Music in the Paleolithic

The physiological requirements for music existed from at least the advent of Homo sapiens 150,000 years ago. By the time humans dispersed from Africa around 70,000 years ago, they had modern behaviours, distinguishing them cognitively from the early generations of Homo sapiens. Only once those behaviours had emerged, I would argue, could we make music as we understand it today.

Like language, music itself leaves no traces and can only be studied indirectly through the material remains of musical behaviours, but archaeological finds of musical instruments prove beyond doubt that Homo sapiens was making music towards the end of the Paleolithic.

We shouldn’t conclude though that music is no older than these surviving instruments. Modern hunter-gatherers often make instruments out of natural materials like skins, wood, hollowed plant stems and gourds, which are perishable, and we have ample evidence that Paleolithic people had the tool-making skills necessary to make comparable objects. We know from wooden spears found at Schöningen in 1995 that early humans were skilfully working wood, for example, at least 400,000 years ago. Also, we don’t need accessories to make music: the most versatile musical tool of all (and probably the oldest) is the human voice, which can create an immense range of sounds. This could have been accompanied by handclaps or other forms of percussion, such as hitting objects together. Music in this form could in theory predate tool-making. If the only evidence we consider is the surviving instruments, we will have only the most limited conception of Paleolithic music-making.

Even when instruments still exist, reconstructing the development of music in the Paleolithic is very difficult because only the invention of time travel could reveal to us what music was created with them. Ways of writing music down appeared relatively late – our earliest example of notation is a tablet from Nippur in Mesopotamia dating to around 2000 BCE. Even today, most of the music being played across the world from one day to the next is never written down or recorded.

Musical instruments in the Paleolithic

We don’t know when in the Paleolithic people began making instruments. The simplest percussion instruments – such as rattles, shakers and drums – must predate sophisticated objects like flutes, possibly by many millennia, and they predominate over melodic instruments amongst modern hunter-gatherers. One unusual discovery was a set of mammoth bones found in Mezin in the Ukraine. These were ornamented with red paint and located with a hammer and other items, which invite interpretation as percussion instruments – even as a kind of Ice Age ‘orchestra’.[1] These date to around 20,000 years ago, and it remains to be seen whether we will unearth anything more ancient.

Archaeologists have found many Paleolithic objects which are, or may be, musical instruments. All the human-made items are made of bone or ivory, because these preserve much better than materials such as wood and skins. There is still considerable debate about whether some of these objects should be identified as instruments.

The archaeologist Iain Morley has concluded that the objects fall into five main types: flutes and pipes, pierced phalanges, bullroarers, rasps, and caves (as exploited for their acoustic effects).[2]

The Divje Babe flute

The object regarded as possibly the oldest surviving musical instrument is a perforated bear femur found at the Divje Babe site in modern Slovenia, thought to date to 43,000 years ago. This object was found in a Mousterian level, associated with Neanderthals. Archaeologists are still disputing whether this object is part of an instrument or just a bit of bone with two holes in it. A detailed study by Francesco d’Errico and colleagues in 2003 was sceptical, concluding that the perforations were made by a carnivore [3]. Morley considers some rival interpretations and also concludes, albeit with reservations, that this object probably wasn’t a musical instrument. There is little other evidence that Neanderthals made music, so for the moment it is better to err on the side of caution. One of the suggested reasons why our species survived while Neanderthals became extinct is the possession by Homo sapiens of unique cognitive and social powers, which could have made a huge qualitative difference to our ability to create music.

Unambiguous flutes and pipes made by our own species do exist, and are the most numerous sort of instrument, with over 120 claimed examples having been found. (A pipe is blown into directly, whereas a flute is played by blowing across a hole, but not every writer makes this distinction.) More than thirty unequivocal examples survive, all from the European Upper Paleolithic, spanning the Aurignacian, Gravettian and Magdalenian periods. These are often made from bird bones – which are naturally hollow – and have a variable number of holes. The oldest examples were found in caves in Germany and date to around 35,000 years ago. The most complete was from Hohle Fels in Swabia: a flute with five finger holes made from a vulture bone. Two other examples from nearby caves at Geissenklösterle were made of swan bone and mammoth ivory.

Paleolithic bone flute, ca. 35,000 years old, from Hohle Fels.

The latter in particular would have required considerable skill, as mammoth ivory is a dense material and difficult to carve. This implies what the flutes’ discoverers call a “well-established musical tradition” [4] that must date further back than these particular specimens. These finds represent the first known unambiguous evidence of music-making, as all other extant Paleolithic instruments post-date 30,000 years ago. The prehistorian Friedrich Seeburger has reconstructed what these prehistoric flutes sounded like using replicas, which you can listen to at the nature.com website. These instruments were not far removed from modern flutes and capable of expressive melody.

An important set of pipes was found at Isturitz in south-west France, where more than twenty items have been found spanning a 15,000-year period from the Aurignacian to the Magdalenian. The status of some of these is questionable, but the finest examples have drilled holes and incised decorations and were clearly intended for making music.

Phalangeal whistles from France. The two left-hand items
are from the Aurignacian site of Tarté; the right-hand
item is from Le Moustier. Photo: Duncan Caldwell.

The next set of instruments are pierced phalanges or phalangeal whistles. These are made of the phalange bones – in humans, these are the bones of the fingers and toes – of animals such as reindeer and ibex, pierced with a single hole. Blowing across this hole produces a high-pitched sound.

The ease with which such perforations can appear sometimes makes it hard to tell exactly if an object was manufactured. But there is no doubt that some were deliberately made by Paleolithic people. Whether the whistles were in fact used for music, rather than as noise-makers for other purposes, such as signalling, remains hard to say.

Less common is the third category, the bullroarers – these are flat pieces of bone or wood that make a buzzing or humming sound when spun in the air. (You can hear a sound sample here.) These have been used by many cultures, including modern hunter-gatherers such as the Australian Aborigines. A bullroarer can be made very easily by drilling a hole in a piece of bone, flint or wood and spinning it on a cord, so many perforated Paleolithic objects are open to interpretation as bullroarers. Many have been described as pendants or fishing weights, or as not of human provenance at all. But some of the evidence is stronger, such as the oval specimen carved from reindeer antler found in the cave of La Roche de Birol in the Dordogne, which is incised with a geometric pattern and pierced at one end. It is not certain that this and similar objects from the Paleolithic are bullroarers, but in tests they perform very well as such.

The fourth type of instrument is the rasp, a scraped form of idiophone or vibrating instrument. This is a piece of wood, stone or bone carved with grooves, against which the musician scrapes another object. Likely candidates include a Mousterian mammoth bone discovered in Belgium and dated to 50–40,000 years ago, which has regular striations down one side; a Magdalenian item made of reindeer antler from Pekárna cave in the Czech Republic; and further Magdalenian examples from the French sites of Mas d’Azil and Bruniquel. These objects perform as rasps, but, as with the bullroarers, we still cannot be sure that their purpose was musical.

The ‘Woman with a Horn’ from Laussel,
ca. 25,000–20,000 years ago.

We have referred before to the bas-relief image from Laussel known as the ‘Woman with a Horn’. Morley points out that the crescent-shaped object in the woman’s right hand resembles an incised bison horn similar to rasps from Mexico.

The final type of instrument is a telling example of how Paleolithic people could have used their environment to make sounds in a variety of creative ways. Several prehistorians have observed correlations between cave acoustics and parietal art. Iegor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois studied three caves in the French Pyrenees, making sound tests to draw up a ‘resonance’ map of the caves, and found that most cave paintings are situated one metre from points where the caves resonate to certain notes.[5] They concluded that the paintings’ locations were chosen according to the acoustics of the caves, even when the point of resonance was poorly accessible and did not leave the artists enough room for a full image.

It follows that there may have been rituals or other social events that involved both the paintings and music – above all the human voice, to which the caves’ resonances responded more than to whistles and other instruments. As the archaeologist Chris Scarre noted, “the image of the cave artists chanting incantations in front of their paintings may not be too fanciful.”[6]

Researchers have also noted that stalactites, stalagmites, and other points can produce a tone when struck, thus acting as lithophones.

The caves at Nerja in Andalucia in Spain. Image: Luzzyacentillo

One example of this is the cave of Nerja, a natural amphitheatre in which concerts are performed today. The Belgian archaeologist Lya Dams observed that the so-called ‘organ’, a section of the cave compromising a series of fluted calcareous folds, can produce clear notes when struck. These had been painted with both abstract images and animals, and bear signs of having been hit with hard objects.[7] It is hard to believe that the cave’s Paleolithic occupants would not have noticed this property, so Dams concludes that the ‘organ’ was being used as a lithophone, and that the parietal art was closely connected with this musical purpose.

