The evolution of human music in light of increased prosocial behavior: a new model

Abstract

Together with language, music is perhaps our most distinctive behavioral trait. Following the lead of paleolinguistic research, different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in the species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the theory of self-domestication, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to mammal domestication, triggered by a progressive reduction in reactive aggression levels in response to environmental changes. In the paper, we specifically argue that changes in aggression management through the course of human cultural evolution can account for the behaviors conducive to the emergence and evolution of music. We hypothesize 4 stages in the evolutionary development of music under the influence of environmental changes and evolution of social organization: starting from musilanguage, proto-music gave rise to personal and private forms of timbre-oriented music, then to small-group ensembles of pitch-oriented music, at first of indefinite and then definite pitch, and finally to collective (tonal) music. These stages parallel what has been hypothesized for languages and encompass the diversity of music types and genres described worldwide. Overall, music complexity emerges in a gradual fashion under the effects of enhanced abilities for cultural niche construction, resulting from the stable trend of reduction in reactive aggression towards the end of the Pleistocene, leading to the rise of hospitality codes, and succeeded by increase in proactive aggression from the beginning of the Holocene onward. This paper addresses numerous controversies in the literature on the evolution of music by providing a clear structural definition of music, identifying its structural features that distinguish it from oral language, and summarizing the typology of operational functions of music and formats of its transmission. The proposed framework of structural approach to music arms a researcher with means to identify and comparatively analyze different schemes of tonal organization of music, placing them in the context of human social and cultural evolution. Especially valuable contribution to the understanding of transition from animal communication to human music and language is the theory of so-called “personal song”, described and analyzed here from ethological, social, cultural, cognitive, and musicological perspectives. The emergence of personal song and its development into a social institution are interlinked with the evolution of kinship and placed into the timeline of cultural evolution, based on totality of ethnographic, archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and paleoclimatic data.

The (co)evolution of language and music under human self-domestication

“…Many aspects of music and music-like behaviors are shared with other species: entertainment to a beat, use of complex vocalizations for mating or defense, learning of vocalizations from adults, etc.. This and diverse functionality of music -hedonistic stimulation, emotional communication, emotional regulation, interpersonal bonding, coalition status display, compliance to norms, recreation, self-promotion, physical aid, learning aid, contemplating an event, calling to action, conservation of memories, or personal profiting (see Nikolsky and Benítez-Burraco, 2022 for details) -make it difficult to identify possible reasons for the emergence of music. Interestingly, music shares many commonalities with language, which also features numerous functions, typologies of complexity, and shows a pronounced evolutionary continuity with First, some of the structural parameters of music (pitch, rhythm, meter, dynamics, and timbre) are also exploited by language.…”

“…Interestingly, music shares many commonalities with language, which also features numerous functions, typologies of complexity, and shows a pronounced evolutionary continuity with First, some of the structural parameters of music (pitch, rhythm, meter, dynamics, and timbre) are also exploited by language. For example, pitch changes are used to distinguish different words in tonal languages, or different sentence types, as in prosodic intonation (see Nikolsky and Benítez-Burraco, 2022, section 2.3 for ample discussion).…”

“…Infants routinely learn multiple music systems just like they learn multiple languages used by their caretakers (Wong et al, 2009). Perception of quite a number of important characteristics of music seems to be biologically ingrained and therefore cross-cultural: discrimination of consonance/dissonance, melodic steps/leaps, regular/irregular rhythms, binary/non-binary meters, and fast/slow tempi (see section 3.2 in Nikolsky and Benítez-Burraco, 2022). At the same time, following suit of languages again, many structural attributes of music are culture-specific and require explicit learning (e.g., chords and keys).…”

“…As discussed in detail by Nikolsky and Benítez-Burraco (2022), these functions can be not just ordered according to their dependencies, but also according to their ontogenetic succession, which is likely to reflect the evolutionary succession, since cultural transmission of music is determined by the bottleneck of the capacity of children to receive music communication from their caretakers at every successive generation. Functions acquired earlier in infancy -especially those that are universally present in all forms of music -probably correspond to the earliest evolutionary stages.…”

“…In a recent paper (Nikolsky and Benítez-Burraco, 2022), we have developed a detailed model of the evolution of music under the effects of HSD. As noted, we find this a more parsimonious view of music evolution compared to other accounts that hypothesize different rationales and mechanisms for the evolution of music and of language.…”