0.7 Music, biological evolution, and the brain  (Page 7/30)

Pinker’s proposal is notable for its specificity in suggesting the nonmusical foundations upon which music builds. These are: 1) the prosodic component of language, 2) auditory scene analysis, 3) emotional calls, 4) habitat selection, and 5) motor control. Pinker also allows for the possibility that the love of music is a chance byproduct of the wiring of our brains, e.g., “some kind of…short-circuit or coupling that came along as an accident of the way that auditory, emotional, language, and motor circuits are packed together in the brain” (p. 538). According to Pinker, music brings us pleasure because it “tickles the sensitive spots” of these faculties. Specifically, 1) music has prosody-like properties, and the brain rewards the analysis of prosodic signals (patterns of linguistic rhythm and intonation) because prosody is an important component of language; 2) music is rich in harmonic sounds (sounds in which frequency components are integer multiples of some fundamental frequency), and the brain rewards the analysis of such sounds because harmonicity is an acoustic cue used to identify sound sources, an important part of auditory scene analysis; 3) music can evoke strong emotions because it contains pitch and rhythm patterns that resemble our species’ emotional calls, and 4) because it contains sound patterns reminiscent of evocative environmental sounds (e.g. “safe” or “unsafe” sounds, such as thunder, wind, or growls); 5) musical rhythm engenders rhythmic movement (e.g., in dance), and such movement is rewarded by the brain because rhythmic motor patterns are associated with biologically meaningful behaviors, such as walking, running, or digging.

Pinker’s proposal is much more detailed than that of James (1890), informed as it is by the century of cognitive science research that separates the two books. (For example, Pinker discusses in detail the influential music-cognition theories of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1983.) Nevertheless, James and Pinker arrive at a similar view of the biological significance of music. James wrote that music has “no zoological utility,” and Pinker asserts, “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless.” Perhaps James and Pinker were referring to evolutionary utility as opposed to utility during the lifetime of individual humans, but their writings do not specify this. Furthermore, Pinker’s metaphor of music as a recreational drug implies a view of music as having a rather superficial relationship to human biology.

There are now several nonadaptationist theories of music, each offering distinct hypotheses about the brain systems upon which music builds. Livingstone and Thompson (2009), for example, argue that music builds on a recently evolved human theory of mind ability to serve the primary purpose of affective engagement. Panksepp (2009), in contrast, emphasizes music’s connection to evolutionarily ancient socio-emotional brain circuitry. There are other nonadaptationist proposals (e.g., Sperber, 1996), but none systematically considers music’s power to shape human brain function. It is on this point that TTM theory differs from existing nonadaptationist theories of music.