No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Parent-offspring conflict and the evolution of infant-directed song
Abstract
We present a theory of the origin and evolution of infant-directed song, a form of music found in many cultures. After examining the ancestral ecology of parent-infant relations, we propose that infant-directed song arose in an evolutionary arms race between parents and infants, stemming from the dynamics of parent-offspring conflict. We describe testable predictions that follow from this theory, consider some existing evidence for them, and entertain the possibility that infant-directed song could form the basis for the development of other, more complex forms of music.
... For instance, music production is universal and the associated behaviours vary substantially less across cultures than within cultures 1 . Humans have manufactured musical instruments for at least 35,000 years 27 and have likely produced vocal music for longer 18,28,29 . The universality and deep history of music production suggest that it is underlain by psychological mechanisms shared across humans. ...
... First, individuals worldwide produce music for specific behavioural functions, such as dance or infant care, and comparative research suggests that many of these specific behavioural functions themselves appear reliably across societies 1,5 . Second, genetic evolutionary theories often explain the evolution of music in the context of specific behavioural functions such as enabling dancing 18,29 , soothing infants 18,28 , signalling mate quality 112 and promoting social bonding 19 . Insofar as the music faculty involves domain-specific cognitive adaptations, we should expect those adaptations to be specialized for these behavioural functions. ...
... Lullabies and dance songs are the most stereotyped song domains across cultures and are identified by naive participants with the highest accuracy 1,5,117,119 . They have also been hypothesized to be central to the evolution of music 19,120 , such as in the context of credible signalling 18,28,29 . Among the different behavioural responses to music, responses to lullabies and dance songs are most likely to reflect evolved specialized adaptations, making them prime candidates to study early development and domain specificity. ...
... Developmental precursors of this transition from gestures to word use can be found in the early pragmatic usage of audible and visual signals across contexts. In this respect, evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) theories have consistently pointed out the links between vocal communication and the need of immature offspring to secure parental attention in the human lineage (Falk, 2004;Locke, 2006Locke, , 2017Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Oller et al., 2016). Accordingly, infants' vocalizations have often been considered as attempts to obtain attention (Colonnesi et al., 2012;Jaffe et al., 2001). ...
... From the evo-devo standpoint, primate parental attention may have become distal after the bipedalism breakthrough because it very likely prohibited immature infants from climbing on and gripping their mother's body on command (Falk, 2004;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). Distal communication addressed to infants by early human mothers, by means of melodic vocal communication such as motherese (Falk, 2004) or songs (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017), may have initially provided maternal attention distally (instead of physically), whereas infants may have gained selective advantages through being perceived by means of their vocalizations (Falk, 2004;Longhi & Karmiloff-Smith, 2004;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Oller et al., 2016). ...
... From the evo-devo standpoint, primate parental attention may have become distal after the bipedalism breakthrough because it very likely prohibited immature infants from climbing on and gripping their mother's body on command (Falk, 2004;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). Distal communication addressed to infants by early human mothers, by means of melodic vocal communication such as motherese (Falk, 2004) or songs (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017), may have initially provided maternal attention distally (instead of physically), whereas infants may have gained selective advantages through being perceived by means of their vocalizations (Falk, 2004;Longhi & Karmiloff-Smith, 2004;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Oller et al., 2016). Vocal communication by human infants therefore is likely to leverage parental attention and care (Locke, 2006;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Trivers, 1974). ...
Developmental precursors of the prelinguistic transition from gestures to word use can be found in the early pragmatic usage of auditory and visual signals across contexts. This study examined whether 6-month-old infants are capable of attention-sensitive communication with their mother, that is, adjusting the sensory modality of their communicative signals to their mother’s attention. Proxies of maternal attention implemented in experimental conditions were the mother’s visual attention (attentive/inattentive), interaction directed at the infant (interactive/non-interactive), and distance (far/close). The infants’ signals were coded as either visual or auditory, following an ethological coding. Infants adjusted the sensory modality of their communicative signals mostly to maternal interaction. More auditory signals were produced when the mother was non-interactive than when she was interactive. Interactive conditions were characterized by higher rates of visual signaling and of gaze-coordinated non-vocal oral sounds. The more time infants spent looking at their attentive mother, the more they produced auditory signals, specifically non-vocal oral sounds. These findings are discussed within the articulated frameworks of evolutionary developmental psychology and early pragmatics.
Temporary download link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gevB51Y-PtdN
... In music, infant-directed songs also seem to have some stereotyped acoustic features. Lullabies, for example, tend toward slower tempos, reduced accentuation and simple repetitive melodic patterns 31,32,35,70 , supporting functional roles associated with infant care 33,41,42 in both industrialized 34,71-73 and small-scale societies 74,75 . Infants are soothed by these acoustic features, whether produced in familiar 76,77 or unfamiliar songs 78 and both adults and children reliably associate the same features with a soothing function 31,32,70 . ...
... The distinguishing features of infant-directed song were more subtle than those of speech but nevertheless corroborate its purported soothing functions 33,41,42 : reduced intensity and acoustic roughness, although these were less consistent across fieldsites than the speech results. The less-consistent effects may result from the fact that, while solo-voice speaking is fairly natural and representative of most adult-directed speech (that is, people rarely speak at the same time), much of the world's song occurs in social groups where there are multiple singers and accompanying instruments 32,42,80 . ...
... as the above findings demonstrate, this may enable listeners to make reliable inferences concerning the intended targets of speech and song, consistent with functional accounts of infant-directed vocalization 33,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42]83,84 . We tested this secondary hypothesis in a simple listening experiment, conducted in English using web-based citizen-science methods 85 . ...
When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech and song produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural and small-scale societies. Infant-directedness was reliably classified from acoustic features only, with acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differing across language and music but in consistent fashions. We then studied listener sensitivity to these acoustic features. We played the recordings to 51,065 people from 187 countries, recruited via an English-language website, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were more accurate than chance, predictable in part by common sets of acoustic features and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. These findings inform hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication.
... Theories of mother-infant interaction as the primordial context of musicality focus primarily on vocal behavior and emphasize two putative adaptive functions that may explain why hominin vocalizations acquired music-like features: mother-infant bonding (Dissanayake, 2000(Dissanayake, , 2009bMithen, 2005) and credible signaling of parental attention (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Mehr et al., 2021). ...
... The credible signaling of parental attention theory proposes that infant-directed song, which is universally present across human cultures (Mehr et al., 2019;Trehub et al., 1993), is rooted in increasingly elaborated contact calls that, in ancestral hominin species, had evolved to encode parental cues of attention to the offspring (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Mehr et al., 2021). Two putative selection pressures would have led to this development. ...
... On the other hand, bipedalism and loss of body hair prevented infants from clinging to the parent's body (as the infants of other ape species do), thereby preventing constant mother-infant proximity. These shifts in parentinfant ecology purportedly prompted early Homo species to evolve songlike vocalizations that enabled foraging caregivers to continuously convey parental attention to their multiple offspring from some distance, without incurring foraging costs (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). ...
There has recently been a growing interest in investigating rhythm cognition and behavior in nonhuman animals as a way of tracking the evolutionary origins of human musicality – i.e., the ability to perceive, enjoy and produce music. During the last two decades, there has been an explosion of theoretical proposals aimed at explaining why and how humans have evolved into musical beings, and the empirical comparative research has also gained momentum. In this paper, we focus on the rhythmic component of musicality, and review functional and mechanistic theoretical proposals concerning putative prerequisites for perceiving and producing rhythmic structures similar to those encountered in music. For each theoretical proposal we also review supporting and contradictory empirical findings. To acknowledge that the evolutionary study of musicality requires an interdisciplinary approach, our review strives to cover perspectives and findings from as many disciplines as possible. We conclude with a research agenda that highlights relevant, yet thus far neglected topics in the comparative and evolutionary study of rhythm cognition. Specifically, we call for a widened research focus that will include additional rhythmic abilities besides entrainment, additional channels of perception and production besides the auditory and vocal ones, and a systematic focus on the functional contexts in which rhythmic signals spontaneously occur. With this expanded focus, and drawing from systematic observation and experimentation anchored in multiple disciplines, animal research is bound to generate many important insights into the adaptive pressures that forged the component abilities of human rhythm cognition and their (socio)cognitive and (neuro)biological underpinnings.
... Second, singing may also signal parental investment [21,22], transmitting reliable information concerning a parent's proximity, activity and attention. On this idea, it is in infants' interest to elicit infant-directed songs and in parents' interest to provide them. ...
... [47]). In line with their growing maturity, one might therefore expect parents to reduce the frequency of their singing as children become less reliant on parents as sources of attention and stimulation [22]. ...
... Previous work has suggested the possibility of age effects in parents' musical activities, such as that infants grow older, parents may produce less music for them [22]; these effects have been difficult to test, however, without large samples of parents with a broad range of child ages. The pooled sample solves this problem ( Based on these first-order results, we continued by modelling the positive effects found above in a single model, so as to estimate the unique variance associated with each demographic characteristic. ...