“Whereas we now visit painted caves in a hushed reverence,” Steven Mithen commented, “they probably once reverberated with the sounds of pipes, stalagmite xylophones, singing and dancing.”[8]

The instruments we’ve considered are all from the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic. This is not down to Eurocentric bias but to the reality of the archaeological record. Instruments from other parts of the world, e.g. the bone flutes found at the Jiahu site near Henan in China, currently date only from the Neolithic. This does not necessarily mean that musical instruments were unique to Europe during the Paleolithic, only that we haven’t found any elsewhere. This absence could be for a variety of reasons – e.g. the preservative quality of the materials used.[9] There is a disparity, unexplained as yet, that anatomically modern humans seem to have emigrated from Africa around 70,000 years ago, but the earliest unequivocal musical instruments appear not in Africa but in Europe nearly 40,000 years later. This gap in the archaeological record may simply be down to the different intensity of research in Europe as opposed to Africa, and future excavation may yet resolve it.

The purpose of Paleolithic music

It is impossible to say what form music took in the Ice Age. If we look to modern hunter-gatherer societies for parallels, we can see that music is likely to have been highly diverse. Bullroarers, for example, are used in quite different ways across cultures; amongst Australian Aborigines alone, their uses vary according to context and to tribal group: in initiation ceremonies, in burial rituals, to ward off spirits, to imitate the voices of spirits, to warn women away from exclusively male rituals, and so on.

It would be a mistake to make bold assertions about Paleolithic music-making based on our observations of peoples who are separated from the Stone Age by many thousands of years. Music developed during the Pleistocene, in part when humans were still undergoing speciation. No such environment exists today for us to study. It would also be a mistake to view hunter-gatherer societies as somehow ‘frozen’ in a Paleolithic state, as thousands of years have passed since the Pleistocene and no society undergoes zero change. So all such parallels can do is open our minds to some of the possibilities.

Nonetheless there are grounds for some educated speculation. Iain Morley studied four diverse hunter-gatherer groups – Native American, African pygmy, Australian aborigine and Eskimo – and found strong parallels between their musical-making.

All four groups meet up with fellow communities during their most difficult subsistence season, during which time there is increased performance of ceremonial and communal music and dance. In all four cultures, the ceremonial and social use of music is very important, is communal and is almost always accompanied by rhythmic dancing. In all four cultures music is also performed purely as a communal activity for pleasure.

All four have music which is predominantly vocal, and accompanied mainly by percussion instruments. The use of melodic instruments is minimal and, when used, invariably consists of end-blown pipes. These are usually single-toned instruments. All the instruments, whether percussive or melodic, are made from naturally occurring organic materials.

All four peoples believe themselves to have come from the land, to be akin with the other fauna of their environment, and use music to try to influence the world around them. Music and dance can have important uses in engendering group cohesion, altering mood, as an aid to the teaching of dance, and can facilitate group interactions and communality, within and between groups. In the majority of these instances the music itself has no inherent symbolism, but it can be used to accompany symbolic activities.[10]

A great deal of these societies’ music didn’t require any instruments. Instead, the group vocalised, with accompanying foot-stamping, hand-clapping and so on. This may be significant given the absence of instruments older than 35,000 years. Morley also found that these societies sometimes used music as a mnemonic, helping to preserve tribal lore. It is much easier to remember texts that are highly structured with pattern and repetition.

The findings are important because the groups studied occupy different continents and developed their musical practices independently of each other. Morley concludes that there are “fundamental similarities in the nature and roles of music between these diverse groups” which may indicate an extremely ancient tradition, and proposes that “there are important evolutionary driving forces towards those common behaviours, either as a consequence of subsistence method or of human biology.”

Conclusion

Bone pipes and most other instruments can only be made with an advanced level of tool-making. As technology improved so did the sophistication and range of our instruments, which were often artistic objects in themselves. By the rise of early civilisation around 3000 BCE, we see very finely-made instruments such as the lyres found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, decorated with beaten gold. This technological process has of course continued into the present, adding electric guitars and samplers and many other things to our musical inventory.

On the current evidence, there appears to have been a relatively sudden proliferation of instruments from about 35,000 years ago. The creation of musical instruments may therefore be the product of the crucial leap in human cognitive and symbolic capacities during the Upper Paleolithic. It is probably no accident that instruments appear in Europe at about the same time as cave painting and sculpture. This is not to say that we can rule out musical activity by Homo sapiens or even pre-sapiens humans prior to 35,000 years ago. The sophisticated instruments that have survived must have been preceded by earlier, less developed forms, perhaps in more perishable materials, not to mention yet earlier periods before musical tools were used at all. As always in palaeoanthropology, the incomplete archaeological record gives us only very partial information. Limited to material traces and what can be inferred from them, we can say little or nothing about what melodies were played, about which people in a particular society created music, if and how music was combined with other art forms, etc.

It can be difficult to ascertain whether a particular item that can be used musically was actually made for that purpose. There is ongoing debate about whether or not Neanderthals were capable of creating music and therefore musical instruments, and whether some of the objects were created by humans at all. There is also no way of knowing whether the materials used for making them were simply the most appropriate or had their own symbolic meaning.

Paleolithic humans may have used music for some or all of the reasons that modern hunter-gatherers do, or for other reasons now lost. What does seem certain is that they, like more recent societies, are bound to have created rich and varied musical cultures for a range of spiritual, social and entertainment purposes.

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[1] See for example Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn, Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age (2007).
[2] Iain Morley, The Evolutionary Origins and Archaeology of Music, PhD dissertation (2003).
[3] D’Errico, Henshilwood, Lawson, Vanhaeren, Tillier, Soressi, Bresson, Maureille, Nowell, Lakarra, Backwell and Julien, ‘Archaeological evidence for the emergence of language, symbolism and music — an alternative multidisciplinary perspective’, Journal of World Prehistory Vol. 17 (2003).
[4] Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen, quoted in John Noble Wilford, ‘Flutes offer clues to Stone Age music’, New York Times (24 June 2009).
[5] Iegor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois, ‘La dimension sonore des grottes ornées’, Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française Vol. 85 (1988).
[6] Chris Scarre, ‘Painting by Resonance’, Nature (1989).
[7] Lya Dams, ‘Preliminary findings at the “Organ” Sanctuary in the cave of Nerja, Malaga, Spain’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology (1984).
[8] Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[9] The oldest known wooden instruments, for example, a set of six pipes found at Greystones in Ireland, are relatively recent at 4000 years of age.
[10] Morley, op. cit.

The origins of music, part 5: Summary

Given its existence in even the most isolated human cultures, it is highly likely that our musical capacities were already in place when our species emigrated from Africa. Music is universal, participated in by everyone as a community, not just for entertainment but for practical and social purposes. As observed by Brown, Merker and Wallin:

Even the most cursory glance at life in traditional cultures is sufficient to demonstrate that music and dance are essential components of most social behaviours, everything from hunting and herding to story telling and playing; from washing and eating to praying and meditating; and from courting and marrying to healing and burying. Therefore the study of music origins is central to the evolutionary study of human cultural behaviour generally.[1]

Music is yet another of the many ways in which human beings fulfil their creative impulse – objectifying their human nature through the ordering of aspects of the material world.

Despite the new wave of research, the precise origins of music remain opaque. Charles Darwin concluded that

as neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.[2] 

Like language, music clearly draws upon diverse variables: the formation of the vocal tract and auditory system, hominin brain expansion, symbolic gesturing, the development of syntax, cultural transmission and many more evolutionary, cognitive and social aspects. Depending upon whom you ask, music is a form of sexual selection; a means of group bonding; a way for parents to communicate with their infants; or conversely a ‘spandrel’ drawing upon capacities that formed for other purposes, with no evolutionary value at all.

Trying to locate music in this or that part of the brain, or such and such an adaptive advantage, is probably futile. The evidence suggests that music arose as part of a complicated interaction of processes predicated upon the qualitative uniqueness of human consciousness. Music (and dance) cannot be reduced to a single function, and many of the processes crucial to its formation will have had no direct relationship to musicality at all.

