Music and Evolution

Just a little rambling about rhythm, neither here nor there!

Have you ever watched a horse or a lion run? See the rhythm? Can you anticipate it? And then shoot it from a distance with a spear or bow and arrow? How about the rhythm of a birds wings when it's in full flight? Does it change when the bird slows down or speeds up? The difference would clue an aware hunter/huntress into when and where to aim that slingshot. And then there is the constant rhythm of the sea and it's tides and waves on shore... It seems rhythm is just a part of life... Have you ever just watched a baby sleep? The rhythm of their breathing is sooo sweet and serene. A mother would instantly notice a change and try to determine why. Is the baby waking up? Is the baby sick? Is the baby dreaming?

And so rhythm is just another way of giving us all additional clues to what's happening around us? O.K., don't know about that, but it's something to think about.

/end ramble

Interesting thoughts SuezanneC.

And as a side note -- drummers get laid more because they can keep the beat, and keep the beat going, and going, and going!

What a nice post, Jincey, it's nice to hear from you again. I was telling someone just lately about my more enjoyable times introducing people to Second Life, and showing you around was the episode I was really thinking of.

Birds make complex noises, but is it music to them? Does it make them happy when they hear certains parts of it or is it just bird talk, warning of predators and scaring away cats?

I said that bird's developing their song production wouldn't have much explanatory usefulness for human musical abilities since humans didn't evolve from birds, but early humans or pre-humans might have different survival rates based on their ability to interpret the meaning of bird song, since it does appear to vary based on the presence of predators and perhaps other conditions that would be of significance like water supply and such.

Also if I understand correctly there is evidence of genes being transferred from one species to another, through viruses, if I remember correctly, so it might be farfetched but maybe bird or some other creature in which music evolved happened to transfer a gene cross species.

Some non-human animals do express themselves by beating on their chests and flailing their arms about.

Do any non-huiman primates show any drum playing abilty? Can a chimp play the drum worth beans?

Drummers only get laid if they keep the beat on the target, both spatially and temporally, if they beat off too much that would work against them.

There is a Thai elephant orchestra, actually, several of them. Not the most rhythmically metric, but they do their darndest.

Whale songs, aren't they music?

It has been shown that many animals do chemical analyses of their conspecifics for various purposes. Canine butt sniffing is used for both purposes of indentification and also dietary analysis of your pal (hmm, is she getting something I ain't? maybe I should follow her around). Bull elephants will sample female urine to detect if she's fertile, primates will "play" single-finger gynocologist for the same purpose. Mice will not mate with others who smell like their littermates and check for this in much the same manner as dogs. Since I got into this pleasant topic, I'll toss in the totally unrelated observation that there are animals that have extremely low quality diets and so need to run the stuff through twice - this is called coprophagia. For the coprophagics, they have to want to eat it and this is likely wired in as an "ooh, that smells yummy" preference.

It is a rich chemical world out there for those who can exploit it. I have a pretty lousy sense of smell, but find that I can detect some character in women's breath that is about 90% accurate in picking out her ovulation (not a scientific sample as the number of women that I can safely ask "are you ovulating" and who know the answer is small and biased (don't ya wanna be my friend? )).

As for the birdsong related to human music and lack of common descent, you are right, our music is not derivable from birds. The point I was making badly is that birdsong need not be pleasant to us, but it is and it is closely related - sonically - to the music we do make. Thus, there seems to be something fundamentally nice about birdsong which may not have the same affective result in a bird brain as it does ours but it is nice nevertheless. This is similar to the idea that flowers were "designed" to attract polinating insects yet are attractive to us - that is, there is something basally aesthetic about flowers. This is somewhat interesting and puzzling as insect vision is radically different than ours. Similarly, yellow/black is a pretty universal marker for "I will sting you" and red/black says "I'm poisonous" and the recognition of these messages likely arose independently in various lines. Finally, birdsong and human music have some rather striking similarities. Birds have to learn the prevailing fashion from hearing other birdsong and then begin working their ideosyncratic improvisation off the base song. Human musicians need to learn the prevailing modality from listening (compare Indian music to European for almost incommensurable differences in aural frameworks) but merely echoing what you've heard is considered boring so after an artist learns the rudiments they begin to develop their own style.

An open question for me is why sunsets should be so damn beautiful. I'd appreciate any pointers on that one.

My original post, which seems to have gone largely unread, concerns manual dexterity which seems far beyond anything having any possible mundane use.

Things that you do with your fingers, taking objects and carefully moving them through trajectories in a highly intricate space and time pattern.

