The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

Birdsong and Music

Might our understanding of birdsong help to shed light on the origins of

human music? The first point is that any similarity is more likely to be

by analogy than homology because humans shared a musical ancestor

with other singing animals.Our closest living relatives,the great apes,

communicate more by gesture and by facial expression than by sound.

They do have loud vocal displays,such as the pant-hoot of chimpanzees

(Pan troglodytes),but these are far from elaborate or musical.Further-

more,little evidence exists that any monkey or nonhuman ape learns

sounds that it produces from other individuals (Janik and Slater 1997).

Humans obviously do so,and this is also the way in which whales and

songbirds,the most notable singers elsewhere in the animal kingdom,

obtain their sounds.Indeed,learning seems essential to build up large

repertoires.For some reason,therefore,elaborate singing behavior arose

quite separately in different animal groups,and in our case this was in

the relatively recent past,since the common ancestor that we shared with

chimpanzees died about two million years ago.

Straight comparison may not be justified,but does analogy with birds

help to suggest why singing and other musical attributes in humans may

have arisen? With any complex or varied display,sexual selection is a

prime suspect,and the fact that in many cultures singing (and in our own

culture,composition) is predominantly a feature of young males (see

Miller,this volume) confirms that suspicion. However,why singing

behavior should have been favored in early humans in particular rather

than in other species remains a matter of speculation.The singing of

humans also has some features,such as the simultaneous chanting of the

same tune by groups of individuals (see Nettl and Merker,this volume),

that have not been described among animals.

Do birds produce music? This is not an easy question to answer,partly

because no definition of music seems to be universally agreed upon.

Many animal sounds are rhythmic,such as the trill of a stridulating

grasshopper.Others are pure and tonal,such as whistles common in bird-

songs.Energy efficiency alone might predict these features.A regular

rhythm is shown by a mechanism operating at its resonant frequency,and

this is where energy cost is least.Concentrating all the energy in a

narrow frequency band to produce fairly pure sounds is also economi-

cal as the sounds carry further.But rhythmical and tonal sounds may

have arisen in the animal kingdom for other good reasons.For most

animal signals,and especially those concerned with attracting mates and

repelling rivals,it is essential that the signal incorporate species identity.

Some areas of the world,notably tropical rainforest,may contain

59 Birdsong Repertoires

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