Let us take one example. The physiology of music depends in part upon bipedalism, which allowed a lowering of the larynx and a greater control of sounds in the oral cavity. It also encouraged a 90-degree rotation of the labyrinthine capsule of the inner ear, which affected the morphology of the semi-circular canals responsible for balance and body coordination. In other words, bipedalism (as we touched on in the previous post) had implications for dance, breath control, and vocal expressiveness. Yet bipedalism is not an adaptation ‘for music’ but to life on the African savannah. It is not difficult to see from this that the totality of human music-making is dependent on a great web of evolutionary and cultural processes. Some of these processes will have been far more powerful determining forces than others, and establishing which were most important is the key to understanding music, but this does not mean the others can be ignored. So to explore the origins of music, we must also research the development of language, mind, and body from various directions.

One of the most important characteristics of music is that it is primarily a social and collective activity. Attempts to explain it as a form of individual selection cannot account for why it has predominantly been created by groups. Adaptive theories only work when they are able to explain how music-making humans would have had an advantage over non-music-making ones – the only satisfactory account is that the former had advantages from stronger group cooperation, i.e. music as an adaptation can only work at the level of the social group. Therefore I find Steven Brown persuasive when he argues that “music making is not only about within-group cooperation, coordination, and cohesion, but it is principally about these things.”[3]

Of course we can listen to music in solitude, but such behaviour is probably unusual in the history of music, especially in prehistory – and even listening in solitude requires, in usual Western practice, a set of musical equipment, such as MP3 players supplied with digital sound files, which has to be manufactured and therefore involve the solitary listener in a network of social labour.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding its origins, on one level music simply follows the same pattern as all the arts. We take the materials we find in nature and transform them through labour into a humanised object. Just as we use minerals to create pigments and make paintings, we take the naturally occurring phenomenon of sound and organise it, transform it and impose an order upon it to create a new ‘object’ in which we perceive ourselves objectified. Only humans do this. The study of gorillas beating their chests and animal mating calls, etc, is important and interesting, but social communication, group bonding, parent-infant interaction and so on are behaviours displayed by many animal species. Humans bring a particular qualitative ingredient to such activity which allows something new and unique to take off – it is in the creativity of human consciousness that music really begins.

My own expectation is that music as we know it was probably a result of the cognitive leap that produced the Human Revolution. We may have had the capacity for making musical sounds for thousands of years, just as we had the capacity to make images on cave walls using tools long before we actually did so, but this could not become music until our species underwent the enculturating process that made possible the flowering of art. Hence the absence of musical instruments until the Human Revolution was already underway – presumably there must have been other, cruder instruments at the outset around 60–40,000 years ago. How our basic musical capacity developed is still disputed, but whatever that process was, and whatever forms the earliest manifestations of musicality took, only with behaviourally modern, creative Homo sapiens could music flower.

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[1] Wallin, Merker and Brown, ‘An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology’ in The Origins of Music (2000).
[2] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871).
[3] Steven Brown, ‘The Musilanguage Model of Language Evolution’, from Wallin, Merker and Brown, op. cit.

The origins of music, part 4: Movement and dance

Music is not just about sound. Wherever you go, it is accompanied by movement, from Western nightclubs to African drumming or children clapping in the playground. Even infants can match their body movements with the rhythm of voices, and we may see the germs of musicality in their desire to communicate with adults through gestures of voice and body.

This behaviour, found in all human cultures, is known as bodily entrainment, defined by W. Tecumseh Fitch as “the capacity to move one’s limbs or body to a complex external ‘beat’.”[1] Music can compel us to tap our feet, click our fingers, or swing our whole bodies in circles. This movement can be purely spontaneous and unconscious, or it can be highly organised. The phenomenon seen in classical concerts of people listening to rhythmic, emotive music in complete stillness is highly exceptional, and has its origins in the elite culture for which that music was originally written.[2] In almost every society, music and movement have explicitly belonged together. Just as we can’t properly understand language if we ignore gesture, we can’t understand music without exploring its relationship to movement.

Flutists and dancers in an unusually animated Egyptian
wall painting from a tomb in Thebes, c. 1400 BCE.

Of course, movement and music can exist independently of each other. But there is a strong relationship between the auditory system and the motor system, producing the bodily movements that seem to be an instinctive part of our response to music and become part of how we make it. This relationship is expressed most comprehensively in dance, which takes an immense diversity of forms: tribal dances, ballet, the tango, figure-skating, breakdancing and many more. And if music is a means to communicate individual and collective experience, so is dance. This is why dance therapy is possible: by sharing a series of gestures, the client and the therapist can communicate their emotions and build a relationship.

Why we do all this is surprisingly hard to explain. Like music-making, movement to music does not leave archaeological traces. Dance has certainly been practiced since at least the early civilisations: there are illustrations of dancers from Egypt dating back to the predynastic period, and from Mesopotamia dating to the eighth millenium BCE. But none of this goes back nearly far enough.

Bipedalism

Steven Mithen suggests that a hugely important development in both music and dance was the hominid shift to walking on two legs (bipedalism) approximately four million years ago. Our cousins the great apes struggle to stay upright on two legs, and have an anatomy adapted for both knuckle-walking and tree-climbing. Unlike humans they cannot lock their leg into a straight position, and must walk by shifting their weight from side to side on legs that are relatively wide apart. Mithen observes:

We avoid this waddling gait by placing our feet relatively close together on the ground and using strong hip muscles to counter any side-to-side movement.[3]

A reconstruction of
Australopithecus afarensis

Humans developed bipedalism as early as the australopithecines, as evidenced by the skeleton of Lucy and the 3.6 million year-old footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania that have been ascribed to Australopithecus afarensis. These species would not have walked as efficiently on two legs as we do. One of the archaeological clues to this is the morphology of the inner ear, which assists our sense of balance: that of the australopithecines was still ape-like, reflecting ways of moving around that included tree-climbing and hanging.

By the advent of Homo ergaster (which had an inner ear morphology much like ours), hominins had developed a bipedalism much like that of modern Homo sapiens.

Anatomical adaptations for bipedalism continue up through the body: a broader pelvis, a curved lower spine, and a head held vertically. With such anatomy, humans have a striding, fluid gait, in which each leg alternately has a swing phase followed by a stance phase.

As argued by the anthropologist Leslie Aiello [4], it is likely that the increase in brain size in Homo ergaster was necessary to handle the more complex motor control required by bipedalism, an increase that may have given impetus to more general intelligence and language development (and thereby also to singing). It was also significant that a large proportion of our body, most obviously our hands, was freed from being used for locomotion, allowing us to make not only tools but complex gestures.

There has been plenty of debate about why we adopted bipedalism. It was not to free our hands to make tools – although that was certainly useful subsequently – because fossils show it predates tool-making. No adaptation ever takes place in anticipation. Nor was it to allow us to see over the grasses of the savannah, because australopithecines lived in wooded landscapes. Most likely it was a mixture of things, above all to reduce overheating and energy use. As we spent more and more time on open plains, an upright posture exposed less of our bodies to the sun and was a more efficient method of movement. This increased our range for scavenging – our long-distance running is unique among primates.

Whatever its causes, bipedalism had implications for expressive movement. Mithen lists “new degrees of motor control, independence of torso and arms from legs, and internal and unconscious time-keeping abilities” as contributors to our potential for dance. Even though it did not evolve expressly for the purpose, our anatomy enables us to make an immense range of flexible and athletic movements. This may have “initiated the greatest musical revolution in human history.” Mithen notes approvingly the work of the musicologist John Blacking, who wrote:

Many, if not all, of music’s essential processes can be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of human bodies in society.[5]

There seems to be a close connection between the areas of the brain responsible for complex vocalisations and for complex muscular movements. If these evolved together, it might help explain why rhythm, music and dance are so closely related in human cultures. If musilanguage existed, uttered holistic phrases may have been accompanied by gestures of the body such as the head and hands.

Rhythm

Our sense of rhythm, one of the most important aspects of music, begins with a sense of time, something human beings share in both perception and motor behaviour. Brown, Merker and Wallin observed:

One of the most distinct features of music, with reference to both animal song systems and human speech, is its use of isometric rhythms. The human ability to keep time should be distinguished from the ability of most animals (including humans) to move in a metric, alternating fashion.What is special about humans is not only their capacity to move rhythmically but their ability to entrain their movements to an external timekeeper, such as a beating drum.[6]

This ability to entrain is effectively unique to human beings, as the testing carried out so far tells us that animals do not naturally demonstrate this ability; even in the rare exceptions that have been observed, their ability is severely limited compared to ours. Mithen relates this to bipedalism:

Rhythm... is essential to efficient walking, running and, indeed, any complex coordination of our peculiar bipedal bodies. Without rhythm we couldn’t use these effectively: just as important as the evolution of knee joints and narrow hips, bipedalism required the evolution of mental mechanisms to maintain the rhythmic coordination of muscle groups.[7]

We still don’t quite understand how our auditory system links up with our motor system to produce synchronated movements, although they are clearly connected. It is likely that the evolution of bipedalism had a profound impact on our association of movement and rhythm. The existence of rhythm awareness in newborns – even blind ones, who cannot be imitating their parent – proves that it is not culturally acquired but hereditary. Infants show strong emotional associations too, being able to recognise a difference for example between approving and scolding tones of voice, and this union of emotion with tone and movement lays the foundations for music and dance.