Music is universally prevalent in human society and is a salient component of the lives of young families. Here, we studied the frequency of singing and playing recorded music in the home using surveys of parents with infants ( N = 945). We found that most parents sing to their infant on a daily basis and the frequency of infant-directed singing is unrelated to parents’ income or ethnicity. Two reliable individual differences emerged, however: (i) fathers sing less than mothers and (ii) as infants grow older, parents sing less. Moreover, the latter effect of child age was specific to singing and was not reflected in reports of the frequency of playing recorded music. Last, we meta-analysed reports of the frequency of infant-directed singing and found little change in its frequency over the past 30 years, despite substantial changes in the technological environment in the home. These findings, consistent with theories of the psychological functions of music, in general, and infant-directed singing, in particular, demonstrate the everyday nature of music in infancy.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.
... Infant-directed songs may credibly signal parental attention to infants, conveying information to infants that an adult is nearby, attending to them and keeping them safe 22,23 . Singing indicates the location, proximity and orientation of the singer (even when the singer is not visible, as at night); and it is also costly, in that the singer could be expending their energy on some other activity. ...
... Infants attended longer to singing than speech before becoming fussy, when both were produced in a foreign language 52 , but whether this effect reflects increased attention to songs or increased relaxation as a result of listening to music is unknown. In sum, while there is some evidence that infant-directed songs produce relaxation effects in infants, the effects in prior studies may be attributable to infants' familiarity with the songs, rather than the songs' acoustic properties (as would be predicted by a credible signalling account 22,23 ). ...
... The acoustic features of lullabies differ from those of other songs in systematic ways, universally 1 : which of these features drive the relaxing effect of lullabies, and how? Do those features reflect evolved predispositions that are specific to music 22,23 ? Or might they reflect general form-function principles of animal vocal signals, such as those that lead alarm signals to be consistently loud and harsh across species 31,32,64 ? ...
Music is characterized by acoustic forms that are predictive of its behavioural functions. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. This property could reflect a function of listeners’ experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. Here, we show that US infants (N = 144) relax in response to eight unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry and electrodermal activity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting that the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. The infants’ parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. Together, these findings suggest that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies found in different cultures.
... A t least since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow declared in 1835 that "music is the universal language of mankind" (1), the conventional wisdom among many authors, scholars, and scientists is that music is a human universal, with profound similarities across societies (2). On this understanding, musicality is embedded in the biology of Homo sapiens (3), whether as one or more evolutionary adaptations for music (4,5), the by-products of adaptations for auditory perception, motor control, language, and affect (6)(7)(8)(9), or some amalgam of these. ...
... We take up this challenge here. We focus on vocal music (hereafter, song) rather than instrumental music [see (57)] because it does not depend on technology, has well-defined physical correlates [i.e., pitched vocalizations (19)], and has been the primary focus of biological explanations for music (4,5). ...
... 3) We tested which behaviors are universally or commonly associated with song. We cataloged 20 common but untested hypotheses about these associations, such as religious activity, dance, and infant care (4,5,40,54,(58)(59)(60), and tested them after adjusting for sampling error and ethnographer bias, problems that have bedeviled prior tests. 4) We analyzed the musical features of songs themselves, as documented in the NHS Discography. ...
Cross-cultural analysis of song
It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity. There is more variation in musical behavior within societies than between societies, and societies show similar levels of within-society variation in musical behavior. At the same time, one-third of societies significantly differ from average for any given dimension, and half of all societies differ from average on at least one dimension, indicating variability across cultures.
Science , this issue p. eaax0868 ; see also p. 944
... Specifically, we hypothesised that textual information is introduced differently in child-directed songs (CDSo) compared to adult-directed songs (ADSo) and child-directed stories (CDSt). We think that those characteristics emerged from a long evolutionary process (through copy, variation, competition, and selection) carried by children (Barrett, 2003) along with caregivers (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). By looking at the shape of textual content as cultural artefacts (mentefact; Eubank, 1932), we can try to unveil the selective pressures that shaped them in the first place. ...
... We hypothesised that the form of CDSo lyrics should be determined by the functions they have and the multiple caregiving roles that they support. In other words, that the introduction of lyrical information, like any other musical feature, is potentially shaped to fulfil specific needs for each agent (Mehr et al., 2018;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). Accordingly, we posited that the differences in the patterns of textual information introduction, between CDSo and ADSo, and between CDSo and CDSt, stem from the different functions of each register. ...
... Evolutionary theories support the proposal that ID singing plays an important role in the protection and safety of human offspring by improving the "cohesion" and "bonding" between mothers and infants (Dissanayake, 2000(Dissanayake, , 2008(Dissanayake, , 2009D. Falk, 2009;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Trehub, 2001Trehub, , 2003. Mehr and Krasnow (2017) propose that ID singing is a way of signaling proximity to the caregiver, allowing the infant to calm down, stop crying and eventually fall asleep; this could function as a survival strategy by preventing detection by predators. ...
... Falk, 2009;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Trehub, 2001Trehub, , 2003. Mehr and Krasnow (2017) propose that ID singing is a way of signaling proximity to the caregiver, allowing the infant to calm down, stop crying and eventually fall asleep; this could function as a survival strategy by preventing detection by predators. At the same time, this calming effect allows the mother to engage in other tasks. ...
Despite the neurological vulnerability of premature newborns, there is evidence that they are able to process temporal aspects of the maternal voice, as a previous study observed more overlapping vocalizations during maternal humming versus speech. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the markers of the infants' overlapping vocalizations. Our aim was to identify the location of overlapping vocalizations during the humming and the impacts of maternal antenatal and postnatal engagement of infant-directed singing on: (1) the features of humming and (2) the infants' overlapping vocalizations during humming. Preterm dyads (N = 36) were observed in silent, speech, and humming conditions. Microanalysis was performed using the Elan Program to identify the location of the overlapping vocalizations during the humming phrase. Infants' overlapping vocalizations were found predominantly at the ends of each humming phrase; almost half of the overlaps occurred on the final note. More overlapping vocalizations in the final notes were observed in female infants. Antenatal and postnatal experiences of ID singing are influenced by the mothers' nationality and contribute to maternal humming style. Preterm newborns synchronize with maternal humming, anticipating the end of musical phrases. The ability to synchronize seems to be phylogenetically associated with gender differences.
... Other researchers have proposed the null hypothesis that music is just a spandrel for human evolution, a useless byproduct of other evolved abilities with no adaptive function and not involving direct selection for musical ability (Pinker, 1997). However, other researchers believe that music is an important developmental condition in biological evolution, with a specific adaptive purpose, and propose other adaptive hypotheses, including sexual selection (Miller, 2000), advertising male coalitions (Hagen and Bryant, 2003), its role in mother-infant relationships (Fitch, 2006;Mehr and Krasnow, 2017), and its role in enhancing social cohesion in human populations (Wallin et al., 2001;Merker et al., 2009). Unlike scholars who believe that music has adaptive traits, some thinkers believe that human music is a cultural invention built on brain circuits that evolved for other reasons (Pinker, 1997). ...
Phylogenic evolution of beat perception and synchronization: a comparative neuroscience perspective. The study of music has long been of interest to researchers from various disciplines. Scholars have put forth numerous hypotheses regarding the evolution of music. With the rise of cross-species research on music cognition, researchers hope to gain a deeper understanding of the phylogenic evolution, behavioral manifestation, and physiological limitations of the biological ability behind music, known as musicality. This paper presents the progress of beat perception and synchronization (BPS) research in cross-species settings and offers varying views on the relevant hypothesis of BPS. The BPS ability observed in rats and other mammals as well as recent neurobiological findings presents a significant challenge to the vocal learning and rhythm synchronization hypothesis if taken literally. An integrative neural-circuit model of BPS is proposed to accommodate the findings. In future research, it is recommended that greater consideration be given to the social attributes of musicality and to the behavioral and physiological changes that occur across different species in response to music characteristics.
... Various hypotheses explaining the functions of musicality have focused on different types of social interactions, such as mate-quality signaling (Miller, 2000), male coalitions (Hagen & Bryant, 2003), infant care (Falk, 2004;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017), and group cohesion (Dunbar, 2012;Trainor, 2015). More recent theories have consolidated these functions into two overarching evolutionary hypotheses of musicality. ...
This research examines the hypothesis that music experienced during puberty in early adolescence imprints on individuals to promote the pursuit of friendships and mating. We conducted an online survey with samples from the United States and China (Study 1) and a within-subject experiment (Study 2). Results suggest that most songs and poems identified as "favorites" were learned during early adolescence. Furthermore, compared with recently acquired songs and poems, those from early adolescence reminded participants more about friendship and induced more emotional reactions. In the Chinese sample, the shared preference for similar songs from early adolescence increased friendliness perception. Music from early adolescence also increased positive feelings more than other art forms, such as poems, fine arts, movies, dance, and views of natural scenery, especially when experienced in the company of friends than alone. In Study 2, singing songs from early adolescence (vs. those from recent years) enhanced the trustworthiness ratings of faces of the opposite sex and promoted intentions to cooperate. However, early adolescent music did not facilitate mating-related evaluations such as the ratings of facial attractiveness and artistic intelligence. The present two studies provide evidence that early adolescent songs learned during puberty possess imprinting-like effects on friendship formation and trust-building.
