The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

Do Animals Make Music?

If it is at all true that phonocoding in animals has some relationship,

however remote,to the creation of human music,where in the animal

kingdom should the search begin? The potential for the unusually rich

exploitation of phonological syntax that generates the wonderfully

diverse sound patterns of birdsong seems to depend in turn on their

learnability.Phonocoding does occur in innate songs of both birds and

mammals (Craig 1943;Robinson 1979,1984),but never on the elaborate

scale that we find in some learned birdsongs.The only other case in which

something remotely similar is to be found in animals is in the learned

songs of the humpback whale (Payne,Tyack,and Payne 1983;Payne and

Payne 1985).Note that the only animal taxa for which we know for sure

that vocal learning shapes the development of naturally occurring vocal

behavior are birds and cetaceans.With the possible exception of bats

(Boughman 1998),other animals,including nonhuman primates,have

vocal repertoires that are innate.We can infer that the ability to learn

new vocalizations,evident in no primate other than humans (Snowdon

and Elowson 1992),greatly facilitated the emergence and rich exploita-

tion of phonocoding,employed subsequently as a basic step in the evo-

lution of speech behavior.On this basis I would argue that human music

may have predated the emergence of language (see chapter 1 and

Merker,this volume).What gave the human brain the capacity for lan-

guage was more than the ability to learn and produce new sounds in an

infinite number of combinations.Much more remarkable was the com-

pletely novel ability of our immediate ancestors to attach new meanings

to these sounds and recombine them into a multitude of meaningful sen-

tences,something that no other organism has achieved.So if what birds

and whales can tell us about the evolution of language is so limited,it is

not unreasonable to wonder if they have more to say about the origins

of music.

The fact that many animal calls are fundamentally affective and non-

symbolic augurs well for the prospect of some kind of commonality

between those sounds and music.Both are immensely rich in emotional

meaning,but generally speaking,neither animal song nor,except in very

special cases,human music is usually viewed as meaningful in the strict,

referential,symbolic sense.So rather than referential alarm and food

calls of animals,we would be more likely to gravitate to animal songs if

we were looking for roots for human music.As we have seen,some are

complex enough to offer intriguing possibilities.I focus here on one basic

theme,namely,creativity,which I take to be a fundamental requirement

for the origins of music.Adopting once more a reductionistic stance,I

41 Origins of Music and Speech

MUS3 9/14/99 11:58 AM Page 41