Gesture

As we all know, our bodies can be highly expressive of emotional states, even unconsciously. The evolutionary changes in Homo ergaster – greater motor control, a strong sense of time and rhythm, the independence of the arms and hands – meant a dramatic increase in hominids’ command of body language. Together with vocalisation, emotional association and a possible musical proto-language, we were equipped with powerful tools for communication in the complex social life of our species.

Gesture works differently to words because it does not rely on any form of grammar. As Mithen puts it:

the majority of spontaneous gestures used by modern humans are iconic, in the sense that they directly represent whatever is being verbally expressed... So if I were describing something big, my gesture would most likely involve placing my hands together and then gradually moving them apart; whereas when describing something as small I might gradually move the finger and thumb of one hand together until they are almost touching.[8]

Not only do such gestures back up what is communicated verbally, they add additional layers of meaning, i.e. they are complementary rather than merely derivative. But gestures can also be made independently of verbal meaning, or convey information that contradicts it. A measure of the communicative power of gesture to illustrate our inner life is that when we are being dishonest with our words, our body language can sometimes betray our true feelings.

Some of the earliest gestures may have been acts of mimicry. As Merlin Donald has explored [9], our ancestors probably used acting, song and dance to metaphorically recreate certain emotions and experiences in a narrative form. Donald suggests that such mimetic acts would be an early stage in the evolution of the human mind: miming everyday events like hunting, stripping a carcass, etc required us to understand metaphor and so prepared the way for symbolism. Later, dance may have been a means to recreate and preserve tribal wisdom and stories in an age before written records.

Another aspect of mimicry is that by imitating the posture of another person, we imply an empathy with their emotions. When consoling someone, we adopt a similar sad posture, facial expression and tone of voice. Music and dance provide a culturally defined framework for recreating emotional states through synchronicity and cooperation. Understanding how certain facial expressions, for example, communicate certain emotions, we may then adopt those expressions metaphorically, pretending to be sad, happy, and so on to elicit an emotional response from others. The responses elicited then, in turn, have an impact upon the dancer.

Mithen refers to the work of the dancer, choreographer and theoretician Rudolf Laban, widely considered one of the most important figures in the history of dance:

Laban gives the simple example of the expressive range of gestures that can accompany the word ‘no’. He explains that one can ‘say’ this with movements that are pressing, flicking, wringing, dabbing, thrusting, floating, slashing or gliding, each of which ‘says’ ‘no’ in a quite different manner. Once such gestures are integrated into a sequence of body movements and vocalisations, once some are exaggerated, repeated, embedded within each other, one has both a sophisticated means of self-expression and communication, and a pattern of movements that together can be observed as pure dance alone.

Conclusion

Our capacity for music and dance expresses a need to communicate with other humans through co-ordinated gestures in time, a skill we seem to possess to some degree even before we are born. Like musilanguage, gesture and movement as means of communication predate language. It depends upon our ability to recognise others as intentional and sympathetic human beings like ourselves. Like language and music, dance is a means of symbolic communication – because of our differing personal experiences, symbols are never entirely fixed but have differing meanings for individuals, which may help to explain why a certain piece of music can provoke wildly different responses in its listeners.

In music and dance we act as social beings, using a shared cultural framework to share experience through drama and metaphor.

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[1] W. Tecumseh Fitch, ‘Biology of Music: Another One Bites the Dust’, Current Biology (2009). In this essay Fitch observes that entrainment is not strictly unique to humans, reporting evidence for its appearance in some bird species.
[2] This cultural elitism persists in classical music because of its history, but no one should let that drive them away. The music may be appreciated by anybody.
[3] Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[4] L. C. Aiello, ‘Terrestriality, bipedalism and the origin of language’, Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man, ed. J. Maynard-Smith (1996).
[5] John Blacking, How Musical is Man? (1973).
[6] Wallin, Merker and Brown, ‘An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology’ in The Origins of Music (2000).
[7] Mithen, op. cit.
[8] Mithen, op. cit.
[9] See Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind (1991).

The origins of music, part 3: Social bonding

I am sceptical about the idea that music’s origins lie in sexual selection. That does not mean that natural selection has not played a role.

Plenty of thinkers across history have decided that the arts have no practical use whatsoever. Adaptive value may lie in other processes which make music possible, rather than in music itself. If that is so, then in evolutionary terms music is a tremendous waste of time and energy.

We may more or less agree with the musicologists Cross, Zubrow and Cowan that

from a cognitive-scientific perspective, music is inescapably material, being evidenced in musical behaviours; behind human behaviours lie human minds, and behind human minds lie embodied human brains.[1] 

For music to originate in evolution, even if only partly, it must have given our Pleistocene ancestors an advantage in natural selection: that is, helped them to survive and procreate. The sheer ubiquity of music suggests to many thinkers that is not a mere by-product or accident. At the same time, recognising an evolutionary heritage does not require us to be reductive or deny creative freedom. Our palaeo-anthropological past is one thing, post-Human Revolution creative practice is another. Human consciousness has allowed us to go beyond our evolutionary inheritance.

We referred in the last post to the ideas of Dissanayake and Mithen on infant-directed speech. In this post we shall look at another significant adaptive theory centred upon social bonding. Our task is two-fold: to ask whether music does in fact reinforce social bonding, and if so, to work out if it does so as ‘evolution’ or as ‘cheesecake’.

Music as a collective activity

Infants are very effective at creating non-verbal sound that communicates a solipsistic need. In babies, this is usually a demand for something, such as food, drink or reassurance. As we get older, we are forced to come to terms with the existence of others who have their own intentions and demands, and must relinquish our infantile egotism. Part of this involves learning the structures through which our self-objectification is normally expressed. Learning to hum and sing what is considered music in our culture, and together with others, rather than producing noise to please ourselves, is an essential socialising process.

Music in modern Western society is often a passive activity, in the sense that the listener becomes a non-participating audience for the work of professional musicians. This separation of ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ is unusual – a product of a compartmentalised, commodified culture – but even then, the relationship between artist and audience creates a collective experience. Mithen notes that “music-making is first and foremost a shared activity, not just in the modern Western world, but throughout human cultures and history.”[2] This doesn’t mean that music can’t be created or enjoyed by just one person, or a couple of individuals, but it was and is normal in most societies for music to be a group activity in which everyone may take part.

In this, music is different to most other arts. It is not inconceivable for people to paint, sculpt or declaim poetry simultaneously with other practitioners in one creative event, but it is unusual. Music and dance therefore are peculiarly suited to the active expression of a collective identity.

In doing so they call upon responses which go beyond the arts. The historian William McNeill, recalling his basic training as a US conscript, commented on his experience of military drill:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.[3]

McNeill concluded that there was “something visceral at work”, a satisfying sense of social cohesion and solidarity through rhythmic and musical group movement that he terms “muscular bonding”.

Paleolithic bone flutes show humans were making instruments at the time of our cultural flowering 40,000 years ago, and non-instrumental music must have long predated that. So not only are music and dance used in various forms to encourage group solidarity across the world, they probably always have been. The biologist Walter J. Freeman has pointed out that “anthropologists and ethnopsychiatrists have documented the prevalence in preliterate tribes of singing and dancing... during religious and social ceremonies.”[4] In these ceremonies, the members of the social group gather together with shamans/priests and musicians, and dance themselves into a trancelike state to the accompaniment of clapping, drumming, chanting etc until they collapse with exhaustion. In the trance, individualism is broken down, with each individual repeating a set of rhythmic movements to the unifying glue of music. “There is no reason to doubt,” writes Freeman, “that these activities give great pleasure and catharsis to those caught up in the communal spirit of the events, and that immersion in the dance is followed by a refreshed sense of belonging to the tribe.”

For similar reasons, music is regularly used throughout social life: wedding marches and parties, military parades, funerals, religious rites and so on. There is plenty of evidence that the “strange sense of personal enlargement” described by McNeill is a genuine phenomenon. But if music can help encourage social bonding, what evolutionary advantage might it have conferred?