... Various hypotheses explaining the functions of musicality have focused on different types of social interactions, such as mate-quality signaling (Miller, 2000), male coalitions (Hagen & Bryant, 2003), infant care (Falk, 2004;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017), and group cohesion (Dunbar, 2012;Trainor, 2015). More recent theories have consolidated these functions into two overarching evolutionary hypotheses of musicality. ...
This research examines the hypothesis that music experienced during puberty in early adolescence imprints on individuals to promote the pursuit of friendships and mating. We conducted an online survey with samples from the United States and China (Study 1) and a within-subject experiment (Study 2). Results suggest that most songs and poems identified as “favorites” were learned during early adolescence. Furthermore, compared with recently acquired songs and poems, those from early adolescence reminded participants more about friendship and induced more emotional reactions. In the Chinese sample, the shared preference for similar songs from early adolescence increased friendliness perception. Music from early adolescence also increased positive feelings more than other art forms, such as poems, fine arts, movies, dance, and views of natural scenery, especially when experienced in the company of friends than alone. In Study 2, singing songs from early adolescence (vs. those from recent years) enhanced the trustworthiness ratings of faces of the opposite sex and promoted intentions to cooperate. However, early adolescent music did not facilitate mating-related evaluations such as the ratings of facial attractiveness and artistic intelligence. The present two studies provide evidence that early adolescent songs learned during puberty possess imprinting-like effects on friendship formation and trust-building.
... In addition, music might have played a role in emotional regulation throughout human existence, especially regarding soothing infants (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017), and in social bonding, in a broad sense ranging from dyads (e.g., parent and infant, mate bonding) to bands of small coalitions and large groups of unrelated individuals (Savage et al., 2021). As Savage and collaborators stated in their music and social bonding hypothesis (Savage et al., 2021), group living comes with benefits (e.g., greater safety in numbers, and greater success with cooperative hunting and defense), but also costs (e.g., increased local competition for food and mates). ...
There is currently a growing interest in ways to enhance and preserve our cognitive skills through changes in lifestyle. Extensive scientific evidence links several behavioral and environmental factors, such as smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, a sedentary lifestyle, and inadequate nutrition, to an increased risk of cognitive impairment, dementia, and accelerated aging. On the other side, education, physical exercise, and cognitively stimulating occupations and leisure activities have all been associated with neurocognitive benefits and the prevention of the pervasive consequences of neural aging. Among them, a wealth of studies has associated musical training, and particularly learning to play an instrument, with differences in auditory and sensorimotor skills, as well as in multiple non-musical cognitive capacities: intelligence, visuospatial abilities, processing speed, executive control, attention and vigilance, episodic and working memory, and language.
... Overall increased infant attention to ID song over speech has been considered in line with the theory of ID song as a credible signal of parental attention (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017;Mehr et al., 2020). Increased attention to the mouth in song may perhaps also be in line with an extension of such theory into the visual components of the vocal signal. ...
The mechanisms by which infant‐directed (ID) speech and song support language development in infancy are poorly understood, with most prior investigations focused on the auditory components of these signals. However, the visual components of ID communication are also of fundamental importance for language learning: over the first year of life, infants’ visual attention to caregivers’ faces during ID speech switches from a focus on the eyes to a focus on the mouth, which provides synchronous visual cues that support speech and language development. Caregivers’ facial displays during ID song are highly effective for sustaining infants’ attention. Here we investigate if ID song specifically enhances infants’ attention to caregivers’ mouths. 299 typically developing infants watched clips of female actors engaging them with ID song and speech longitudinally at six time points from 3 to 12 months of age while eye‐tracking data was collected. Infants’ mouth‐looking significantly increased over the first year of life with a significantly greater increase during ID song versus speech. This difference was early‐emerging (evident in the first 6 months of age) and sustained over the first year. Follow‐up analyses indicated specific properties inherent to ID song (e.g., slower tempo, reduced rhythmic variability) in part contribute to infants’ increased mouth‐looking, with effects increasing with age. The exaggerated and expressive facial features that naturally accompany ID song may make it a particularly effective context for modulating infants’ visual attention and supporting speech and language development in both typically developing infants and those with or at risk for communication challenges. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/SZ8xQW8h93A .
Research Highlights
Infants’ visual attention to adults’ mouths during infant‐directed speech has been found to support speech and language development.
Infant‐directed (ID) song promotes mouth‐looking by infants to a greater extent than does ID speech across the first year of life.
Features characteristic of ID song such as slower tempo, increased rhythmicity, increased audiovisual synchrony, and increased positive affect, all increase infants’ attention to the mouth.
The effects of song on infants’ attention to the mouth are more prominent during the second half of the first year of life.
... Stated using a more classical formulation, there exists adaptive challenges in the logistics of not only mate selection but also in mate cooperation in order to successfully bring forth offspring (Zahavi and Zahavi, 1999). This form stands in marked contrast to more recent forms of [credible] signal, such as from a parents who reliably indicate infant offspring attention (Mehr and Krasnow, 2017). ...
Chemical sensing via olfaction constitutes a most ancient form of inter-organism communication. But acoustical signaling via tonal and rhythmic patterning is also common among higher vertebrates. Animals that live in well ventilated habitats and move in diasporic ways have further evolved more spectrally varied and discretized call structure. But unlike song in birds, researchers have struggled to locate isolated nucleii specialized for music cognition. The brain stem, midbrain, hindbrain, and forebrain, however, all largely associate with aspects of musical performance, perception, memory, and emotion. I hypothesized that spectral features of musical display evolved as honest signals of spatial cognition for precarious locomotor tasks associated with nurturing and protecting vulnerable offspring. I investigated possible connections between motor, visual, and spatial cognitive areas in relation to both signaler production and receiver processing of acoustical features of musical output. Brain component volume fractions of 42 parts from 48 primates were compiled, from a single source, and compared against a vocal complexity index (ARDI) as well as individual musical feature scores: including tone, interval, repetition, transposition rhythm, and unique syllable count. Structures for spatial and visual perception as well as motor control and emotional processing associated moderately with areas used by species who produce calls with both temporal and spectral musical features. These findings are consistent with a dual (both receiver- and signaler- side) function of musical signals. Associations with spatio-social areas (e.g. schizocortex and insula) support direct selection for a paralimbic-based neighbor orienting [PIANO] sensory modality for mapping and anticipating movement of fellow arboreal cohabitants. Associations with motor areas (e.g. LGN, mid-brain, and thalamus) support the complementary model that signaler capacities for spatio-motive emplacement [ME] are indirectly selected by conspecific receivers. This dual manifestation in low-parity species that locomote in diasporic ways through (arboreally) diffuse habitats, is compatible with musicality serving as courtship signals by long-term mates with consistent and reliable spatial capacities directly relevant to care of vulnerable (arboreal) offspring.
... At around 2 years of age, children start to generate recognisable songs and once they reach adulthood, most people can sing accurately in time and in tune (Dalla Bella, Giguère, & Peretz, 2007). Thus, singing is particularly suitable for studying the biological and cultural foundations of music evolution (Jacoby et al., 2019;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). ...
ince generations, singing and speech have been mainly trans- mitted orally. How does oral transmission shape the evolu- tion of music? Here, we developed a method for conducting online transmission experiments, in which sung melodies are passed from one singer to the next. We show that cognitive and motor constraints play a profound role in the emergence of melodic structure. Specifically, initially random tones de- velop into more structured systems that increasingly reuse and combine fewer elements, making melodies easier to learn and transmit over time. We discuss how our findings are compati- ble with melodic universals found in most human cultures and culturally specific characteristics of participants’ previous mu- sical exposure. Overall, our method efficiently automates on- line singing experiments while enabling large-scale data col- lection using standard computers available to everyone. We see great potential in further extending this work to increase the efficiency, scalability, and diversity of research on cultural evolution and cognitive science.
... At around 2 years of age, children start to generate recognisable songs and once they reach adulthood, most people can sing accurately in time and in tune (Dalla Bella, Giguère, & Peretz, 2007). Thus, singing is particularly suitable for studying the biological and cultural foundations of music evolution (Jacoby et al., 2019;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). ...
Since generations, singing and speech have been mainly transmitted orally. How does oral transmission shape the evolution of music? Here, we developed a method for conducting online transmission experiments, in which sung melodies are passed from one singer to the next. We show that cognitive and motor constraints play a profound role in the emergence of melodic structure. Specifically, initially random tones develop into more structured systems that increasingly reuse and combine fewer elements, making melodies easier to learn and transmit over time. We discuss how our findings are compatible with melodic universals found in most human cultures and culturally specific characteristics of participants’ previous musical exposure. Overall, our method efficiently automates online singing experiments while enabling large-scale data collection using standard computers available to everyone. We see great potential in further extending this work to increase the efficiency, scalability, and diversity of research on cultural evolution and cognitive science.