Whales songs do not involve that object manipulation.

Making noises is not neccesarily music. Whale noises might be music, it' hard for me to say because I'm not a whale. And if I were a whale, it would still be hard for me to say because whales can't type. Or play the drums.

Tonal music is most likely related to language, not evolution. Tonality conveys emotion in a social context (ever listen to someone cry?), which is why tonal music can affect our emotions. The ears are most highly tuned to mid range Hz cycles in the spectrum of our hearing- which is, not coincidentally, the average tonal range of our voices. THIS aspect, the perceptual limitations aspect, which is part of the Fletcher Munson effect, is probably related to evolution (along with our ability to differentiate a greater number of sounds in the higher frequency ranges, a la "was that a stick behind me cracking or just tree limbs blowing in the breeze?".

As far as rhythm goes, the most basic beat (4/4) is the same as our heartbeat.

Evolution didn't teach us to appreciate music, language and the social nature of language did. There is negligible sexual advantage to musical appreciation. Even deaf people screw and natural selection doesn't even hold enough leverage with them to alter their abilities to procreate by killing them off because they can't carry a tune.

Evolution would be a factor if we built AI's that went around killing anyone who couldn't appreciate music. Language and tool use at our level renders most rules of evolution, in the biological sense (not to be confused with the colloquial sense that means only "change," and not to be further confused with the misconception that evolution means only "change for the better", irrelevant.

This conversation is weird, but it does display a lot of imagination.

Perhaps a voting propostion is in order.

I would be safe, I appreciate music.

I can't perform the complex motions that have have no aparent mundane use that the thread was intended to discuss, but I do appreciate music.

Are there people who respond to all forms of music with a "what's the fuss all about?" response?

Maybe some brain injury victims.

========================= Edit

I just had a though about something else that humans do that resemble in some fashion playing druims - or the piano.

Dancing.

Dancing seems kind of cheaty because it seems closely related to music rather than being mundane like cracking nut or clamshells but it does involve gross motor skills that bear some resemble to what the tips of drumsticks do when the bounce - or dance, you might say, around on the surface of a drumset.

Dancing can be motion focused, but picture tap dancing. Tap dancing is drumming with your feet, right?

A bird has landed on the windowsill. The window is open.

It's song consists of one frequency on note in a constant pattern, like some kind avian metronome.

This is suggesting to me that birds may not have so much to do with music but are instead involved with the production of the sound effects for submarine movies.

A lot more than brain injury victims.

I have noticed from years as an audiophile and basement musician that many, MANY people have selective hearing. I once did too (because it's a language thing). For instance, a good friend of mine who generally had good taste had the "what's the fuss all about" reaction to Aphex Twin. He said it just sounded like loops. I was incredibly baffled and on the edge of outrage for days as I tried to figure out what he was talking about. Then I realized that Richard D. James tends to focus on the interrelation and changeability of high EQ sounds (lots of taps and clicks), as well as spatial effects and will often fill up the midrange with very simplistic melodies.

The problem was that my friend COULD NOT LISTEN TO anything that wasn't in the midrange. I analyzed his other tastes in music, hates jungle, hates idm, "doesn't get it," etc and tested my theory by playing other music for him that focused on elements outside the midrange. He "didn't get them." It actually made me... sad. But it makes perfect sense. Mid-range EQ is where voices speak, it's where we cry and moan. It's those emotional notes right in the smack dab of the keyboard that make up the meat of a tune. The more I thought about it, I started remembering when I was first learning to play guitar and how difficult it was for me to focus on the drums or bass. It's just a natural inclination of people to only know how to listen to specific kinds of music, usually focusing on the midrange. After figuring that out, I stopped paying very much attention to most people's criticisms of music since "criticism is, at best, a mode of autobiography" anyway (oscar wilde).

Steven Pinker would beg to strongly differ and he's probably right. His book "The Language Instinct" is a very readable work that pretty effectively demolishes the earlier guesses that language is a social construction and demonstrates that were are as constructed to be lingustic in the same way we are constructed to be bipedal.

But that is a monograph, albiet a highly regarded and well reviewed one. The journal Behavioral and Brain Science is somewhat unusual in that it has a feature article followed by open peer commentary. Probably the most known article that appeared there was Searle's "Chinese Box" paper Minds, Brains, and Programs BBS 3 (3) 1980. I tend to think of BBS as a salon where Chomsky, Gould, Smolensky and pals get into rather heated debate about their work.

