concept provides a new and promising approach to the longstanding
mystery of music’s origin and evolutionary purpose.
I do not refer to lullabies or to maternal singing but to early inter-
actions,ritualized packages of sequential behaviors,vocal,facial,and
kinesic,between mothers and infants under six months of age.I thus
view music in its origins more broadly than as vocalizations,rather,as a
multimodal or multimedia activity of temporally patterned movements.
I also emphasize its capacity not only to attract and charm individuals,
but to coordinate the emotions of participants and thus promote
conjoinment.
My thesis begins with the physical helplessness of the human infant
at birth.During hominization,as we know,increasing commitments to
bipedal locomotion and to expanding brain size affected gestation length
and compelled greater infant altriciality,since the narrow birth passage
required by upright posture conflicted with continuing encephalization.
The solution (or compromise) was that infants were born increasingly
prematurely (Leakey 1994:45;Morgan 1995:59).
The trend toward increasingly helpless infants surely created intense
selective pressure for proximate physiological and cognitive mechanisms
to ensure longer and better maternal care.^1 I suggest that the solution to
this problem was accomplished by coevolution in infants and mothers of
rhythmic,temporally patterned,jointly maintained communicative inter-
actions that produced and sustained positive affect—psychobiological
brain states of interest and joy—by displaying and imitating emotions
and motivations of affiliation,and thereby sharing,communicating,and
reinforcing them.^2Typical Features of Mother-Infant Early Interaction
Early-interaction studies indicate that in the first half year of life infants
possess quite remarkable unlearned abilities that predispose them for
interaction and intimacy with a partner (e.g.,Stern 1971,1983;Trevarthen
1974,1977,1979a,b,1993;Beebe 1982;Beebe and Gerstman 1984).Even
neonates,for example,can perceive time and temporal sequence,esti-
mate durations of intervals lasting seconds and fractions of seconds in
their own and in others’ behavior,detect contingencies between their
behavior and environmental events,and develop expectancies of when
events occur (Jaffe et al.submitted).Studies with neonates and six-
week-old infants indicate that temporal organization composed of short
cycles of attention and inattention underlies the earliest social interac-
tions (Beebe,Stern,and Jaffe 1979;Trevarthen 1984;Jaffe et al.1991;
Feldstein et al.1993;Jaffe et al.submitted).Infants can respond to vari-390 Ellen Dissanayake