... It is possible that a recipient who is paying attention to one set of sounds may be inhibited (or primed) in its ability to perceive another, or that pre-existing physical contact with a signaller alerts the recipient to the possibility of further information in that modality. For example, the physical contact between the mother and her offspring could be defined as a specific form of parental engagement involving physical attention from both mother and infant (Falk, 2004;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). But, neither case provides observers with a consistent externally observable indication of these states of attention. ...
Gestural communication permeates all domains of chimpanzees' social life and is intentional in use. However, we still have only limited information on how young apes develop the sociocognitive skills needed for intentional communication. In this cross-sectional study, we document the development of behavioral adjustment to the recipient's visual attention—considered a hallmark of intentional communication—in wild immature chimpanzees' gestural communication. We studied 11 immature chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii): three infants, four juveniles, and four adolescents gesturing towards their mother. We quantified silent-visual, audible, and contact gestures indexed to maternal visual attention and inattention. We investigated unimodal adjustment, defined by the capacity of young chimpanzees to deploy fewer silent-visual signals when their mothers did not show full visual attention towards them as compared with when they did. We then examined cross-modal adjustment, defined as the capacity of chimpanzees to deploy more audible-or-contact gestures than silent-visual gestures in the condition where their mothers did not show full visual attention as compared to when they did. Our results show a gradual decline in the use of silent-visual gestures when the mother is not visually attentive with increasing age. The absence of silent-visual gesture production toward a visually inattentive recipient (complete unimodal adjustment) was not fully in place until adolescence. Immature chimpanzees used more audible-or-contact gestures than silent-visual ones when their mothers did not show visual attention and vice-versa when they did. This cross-modal adjustment was expressed in juveniles and adolescents but not in infants. Overall, this study shows that infant chimpanzees were limited in their sensitivity to maternal attention when gesturing, whereas adolescent chimpanzees adjusted their communication appropriately. Juveniles present an intermediate pattern with cross-modal adjustment preceding unimodal adjustment and with variability in the age of onset.
Research Highlights
• We examined immature wild chimpanzees' attention-sensitive gesturing, that is their ability to adjust the sensory modality of their gestures to the visual attention/inattention of their mother.
• Chimpanzees were first capable of deploying audible-or-contact instead of silent-visual gestures when visual attention was unavailable, that is, cross-modal adjustment, before being able to inhibit their silent-visual gestures, that is, unimodal adjustment.
• Infants did not display attention-sensitive gesturing while adolescents did, and juveniles presented an intermediate pattern with cross-modal adjustment preceding and predicting unimodal adjustment and with high variability in the age at the onset.
... As a special form of making music, singing is used by mothers around the world as a tool to relax and calm the baby [22][23][24]. There is evidence that music and singing can affect bonding and interactions in social contexts, as well as possessing evolutionary aspects of infant care and parental attention [25][26][27]. It has been shown that directly after birth, infants have the ability to perceive and process complex musical stimuli [28,29]. ...
Background: Postpartum depression is fairly common in new mothers and moreover associated with impaired bonding and poor maternal well-being. The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of a mother-infant singing intervention within the first three months after birth on maternal well-being, depressive symptoms and bonding.
Methods: 120 women who were recruited at the maternity ward at the University Clinic in Düsseldorf took part in this prospective, randomised-controlled study. Beside the baseline measurement 1–3 days after childbirth, depressive symptoms, maternal well-being and mother-infant bonding were evaluated with questionnaires before (two weeks after birth) and after (twelve weeks after birth) the intervention took place. The experimental group
(n = 59) participated in several singing intervention sessions while the control group (n = 61) did not. In the intervention group, salivary cortisol as well as attachment and mood were assessed immediately before and after the singing sessions.
Results: The participants of the intervention group showed a significant reduction of cortisol (p = .023) and an improvement of attachment and mood from start to end of the intervention session (all p ≤ .008). However, no prolonged effects were revealed beyond the intervention sessions as the two groups did not differ regarding the alterations of the primary outcomes postpartum depression (interaction effect p = .187) and postpartum bonding (interaction effect p = .188) in the 10-week period from two up to twelve weeks after childbirth (all p > .05). Additional analyses of singing habits at home in both groups, revealed that only in the singing group more frequent singing was associated with less anxiety and more well-being of the mother.
Conclusion: Singing towards the infant seems to have positive immediate effects on the well-being of new mothers (on subjective variables as well as physiological measurements). However, the intervention did not lead to more long lasting positive effects although several limitations should be considered.
... In any case, these evolutionary theories are not mutually exclusive. We are sympathetic to the view that infant-directed singing developed as an adaptation to support infant nurture in early hunter-gatherer societies experiencing harsh living conditions and correspondingly high rates of infant mortality (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017; also see Roederer, 1984;Papoušek, 1996). Perhaps the persistence of infant-directed singing across millennia and into the modern era derives from its continued enhancement of natural fitness despite extraordinary improvement in living conditions. ...
... Importantly, we should assume that prior to this behavior's emergence, humans did not possess a strong tendency to anticipate beats, nor did they derive any particular pleasure from beat-based interactions. Thus, the initial function of such interactions could not have been social bonding (the most commonly cited function, see Mehr & Krasnow 2017). Social bonding can be achieved through many kinds of activities and does not relate specifically to beat-based behavior. ...
Studying the evolution of music requires defining its unique features-both universal in humans and missing in other species. Based on recent research, I argue that music's most critical feature is its anticipatory nature, which enables beat-based embodied synchrony. Music is made up of periodically-repeated sound elements which, in humans, trigger an embodied anticipation of their continuation. This feature is rooted in beat-based group interactions, and most likely originated in synchronous group signaling whose initial function was territorial defense and predator deterrence. I briefly review the evidence for this hypothesis from music psychology, comparative musicology and the comparative study of the musical behaviors of other species. I then suggest that the prerequisites for synchronous signaling evolved during the Lower Paleolithic, and consider its benefits as a signaling strategy. Finally, I suggest experimental methods to test this hypothesis.
("Anthropological Views on Early Musicality" workshop in EvoLangXIII - postponed)
... In premature infancy, the listening conditions might translate well within a quiet or active alert state context, and the musical vocalizing might translate to a contingent singing (Malloch et al., 2012;Shoemark, 2017) or infant-directed singing (Mehr and Krasnow, 2016) exploration. In such contexts, the in-themoment improvisatory experience might be indicative of a developing repartee and one whereby the music therapist is singing back the premature infant's vocalization, strategically on the exact pitch of the infant's tone. ...
Neonatal brain development relies on a combination of critical factors inclusive of genetic predisposition, attachment, and the conditions of the pre and postneonatal environment. The status of the infant’s developing brain in its most vulnerable state and the impact that physiological elements of music, silences and sounds may make in the earliest stages of brain development can enhance vitality. However, little attention has been focused on the integral aspects of the music itself. This article will support research that has hypothesized conditions of music therapeutic applications in an effort to further validate models of neurobehavioral care that have optimized conditions for growth, inclusive of recommendations leading toward the enhancement of self-regulatory behaviors.
... Some neuroscientists such as Koelsch (2012) and Arbib (2013) have even argued that music is processed as a ''special kind of language.'' Other scholars contend that language is functionally specialized for communicating mental states (Pinker & Bloom, 1990), and that music is a byproduct of the language and auditory faculties (Marcus, 2012;Pinker, 1999), leaving open the possibility of functional specialization in specific forms of music (e.g., signaling attention to infants ;Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). Another approach highlights the differences between music and language. ...
Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of “music” and “culture.”
... But they also likely reflect the behavioral reality of sociocultural patterns. In the same way that gas molecules released into some room will eventually come to fill it uniformly, a hypothetical human society placed in some novel environment and devoid of complex cultural practices seems to exhibit a tendency toward developing a swath of sociocultural near-universals, including shamanism, laws against killing (Hoebel 1954), and lullabies (Mehr & Krasnow 2017). In the target article, I theorized how fundamental aspects of humanssuch as our superstitious psychology, our biases to detect agents, and the incentive to monopolize servicesinteract in predictable ways to assemble shamanism. ...
Our species-unique capacity for cumulative culture relies on a complex interplay between social and cognitive motivations. Attempting to understand much of human behaviour will be incomplete if one of these motivations is the focus at the expense of the other. Anchored in gene-culture co-evolution theory, we stake a claim for the importance of social drivers in determining why shamans exist.
... Shamanism evolved in the context of this ritual of empowerment that enhanced wellbeing, augmented consciousness through ASC, and enhanced susceptibility to ritually elicited placebo effects. against killing (Hoebel 1954), and lullabies (Mehr & Krasnow 2017). ...
Singh conflates diverse religious statuses into a single category that includes practitioners with roles that differ significantly from empirical characteristics of shamans. The rejection of biological models of trance and conspicuous display models misses the evolutionary roots of shamanism involving the social functions of ritual in producing psychological and social integration and ritual healing.
... But they also likely reflect the behavioral reality of sociocultural patterns. In the same way that gas molecules released into some room will eventually come to fill it uniformly, a hypothetical human society placed in some novel environment and devoid of complex cultural practices seems to exhibit a tendency toward developing a swath of sociocultural near-universals, including shamanism, laws against killing (Hoebel 1954), and lullabies (Mehr & Krasnow 2017). In the target article, I theorized how fundamental aspects of humanssuch as our superstitious psychology, our biases to detect agents, and the incentive to monopolize servicesinteract in predictable ways to assemble shamanism. ...
