Steven Brown

Abstract

Analysis of the phrase structure and phonological properties of musical and lin-

guistic utterances suggests that music and language evolved from a common

ancestor,something I refer to as the “musilanguage”stage.In this view,the many

structural features shared between music and language are the result of their

emergence from a joint evolutionary precursor rather than from fortuitous par-

allelism or from one function begetting the other.Music and language are seen

as reciprocal specializations of a dual-natured referential emotive communica-

tive precursor,whereby music emphasizes sound as emotive meaning and lan-

guage emphasizes sound as referential meaning.The musilanguage stage must

have at least three properties for it to qualify as both a precursor and scaffold

for the evolution of music and language:lexical tone,combinatorial phrase for-

mation,and expressive phrasing mechanisms.

Beyond Music-Language Metaphors

Theories of music origin come in two basic varieties:structural models

and functional models.Structural models look to the acoustic properties

of music as outgrowths of homologous precursor functions,whereas

functional models look to the adaptive roles of music as determinants of

its structural design features.This chapter presents a structural model of

music evolution.Functional models are presented elsewhere (Brown in

press).

Before discussing music from an evolutionary perspective,it is impor-

tant to note that two different modes of perceiving,producing,and

responding to musical sound patterns exist,one involving emotive

meaning and the other involving referential meaning.These I call,

respectively,the acoustic and vehicle modes.The acoustic mode refers to

the immediate,on-line,emotive aspect of sound perception and produc-

tion.It deals with the emotive interpretation of musical sound patterns

through two processes that I call “sound emotion”and “sentic modula-

tion.”It is an inextricably acoustic mode of operation.The vehicle mode

refers to the off-line,referential form of sound perception and produc-

tion.It is a representational mode of music operation that results from

the influence of human linguistic capacity on music cognition.^1 The

vehicle mode includes the contexts of musical performance and contents

of musical works,where both of these involve complex systems of cul-

tural meaning (see footnote 2 for details).

This distinction between the acoustic and vehicle modes addresses an

important issue in contemporary musicology:the conflict between abso-

lutists,who view music as pure sound-emotion,and referentialists,who

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The “Musilanguage” Model of Music Evolution