The possible adaptive value of music

On this question we are limited to educated speculation. Certain clues do suggest an adaptive explanation: the universality of music to all human cultures, its likely great age, the possession of musical skills by infants, its use to mark key stages in our lives, and its ability to rouse emotions and give pleasure.

The anthropologists Hagen and Bryant have proposed that music and dance evolved as a ‘coalition signalling system’ that allowed cooperative alliances between social groups.[5] Humans are unique among primates in being able to form such alliances between groups even when there is no kinship relation. Originating in territorial signals, music and dance could have communicated information about the group’s quality as coalition partners, through such means as co-ordinated vocalisations to signal group strength.

A slightly different approach was taken by another anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, who claimed that the difficulties of communicating and alliance-building in ever-increasing social groups may help to account for the origins of language. For our hominid ancestors, group cohesion was encouraged by social grooming, but once the group grew bigger than about 80 members it was no longer practical for individuals to spend half their day grooming others. Language was a more efficient means of communication, and music – or musilanguage – may have been its precursor, arising out of cooperative primate behaviours.

Encouraging greater cohesiveness may have had its own adaptive value. As human groups became larger, organising a functioning society required co-ordinated and collective behaviour. Solipsistic individuals could never have built a functioning tribe, let alone a civilisation. As Mithen put it:

Music-making is a cheap and easy form of interaction than can demonstrate a willingness to cooperate and hence may promote future cooperation when there are substantial gains to be made... Those who make music together will mould their own minds and bodies into a shared emotional state, and with that will come a loss of self-identity and a concomitant increase in the ability to cooperate with others. In fact, ‘cooperate’ is not quite correct, because as identities are merged there is no ‘other’ with whom to cooperate, just one group making decisions about how to behave.[6]

During the Ice Age, an increasingly complex human nature and society demanded social, collective action by human groups. The advantage may have resided in the ability of some groups of (musical) hominids to outperform other (non-musical) groups through superior group morale and cooperation.

Critics such as Steven Pinker contend that music is linked to domains of human experience that are connected to survival, such as vocalisation, emotion, auditory skills and motor control, but that it is itself only a tantalising by-product of these adaptations. To this we might reply, with musicologist Ian Cross, that music actively exercises those domains. “If the faculties that it exercises are necessary for survival, then the availability of a competence such as music that gives them a periodic workout and is fun into the bargain would seem to be highly adaptive.”[7] By affecting a number of aspects of experience, musical skills could actually promote general development. An infant rocked by a parent singing a lullaby has a complex experience that is sonic, emotional, symbolic, motoric, spatial, social, etc. Bringing together multiple domains on multiple levels, music allows for social interaction within agreed cultural norms, encouraging the flexibility of the mind. It’s for this reason that Cross thinks it may be “the most important thing that we humans ever did”.

Another possible criticism is that music provides no advantages to the social group that are not met by language, which is a more effective form of communication. In reply, we might refer to the musical competences of infants – shared emotional states, stress and rhythm, etc – which predate the ability to talk. One need only attend a concert to experience how music’s power to express emotion is highly effective in bringing people together without requiring any words at all.

For reasons such as these, a strong case can be made for the importance of social bonding in the evolution of music, and that such bonding offered adaptive advantage.

Conclusion

Evolution is a very slow process, and adaptations require millennia. To be an adaptive behaviour, music needs to be immensely old. If we accept the musilanguage theory, which allows musicality to predate our own species, it probably fits this criterion. It is also conceivable that music will have encouraged the propagation of the genes of those who practiced it, e.g. through a variety of benefits resulting from closer social cooperation.

There is however a danger in stressing adaptive models, because we are dealing not with animals but with self-aware human beings. When we discuss music’s ‘evolution’ we must consider both biological and cultural evolution. It is because so much of our musicality is not genetically but culturally transmitted that we see such variation in musical form and content. We are not slaves to biological programming – lots of human sexual practice, for example, has nothing to do with procreation. (It is for that reason that Freud referred to sexuality as a ‘drive’ rather than an ‘instinct’.) In the same way, we can enjoy music in ways which don’t obviously accord with the processes by which it originally arose – even if music did evolve partly as an aid to bonding a group of participants, that doesn’t stop us enjoying it in solitude.

The scientific debate between music as an evolutionary adaptation and as ‘cheesecake’ is still open. I find the arguments for music’s adaptive origins persuasive, but there is not yet a ‘correct’ view on this intriguing question.

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[1] Ian Cross, Ezra Zubrow, Frank Cowan, ‘Musical behaviours and the archaeological record: a preliminary study’, Experimental Archaeology. British Archaeological Reports International Series (2002). I would prefer an extended concept of the mind that embraces all our body and partly includes our environment – the mind cannot be constrained to the brain alone.
[2] Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[3] William H. McNeill, Keep Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (1995).
[4] Walter J. Freeman, ‘A neurobiological role of music in social bonding’, from Wallin, Merker and Brown (eds), The Origins of Music (2000).
[5] Edward Hagen and Gregory Bryant, ‘Music and Dance as a Coalition Signalling System’, Human Nature (2003).
[6] Mithen, op. cit.
[7] Ian Cross, ‘Is music the most important thing we ever did? Music, development and evolution’, Music, Mind and Science (1999).
 

The origins of music, part 2: Musilanguage

One of the major theories about the origins of music is built upon its strong similarity to language. Both share the purpose of communicating predominantly, though not exclusively, through the organisation of sound.

Steven Mithen has noted that language and music have three things in common: they may be vocal, they may be gestural, and they can be written down. Vocalisation must be one of music’s earliest forms, and it is highly gestural, e.g. people find it hard not to tap along to the rhythm. Writing and musical notation appeared in the early civilisations and are relatively late innovations.

To use the terminology of the neuroscientist Steven Brown, both music and language involve a limited repertoire of discrete building blocks, organised into phrases and higher-order structures using combinatorial rules.[1] Put simply, both organise individual acoustic elements using a kind of grammar, which can be built into larger structures such as novels or symphonies. Both also use expressive phrasing, where we modulate acoustic properties such as pitch and rhythm “for the purposes of conveying emphasis, emotional state, and emotive meaning.” In both music and language, certain modes of symbolic expression are the same across all cultures and intensify along with the emotion: happiness is expressed through faster, louder and higher music or speech, sadness by the opposite. Dean Falk, an anthropologist who specialises in the evolution of the brain, tells us that language and music are “neurologically intertwined”, and concludes that “they began evolving together by two million years ago”.[2]

Although similar, music and language are also distinct. Language conveys referential meaning, i.e. a symbolic content based upon the arbitrary association of words with specific referents. Music, on the other hand, has difficulty conveying such meaning – its emphasis is on the emotive, and it is therefore ‘manipulative’, moving our emotions and bodies. This is a divide of emphasis only. Language often uses onomatopoeia to emulate sounds, such as the English “miaow” or “tick tock”. One couldn’t easily devise music to convey the sense, “Please go and fetch the first cup on the left,” but music is not incapable of direct semantic representation. The imitation of a cuckoo in Beethoven’s sixth symphony is a famous example; or, in musical narrative, certain phrases can be associated with certain characters or concepts, as in the operatic use of leitmotif. Both language and music often use gesture, and language would not be so effective without the ‘musical’ changes of pitch, volume etc that add layers of meaning to speech.

Broadly, language and music are structurally similar forms of communication that use different systems: sound reference and sound emotion. It could be that their similarities are a pure accident, or that music grew out of language or vice versa. Brown prefers another option – that “music and language must converge at some deep level to have hierarchical organisation flower from two such different grammatical systems.”

Whereas language has a clear purpose in conveying information, the ‘use value’ of music is less obvious. Steven Pinker described music as “auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties” [3] – that is, a by-product of adaptations that evolved for other purposes. A slice of cake pleases our taste buds, not because cake was essential to our evolution, but because our ancestors evolved a liking for fat and sugar as excellent energy sources. Music would thus be what Gould called a ‘spandrel’: an accidental offshoot of more significant processes. This wouldn’t stop music being glorious, but it would mean that it was not an evolutionary adaptation.

An ancestral proto-language

Steven Brown explains the similarities by suggesting that music and language originate in a single, ancient form of vocal communication that he terms ‘musilanguage’: “an ancestral stage that was neither linguistic nor musical but that embodied the shared features of modern-day music and language.” Musilanguage combined sound as emotive meaning and as referential meaning. Only later in human development did music and language separate.