Shamans can have efficacy at healing through botanical remedies and in observational and advisory functions through cognitive strengths, while shamanic acts of strangeness are likely honest signals of these qualities. Given this potential for shamanic practices to have true efficacy and the capacity for honest signaling, we expect efficacy will influence the spread, persistence, and loss of shamanic practices.
... But they also likely reflect the behavioral reality of sociocultural patterns. In the same way that gas molecules released into some room will eventually come to fill it uniformly, a hypothetical human society placed in some novel environment and devoid of complex cultural practices seems to exhibit a tendency toward developing a swath of sociocultural near-universals, including shamanism, laws against killing (Hoebel 1954), and lullabies (Mehr & Krasnow 2017). In the target article, I theorized how fundamental aspects of humanssuch as our superstitious psychology, our biases to detect agents, and the incentive to monopolize servicesinteract in predictable ways to assemble shamanism. ...
The target article advances several original concepts about shamanism, including prospective explanations for how shamanism could express itself in different cultural settings. Although the potential for “innate psychological tendencies” is acknowledged, the target article prematurely dismisses one such hard-wired feature of shamanism: psychosis.
... But they also likely reflect the behavioral reality of sociocultural patterns. In the same way that gas molecules released into some room will eventually come to fill it uniformly, a hypothetical human society placed in some novel environment and devoid of complex cultural practices seems to exhibit a tendency toward developing a swath of sociocultural near-universals, including shamanism, laws against killing (Hoebel 1954), and lullabies (Mehr & Krasnow 2017). In the target article, I theorized how fundamental aspects of humanssuch as our superstitious psychology, our biases to detect agents, and the incentive to monopolize servicesinteract in predictable ways to assemble shamanism. ...
Singh places the understanding of shamanism within the cognitive/evolutionary psychology of religion but is then sidetracked by presenting unhelpful analogies. The concepts of “superstition” as a general term for religious rituals and of “superstitious learning” as a mechanism accounting for the creation of rituals in humans reflect an underestimation of the human imagination, which is guided by cognitive/evolutionary constraints. Mentalizing, hypervigilance in agent detection, and anthropomorphism explain the behaviors involved in religious illusions (or delusions).
... But they also likely reflect the behavioral reality of sociocultural patterns. In the same way that gas molecules released into some room will eventually come to fill it uniformly, a hypothetical human society placed in some novel environment and devoid of complex cultural practices seems to exhibit a tendency toward developing a swath of sociocultural near-universals, including shamanism, laws against killing (Hoebel 1954), and lullabies (Mehr & Krasnow 2017). In the target article, I theorized how fundamental aspects of humanssuch as our superstitious psychology, our biases to detect agents, and the incentive to monopolize servicesinteract in predictable ways to assemble shamanism. ...
Singh's analysis of shamanism is regarded as a contribution to the evolutionary study of healing encounters and evolutionary medicine. Shamans must create convincing healing spectacles, while sick individuals must convincingly express symptoms and suffering to motivate community care. Both have a shared interest in convincing onlookers. This is not restricted to shamanic treatment, but is still true in modern medical care.
Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some have argued for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing. Such claims often concern the inferior frontal component of the language system located within "Broca's area." However, others have failed to find overlap. Using a robust individual-subject fMRI approach, we examined the responses of language brain regions to music stimuli, and probed the musical abilities of individuals with severe aphasia. Across 4 experiments, we obtained a clear answer: music perception does not engage the language system, and judgments about music structure are possible even in the presence of severe damage to the language network. In particular, the language regions' responses to music are generally low, often below the fixation baseline, and never exceed responses elicited by nonmusic auditory conditions, like animal sounds. Furthermore, the language regions are not sensitive to music structure: they show low responses to both intact and structure-scrambled music, and to melodies with vs. without structural violations. Finally, in line with past patient investigations, individuals with aphasia, who cannot judge sentence grammaticality, perform well on melody well-formedness judgments. Thus, the mechanisms that process structure in language do not appear to process music, including music syntax.
The interface of sexual behavior and evolutionary psychology is a rapidly growing domain, rich in psychological theories and data as well as controversies and applications. With nearly eighty chapters by leading researchers from around the world, and combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work in the field. Providing a broad yet in-depth overview of the various evolutionary principles that influence all types of sexual behaviors, the handbook takes an inclusive approach that draws on a number of disciplines and covers nonhuman and human psychology. It is an essential resource for both established researchers and students in psychology, biology, anthropology, medicine, and criminology, among other fields. Volume 1: Foundations of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology addresses foundational theories and methodological approaches.
At first glance, the relationship between parent and offspring seems to begin in perfect harmony. In particular, the image of human parents’ devotion to their infant is one that has been depicted in art for thousands of years. And yet it often seems a sharp contrast to the modern Western image of the adolescent–parent relationship, full of strife and angst. It’s also a contrast to the relatively abrupt end of parent–child relationships seen in many animal species as offspring disperse. Human offspring have a much longer period of juvenile dependence and sometimes don’t disperse very far. But is there a good reason to expect perfect harmony or strife and angst? Parent–offspring conflict theory has informed a wide range of research in nonhuman animals as well as in humans. Both research areas have focused on early maternal–infant conflict, such as prenatal conflict and weaning conflict; however, recent research in humans (as well as research in animals on cooperative breeders) has also highlighted conflict over mate choice. In this chapter we examine these sources of conflict.
How is music represented in the brain? While neuroimaging has revealed some spatial segregation between responses to music versus other sounds, little is known about the neural code for music itself. To address this question, we developed a method to infer canonical response components of human auditory cortex using intracranial responses to natural sounds, and further used the superior coverage of fMRI to map their spatial distribution. The inferred components replicated many prior findings, including distinct neural selectivity for speech and music, but also revealed a novel component that responded nearly exclusively to music with singing. Song selectivity was not explainable by standard acoustic features, was located near speech- and music-selective responses, and was also evident in individual electrodes. These results suggest that representations of music are fractionated into subpopulations selective for different types of music, one of which is specialized for the analysis of song.
We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.'s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute (1) our social bonding hypothesis, (2) byproduct hypotheses, and (3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicality. Instead, the commentators generally support our more inclusive proposal that social bonding and credible signaling mechanisms complement one another in explaining cooperation within and competition between groups in a coevolutionary framework (albeit with some confusion regarding terminologies such as “byproduct” and “exaptation”). We discuss the proposed criticisms and extensions, with a focus on moving beyond adaptation/byproduct dichotomies and toward testing of cross-species, cross-cultural, and other empirical predictions.
Savage et al. argue for musicality as having evolved for the overarching purpose of social bonding. By way of contrast, we highlight contemporary predictive processing models of human cognitive functioning in which the production and enjoyment of music follows directly from the principle of prediction error minimization.
We propose that not social bonding, but rather a different mechanism underlies the development of musicality: being unable to survive alone. The evolutionary constraint of being dependent on other humans for survival provides the ultimate driving force for acquiring human faculties such as sociality and musicality, through mechanisms of learning and neural plasticity. This evolutionary mechanism maximizes adaptation to a dynamic environment.
We discuss approaches to the study of the evolution of music (sect. R1); challenges to each of the two theories of the origins of music presented in the companion target articles (sect. R2); future directions for testing them (sect. R3); and priorities for better understanding the nature of music (sect. R4).
I propose an adjunct to the two models presented in the target articles, a function of music that is ubiquitous and would have solved a clear adaptive problem, that of transmitting important survival information among pre-literate humans. This class of knowledge songs uniquely preserved cultural, botanical, medical, safety, and practical information that increased the adaptive fitness of societies.
I support the music and social bonding (MSB) framework, but submit that the authors' predictions lack discriminative power, and that they do not engage sufficiently with the emotion mechanisms that mediate between musical features and social bonding. I elaborate on how various mechanisms may contribute, in unique ways, to social bonding at various levels to help account for the socio-emotional effects of music.
We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.’s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute 1) our social bonding hypothesis, 2) byproduct hypotheses, and 3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicality. Instead, the commentators generally support our more inclusive proposal that social bonding and credible signaling mechanisms complement one another in explaining cooperation within and competition between groups in a coevolutionary framework (albeit with some confusion regarding terminology such as “byproduct” and “exaptation”). We discuss proposed criticisms and extensions, with a focus on moving beyond adaptation/byproduct dichotomies and toward testing of cross-species, cross-cultural, and other empirical predictions.
Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music — that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality — are incomplete or wrong. We argue instead that music evolved as a credible signal in at least two contexts: coalitional interactions and infant care. Specifically, we propose that (1) the production and reception of coordinated, entrained rhythmic displays is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling coalition strength, size, and coordination ability; and (2) the production and reception of infant-directed song is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling parental attention to secondarily altricial infants. These proposals, supported by interdisciplinary evidence, suggest that basic features of music, such as melody and rhythm, result from adaptations in the proper domain of human music. The adaptations provide a foundation for the cultural evolution of music in its actual domain, yielding the diversity of musical forms and musical behaviors found worldwide.
Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution due to their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.
Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of music’s social bonding functions involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution due to their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.
Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture’s shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplicity is accompanied by a widening array of novel song choices. We do so by using six decades (1958-2016) of popular music in the United States (N = 14,661 songs), controlling for multiple well-studied ecological and cultural factors plausibly linked to shifts in lyrical simplicity (e.g., resource availability, pathogen prevalence, rising individualism). In years when more novel song choices were produced, the average lyrical simplicity of the songs entering U.S. billboard charts was greater. This cross-temporal relationship was robust when controlling for a range of cultural and ecological factors and employing multiverse analyses to control for potentially confounding influence of temporal autocorrelation. Finally, simpler songs entering the charts were more successful, reaching higher chart positions, especially in years when more novel songs were produced. The present results suggest that cultural transmission depends on the amount of novel choices in the information landscape.
What is the neural basis of the human capacity for music? Neuroimaging has suggested some segregation between responses to music and other sounds, like speech. But it remains unclear whether finer-grained neural organization exists within the domain of music. Here, using intracranial recordings from the surface of the human brain, we demonstrate a selective response to music with vocals, distinct from responses to speech and to music more generally. Song selectivity was evident using both data-driven component modeling and single-electrode analyses, and could not be explained by standard acoustic features. These results suggest that music is represented by multiple neural populations selective for different aspects of music, at least one of which is specialized for the analysis of song.
Parent-offspring conflict—conflict over resource distribution within families due to differences in genetic relatedness—is the biological foundation for many psychological phenomena. In genomic imprinting disorders, parent-specific genetic expression is altered, causing imbalances in behaviors influenced by parental investment. We use this natural experiment to test the theory that parent-offspring conflict contributed to the evolution of vocal music by moderating infant demands for parental attention. Individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome, a genomic imprinting disorder resulting from increased relative maternal genetic contribution, show enhanced relaxation responses to song, consistent with reduced demand for parental investment (Mehr, Kotler, Howard, Haig, & Krasnow, 2017, Psychological Science). We report the necessary complementary pattern here: individuals with Angelman syndrome, a genomic imprinting disorder resulting from increased relative paternal genetic contribution, demonstrate a relatively reduced relaxation response to song, suggesting increased demand for parental attention. These results support the extension of genetic conflict theories to psychological resources like parental attention.
Actors, sportspeople, and politicians may be idolised for their appearance, personality, skills, or ideals. The idolisation of musicians additionally involves transcendental musical emotions. Fans devote extraordinary amounts of time, energy and money to following, empathising with, identifying with and imitating their idols. During great performances, fans experience altered states of consciousness. Existing evolutionary approaches can explain social dominance hierarchies but not specific fan behaviours. Another approach involves the mother schema: the perceptions, cognitions, and emotions that the late foetus and early infant (3rd and 4th trimesters) associate with the mother and her changing behaviours and physical/emotional states. The mother schema was an evolutionary response to the fragility (altriciality) of human infants, born earlier due to a larger brain and upright gait. Active reciprocal interactions between infants and carers (e.g. motherese) involve both the carer’s infant schema and the infant’s mother schema. In later life, the typical emotions of the mother schema are evoked by stimulus patterns reminiscent of the mother as perceived by the infant. In ritual situations, where the focus is on shared subjectivity, similar patterns and emotions are created. Evolutionary by-products of the mother schema include musical behaviours, religious behaviours and musical idol worship. The theory can explain why musical idols are perceived as all-loving, all-knowing and/or all-powerful, and is consistent with psychosocial functions of music and religion such as social cohesion and identity, collective motivation, empathy and mood regulation, catharsis and coping, distraction and entertainment, conflict resolution, and skill transfer.
It has been proposed that singing evolved to facilitate social cohesion. However, it remains unclear whether bonding arises out of properties intrinsic to singing or whether any social engagement can have a similar effect. Furthermore, previous research has used one-off singing sessions without exploring the emergence of social bonding over time. In this semi-naturalistic study, we followed newly formed singing and non-singing (crafts or creative writing) adult education classes over seven months. Participants rated their closeness to their group and their affect, and were given a proxy measure of endorphin release, before and after their class, at three timepoints (months 1, 3 and 7). We show that although singers and non-singers felt equally connected by timepoint 3, singers experienced much faster bonding: singers demonstrated a significantly greater increase in closeness at timepoint 1, but the more gradual increase shown by non-singers caught up over time. This represents the first evidence for an 'ice-breaker effect' of singing in promoting fast cohesion between unfamiliar individuals, which bypasses the need for personal knowledge of group members gained through prolonged interaction. We argue that singing may have evolved to quickly bond large human groups of relative strangers, potentially through encouraging willingness to coordinate by enhancing positive affect.
Much is known about the efficacy of infant-directed (ID) speech and singing for capturing attention, but little is known about their role in regulating affect. In Experiment 1, infants 7–10 months of age listened to scripted recordings of ID speech, adult-directed speech, or singing in an unfamiliar language (Turkish) until they met a criterion of distress based on negative facial expression. They listened to singing for roughly twice as long as speech before meeting the distress criterion. In Experiment 2, they were exposed to natural recordings of ID speech or singing in a familiar language. As in Experiment 1, ID singing was considerably more effective than speech for delaying the onset of distress. We suggest that the temporal patterning of ID singing, with its regular beat, metrical organization, and tempo, plays an important role in inhibiting distress, perhaps by promoting entrainment and predictive listening.
Significance
Which features of music are universal and which are culture-specific? Why? These questions are important for understanding why humans make music but have rarely been scientifically tested. We used musical classification techniques and statistical tools to analyze a global set of 304 music recordings, finding no absolute universals but dozens of statistical universals. These include not only commonly cited features related to pitch and rhythm but also domains such as social context and interrelationships between musical features. We speculate that group coordination is the common aspect unifying the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music, with implications for the study of music evolution.
Adolescents and adults commonly use music for various forms of affect regulation, including relaxation, revitalization, distraction, and elicitation of pleasant memories. Mothers throughout the world also sing to their infants, with affect regulation as the principal goal. To date, the study of maternal singing has focused largely on its acoustic features and its consequences for infant attention. We describe recent laboratory research that explores the consequences of singing for infant affect regulation. Such work reveals that listening to recordings of play songs can maintain 6- to 9-month-old infants in a relatively contented or neutral state considerably longer than recordings of infant-directed or adult-directed speech. When 10-month-old infants fuss or cry and are highly aroused, mothers' multimodal singing is more effective than maternal speech at inducing recovery from such distress. Moreover, play songs are more effective than lullabies at reducing arousal in Western infants. We explore the implications of these findings along with possible practical applications.
© 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Whether music was an evolutionary adaptation that conferred survival advantages or a cultural creation has generated much debate. Consistent with an evolutionary hypothesis, music is unique to humans, emerges early in development and is universal across societies. However, the adaptive benefit of music is far from obvious. Music is highly flexible, generative and changes rapidly over time, consistent with a cultural creation hypothesis. In this paper, it is proposed that much of musical pitch and timing structure adapted to preexisting features of auditory processing that evolved for auditory scene analysis (ASA). Thus, music may have emerged initially as a cultural creation made possible by preexisting adaptations for ASA. However, some aspects of music, such as its emotional and social power, may have subsequently proved beneficial for survival and led to adaptations that enhanced musical behaviour. Ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence is considered in this regard. In particular, enhanced auditory-motor pathways in humans that enable movement entrainment to music and consequent increases in social cohesion, and pathways enabling music to affect reward centres in the brain should be investigated as possible musical adaptations. It is concluded that the origins of music are complex and probably involved exaptation, cultural creation and evolutionary adaptation.
Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the extent to which they are present in non-human species. We argue for the importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective means of studying them in human and non-human animals. It is virtually impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole, but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity is an excellent starting point for a research programme aimed at illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an autonomous trait.
© 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
When speaking to infants, adults typically alter the acoustic properties of their speech in a variety of ways compared with how they speak to other adults; for example, they use higher pitch, increased pitch range, more pitch variability, and slower speech rate. Research shows that these vocal changes happen similarly across industrialized populations, but no studies have carefully examined basic acoustic properties of infant-directed (ID) speech in traditional societies. Moreover, some scholars have suggested that ID speech is culturally specific and does not exist in some small-scale societies. We examined fundamental frequency (F0) production and speech rate in mothers speaking to both infants and adults in three cultures: Fijians, Kenyans, and North Americans. In all three cultures, speakers used higher F0 when speaking to infants relative to when speaking to other adults, and they also used significantly greater F0 variation and fewer syllables per second. Previous research has found that American mothers tend to use higher pitch than do mothers from other cultures, but when maternal education was controlled in the current study, we did not find a significant difference in average pitch across our three populations. This is the first research systematically comparing spontaneous ID and adult-directed speech prosody between Western and traditional societies, and it is consistent with a large body of evidence showing similar acoustic patterns in ID speech across industrialized populations.
