The Origins of Music

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The Origins of Music

• Heather Briere
• Lee Choong-Yong
• John Gunther
• Yoemun Yun

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• 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

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• Music is a universal and multifunctional cultural
  behavior.
• Music and language share many underlying features
• 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.

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Biomusicology
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Major Issues in Evolutionary Musicology

• 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.

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• Music evolution versus language evolution
• Many connections exist between music and language
  at the structural level.
• Three possible interactive theories for the
  evolution of music and speech
• Music evolved from speech
• Speech evolved from music
• Both evolved from a common ancestor

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• Selection Mechanism for music
• What is music for?
• Under what conditions did it evolve?
• The evolution of meter
• 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).
• Absolute Pitch
• Genetics
• Cultural exposure
• Learned at a young age
• In non-musicians
• In animals

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• Music Universals
• provides a focus on the unity that underlies
  the great diversity present in the worlds
  musical systems, and attributes this unity to
  neural constraints underlying musical
  processing.
• Examples of universal musical aspects
• Octaves are perceived as equivalent in almost all
  cultures
• Virtually all scales of the world consist of
  seven or fewer pitches per octave
• Most of the worlds rhythmic patterns are based
  on divisive patters of twos and threes
• Emotional excitement is universally expressed
  through loud, fast, accelerating, and hugh
  registered sound patterns

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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 its associated displays

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• Physical anthropology and musical archeology
• Music-language comparative analysis
• Human brain imaging
• Comparative musicology

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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

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• 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
  roots- one in east Asia and one in sub-Saharan
  Africa.

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Vocal Communication in Animals
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Music, Language, and Human Evolution
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Theories of Music Origin
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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?

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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,
  stimulus-dependent 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.

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Biological Isolation of Brains from Each Other

• These experiments indicate that all knowledge is
  created within the brains of individuals.
• 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?

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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Universals in Music
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Human Processing Predispositions and Musical
UniversalsBy 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• These procedures revealed that infants
  perception of music-like patterns is remarkably
  similar to that of adults.

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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.

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• 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.

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• Therefore, one can propose three processing
  universals
• The priority of contour over interval processing
• The priority of temporal patterning over specific
  timing cues
• The relevance of gestalt principles of grouping
• 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.

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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.

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• 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
  late-integer frequency ratios can be considered
  another processing universal.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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 culture-specific
  exposure. There is a definite priority for
  unequal over equal steps in scales, which can be
  considered another processing universal.

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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.

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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
  re-examined at 8-months-old, they show the same
  results as the adults.

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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.

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Speech and Sign for Infants

• Caregivers everywhere enhance their vocal
  messages to prelinguistic infants by making them
  more musical than usual.These caregivers use
• Specific pitch contours
• Articulate words poorly
• Raise their pitch level
• Slow their tempo
• Make utterances more rhythmic and repetitive

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Music for Infants

• The lullaby is a distinct genre of song with its
  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 infants
  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.

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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.

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Conclusions

• 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)
• Thus, the findings from these experiments show
  that there is a biological base for some music
  principles.

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The Question of Innate Competencies in Musical
CommunicationBy Michel Imbery
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Gestaltism

• 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
• 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.

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• There are musical and linguistic universals that
  characterize human thought.
• 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.

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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.

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• Two difficulties arise to define the scope of
  innateness in the case of musical competence
• Musical competence seems to be reducible to the
  capacity to produce variations on prototypical
  schemas without possible limitations or
  recurrences.
• 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.

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The Question of Atonal Music

• The General Theory of Tonal Music is based on
  the hypothesis of certain equivalence between the
  musical pieces structure as it is described and
  the psychological need for hierarchical
  organization in perception and memory, as well as
  emotional dynamics.

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• Lerdahl formulated a new proposal (based on
  Schoenberhs pieces) that in atonal music,
  prolongation structures are structures of the
  hierarchical organization of salience. They are
  those sounds that immediately catch ones
  attention.

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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.

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• 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.

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An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates Universals in
Musical Sound and Musical CultureBy 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.

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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 worlds cultures vary in the degree to which
  they have the concept of music and in the value
  and function they assign to it.

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• 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?

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Universals

• Musicness is separate from speechness
• Music is a transforming experience
• Music provides some kind of fundamental change in
  an individuals 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 worlds 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.

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• 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.

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The Necessity of and Problems with a Universal
MusicologyBy 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.
• Mâches 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.

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• Pentatonic polyphony of a drone (limited to
  humans)
• Examples Folk songs from Albania, the Gerewol
  song of the Peuls Bororo of Niger, and the music
  of the Paiwan aborigines of Taiwan
• 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.
• 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.

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• The occurrence of a set of discrete pitches
• (Music is claimed to begin with the invention of
  a scale)
• 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.
• The evidence for a hierarchy between the degrees
  of a scale
• 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.

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• The process of transposition
• 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 imitators voice.
• The process of imitation
• Examples Refrains, rhymes, symmetry, and
  reprises are common in many animals songs.

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• 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.

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• http//homepages.nyu.edu/hmb249

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Reference For The Preceding Findings

• Origins of Music (2000) Wallin, Merker, Brown
  eds. Cambridge The MIT Press.