This is not a new idea. The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, wrote in 1754 that “verse, singing and speech have a common origin... one spoke as much by natural sounds and rhythm as by articulations and words”.[4] Charles Darwin suggested it in 1871 in a context of sexual selection:

When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, – would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph, – and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.[5]

In the 1920s, the linguist Otto Jespersen also championed the idea. But it has only received consistent academic attention in the last couple of decades. In The Singing Neanderthals, one of the most prominent recent books on the origins of music, Mithen argues that music and language have common origins in a quasi-musical ‘proto-language’, i.e. a musilanguage (the term I shall keep to for simplicity). Drawing upon archaeology, genetics and linguistics, Mithen follows linguist Alison Wray in proposing that

the precursor to language was a communication system composed of ‘messages’ rather than words; each hominid utterance was uniquely associated with an arbitrary meaning... modern language only evolved when holistic utterances were ‘segmented’ to produce words which could then be composed together to create statements with novel meanings.[6]

This holistic musilanguage would have made “extensive use of variation in pitch, rhythm and melody to communicate information, express emotion and induce emotion in other individuals”. A modern equivalent to how this worked might be proverbial phrases like “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, which we understand in a holistic way rather than according to their individual parts.

Steven Brown listed three essential features of musilanguage:
1. the use of pitch to convey semantic meaning
2. the creation of phrases by combining “lexical-tonal elements”, and
3. use of expressive phrasing to give emotional emphasis.

Mithen refers to musilanguage by the annoying acronym ‘Hmmmmm’, because it is holistic (made of complete meaningful phrases rather than discrete parts), manipulative (influencing our emotional states and behaviour), multimodal (using both sound and movement), musical (temporal, rhythmic, and melodic), and mimetic (making use of sound symbolism and gesture).

Pre-sapiens human species could have possessed such a musilanguage and thus had a musical capacity as well, but true language was probably limited to ourselves, so we may speculate that the separation of musilanguage into two distinct forms of communication was confined to our own species.

Mithen suggests we may hear an echo of musilanguage in the special speech we use for babies, the so-called “infant-directed speech” or “parentese”. This form of speech, which is universal in human cultures, doesn’t rely on proper words, but employs extended vowels, exaggerated pauses, and wider ranges of pitch to allow us to communicate with infants. It works because we are sensitive to the tempos and rhythms of speech long before we have learnt words (and we begin to hear before we even leave the womb). The exaggerated discourse of infant-directed speech probably helps children to pick up how words are formed and sentences constructed. But as it can communicate with infants regardless of the mother tongue of the person using it, it seems to be less about language as such and more about emotive and intentional communication through expressive phrasing. Babies can communicate non-verbally long before they can talk (and the importance of non-verbal sound stays with us into adulthood).

This idea is not Mithen’s. It was Helen Dissanayake who hypothesised that

it is in the evolution of affiliative interactions between mothers and infants – not male competition and adult courtship – that we can discover the origins of the competencies and sensitivities that gave rise to human music.[7]

We should point out that this interaction can be practiced by mothers and fathers, i.e. childcare is not a uniquely female destiny. Dissanayake’s idea is that human groups found the capacities encouraged in parent-infant interaction to be useful both emotionally and functionally in social rituals. Dean Falk has suggested something similar in her book Finding Our Tongues.

We don’t only talk with our infants – we sing to them too, to soothe them, reassure them of our presence, and to make them smile. The psychologist Sandra Trehub has demonstrated that lullabies, like infant-directed speech, sound remarkably similar across cultures. The universality of baby talk and lullabies, which are used instinctively by adults, strongly implies a genetic aspect to both. Mithen’s comment is insightful:

Those who use facial expressions, gestures and utterances to stimulate and communicate with their babies are effectively moulding the infants’ brains into the appropriate shape to become effective members of human communities.

So musilanguage may have conferred an evolutionary advantage through improved socialisation.

Beginnings

Drumming behaviour in chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas – on the ground, on their chest, or on objects like trees – may represent a distant connection to our own past through a common ancestor some 7–8 million years ago.

Great apes use barks, hoots, screams and other noises to communicate all sorts of messages – what members of the group are up to, the approach of strangers, competitive displays, etc – and sometimes accompany their vocalisations with vigorous movements like shaking branches or stamping. Such behaviours are manipulative, in the sense of trying to get a response from other apes, rather than referential, i.e. there is nothing that resembles words. They are possibly the distant precursors of music, language and dance.

John S. Allen has pointed out:

If we consider the various functions that form the basis of music’s claim to be an adaptation – courtship display, emotional communication, synchronising group behaviour, a mnemonic device for carrying information, and so on – all of these functions are at least as well served by language as by music, which would certainly limit the potential fitness benefits that might accrue with musical expertise. So in order for music to be considered an adaptation in these domains, it would have to have enhanced prelinguistic expression in earlier hominids.[8]

The differences of anatomy between the hominids and other apes as a result of our shift to meat-eating, such as reduced size of the teeth and jaws, allowed us to increase our vocal range. This capacity was also affected by bipedality, which lowered our larynx as well as expanding our brain and nervous system. Increasing group size probably demanded an increase in the quality and quantity of calls. Drawing on Robert Dunbar’s research on the development of language through vocal instead of physical grooming, Mithen speculates that early hominids ‘sang’ to each other, reinforcing their social relationships:

One might have heard predator alarm calls; calls relating to food availability and requests for help with butchery; mother-infant communications; the sounds of pairs and small groups maintaining their social bonds by communicating with melodic calls; and the vocalisations of individuals expressing particular emotions and seeking to induce them in others.[9]

Mithen then imagines the whole group, at the close of the day, engaged in group song.

Musilanguage would have arisen among early hominids and died out with the Neanderthals. It is worth stressing that true music is a uniquely human activity. Tracing music’s lineage back to great ape communication does not mean that there is anything musical about that communication, only that it provided a foundation for a human behaviour. Some animal species are capable of very complex vocalisations which to us sound musical (the obvious example being songbirds). But we must be cautious about making lazy, anthropocentric connections. Apes’ capacity for vocal learning is much poorer than our own. Humans are separated from chimps, our nearest surviving ape ancestors, by six million years of evolution, and from birds, some of whose vocal learning is considerably better than chimps’, by far longer again. It is possible to teach a degree of symbolic behaviour to apes, but only under controlled conditions. Animals miss the vital ingredient of creative self-awareness, and so their communication does not contain the rich meanings of human signs, or break out of instinctive patterns. Recognising a phylogenetic aspect to music is one thing; assuming a gradualist development from animal behaviours that ignores the uniqueness of humans is another.

Mimesis

Mithen finds another possible source of musical behaviours, for which he consults the work of the evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald. Early human species may have possessed a culture in-between that of apes and modern humans, what Donald called “mimetic”. Mimesis, or imitation, would in this context have been deliberate representational behaviour that didn’t use words, which may have played an important role in communicating encounters with new animals and environments as humans spread out of their traditional African homelands.

The earliest attempts at what became music may have been people observing and trying to imitate the sounds of the natural world – as practised by surviving hunter-gatherer societies – or of human labour, such as the rhythmic knapping of flints. These imitations, predominantly created using the voice, could then be repeated, structured, combined, and added to social rituals such as attaining adulthood, burial and so on. Through imitation, early humans could “create new types of tools, colonise new landscapes, use fire and engage in big-game hunting” (Mithen).

Such mimetic behaviour would have operated as holistic, self-contained messages. Hence the title of Mithen’s book – the Neanderthals, although not possessing true language, would have had a rich repertoire of holistic phrases, and therefore some measure of musicality.

Once humans had the ability to vocally imitate the sounds of nature and their own activities, and accompany these vocal signs with gestural ones, we had the seeds of language. This would often have been onomatopoeic: a buzzing noise intended to imitate a bee, for example, could become a word which meant ‘bee’. Another means of language development is ‘sound synaesthesia’, a more precise term for ‘sound symbolism’, wherein the sound not only mimics the animal’s own calls, but tries to capture something of its nature. An example is the use of long sounds like ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ to represent a large, heavy animal. Such sounds could be accompanied by gestures, or mime. This process proceeded in a dialectical spiral, the physiological and lexical assisting one another.

Mimesis is one of the most persuasive theories for the beginnings of music, potent whether or not one subscribes to the existence of an ancestral musilanguage.

From musilanguage to language and music

One of the challenges for proponents of musilanguage is to explain how it made the leap to modern music and language, and when in human history that took place.

According to Brown, the division arose because musilanguage had two aspects that gradually became separate specialisms. The first, symbolic communication emphasising referential meaning, became language. The other, emphasising emotional communication, became music.