Music is a core human experience and generative processes reflect cognitive capabilities. Music is often functional because it is something that can promote human well-being by facilitating human contact, human meaning, and human imagination of possibilities, tying it to our social instincts. Cognitive systems also underlie musical performance and sensibilities. Music is one of those things that we do spontaneously, reflecting brain machinery linked to communicative functions, enlarged and diversified across a broad array of human activities. Music cuts across diverse cognitive capabilities and resources, including numeracy, language, and space perception. In the same way, music intersects with cultural boundaries, facilitating our "social self" by linking our shared experiences and intentions. This paper focuses on the intersection between the neuroscience of music, and human social functioning to illustrate the importance of music to human behaviors.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin speculated that our capacity for musical rhythm reflects basic aspects of brain function broadly shared among animals. Although this remains an appealing idea, it is being challenged by modern cross-species research. This research hints that our capacity to synchronize to a beat, i.e., to move in time with a perceived pulse in a manner that is predictive and flexible across a broad range of tempi, may be shared by only a few other species. Is this really the case? If so, it would have important implications for our understanding of the evolution of human musicality.
We conducted a randomized trial to test the hypothesis that mother's voice played through a pacifier-activated music player (PAM) during nonnutritive sucking would improve the development of sucking ability and promote more effective oral feeding in preterm infants.
Preterm infants between 34 0/7 and 35 6/7 weeks' postmenstrual age, including those with brain injury, who were taking at least half their feedings enterally and less than half orally, were randomly assigned to receive 5 daily 15-minute sessions of either PAM with mother's recorded voice or no PAM, along with routine nonnutritive sucking and maternal care in both groups. Assignment was masked to the clinical team.
Ninety-four infants (46 and 48 in the PAM intervention and control groups, respectively) completed the study. The intervention group had significantly increased oral feeding rate (2.0 vs 0.9 mL/min, P < .001), oral volume intake (91.1 vs 48.1 mL/kg/d, P = .001), oral feeds/day (6.5 vs 4.0, P < .001), and faster time-to-full oral feedings (31 vs 38 d, P = .04) compared with controls. Weight gain and cortisol levels during the 5-day protocol were not different between groups. Average hospital stays were 20% shorter in the PAM group, but the difference was not significant (P = .07).
A PAM using mother's voice improves oral feeding skills in preterm infants without adverse effects on hormonal stress or growth.
This article departs from many discussions of the origin, evolution, and adaptive function(s) of music by treating music not as perceptual qualities (pitch, timbre, meter), formal elements (prosody, melody, harmony, rhythm), performed activity (singing, drumming), or genre (lullaby, song, dance). Rather, music is conceptualized as a behavioral and motivational capacity: what is done to sounds and pulses when they are “musified” — made into music — and why. For this new view, I employ the ethological notion of ritualization, wherein ordinary communicative behaviors (e.g., sounds, movements) are altered through formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration, thereby attracting attention and arousing and shaping emotion. The universal sensitivity of infants as young as 8 weeks to such alterations of (or operations on) voice, facial expression, and body movements, when these are presented to them by adults in intimate dyadic interactions within a shared temporal framework, suggests an evolved, adaptive capacity that enabled and reinforced emotional bonding. Such protoaesthetic (proto-musical) operations existed as a reservoir from which individual cultures could draw when inventing art-saturated ritual ceremonies that united groups temporally and emotionally as they did mother-infant pairs. Music in its origins and evolution is assumed to be multimodal (visual and kinesic, as well as aural) and a social — not solitary — activity. An appendix describes important structural and functional resemblances between music, mother-infant interaction, ceremonial ritual, and adult courtship and lovemaking (as differentiated from copulation). These resemblances suggest not only an evolutionary relationship among these behaviors but argue for the existence of an evolved amodal neural propensity in the human species to respond — cognitively and emotionally — to dynamic temporal patterns produced by other humans in contexts of affiliation.
What's so special about music? We experience it internally, yet at the same time it is highly social. Music engages our cognitive/affective and sensory systems. We use music to communicate with one another—and even with other species—the things that we cannot express through language. Music is both ancient and ever evolving. Without music, our world is missing something essential. This book offers a social and behavioral neuroscientific explanation of why music matters. Its aim is not to provide a grand, unifying theory. Instead, it guides the reader through the relevant scientific evidence that links neuroscience, music, and meaning. It considers how music evolved in humans and birds, how music is experienced in relation to aesthetics and mathematics, the role of memory in musical expression, the role of music in child and social development, and the embodied experience of music through dance. It concludes with reflections on music and well-being. The book is a tour through the current research on the neuroscience of music.
Male primates, carnivores and rodents sometimes kill infants that they did not sire. Infanticide by males is a relatively common phenomenon in these groups, but tends to be rare in any given species. Is this behavior pathological or accidental, or does it reflect a conditional reproductive strategy for males in certain circumstances? In this book, case studies and reviews confirm the adaptive nature of infanticide in males in primates, and help to predict which species should be vulnerable to it. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the evolutionary consequences of the threat of infanticide by males for social and reproductive behavior and physiology. Written for graduate students and researchers in animal behavior, behavioral ecology, biological anthropology and social psychology, this book shows that social systems are shaped not only by ecological pressures, but also social pressures such as infanticide risk.
This chapter provides an overview of life history theory (LHT). LHT conceptualizes specific allocation tradeoffs in terms of three broad, fundamental trade-offs: the present-future reproduction trade-off, the quantity-quality of offspring trade-off, and the tradeoff between mating effort and parenting effort. The chapter then considers specific applications of LHT to an understanding of the human life course. The topics concerning human life histories are the evolution of large brains, development and childhood, and aging. The chapter argues for ways in which LHT can and should be infused into evolutionary psychology. Over the past 40 years, evolutionary biology has witnessed a tremendous explosion in understanding of adaptations, particularly as they relate to behavior. A key foundation of these developments is economic cost-benefit analysis of selection pressures. LHT is not a particular domain of cost-benefit analysis; rather, it is a broad, overarching perspective within which understanding of adaptation must ultimately be situated.
Music is present in every culture, but the degree to which it is shaped by biology remains debated. One widely discussed phenomenon is that some combinations of notes are perceived by Westerners as pleasant, or consonant, whereas others are perceived as unpleasant, or dissonant. The contrast between consonance and dissonance is central to Western music, and its origins have fascinated scholars since the ancient Greeks. Aesthetic responses to consonance are commonly assumed by scientists to have biological roots, and thus to be universally present in humans. Ethnomusicologists and composers, in contrast, have argued that consonance is a creation of Western musical culture. The issue has remained unresolved, partly because little is known about the extent of cross-cultural variation in consonance preferences. Here we report experiments with the Tsimane'-a native Amazonian society with minimal exposure to Western culture-and comparison populations in Bolivia and the United States that varied in exposure to Western music. Participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like discrimination abilities and Western-like aesthetic responses to familiar sounds and acoustic roughness, the Tsimane' rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. By contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance, albeit to a lesser degree than US residents. The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to harmonic natural sounds. The observed variation in preferences is presumably determined by exposure to musical harmony, suggesting that culture has a dominant role in shaping aesthetic responses to music.
A most basic issue in the study of music perception is the question of why humans are motivated to pay attention to, or create, musical messages, and why they respond emotionally to them, when such messages seem to convey no real-time relevant biological information as do speech, animal utterances, and environmental sounds. Expanding on previous work (Roederer, 1979, 1982) three possibly concurrent factors will be examined: (1) The inborn motivation to train language-handling networks of the brain in the processing of simple, organized sound patterns as a prelude to the acquisition of language; (2) The need to extract the information contained in the “musical” components of speech; (3) The value of music as a means of transmitting information on emotional states and its effect in congregating and behaviorally equalizing masses of people. In the discussion, special attention will be paid to the role of motivation and emotion in auditory perception, to the fact that in humans limbic system functions can be activated by internally evoked images in complete detachment from the current state of environment and organism, and to the existence of two distinct strategies of cerebral information processing, namely short-term time sequencing, as required in speech communication and thinking, and holistic pattern recognition, as required in music perception. © 1983, Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
For 1 to 2 weeks, 5-month-old infants listened at home to one of two novel songs with identical lyrics and rhythms, but different melodies; the song was sung by a parent, emanated from a toy, or was sung live by a friendly but unfamiliar adult first in person and subsequently via interactive video. We then tested the infants' selective attention to two novel individuals after one sang the familiar song and the other sang the unfamiliar song. Infants who had experienced a parent singing looked longer at the new person who had sung the familiar melody than at the new person who had sung the unfamiliar melody, and the amount of song exposure at home predicted the size of that preference. Neither effect was observed, however, among infants who had heard the song emanating from a toy or being sung by a socially unrelated person, despite these infants' remarkable memory for the familiar melody, tested an average of more than 8 months later. These findings suggest that melodies produced live and experienced at home by known social partners carry social meaning for infants.
