Sociologists still don’t know exactly the social role of music, is it a language? A means of communication? A way to attract a mate? A way for a mother to bond with her child? A way to socialize more and find a group to belong to? There are too many propositions, but scientists also ask a different question: Did we, humans, invent music? After all, birds and whales have beautiful chants!
There is an interesting article in the Atlantic, which ask many questions related to the origin and the role of music. Basically two opposed points of views are represented by Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, who thinks that music is a cultural invention, and Geoffrey Miller professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, who thinks that music is a biological adaptation, a product of sexual selection and an adaptation.
Miller’s best argument is the fact that music is universal and ancient, but the universality of music seems to be a stretch sometimes, since westernized ears are often hermetic to Chinese traditional music which uses a pentatonic scale. And how ancient music is by the way? Marcus estimates that the oldest known musical artifact (flutes) are 35,000 years old, which is nothing when we know that our species is at least 200,000 years old! So if music were a biological adaptation, why did it appear so late in our evolution?
Marcus also notes that harmony (present in every pop song) as we know it did not exist 1,000 years ago; yeah, try to listen to middle age music, pretty boring and flat to our modern ears.
And if music is a biological adaptation, everybody should be drawn to learn it, or at least sing it, which is not the case as a lot of people not only will never learn how to play an instrument but also will never be interested by music, to what Marcus adds that 10 % of the population is tone deaf and will never be able to sing.
Another Miller’s argument is the fact that kids are naturally attracted to music, so it must be in our genes? Or not, as Marcus explains: music is probably better seen as designed to be irresistible to our brains rather than our brains designed by evolution to respond to music…
And if you want another proof of this, there is no real part in the brain which is fully dedicated to music, as areas involved in music have usually other occupations such as analyzing sounds, feeling emotions and analyzing language. If music were a product of biological evolution, wouldn’t there be this specific spot in the brain reserved only to music as it is the case for language? On the contrary, almost all our brain is engaged when we listen to music.
Darwin thought that music evolved by sexual selection, for example the female nightingale will choose the best singer, and this happy bird will be able to mate, reproduce and pass its good-singer genes to its offspring. Yeah it works for birds and frogs, but humans? I don’t doubt that Mick Jagger got more women than your average guy but if music was invented only recently, our ancestors were obviously not relying on music talents for selecting a mate.
Marcus also noted that we haven’t been able to identify specific genes tied to music, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Miller says that probably thousands of genes may contribute to music talent, although a lot of these genes contribute to other tasks, and were not selected specifically for music abilities.
As we share more than 98% of our DNA with chimps, scientists still have to identify the genes that make us musical animals compared to our close cousins. We don’t know if Neanderthal men were in fact able to sing in default of playing an instrument, but, if we find these genes, their DNA may talk about this one day!
But you can't talk about the evolution of music without mentioning dance as they probably evolved together. There is this idea that our complex brains are always looking for patterns and music and dance are just expressions of this: seeking, realizing, identifying patterns. All animals have this ability, they develop patterns, when you think about it, all birds' dances and songs have a pattern, and we, as humans, just seek and produce more of them.
So, at the end, we haven’t invented anything, we have just produced more varied patterns than animals. Although, when I watch this bird, I wonder if everything hasn’t already been invented by nature.