Ellen Dissanayake

Abstract

Speculations about the biological origins of music, like other human social behav-

iors, typically assume that competition affecting reproductive success was and

is the ultimate evolutionary driving force. A different approach maintains that

human music originated in perceptual, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional com-

petencies and sensitivities that developed from primate precursors in survival-

enhancing affiliative interactions (using ritualized packages of sequential vocal,

facial, and kinesic behaviors) between mothers and infants under six months of

age. Thus music in its origins is viewed as a multimedially presented and multi-

modally processed activity of temporally and spatially patterned—exaggerated

and regularized—vocal, bodily, and even facial movements. It is held that because

of increasing infant altriciality during hominization, the primate propensity for

relationship or emotional communion, not simply sociability, became so crucial

that special affiliative mechanisms evolved to enhance and ensure it. These mech-

anisms in turn could be further developed (as temporal arts, including music) to

serve affiliative bonding among adults in a species where close cooperation also

became unprecedentedly critical for individual survival. That musical ability (like

any variable attribute) can be and is used competitively in particular instances

is not denied. However, the hypothesis offered here is able to address and

account for music’s specific and widely attested power to coordinate and conjoin

individuals, both physically and psychologically.

In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin

(1885:566–573) speculated, as do we more than a century later, about the

origins of human music. He identified analogues and possible precursors

of music in the animal world, most of which evolved by sexual selection,

and thereby set the course for subsequent evolutionary speculations

about the arts. Darwin noted that male animals use their vocal organs in

the excitement of love, rage, and jealousy (p. 566), and during the breed-

ing season more than at any time (p. 567). Hence he inferred that the

ancestors of humans probably also used musical tones and rhythm when

excited by jealousy, rivalry, and triumph (p. 572), as well as for attracting

and charming each other (p. 573). Still Darwin also observed 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” (pp. 569–570).

I suggest that the enjoyment and capacity of producing musical notes

are faculties of indispensable use in the daily habits of life of countless

women, specifically mothers, and their infants, and that it is in the evo-

lution of affiliative interactions between mothers and infants—not male

competition or adult courtship—that we can discover the origins of the

competencies and sensitivities that gave rise to human music. Such a

21

Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant

Interaction