Music is universal and used in strikingly similar ways across the globe: study
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
First, humans are a social species and use language to communicate. Babies learn language by observing and emulating their parents. So it makes sense that humans evolved a rewards pathway that makes it pleasurable to listen to sounds.
Second, the brain is basically a pattern matching and prediction machine. Music is full of patterns, e.g., rhythm and harmonics.
That's why music is so popular -- because it allows the brain to do something which it is very good at and which it also finds pleasurable.
Being innately predisposed to like these disciplines makes one more likely to practice them, become good at them, and help propagate useful info undamaged, thus rising the group's survival abilities.
They were vital for so long (compared to the few millennia since we invented writing) that we still have the taste baked in, even though writing, then the press then computers and photographs took over those roles.
Rhymes and meter are the CRC32 check of prehistory.
There is a 3-5% rate of people who don't enjoy music, and it at least doesn't obviously handicap them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia
Regardless, I don't think there's much evidence (if any) for the idea that the enjoyment of music is the result of a defect in our auditory system.
Defect would imply it's a negative trait. A lot of mental quirks are probably just irrelevant from an evolutionary point of view.
Not sure I've explained myself as well as I could, but hopefully I have.
There is actual evidence for my theory BTW. Aboriginal folks in Australia had a tradition of using songs to describe itineraries.
Antique poetry and the bits of oral traditions that survived until today were using heavily structured verses (like the dactylic hexameter). A notable exception is the old testament, whose first parts were transmitted orally before being written down, and which is structured in verses of unknown structure (or unstructured, except for the psalms).
Modern poetry has gradually lost that strong structure. The prevalence of musical anhedonia and amusia may very well have risen in recent times as a result of the loss of utility of music.
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We tend to make the mistake of assuming any seeming oddities of the human must somehow be due to evolution. But when we see the same in the rest of the body we often make the opposite assumption and assume it's a vestigial trait, or a coincidence.
Even if amusia (of which musical anhedonia is a subtype) was prevalent at the time, culture transmission operates at the group level. The mere existance of amusia with such a low prevalence doesn't invalidate my point.
The civilization could most likely survive the abrupt loss of every piece of music poetry and painting ever created up to this point.
Humans are (largely) the only animals with cultural transmission of skills. Making stone tools or cutting trees or scraping hides or making fire would have involved much rhythmic motor activity.
I prefer to insist on commonalities. We are all human, the same race living on the same planet, with minor variations in customs that add salt to life.
I prefer to insist on differences. If the salt includes prison camps and religious insanity, I'll have low sodium please.
Do you like airports too? Because they are just that, cleaned up commonalities.
I suspect that the parts of our culture that are rooted in language are things most of us don’t even have words for, because they come too naturally for us to need to talk about.
No, not quite. It's just that newborn children make babbling sounds that resemble speech, with a very limited range of “consonsants”, and humans are such narcissists that they assume those babblings refer to them, the parents :)
Or mama, papa, appa, amma, etc are the easiest words for infants/toddlers to pronounce and hence we used these word for children to call attention to the two most important people for their survival?
Is it narcissism or the fact that infants/toddlers cannot even pronounce most vowels/consonants other than a, m, b/p?
i have no background in linguistics but my thought was that since our ancestors moved from place to place. when they move to a new inhabited place, people there needed that word to let them know that their (long) journey has reached a stopping point, they can rest now, or stay, etc.
This was a while back so details I remember are sparse.. but he had tons of examples from around the world where what we might consider "happy" or "sad" was entirely different in many cultures.
Granted, it's probably still more true than not to say "for the most part music is universal", I don't think it holds as a simple factual statement.
So depending on what is dangerous or useful to a species it should develop different preferences.
What I find strange, though, is why animals don't appreciate music (or almost never). You can't even train pigeons, nice or apes to tap to the beat.
That said, if you ignore the meter, most animals seem to react to various harmonic and aharmonic sounds. Dogs howling, birds whistling, etc. The timings seem quite specific to the creature, and their adapted envirnment.
But most natural objects have multiple degrees of freedom. If you hit a rock, stick, bone, etc. its oscillation is not constrained to a single axis. You can have multiple different unrelated frequencies. It's unlikely that all the prominent frequencies will be integer multiples of the fundamental by chance. To get harmonic sounds from a oscillator with multiple degrees of freedom takes skilled shaping of that object, e.g. tuning a bell by carefully shaving off metal at the right places.
Harmonic sounds are evidence of living creatures, and living creatures are potentially dangerous. Therefore it's not surprising that we're good at detecting them.
This sounds like the Joseph Campbell school of finding similarities. If you squint hard enough, everything looks the same.
Harmonic progression is a staple of Western classical and pop styles, but most folk music is diatonic (confined to a single scale), not least because of the limitations of wind instruments. Diatonic music and harmony has seen a major resurgence with the advent of electronic dance music, which subordinates harmonic progression to rhythmic and timbral development so as to stay 'in the groove' by maintaining a particular musical mood.
Their methods were great, in showing that the functional intent of music could be reliably determined by people around the world.
The way I'd test it would be presenting a set of 2 tones and giving them control over a third. like 200hz +300hz and then letting them move a slider between 325-425hz. Where do they find the resulting sound most pleasant and where most unpleasant?
The sensation of dissonance is so strong and visceral, it is extremely hard to believe it has no universality to it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I wish that press coverage of science could at least post a proper academic reference at the end.