mood, it could contribute to infant growth and development by facilitating feeding, sleep-
ing, and even learning. Children’s extended period of helplessness creates intense selection
pressures for parental commitment and for infant behaviours to reward such commitment.
Falling asleep to lullabies or entering trance-like states to performances of other songs might
be suitable rewards for maternal effort. In general, favourable consequences of maternal
singing on infant arousal, whether through cry reduction, sleep induction, or positive affect,
would contribute to infant well-being while sustaining such maternal behavior. Presumably,
the healthy and contented offspring of singing mothers would be more likely to pass on their
genes than would the offspring of non-singing mothers.
Maternal singing may also be self-soothing, providing a safe outlet for negative as well as
positive feelings.^12 There are numerous examples of lullabies across cultures that combine
laments on life with sleep-inducing singing.12,135Maternal singing is likely to strengthen
the emotional ties between mother and infant106,119just as singing in other contexts
reduces the psychological distance between singer and listener.136,137Indeed, maternal
singing may set the stage for the subsequent role of music in group bonding.26,138In any
case, singing to infants seems to enhance maternal as well as infant well-being.
If women’s expressive singing captures the attention and hearts of infant listeners, it may
have been equally captivating to young adult males in the distant past. In some avian
species, females sing to attract mates, and they lead duets with their male partner.17,139
There is speculation, moreover, that such duetting fosters long-term pair bonding.^140 These
notions are inconsistent with Miller’s^14 view of music as male sexual courtship. To evaluate
his hypothesis, Miller compared the recorded output of prominent jazz, rock, and classical
musicians. Male musicians produced 10 times as much music as female musicians, their
output reaching its peak near the age of peak mating effort. This led Miller^14 to conclude
that music continues to function as a courtship display to attract females. To date, however,
there is no evidence of sexual dimorphism in musical ability or achievement that cannot
be accounted for by sociocultural factors.
Tooby and Cosmides^141 offer a radically different evolutionary account of the universal
attraction to the imaginative arts (e.g.fiction, visual art, music). Unlike human activities that
have fitness-enhancing consequences in the external world (e.g. sex) or on the body (e.g. eat-
ing), aesthetic activities promote fitness-enhancing activities in the human brain. According
to Tooby and Cosmides,^140 readying the brain for its mature role is one of the most critical
and most exacting developmental tasks. They contend that artistic or imaginative actions
(or action tendencies) play a key role in mental development. In line with their view, infants’
attraction to music may reflect motivational guidance systems designed to develop and fine-
tune the brain mechanisms that subserve cognitive and social competence. Part of what may
make music so important in this regard is its lack of immediate consequences (Cross, this
volume)—the very factor that leads others^2 to dispute its biological basis.
Conclusion
It is clear that infants do not begin life with a blank musical slate. Instead, they are
predisposed to attend to the melodic contour and rhythmic patterning of sound sequences,
whether music or speech. They are tuned to consonant patterns, melodic as well as
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