The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

of brain function,the hominid brain expansion,tool production,tool use,

social structure,group rituals,evolution of syntax,and the like,analysis

of music origins provides many avenues for addressing critical questions

related to the origins of language and the evolution of human social

behavior.

Selection Mechanisms for Music

This discussion of the evolution of culture raises several important

questions about the evolution of music.What is music for? under what

conditions did it evolve? what types of selection pressures led to the

evolution of human musical capacity? It seems quite clear that no known

human culture lacks music and that all human beings are capable of

creating and responding to music.Furthermore,neurological studies

demonstrate the brain’s specificity for music (Peretz 1993;Peretz and

Morais 1993),again suggesting that musical capacity represents a specific

biological competence rather a generalized cultural function.Yet,music

is a highly multifunctional adaptation;it serves a large diversity of func-

tional roles in all cultures.The logical question then becomes whether

we can ascertain anything about the selection pressures that led to the

evolution of this function by analyzing music’s many roles in contempo-

rary human cultures.

Many functional accounts for the origins of music have been proposed,

and include everything from its uses in promoting domestication of

animals and coordinating human social activity,to its roles in sexual

display and parental care.If anything,such a diversity of roles would

seem to discourage any simple determination of its underlying selection

pressures.However,a number of evolutionary hypotheses are presented

in this book.They fall into a few categories.First,several authors hold

that music evolved by sexual selection,in other words that it evolved as

a courtship device in the service of mate selection,a proposal closely

connected to theories of singing in nonhuman animals,as many exam-

ples of animal song are thought to play a role in either intrasexual or

intersexual selection (Darwin 1871;Andersson 1994).Such concepts can

be found in the chapters by Slater,Payne,Merker,Miller,and Todd.

Second,several authors link music’s adaptive role to its ability to

promote coordination,cohesion,and cooperation at the level of the

social group.Such ideas can be found in the chapters by Geissmann,

Ujhelyi,Brown,Richman,Dissanayake,and Freeman (see also Brown in

press).Third, Dissanayake (this volume) proposes a parental care

hypothesis in which music evolved to increase individual fitness by

means of increasing offspring survival through improved parent-off-

spring communication.Finally,a number of contributors discuss the

origins of music in terms of homology with language rather than in terms

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