Previous ape language studies have been undertaken with common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), and gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) (Gardner and Gardner, 1969; Rumbaugh, 1977, Savage-Rumbaugh, 1979; Miles, 1982; Patterson and Linden, 1981). Additionally, a brief attempt was made with a pygmy chimpanzee housed in the Stuttgart Zoo by Jordan and Jordan (1977), who employed a Premackian problem-solving paradigm. However, no one has previously attempted to place pygmy chimpanzees in a full-time communicative environment that entails close and constant interaction with human beings for the purpose of attempting to teach them complex symbolic tasks. In fact, apart from the brief work mentioned above by Jordan and Jordan (1977), no serious attempts have been made to investigate the cognitive capacities of these apes, nor to contrast them with other apes. This paucity of information is not due to lack of interest, but simply to lack of availability of these animals for research purposes. They were not reorganized as a distinct species until 1929 (Schwarz, 1929) and it was not until 1956 (Tratz and Heck, 1954) that the wide range of behavioral differences between common chimpanzees and pygmy chimpanzees began to be recognized.
In The Hadza, Frank Marlowe provides a quantitative ethnography of one of the last remaining societies of hunter-gatherers in the world. The Hadza, who inhabit an area of East Africa near the Serengeti and Olduvai Gorge, have long drawn the attention of anthropologists and archaeologists for maintaining a foraging lifestyle in a region that is key to understanding human origins. Marlowe ably applies his years of research with the Hadza to cover the traditional topics in ethnography-subsistence, material culture, religion, and social structure. But the book's unique contribution is to introduce readers to the more contemporary field of behavioral ecology, which attempts to understand human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. To that end, The Hadza also articulates the necessary background for readers whose exposure to human evolutionary theory is minimal.
In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, the author challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers. Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms. Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines. This book provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.
Ever since the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871, the survival value of music for the individual has been placed into question. Darwin’s solution to this problem was to argue that music evolved by sexual selection as a courtship device to increase reproductive success. He envisioned music as functioning analogously to the courtship songs and advertisement calls of many animal species, most of which are performed exclusively by males during a breeding season. However Darwin’s thinking predated the comparative study of world music-cultures, which developed only in the late 19th century. The 20th century anthropological study of music has been overwhelmingly group-functionalist in its thinking. Music is almost exclusively described in terms of its manifold roles in supporting group function—with regard to both within-group cooperation and between-group competitiveness. In this essay, I criticize the sexual selection model of music and attempt to channel the group-functionalist thinking of the ethnomusicology literature into a group selection model. Music is a powerful device for promoting group identity, cognition, coordination and catharsis, and it has a host of design features that reflect its strong role in supporting cooperation and synchronization at the group level, features such as the capacity for pitch blending and the use of isometric rhythms. I argue that music and group rituals co-evolved during human evolution such that ritual developed as an information system and music its reinforcement system. Music is a type of social “reward” system, analogous to the neuromodulatory systems of the brain. This view accounts for music’s universal association to ritual activities as well as its psychologically rewarding properties.
Cross-cultural studies have shown that diversity in the basic characteristics of infant development, cognitive style, and behavior are related to variations in ethnicity and child-rearing practices (Whiting and Child 1953; Geber 1958; Horton 1962; Le Vine 1974; Burton and Kirk 1976; de Vries and de Vries 1977; Werner 1979; Super and Harkness 1982). The impact of infant care practices and ecological factors on infant mortality has also been documented, but the infant’s own contribution to morbidity and mortality has been more difficult to study (Dickeman 1975; Werner 1979).
Over our evolutionary history, humans have faced the problem of how to create and maintain social bonds in progressively larger groups compared to those of our primate ancestors. Evidence from historical and anthropological records suggests that group music-making might act as a mechanism by which this large-scale social bonding could occur. While previous research has shown effects of music making on social bonds in small group contexts, the question of whether this effect ‘scales up’ to larger groups is particularly important when considering the potential role of music for large-scale social bonding. The current study recruited individuals from a community choir that met in both small (n = 20–80) and large (a ‘megachoir’ combining individuals from the smaller subchoirs n = 232) group contexts. Participants gave self-report measures of social bonding and had pain threshold measurements taken (as a proxy for endorphin release) before and after 90 min of singing. Results showed that feelings of inclusion, connectivity, positive affect, and measures of endorphin release all increased across singing rehearsals and that the influence of group singing was comparable for pain thresholds in the large versus small group context. Levels of social closeness were found to be greater at pre- and post-levels for the small choir condition. However, the large choir condition experienced a greater change in social closeness as compared to the small condition. The finding that singing together fosters social closeness – even in large group contexts where individuals are not known to each other – is consistent with evolutionary accounts that emphasize the role of music in social bonding, particularly in the context of creating larger cohesive groups than other primates are able to manage.
(C) Williams & Wilkins 1998. All Rights Reserved.
This study had three goals: (1) to investigate the potential connection between music experiences in early childhood and later music making as a parent, (2) to report the frequency of music making in a sample of American families with young children along with parents’ opinions on possible benefits of music classes, and (3) to compare frequency data to two previous studies. Parents of 4-year-old children were surveyed on the frequency of music activities in the home, their early arts experiences, and a variety of topics concerning arts education. An intergenerational link was found: The frequency of parental song in childhood significantly predicted parents’ later music behaviors with their own children, adjusting for other aspects of the early artistic environment. Parents reported high frequencies of music activities in the home, with most parents singing or playing recorded music to their children on a daily basis. Notably, the frequency of parental music making was unrelated to family income or to participation in music classes. Parents’ opinions on the effects of music education reflected a widespread belief that music classes confer a variety of nonmusical benefits.
Music therapy can improve neonatal function and reduce anxiety in parents during neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) stays. Live music entrained to an infant's observed vital signs, provided by a certified music therapist with First Sounds RBL (rhythm, breath, and lullaby) training, enhanced bonding for infant-parent dyads and triads. The author's song of kin intervention, which employs parent-selected songs, is compared to the presentation of a well-known folk theme ("Twinkle") in 272 neonates. Culturally based, parent-selected, personalized musical tunes provided in song, as a noninvasive intervention, foster optimal, continuous quality of care. Music psychotherapy sessions for parents before working with their infants can instill a potent means of nonconfrontational support, allowing for expression of fear or anxiety related to the premature birth. Although most attention is typically directed to their infant, using music can support the parents' grief and assist in the expression of hope that can instill a sense of security and containment. From the NICU to home, a familiar thread-line theme can be resourced directly from the family and/or parent and applied effortlessly throughout the growing baby's transitional moments.
© 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Tecumseh Fitch studies the evolution of cognition in animals and humans, focusing on the evolution of communication. Originally trained in ethology and evolutionary biology, he has more recently applied his graduate training in speech science to understanding the physics and physiology of animal vocal communication. He is interested in all aspects of vocal communication in terrestrial vertebrates, particularly aspects of vocal production that bear on questions of meaning in animal communication systems, especially human language. Fitch received his Bachelors degree in Biology and a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from Brown University, the latter under Philip Lieberman. He did postdoctoral research with Marc Hauser at Harvard University and MIT in the Speech and Hearing Sciences program. He taught at Harvard (1999–2002) in the Biology and Psychology departments, where he continued his research on humans and various vertebrates (including alligators, birds, and monkeys). In 2002–2003, he was a Fellow at the European Institute for Advanced Studies, in Berlin. He joined the faculty at the School of Psychology at the University of St Andrews in the fall of 2003.
Abstract We investigated the intended receivers and contexts of occurrence of grunt and girney vocalizations in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to assess whether these calls are best interpreted as signals of benign intent or as calls that may function to attract the attention of other individuals or induce arousal. We focally observed 19 free-ranging adult female rhesus macaques. Female calls increased dramatically after infants were born, and most were directed toward mother–infant dyads. When infants were physically separated from their mothers, callers visually oriented toward infants in over 90% of the cases, suggesting that infants were the intended receivers of grunts and girneys. Approaches followed by vocalizations were more likely to lead to the caller grooming the mother, less likely to elicit a submissive response, and more likely to result in infant handling than approaches without calls. Infant handling, however, was not necessarily benign. Vocalizations were often emitted from a distance >1 m and were rarely followed by approaches or social interactions. Our results suggest that grunts and girneys are unlikely to have evolved as signals that encode information about the caller's intention or subsequent behavior. Whereas girneys may be acoustically designed to attract infants’ attention and elicit arousal, grunts may have no adaptive communicative function. Mothers, however, may have learned that other females’ grunts and girneys are unlikely to be associated with significant risk and, therefore, are generally tolerant of the caller's proximity and behavior.
Music has been present in all human cultures since prehistory [1, 2], although it is not associated with any apparent biological advantages (such as food, sex, etc.) or utility value (such as money). Nevertheless, music is ranked among the highest sources of pleasure [3], and its important role in our society and culture has led to the assumption that the ability of music to induce pleasure is universal. However, this assumption has never been empirically tested. In the present report, we identified a group of healthy individuals without depression or generalized anhedonia who showed reduced behavioral pleasure ratings and no autonomic responses to pleasurable music, despite having normal musical perception capacities. These persons showed preserved behavioral and physiological responses to monetary reward, indicating that the low sensitivity to music was not due to a global hypofunction of the reward network. These results point to the existence of specific musical anhedonia and suggest that there may be individual differences in access to the reward system.