped our musicality. The premises that support the presence of cross-domain co-evolutionary interactions in the contemporary communicative niche of Homo sapiens are indicated.

One particular type of conscious human experience is the experience of music. The uniqueness of musical experiences is related to a kind of pre-conceptual sensation that is difficult to express. At the same time, music is a generative phenomenon, reminiscent of natural language in this respect and, like natural language, specific to the Homo sapiens species. In order to understand the causes of the specificity of experiencing music, it is necessary to answer the question of the origins of human musicality — i.e. the set of cognitive abilities that enable musical recognition and musical activity. The aim of the article is to outline contemporary views on the genesis of musicality and to indicate the possible role of the evolution of musicality within the emergence of the complex conceptual consciousness that characterizes modern human beings. It presents the probable adaptive functions of music, and their relationship to those cognitive abilities crucial to the experience of music. The hypothetical role of Baldwinian evolution in the emergence of musicality, which could be the cause of the emergence of music’s generative features, is also indicated. In the proposed evolutionary scenario, the emergence of musical generativity became a turning point for the evolution of complex human conceptual consciousness, enabling the use of the generative mechanism to create complex hierarchical relationships between the pre-existing components of primary conceptual consciousness. Jednym ze szczególnych rodzajów świadomych doznań człowieka jest doświadczenie muzyki. Wyjątkowość doświadczeń muzycznych wiąże się z trudnym do wyrażenia rodzajem przeżyć o charakterze przedkonceptualnym. Muzyka jest jednocześnie zjawiskiem generatywnym, przypominającym pod tym względem język naturalny, i tak jak język naturalny jest specyficzna dla gatunku Homo sapiens. By zrozumieć przyczyny specyfiki doświadczenia muzyki, trzeba odpowiedzieć na pytanie o genezę ludzkiej muzykalności. Tę ostatnią wyznacza zestaw zdolności poznawczych umożliwiających rozpoznawanie muzyki i aktywność muzyczną. Celem artykułu jest zarysowanie współczesnych poglądów na genezę muzykalności oraz wskazanie na możliwą rolę ewolucji muzykalności w powstaniu złożonej świadomości konceptualnej, jaka charakteryzuje współczesnych ludzi. W artykule zostały przedstawione prawdopodobne funkcje adaptacyjne muzyki oraz ich związek z kluczowymi dla doświadczenia muzyki zdolnościami poznawczymi, a także hipotetyczna rola ewolucji baldwinowskiej w powstaniu muzykalności. Procesy tej ewolucji mogły być przyczyną powstania cech generatywnych muzyki. Powstanie generatywności muzycznej w zaproponowanym scenariuszu ewolucyjnym stało się punktem zwrotnym ewolucji złożonej świadomości konceptualnej człowieka, umożliwiając wykorzystanie mechanizmu generatywnego do tworzenia złożonych relacji hierarchicznych pomiędzy istniejącymi wcześniej składowymi pierwotnej świadomości konceptualnej.

The sound environment and music intersect in several ways and the same holds true for the soundscape and our internal response to listening to music. Music may be part of a sound environment or take on some aspects of environmental sound, and therefore some of the soundscape response may be experienced alongside the response to the music. At a deeper level, coping with music, spoken language, and the sound environment may all have influenced our evolution, and the cognitive-emotional structures and responses evoked by all three sources of acoustic information may be, to some extent, the same. This paper distinguishes and defines the extent of our understanding about the interplay of external sound and our internal response to it in both musical and real-world environments. It takes a naturalistic approach to music/sound and music-listening/soundscapes to describe in objective terms some mechanisms of sense-making and interactions with the sounds. It starts from a definition of sound as vibrational and transferable energy that impinges on our body and our senses, with a dynamic tension between lower-level coping mechanisms and higher-level affective and cognitive functioning. In this way, we establish both commonalities and differences between musical responses and soundscapes. Future research will allow this understanding to grow and be refined further.

The interactions between species-specific predispositions and cultural plasticity in the development of human musical behavior have recently become the rationale for a possible Baldwinian origin of human musicality. In the previously suggested Baldwinian scenarios of music origin, social bonding has been indicated as the crucial adaptive value that became the main cause of the co-evolutionary process that led to our musicality. However, the adaptive value of social bonding does not explain the cultural variability of musical expressions that enabled the Baldwinian evolution of musicality. The main aim of this article is to show that free rider recognition, along with social bonding and signaling commitment, could have been a possible adaptive function of hominin musical rituals. In the proposed scenario, free rider recognition became a “flywheel” of the arms race between deception and cooperation. As a result, the interplay between the canalization and plasticity of musical learning became a part of music evolution. This process created a cultural niche in which hominin vocal learning was specialized in the imitation of discrete pitch and rhythm.

Article Bannan, Nicholas. 2019. Every Child a Composer: Music Education in an Evolutionary Perspective was published on April 1, 2022 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 6, issue 1).

This paper argues for a biological conception of music listening as an evolutionary achievement that is related to a long history of cognitive and affective-emotional functions, which are grounded in basic homeostatic regulation. Starting from the three levels of description, the acoustic description of sounds, the neurological level of processing, and the psychological correlates of neural stimulation, it conceives of listeners as open systems that are in continuous interaction with the sonic world. By monitoring and altering their current state, they can try to stay within the limits of operating set points in the pursuit of a controlled state of dynamic equilibrium, which is fueled by interoceptive and exteroceptive sources of information. Listening, in this homeostatic view, can be adaptive and goal-directed with the aim of maintaining the internal physiology and directing behavior towards conditions that make it possible to thrive by seeking out stimuli that are valued as beneficial and worthy, or by attempting to avoid those that are annoying and harmful. This calls forth the mechanisms of pleasure and reward, the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment, the twin notions of valence and arousal, the affect-related consequences of music listening, the role of affective regulation and visceral reactions to the sounds, and the distinction between adaptive and maladaptive listening.