The article where Pinker first laid out his new view was praised even by those whose earlier work he obviated. The abstract is here for your surfing pleasure:

That you believe that music is a side effect of manual dexterity and that you don't appear much interested in the possibility that it may be otherwise. Was that close?

I did in fact read your initial post and attempted at length to show how it was likely not that A led to B but rather that B led to A or that C led to both A and B. But, as someone else noted, if you just wanted agreement with your speculation, it would have been easier if you just asked for such in the first place.

You are responding to a question that was directed at a different avatar , Gryffin Steele.

Is Introvert Petunia Gryffin Steele, or are you serving as its secretary?

My question asked about people who respond to no form of music. Your story describes people who respond to music with content in mid frequencies but not to music where the action is in the high frequencies, and thus doesn't address the question that was asked.

Interesting story though.

I have absolutely no reservations about believing that evolution has given us a strong propensity for semiotic construction and communication. Groups working together are more likely to survive than individuals. Considering that we don't have claws, tough skin, or any real instincts, we'd need our wits to compensate for our other evolutionary shortcomings.

What I do have trouble believing is that we evolved to pass musical appreciation or skills on through our genes. The ability to construct and use languages (that is, "language faculty" to use the term that appeared in the first line of your abstract) is a wholly different thing than a language itself. I find it hard to believe we have any genetic predisposition toward drumming or saxaphone playing than we do for Hebrew or cheerleading. Those are forms of language we've created, not specialized evolved skills that come forth through genetic instinct. Music is just another language, albeit one for communicating emotions instead of words or abstract ideas.

It is easy to imagine how the faculty for language came about through evolution, but it requires a mighty stretch of the imagination to concoct scenarios in which people evolved specialized music skills-- just as it would require a stretch of the imagination to concoct scenarios wherein people evolved Braille-reading skills.

If I didn't understand your post, please put the smackdown on me .

Oh.

I don't understand the intent of your original question to answer it.

Here is the sequence of my post that you quoted, and your answer:





The question of mine that you quoted and appeared to respond to was "Are there people who respond to all forms of music with a "what's the fuss all about?" response?"

I assume your response deals with that that question because you placed your words after quoting "Are there people who respond to all forms of music with a "what's the fuss all about?"" and you prefaced your answer with "A lot more than brain injury victims," which lends strength to the idea that you were responding to the passage that you quoted by repeating some of the words in it.

The question that you quoted asks about people who have no response to any form of music at all.

Your answer deals with people who respond to music with significant content in mid frequencies but don't appreciate muisic with lots of the action happeing in high frequencies.

Someone who enjoys music that contains it's most important part in the mid frequencies is not someone who does not respond to any form of music, hence your answer, while interesting, does not address the question that you quoted and put right above your reply.

I first want to thank you for trying to understand, you are making this worthwhile for me.

I was lamenting to a colleague that even people who think they understand evolutionary theory only partially do. What I realized was that there was a watershed period in evolutionary theory as applied to humans that I entered the field on the cusp of in the mid-1980s but that many people had been taught by "old school" anthropologists who had themselves been steeped in a view that had dominated most of the last century even though it has now been pretty much abandoned. This is not all that uncommon, students were routinely taught the "electron shell" model for decades after the spdf orbital model had replaced the old model for all active physicists; it takes time for new concepts to seep through the minds and books. However, just as Einstein can be viewed as a refinement of Newton, the shell model works just fine for Chem 101. More importantly, they are just electrons which aren't the most interesting thing to most people. On the other hand, people are fascinated with people, so this theoretical divide concerns a matter that people do care a whole lot about. But still the minds and the books lag a little.

There is a book called "Human Universals" by Donald Brown which is currently out of print. The thing that I love about this book is the candor that Brown exhibits in his preface because he went looking for something he knew must be so and found exactly the opposite:The book is not a great read, which probably explains why it is out of print, but the quantity of universals and the rigor with which Brown searched made it a highly influential book.

Fortunately, others have pulled the "meat" of the book out saving me from having to do so. Some of the examples seem rather self-evident, for example:While others people wanted to believe were cultural artifacts:while others seem parodoxical or repugnant:and particularly germane to this thread:Do understand, that as Brown noted in his preface, these are not mere tendencies or aspects of most cultures, they are attributes of the human animal which are present in every single culture that has ever been observed contemporary or historical for which not a single exception has been found.

