Music in culture and evolution

Abstract

When considering the prospective relationships between music and evolutionary thinking, it is necessary articulate clearly just what we mean by the term ‘music’. Anthropological, and increasingly, cognitive and neuroscientific, research suggests that the term has a broad applicability beyond conventional conceptions of music as mere entertainment. Across cultures, music appears active, interactive and embedded in a wide range of social activities; it appears to be as ‘normal’ a feature of human interaction as language. However, unlike language, music’s meanings appear, paradoxically, both natural—music seems to mean like it sounds—and at the same time foundationally indeterminate. This chapter will argue that this paradox is at the heart of music’s role in human interaction. Starting from the premise that music manifests itself in situations where the focus is on social interaction as an end in itself (rather than as a means towards an end), it will suggest that music can best be conceptualised as a communicative medium that has features which are optimal for the management of situations of social uncertainty. It will propose that at least some aspects of meaning in music can be accounted for by its exploitation of communicative mechanisms which, in other species, underlie the phenomenon of ‘honest signalling’. Further features of musical meaning can be postulated to stem from species-specific regularities in the mapping between affect and human vocalisation, while yet others emerge as a result of the contingent dynamics of cultural process. Music thus incorporates multiple dimensions of meaning with different evolutionary roots. The simultaneous availability of all three dimensions of musical meaning endow the experience of music with floating intentionality —music appears to be ‘about’ something’, but the object of the ‘aboutness’ is ambiguous—while the operation of species-general communicative sensitivities affords music the appearance of an ‘honest signal’. At the same time, cognitive and behavioural processes that enable humans to align their actions and sounds in time with each other within a commonly experienced framework of temporally regular pulses and that may be specific to humans impart a sense of mutual affiliativeness to a collective musical experience. Music can be conceived of as a communicative medium that is as vital as language for human social life, and for human conceptions, of and engagements, with human spirituality.