formation and maintenance ofgroup identity, for the conduct ofcollective thinking(as in
the transmission of group history and planning for action), for group synchronization—the
sharing of time—between members of a group, and for group catharsis, the collective
expression and experience of emotion. Ultimately, Brown sees music as having become
instantiated in human cultures through its role as ‘ritual’s reward system’; music, for him,
is a type of‘modulatory system acting at the group level to convey the reinforcement value
of these activities...for survival’. And if Brown is correct in his portrayal of music’s role in
promoting ‘groupishness’, music is likely to have been a major contributor to what Smith
and Szathmáry^41 hold to have constituted one of the major transitions in evolution: the
very emergence of human culture.
Dissanayake^42 see the mature expression of music in human culture as intimately
linked to the characteristics of mother–infant interaction. She views music (p. 390) as
‘multimodal or multimedia activity of temporally patterned movements’that has ‘the
capacity to coordinate the emotions of participants and thus promote conjoinment’.
She suggests that features of the musicality of mother–infant interaction might lay the
foundations for a ‘grammar of the emotions’that can be expressed in mature musical
(and other artistic) activities. For the developing child, the musical characteristics of
mother-infant interaction are of critical importance in the acquisition of capacities for
‘social regulation and emotional bonding’; these characteristics also provide the elements
in the ‘musical play’of later childhood that will equip the adult with the predisposition
and capacity to engage in the structured interactions of ceremony and ritual as well as in
specifically musical behaviours. However, other significant and functional roles have been
proposed for music in individual development and in the development of capacities
for social interaction; music can be both a consequence free means of exploring social
interaction and a ‘play space’for rehearsing processes that may be necessary to achieve
cognitive flexibility.^43
Music is consequence free in that it is not directlyfunctional; it is nonefficacious. It is
specifically suited to testing out aspects of social interaction by virtue of both its noneffi-
caciousness and its polysemic nature, its multiple potential meanings. For each child in a
group ostensibly involved in a cooperative musical activity, that musical activity can mean
something different yet the singularity of the collective musical activity is not threatened
by the existence of multiple simultaneous and potentially conflicting meanings. Music pro-
vides for a child a medium for the gestation of a capacity for social interaction, a risk-free
space for the exploration of social behaviour that can sustain otherwise potentially risky
action and transaction.
Just as one can posit a role for music in the socialization of the child, one can also
postulate a role for music in the development of the child’s individual cognitive capacities
that is quite distinct from its efficacy in the child’s acculturation. Again, this role is
motivated by the intrinsically polysemic nature of music, the fact that its significances
can modulate from situation to situation and can even be simultaneously multiple. If
music is aboutanything, it exhibits a deictic intentionality, a ‘transposable aboutness’.And
it is conceivable that music’s ‘transposable aboutness’is exploited in infancy and childhood
as a means of forming connections and interrelations between different domains of infant
and childhood competence such as the social, biological, and mechanical. To give a crude
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