Explaining how individual words, or sounds, came to be organised into phrases – i.e. grammar, both lexical and musical – and into extended structures is difficult. Proponents of proto-languages, such as Wray and Arbib, have suggested that holistic phrases could have been gradually broken up into elements of meaning, giving us sentences and then nouns, verbs etc. This could have begun with the recognition of chance associations between particular bits of holistic phrasing and their referents: if a particular phoneme appeared in two phrases which both made some reference to a deer, that phoneme could be held up as an arbitrary label for ‘deer’. Instead of developing individual words and only later a grammar to stick them together with, early humans slowly broke down ‘sung’ phrases into discrete parcels with a precise meaning. The isolation of individual musical notes, together with ways of stitching them together with a musical grammar, could have followed the same course. Freed by language of the need to relay information, musilanguage could become music, concentrating upon communicating emotion and reinforcing group identity.

When precisely this split happened is an open question, but it must have been complete [10] by the time of the flowering of art 50,000 years ago. Going by the archaeological evidence of actual musical instruments, true music, despite its beginnings among earlier hominids, matures for certain only with Homo sapiens.

“Discrete words, that can be combined to make new and unique utterances,” Mithen concludes, “were a relatively late development in the evolutionary process that led to language.”

Music emerged from the remnants of ‘Hmmmmm’ after language evolved. Compositional, referential language took over the role of information exchange so completely that ‘Hmmmmm’ became a communication system almost entirely concerned with the expression of emotion and the forging of group identities, tasks at which language is relatively ineffective. Indeed, having been relieved of the need to transmit and manipulate information, ‘Hmmmmm’ could specialise in these roles and was free to evolve into the communication system that we now call music. As the language-using modern humans were able to invent complex instruments, the capabilities of the human body became extended and elaborated, providing a host of new possibilities for musical sound.[11]

These possibilities were indeed immense, because music evolved as a form of communication. How this communication is made and how it is used can take an infinite number of forms: from handclapping in the playground to an orchestra trumpeting the destiny of humankind.

Conclusion

Mithen sharply disagrees with Pinker’s assessment of music as a non-adaptive ‘extra’. Emotions, he argues, are deeply rooted in our evolutionary past and in our physiology. Why would music affect them so strongly if it was a recent and superficial innovation? In his view the development of music from musilanguage did have adaptive value, enabling communication with infants and group bonding. These behaviours were firmly established with Homo sapiens before our migration from Africa, which explains their universality today.

Mithen’s book tends to make speculative claims without adequate evidence. He says for example that the development of language meant a certain loss of musicality, but presents no strong evidence of this. If modern musical practice often diverges from traditional collective and participatory models, this is not the fault of language but of capitalism, which has commodified, individualised and technologised music-making, dividing it up into categories and specialisations. In many non-Western, and indeed Western contexts, human beings continue to participate in music spontaneously and collectively much as our ancestors did. His conclusion that the Neanderthals must have been at some level more musical than ourselves seems completely unprovable.[12]

Another shortcoming of Mithen’s book is his commitment to modularity in the brain. Mithen himself notes that the way music processing is distributed through the brain shows that there cannot be a single ‘music module’, so he then has to suggest an increasing number of different modules dealing with different aspects of music. Brain scans have shown that the neural processing of music takes place in many different areas. Mithen acknowledges this, suggesting that modularity does not have to be limited to discrete areas, but he is unable to prove the location or existence of modules.

These shortcomings don’t prove wrong the theory of musilanguage, which remains one of the most serious attempts to solve the mystery of music’s origins. We will consider some of the other adaptive theories in the next post.

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[1] Steven Brown, ‘The Musilanguage Model of Language Evolution’, from Wallin, Merker and Brown (eds), The Origins of Music (2000).
[2] Dean Falk, ‘Hominid Brain Evolution and the Origin of Music’, from Wallin et al, op. cit.
[3] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997).
[4] Rousseau, Essay On the Origin of Languages (written 1754, pub. posthumously in 1781).
[5] Darwin, Chapter 3 of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). For a discussion of Darwin’s ideas see W. Tecumseh Fitch, ‘Musical protolanguage: Darwin’s theory of language evolution revisited’ from Language Log (2009).
[6] Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[7] Ellen Dissanayake, ‘Antecedents of the temporal arts in early mother-infant interaction’, from Wallin, Merker and Brown (eds), The Origins of Music (2000).
[8] John S. Allen, The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind (2009).
[9] Mithen, op. cit.
[10] Though of course musical elements live on in language, via holistic idioms, infant-directed speech, and the persistence of onomatopeoia, sound synaesthesia etc.
[11] Mithen, op. cit.
[12] To be fair it is one of the benefits of popular science writing, as opposed to strictly scientific papers, that one may engage in creative speculation of this kind.

The origins of music, part 1

“Music is a strange thing, I would almost say it is a miracle.”
– Heinrich Heine

Most musicologists agree that music – like dance, its close companion – is universal in human cultures. All human beings, apart from those with unusual cognitive deficits, perceive pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre etc, process them as music in various parts of our brains, and experience emotional responses. This seems to be true at least as far back as 35,000 years ago, when examples of musical instruments from the Upper Paleolithic provide the first unequivocal evidence of music-making. Given the sophistication of those examples, the history of instruments probably extends back even earlier, implying that music has always been practiced by anatomically and behaviourally modern human beings. It is also conceivable that musicality existed in some form amongst pre-sapiens human species. So music is both ubiquitous and ancient.

All existing human societies have music – whereas not all have literacy. Parents and carers the world over sing to babies, who are sensitive from birth to tonal variation and rhythm. We use music to motivate armies, to marry, to bury the dead, to worship deities and for sheer fun; we listen in groups and alone; it can make us happy or sad. Although music takes an infinite variety of cultural forms, key elements like rhythm and repetition are common to all, and even people who consider themselves ‘unmusical’ can enjoy and participate in it. Enjoyment of music has no national boundaries, meaning that whereas an untranslated poem will be incomprehensible to millions of people, a piece of music may be appreciated by anyone, and this remains true even of music from completely different periods and cultures to one’s own. In 1973 the British musicologist John Blacking put this well:

Music can transcend time and culture. Music that was exciting to the contemporaries of Mozart and Beethoven is still exciting, although we do not share their culture. The early Beatles’ songs are still exciting although the Beatles have unfortunately broken up. Similarly, some Venda songs that must have been composed hundreds of years ago still excite me. Many of us are thrilled by Koto music from Japan, sitar music from India, Chopi xylophone music, and so on… I am convinced that the explanation for this is to be found in the fact that at the level of deep structures in music there are elements that are common to the human psyche, although they may not appear in the surface structures.[1]

Despite music’s extraordinary universality and its evident importance in human culture (including its part in an entertainment industry worth billions of dollars), research into its origins and evolution has been relatively scarce. Only in the last decade or two, which have seen a surge of interest in human cognition, have scientists begun to study it consistently.

Has music existed from the beginnings of Homo sapiens, or in earlier human species? What was it for? How does it relate to the development of language and other capacities? Did it give some kind of evolutionary advantage? These are not easy questions, and I will be offering no firm answers, as music’s origins are still opaque. Our theories can be difficult to test: like language, music does not fossilise.

Even defining music is not straightforward. Trying to do it in terms of particular styles or instruments, for example, is an obvious dead end. All cultures use rhythm, vocals and melody, together with bodily movements, in order to organise sound, but musical practice varies enormously across cultures. There is always an exceptional case – such as John Cage’s 4’ 33”, a piece consisting of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence played by any combination of instruments – to confound definitions [2]. The best we can do is focus on what most music tends to be like, and recognise that not all ‘universal’ musical traits will appear in all music. Although we know of no society that did not have music in practice, a concept of music is not universal, and some cultures (such as the Ewe people of Western Africa) do not even have a word for it, or at least for what the West means by it.

Our understanding of music is further complicated by the subjectivity of our response to it. Some people are obsessed by music, or by one specific form of it, whereas others have no taste for it at all. Every human being will respond to a piece of music in different ways, and furthermore, a person’s reactions to the same piece can vary from one day to the next.

One of music’s most important abilities is arousing emotions in the people who hear it. We shall consider this elsewhere, because we are interested in aesthetically aroused emotion as a topic pertinent to all art forms.

The biology of music

The universality of music suggests that our capacity to create and enjoy it is to some extent genetic, so in our search for its origins we need to draw upon anthropology and evolutionary theory. If we can identify the physiological capacities necessary for making music, we may be able to discover when humans first became capable of it, and gain other insights into its nature.

Like any art, music is not only produced but is also perceived by an audience. (The two cannot be separated, as we only make art that we know can be perceived.) Let us begin with production.

