Steven Pinker and many other evolutionary psychologists believe that music is cognitive cheesecake. That is, we have a lot of cognitive faculties working in concert, and musical appreciation and ability emerge out of the synthesis. But there wasn’t direct selection for music, as such. Musical appreciation then may not be adaptive.
And yet like reading and writing music clearly co-opts part of the human brain in terms of functional localization. There are people with brain injuries who can not speak well who nevertheless can sing well, and can communicate through song.
But perhaps most important, just because a trait did not emerge due to natural selection, does not entail that it might not be subject to later selection. One can make arguments that musical ability was adaptive at some point in human existence on the individual scale. But I have something else in mind: music is functionally important in war. Military marching bands did not arise coincidentally, music as an accompaniment to the march and a way to communicate and rouse the troops to action have been part and parcel of winning and executing battle. Music triggered social change in the 1960s.
I think much the same is probably true of religion. My own position is that the shamanic/primal form of religious belief bubbles up out of our cognitive architecture as a side effect of other processes. But this byproduct can be co-opted by cultural evolutionary selection, and reshaped into something with functional utility.
There are people with brain injuries who can not speak well who nevertheless can sing well, and can communicate through song.
There are examples out there of trained musicians who have suffered brain injuries and lost their musical abilities, even when their speech recovered. (I know this is tangential to your post, but perhaps interesting for readers)
In one case — there is a local jazz pianist, formerly one of the most highly regarded in the area (a very serious, “deep” player of considerable technical skill) who suffered a stroke some years ago. He speaks just fine now but musically, he no longer seems to be able to interpret tempos (he has lost a lot of his sense of rhythm).
A much more well-known case is that of the jazz guitarist Pat Martino, who, after surgery for a brain aneurysm well into his professional career, substantially lost his ability to play. He taught himself to play again by listening to his own records. Very interesting to contrast his pre- and post-brain-surgery musical approaches.
Is music really that distinct from speech? Many languages use tones as part of speech. And lyric is just as much music as it is speech. The Iliad, the root of Western Literature, begins: “Sing Goddess”. The Nobel committee recognized as much by awarding the literature prize to Bob Dylan. The ability to communicate through aural channels that seem to humans very much like music is found in diverse species from whales to birds.
Music: Rhythmic handedness, recruiting excitement, yields multiplied powers.
Religion: Rhythmic self-incantation, joining chthonic feeling, reifies belonging.
“There are people with brain injuries who can not speak well who nevertheless can sing well, and can communicate through song.”
This is true. I know such people. One actually leads a prestigious choral group.
“…this is Steven Pinker’s view of music as “auditory cheesecake”—or else music is made into a romanticized, ur-emotional language from which we finally came to speak propositional notions, while the heart of music remained something emotional. I think both of those views of music are wrong, I think they’re incomplete, I think they’re silly in some ways.”
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/prehistory-music
A little skeptical about brain modules in general and specifically I’d like to hear Steven Mithen’s argument in “The Singing Neanderthals” on music preceding language. William McNeill’s “Keeping Together in Time” might be germane too
Military marching bands did not arise coincidentally, music as an accompaniment to the march and a way to communicate and rouse the troops to action have been part and parcel of winning and executing battle.
In sheer melodrama of their military music, it’s hard to beat the Koreans. Most are aware of the extreme bombast of North Korean military music, for example, but South Koreans are not that far behind.
For example, from my time in ROK, I picked up these two favorites:
War Comrade Sleep Well (or Rest in Peace): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4eQI3fEAbc
The song starts with “Jumping over the corpses (!) of my war comrades, forward, forward!” And “Flow away, Nakdong River, we advance!” The song ends with, “On a moon-lit hill, we shared a last Hwarang (military-issue) cigarette, then my war brother disappeared under the cigarette smoke.” It dates from the Korean War-era, and it’s pretty darn maudlin.
The other one has perhaps the best Cold War-era title ever:
The Torch of the Annihilation of Communism: https://youtu.be/_4bU4eFc4yA?t=9m15s
The original lyrics are actually even more over-the-top than the English translation.
By the way, when you rewind that last one to the beginning, you can see a South Korean military parade with their army songs. It’s interesting that when you watch the parade on mute, the whole thing looks slightly absurd, but with the music on it makes a different impression (which is, of course, obvious to anyone who’s ever watched film dailies without any musical score to set the mood).
I made a comment here, and it was swallowed up. Was it a glitch or is it in a spam box due to the links to YouTube videos?
Choreographed aggression (I think the term is Palin’s) can be beyond terrifying. I was on the receiving end of a haka last year and the effect was visceral, bypassing the ears and the brain – quite proud that I didn’t embarrass our group, or our hosts, by running away.
[See if you can watch this unmoved
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT7Iyk8LoEg ]
Janissary music must have had a very similar effect until it was domesticated by the likes of Mozart & his contemporaries.
And a friend of mine who knows about these things has always maintained that the Highland pipes were never musical instruments, but weapons of war.
I made a comment here, and it was swallowed up. Was it a glitch or is it in a spam box due to the links to YouTube videos?
has to be links. though i thought spam was only 3 link? anyway, pushed it through….
There are people with brain injuries who can not speak well who nevertheless can sing well, and can communicate through song.
Not too suprisingly, Oliver Sachs has a book including examples of this: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
has to be links. though i thought spam was only 3 link? anyway, pushed it through….
Thank you.
It seems to me that music and artistic ability can be explained by the thesis of Richard O. Prum, “The evolution of beauty”. It certainly can cause a woman to swoon over a particularly talented crooner. We all know what swooning leads to.
Moreover, music often plays a role in unifying the emotional state, and synchrony of groups which may at times be advantageous to social organisms in battle, politics or at church for example. Perhaps it was one of the first forms of mass communication when mated with language and chants. What pheromones are to ants, music might be to humans ala Edward Wilson.