The origins of music in auditory scene analysis and the roles of evolution and culture in musical creation

Abstract

Whether music was an evolutionary adaptation that conferred survival advantages or a cultural creation has generated much debate. Consistent with an evolutionary hypothesis, music is unique to humans, emerges early in development and is universal across societies. However, the adaptive benefit of music is far from obvious. Music is highly flexible, generative and changes rapidly over time, consistent with a cultural creation hypothesis. In this paper, it is proposed that much of musical pitch and timing structure adapted to preexisting features of auditory processing that evolved for auditory scene analysis (ASA). Thus, music may have emerged initially as a cultural creation made possible by preexisting adaptations for ASA. However, some aspects of music, such as its emotional and social power, may have subsequently proved beneficial for survival and led to adaptations that enhanced musical behaviour. Ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence is considered in this regard. In particular, enhanced auditory–motor pathways in humans that enable movement entrainment to music and consequent increases in social cohesion, and pathways enabling music to affect reward centres in the brain should be investigated as possible musical adaptations. It is concluded that the origins of music are complex and probably involved exaptation, cultural creation and evolutionary adaptation.

Effects of Interpersonal Movement Synchrony on Infant Helping Behaviors

“…Music also creates a natural context in which interpersonal synchrony can be achieved with others (in the present experiment, movement synchrony was achieved by the artificial means of having the assistant and experimenter listen to a beat track on headphones) because of our propensity to move to the underlying beat in music (for example, see Patel & Iversen, 2014;Repp, 2006;van der Steen & Keller, 2013;Trainor, 2015). When individuals in a group all align their movements with the underlying beats in the same piece of music, they end up aligning their movements with one another by default.…”

The source dilemma hypothesis: Perceptual uncertainty contributes to musical emotion

“…Finally, and of most importance here, a number of theorists have considered the role of auditory scene analysis (ASA) in musical organization and musical aesthetics (e.g., McAdams & Bregman, 1979;Wright & Bregman, 1987;Huron, 2001;Bonin & Smilek, 2015;Trainor, 2015). The auditory system evolved to accurately determine the identity and location of important objects in their environment, such as predators, conspecifics, mates, food sources, and running water, which directly affect survival and reproduction (Bregman, 1990;Fay & Popper, 2000).…”

Statistical learning and Gestalt-like principles predict melodic expectations

“…A key feature of such proposals is that they claim expectations are governed by a small number of relatively simple principles. These principles are not domain-general but are grounded either in music theory or in properties of the auditory system, perhaps stemming from principles used by the auditory system for auditory scene analysis, i.e., segregating auditory 'objects' from complex mixtures of sound (Bregman, 1990;Handel, 1993;Trainor, 2015). Perhaps the best-known example of such a proposal is Narmour's (1989;) Implication-Realization model, which proposes five such principles that are claimed to be innate and universal to music cognition.…”