We know from the tool record that human species long before Homo sapiens had the dexterity to hit two objects together in a way that would function as percussion. But even this does not represent the earliest potential limit for musicality. Part of the musical skill set amongst modern hunter-gatherers requires purely bodily actions such as body-slapping, hand-clapping, stamping and so on, which require only basic primate physiology.

One of the first musical skills, predating the creation of instruments, must have been some form of singing. Singing is almost impossible to trace via the fossil record, but for vocalisations in general we have more evidence. Many animals use vocalisations to serve various functions: courtship, territorialism, aggression, and so on. Some species, such as parrots and bats, can even learn vocal [3] behaviours instead of merely inheriting them. Our hominid ancestors must also have had a repertoire of vocalisations, gestures and other behaviours which, following an increase in general intelligence from Australopithecus or early Homo, provided the foundation for more complex communication later. Humans can produce far more sounds than other apes – partly because of the construction of their vocal system, e.g. the descended larynx which extended the vocal tract and increased the range of sounds we could make, and partly because of our gift for vocal learning and imitation.

It is possible that a vocal apparatus capable of chanting and singing dates as early as Homo ergaster (1.8–1.3 million years ago), though the evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch has argued that singing requires more precise control and breathing capacity even than normal speech, which would date true singing much later, perhaps to the split between the Neanderthal and modern human lineages. [4] It is likely that Neanderthals had a vocal apparatus much like ours: amongst other similarities, a Neanderthal hyoid bone from 60,000 years ago is similar to that of humans, and their larynx was low in the throat like our own.[5]

As for the perception of music, this depends upon our auditory and cognitive abilities, themselves a product of the evolutionary process. The human ear has thousands of nerve endings that send signals to the brain, and it is sensitive to a great range of frequencies and dynamics. It converts sounds into neural messages which are interpreted by parts of the brain in terms of pitch, rhythm, melody, timbre, time, and so on. This can provoke a variety of physiological and emotional responses such as foot-tapping, swaying, weeping and the rest. Processing music requires some brain specialisation and a division of labour between the hemispheres.

It seems from the study of infants that our perception of music is innate. Despite certain difficulties (not least infants’ inability to tell us what they are experiencing), research such as that of psychologist Sandra Trehub has shown that infants can recognise differences in tone, melody, key and rhythm, sometimes better even than adults. Patricia Kuhl, a researcher in language and brain development, found that babies have an “exquisite sensitivity” to speech, preferring to listen to ‘parentese’ [6], the lulling half-sung speech used by parents with infants. As this sensitivity occurs even before language, it is possible that the mechanisms involved are very ancient, even predating our species.

The range of frequencies perceived by the ear approximates to the range of frequencies of our vocalisations (making our auditory system very well suited to perceiving singing). It is probable that our vocal and auditory abilities evolved in a close relationship with one another.

On one level our musicality can be reduced to electrical contacts firing through some of the hundred billion of the brain’s neurons, or nerve cells. We know that parts of the brain are responsible for different functions: two sections named Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area for example are essential for language, and defects in or injuries to the brain can damage people’s ability to understand language (aphasia) or music (amusia).

But aspects of music such as rhythm, melody and pitch seem to be processed in different areas, and there is no evidence that there is any one ‘music area’ of the brain. Consider the totality of a musician playing a tune on an instrument: the process requires not just neurological activity relating to melody but also memory (to remember what fingering is required to get the desired sound), motor skills, listening to and assessing the sounds one is making, breath control, social awareness of the audience’s reaction, etc. The brain’s functions and physical spaces – whether or not one believes it is modular – overlap in complex ways that are poorly understood. The reason there is such a variety of cognitive deficits is because these functions can go wrong in different places, and it is possible that the brain sees the aspects of music as specific examples of more general cognitive tasks rather than identifying it as one musical process. Any hunt for a ‘music gene’ will, like all genetic determinism, be in vain.

The limits of biology

There is certainly a biological aspect to music (without auditory organs, we wouldn’t be able to listen to it). But having a physiological equipment capable of making and perceiving music is one thing, actually using it for that purpose is another. Evidence from Blombos Cave and elsewhere suggests that we had the capacity for art before the emigration from Africa – though unequivocal evidence for music does not exist prior to the appearance of musical instruments in the Upper Paleolithic – but the flowering of art seems to have come thousands of years later and was probably driven by culture. Tracking only the physiological capacity for music is clearly not going to be enough: we must also ask when, how and why we began to use it.

A crow’s syrinx is no less developed than a nightingale’s, but its croak hardly compares to the latter’s song; nearer to home, Neanderthals’ vocal equipment may well have been similar to ours, but there’s no unequivocal evidence that they were at all musical. Despite their physiological similarity to ourselves, earlier human species may not have created music as we understand it, because they are separated from us by a qualitative leap of consciousness. As Marx observed: “It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc.”[7] By this he meant that sights and sounds are experienced differently by an animal to how they are experienced by a self-aware human being. Humans are tool-making, creative, universal beings. Although humans are not strictly unique in making tools, having culture, etc, the reality is that in the sum of our creative and intellectual powers we are unique among animal species. This is why birdsong, the most obvious instance of ‘musicality’ in animals, cannot be considered to be music, however musical it may sound to humans. The behaviours of animals are instinctive and functional, not creative in any way comparable to ours.

Also, of course, music always takes a concrete form mediated by the social context lived in by the musicians. The biological aspect of music doesn’t explain why particular groups or individuals produced particular ‘works’. To ignore this wider context is to distort our understanding and turn music into an abstraction. This is what allowed evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller to draw conclusions like this:

I took random samples of... jazz albums... rock albums... and classical music works... Males produced ten times as much music as females, and their musical output peaked in young adulthood, around age thirty, near the time of peak mating effort... [This suggests] that music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females.[8]

Miller’s view is that music, which makes great demands on our time and energy, must have evolved as an adaptation, specifically as a way of finding a mate. It is true that complex sound displays in other animals, such as birds, are related to sexual selection, so it is not unreasonable to explore this in humans. Darwin originally proposed the idea, in The Descent of Man, writing:

it appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.[9] 

No doubt plenty of males, as in Miller’s account, have succeeded in winning female attention with their skill in music. But Miller’s reduction of music to a heterosexual courtship display, with reference to a narrow sample of modern Western practice (e.g. the promiscuity of Jimi Hendrix), is not adequate to explain most of the music created across human cultures. There is a huge qualitative difference between human music-making and the courtship calls of animals, however fascinating and complex the latter can be. It is also ignorant to ignore the sexism that has excluded women from cultural production.

In my view sexual selection is an unlikely explanation of music for three reasons. Firstly, sexual selection in animals is usually accompanied by sexual dimorphism, i.e. a divergence of form or capacity between the sexes. Musical performance for sexual selection in animals is exclusively performed by males, but in humans, males and females are born with equal musical ability. Secondly, musicality exists from birth, whereas human sexual characteristics generally come into play later in childhood and adolescence. Thirdly, the great majority of music is created by groups involving the whole community, not least to encourage collective identity – not for individual sexual display. Poor examples of evolutionary psychology do not necessarily discredit the discipline in principle, but Miller’s approach serves more to ‘prove’ reactionary social stereotypes than to take science forward.

Opinions on the origins of music tend to divide into two camps: one seeing it as an evolutionary adaptation, principally serving natural selection (e.g. sexual selection as with Miller), and one seeing it as a product of other cognitive adaptations and less adaptively important in itself (e.g. Steven Pinker). It is however possible to consider it as a mixture of both. With this context in mind, our next post will look at one of the most popular evolutionary theories: ‘musilanguage’.

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[1] John Blacking, How Musical is Man? (1973).
[2] This work by Cage should nonetheless be considered music because it is organised sound, albeit one where the sound is playfully silenced, within a tradition of comparable sound performances (i.e. classical concerts).
[3] ‘Vocal’ is distinct from ‘verbal’, which implies language.
[4] W. Tecumseh Fitch, ‘The Evolution of Music in Comparative Perspective’ (2005).
[5] See for example d’Errico et al, ‘Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music – An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective’, Journal of World Prehistory (2003).
[6] Sometimes called ‘baby talk’, ‘infant-directed speech’ or ‘motherese’. I don’t recommend the latter term, as it is sexist in its implication that communicating with infants is a domain for women.
[7] Karl Marx, ‘Private Property and Communism’, Third Manuscript, 1844 Manuscripts (1844).
[8] Geoffrey Miller, ‘Evolution of Human Music Through Natural Selection’, from Wallin, Merker and Brown (eds), The Origins of Music (2000).
[9] Darwin, Chapter XIX of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).