Carl Zimmer’s NY Times story “Why Do People Make Music?” (archived) begins:
Music baffled Charles Darwin. Mankind’s ability to produce and enjoy melodies, he wrote in 1874, “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” […] Other Victorian scientists were skeptical. William James brushed off Darwin’s idea, arguing that music is simply a byproduct of how our minds work — a “mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system.”
That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence.
In recent years, scientists have investigated these ideas with big data.
You can go to the link for the details of the research; I’ll excerpt this bit here:
It’s possible that songs have distinct features because they have a special role in human communication separate from speech, said Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study. What’s more, our brains appear to be sensitive to those features. In 2022, Dr. Patel pointed out, researchers discovered human neurons that only responded to singing — not speech or music played on instruments.
“There is something distinctive about song all around the world as an acoustic signal that perhaps our brains have become attuned to over evolutionary time,” Dr. Patel said.
On the one hand, this is intriguing stuff; on the other, the general tone reminds me of the sort of Times article I was mocking back in 2003. So I thought I’d toss it out there for Hattic de(con)struction. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
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