So, one has to conclude that all of these traits had been present in human culture since the (first) diaspora out of Africa about a million years ago and that these traits had been faithfully preserved even by groups like the residents of the nearly impenetrable Balim Valley in Papua New Guinea who likely last saw outsiders from 50,000 years ago until 1938. Or, you have to accept that these traits are intrinsically human and have been practiced globally because that's what humans do.

We typically have no problem accepting that our teeth or our livers or our big toes are definingly human, that is, all humans have similar big toes and no animal that isn't a human has a human toe. But, largely due to a well-intentioned but just plain wrong view that dominated the 3/4ths of the last century, we still have a hard time accepting that behavior has been equally a subject of selection and that the huge array of universals show that not only can they be, but that they have been.

Post of the year!

Can you give a talk on my land in-world and follow it up with a question/answer session related to your field (I'm assuming it is anthropology)? I will be happy to make whatever accomodations or plans that are necessary as well as notify anyone who shares a serious curiosity.

I have no problems following the sequence of events. Recapping everything that happened after your question doesn't clarify anything for me. You had something in mind when you decided to ask the question right? Some premise that the answer to the question was going to illustrate? Questions aren't often asked for their own answers unless it's for the completion of a task. Your reason for asking that question is probably something really literal and obvious and I am just missing it.

Sometimes I can be really chugging along and get stuck on some absurdly pivotal detail that a normal human being would ignore. One time when I used to do set construction, my boss told me to construct a particular set piece by "1 3/4 foot wide by 4 2/3 feet long by 1 3/4 feet wide." I had been doing this job for half a year with no problems, but he'd never given me instructions like this. When I went to build the set piece, I suddenly found myself confused.

1 3/4 foot wide... by 4 2/3 long ... there should be a third dimension, right? I asked him about it for almost five minutes straight, trying to explain why I didn't understand his instructions- with him becoming increasingly frustrated. It turns out that because he was labelling two dimensions "wide" and they happened to be the exact same dimensions, I kept thinking that he was referring to a singular spatial dimension every time he said it, repeating it because he thought I didn't understand. He was using xyx to represent xyz (or W x L x W to represent L x W x H) and that little detail made me throw out a third of what he was saying. Does that make me crazy or him? I don't know, but it's a funny story that illustrates how I can be defeated with the right linguistic anomaly or accidentally perfect absurdity -so don't take it personally.

I think I can answer this pretty definitively in simple evolutionary terms. Rockstars get laid a lot, right? That drummer from Yes was able to attract mates largely because of that "useless" musical talent. Therefore, it's evolutionarily quite useful, as it granted that drummer a high probablility of passing on his genes.

That's really what it's all about. Pretty much everything we do is in some way responsible for our chance at reproducing, or our "evolutionary success". Why do we have language, for example? So we can talk our way into mating. Why are we compelled to socialize, to build cities, to create art, etc? All of those things serve to bring us together, which is what ensures our survival as a species.

Peacocks have extravagant plumage. We have drum solos. It's all the same thing.

The composer Olivier Messiaen was an ornithologist as well as musician, and would transcribe birdsong into musical notation and incorporate it into his works (quite often with notes about the bird concerned, its appearance and its habits).

I have discovered that many people unfamiliar with classical music are actually incapable of hearing several simultaneous musical streams.

I once played someone Percy Grainger's arrangement of 'Danny Boy' where the tune starts in the cellos while the violins play an accompaniment above, and they were unable to hear the familiar tune that was being played.

Similarly with the Schoenberg Second Quartet, where a very familiar German folk tune appears in the lower instruments, with the violin playing a drooping, two note accompaniment above. My mother could only hear the accompaniment; not the tune.

I can't imagine now classical music must sound to someone who can only hear the top line of the music, but it's safe to say the result would not sound good.

Do you mind? That is how I express myself when I get excited.

I'm honored by your offer. As I've only ever taught as a teaching assistant to graduate students already pretty well acquainted with the theory, I have doubts about my abilities to approach such a broad topic in an SL "seminar" but will think on the the matter and see if I can scope it appropriately. I'd likely not approach this topic as it is all "second floor" and very little "foundation". My field of study was more narrowly "evolutionary psychology" which the academics still can't figure out whether to house in biology, anthropology, or psych. More narrowly, my specialty is sex differences in cognition and somewhat amusingly I'm rather expert on voles (everyone is a specialist these days).

Incidentally, while looking up the name of the Balim Valley, I flipped past the chapter "Animal Origins of Art" in Jared Diamond's staggeringly popular (and readable) The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. This is a topic that has interested many others. Voles, alas, show little artistic ability, but as Diamond put it: